First of all, we will analyze the form consumption takes in Jackbox Games within the circuit of culture. Consumption describes the ways that the audiences use the product. Consumption doesn’t stop with the consumer’s decision in buying the product. Rather, the ways and reasons the consumer interacts with the product are just as important in fully analyzing the consumption of the product. Jackbox Games enhanced the consumption of their product by making the games accessible through a mobile device and by providing so many different avenues for an audience to engage on a broader scale.

To begin, let’s analyze their decision to make the game accessible through a website on a mobile phone. Even as simple as the decision may appear by today’s standard, it was an incredibly monumental one during its creation. Around 2014, when the company was about to collapse, the cell-phone angle was finally implemented. During this time, people were just getting comfortable with their cell-phones, so this decision definitely saved the company. On top of that, there was a recent change in regular video-game consoles in which they could now be connected to the internet, and cell-phones followed suit, allowing players to connect to the games via only a bowser. Having to download an app could deter a lot of casual gamers as it is, so the fact that there only needs to be one host of the game with everybody else only having to log onto the short url Jackbox.tv makes the consumption of this product so much more efficient and accessible. Think about it: nowadays, people already carry their phones everywhere they go, so having the ability to play the game from your phone eliminates a lot of the unnecessary responsibility to engage with the product.

Furthermore, there is also an option for audience members to play while watching their favorite live streamers play Jackbox Games, again expanding the ways in which the consumers could engage with the project. Jackbox provides an feature for all the audience members to join as one entity after the game has started, and this feature could house up to 100,000 members. The audience members could then vote collectively for certain options or answers that could dictate a part of the game, as if they were one real player. While these games were meant to be played on a more intimate level, with people that you could build a deeper connection with, they also provide a way for the public streamer to form a connection with the audience. Most times, when a streamer goes live on a platform like Twitch, the stream could often feel one-sided and disconnected. So, Twitch streamers are constantly trying to find ways for the audience to be more engaged with the content. This paper by Joseph Seering et al. explores the phenomenon of audience participation games and states that they “challenge traditional assumptions about gameplay by blurring the line between audience and player, allowing audience members to impact gameplay in a meaningful way.” Jackbox Games perfectly fits within this definition of the audience participation game and is able to blur the line between the Twitch streamers playing the game and the audience members watching. Thus, the one-sidedness of the Twitch stream is lessened and the audience would feel more hesitant to turn away because now they feel more of a “responsibility” in the stream. Therefore, Twitch streamers would want to use Jackbox Games more for heightened audience engagement, and the audience members would also be more inclined to get the games themselves, after watching the game being framed in such a positive light by their favorite streamers. Overall, this leads to a broader and more efficient form of consumption of Jackbox Games.