The gist is… streamers are gamer role models. The streamer itself is a drop in the bucket… but either they encourage people that like their behavior to play the game, or they encourage people who play the game to act like them.
I used to play town of salem, the social deduction game… the community was relatively small, but when a mainstream youtube channel like pewdiepie or someoen played the game there’d be a collective groan from the community. As it would always follow up with a huge spike if players who start up the game with zero interest in learning how to play (because the youtuber also didn’t learn how to play)… now in those cases that generally was only a week or 2 of annoyance as the obnoxious players either moved on to the next thing, or started actually trying to learn the game instead of just trolling everyone.
and I would also note the sad thing of the blue shell as the analogy, is it fits very well in orwells analysis. (going majorly from memory so, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong), but in short if I recall, the outer party could use the proles to become the new inner party, however no matter what party was in power, the proles position as the bottom rung of society remains constant no matter what they do.
Sadly the blue shell is a very similar analogy there. Why so many people hate the blue shell in mario kart is it’s typically only obtainable if you are in 7th or 8th place. and it’s effect is typically to knock first place into 2nd or 3rd place, but if the race isn’t particularly tight it has little impact on the outcome of the player that threw it. (he’s still in last place).