This thesis examines the play companion industry on Discord, with particular attention to recruitment requirements, gendered divisions of labor, self-presentation and performativity as Strategy, and the commercialization of intimate relationships. The research adopts a qualitative methodology combining digital ethnography and semi-structured interviews. Fieldwork was conducted across several active play companion servers, and interviews were conducted with nine play companions, including four women and five men. All participants occupied dual roles within the industry, functioning not only as play companions but also as customers. The findings indicate that the play companion industry is deeply structured by gender norms. Male play companions are constructed as "technical" companions, whose labor value is primarily evaluated through quantifiable performance indicators such as game rank and win rate. Female play companions, by contrast, are systematically channeled into "entertainment" roles, where labor value is drawn more from offering emotional labor rather than offering gaming skills. Although lower entry thresholds for women are often framed as forms of "preferential treatment," this practice in fact relies on male technical performance as the implicit evaluative standard. As a result, women's technical abilities are persistently placed under suspicion and marginalized, while women are compelled to compensate for their presumed technical inadequacy through heightened emotional labor. Some interviewees argued that women's underrepresentation among high-ranking players is primarily the result of gender imbalance within the player base, and they regarded this outcome as natural and inevitable. However, such explanations overlook structural factors, including the long-standing male-dominated gaming culture, persistent gender stereotypes, and the exclusion and harassment women continue to experience in gaming environments. Through this mechanism, traditional gendered divisions of labor are reproduced, not only constraining women's access to technical roles but also limiting men's opportunities to engage in entertainment companion roles, thereby jointly restricting the occupational trajectories and developmental possibilities of play companions across genders. At the same time, play companions are not merely passive subjects of exploitation. The study demonstrates that companions strategically engage in persona building by decorating their Discord profiles to construct "datafied body" and by using visually appealing avatars to compete in the market and attract customers. Through these practices, companions actively transform gendered expectations into marketable resources. Furthermore, Discord servers institutionalize intimacy through mechanisms such as intimacy levels, ranking tags, and naming rights, which quantify emotional relationships and convert them into purchasable value. This demonstrates that intimacy tiers are inseparable from commercial operations, yet cannot be simplistically dismissed as entirely fabricated emotional performances. Rather, the commodification of intimacy does not operate as a simple binary opposition between "real" or "fake" emotion, but as a hierarchical, tiered process through which emotional engagement is progressively structured and intensified. Overall, by examining play companionship on Discord, this thesis contributes to broader debates on gendered labor, emotional work, and the commodification of intimacy in contemporary digital work.
Yiran Luo (Mon,) studied this question.