Tryhard with a vengeance: Meaning making and boundary keeping on Twitch

Tryhard is a derogatory term aimed to insult players who are “trying too hard” in video games. In the past few years, there have been notable controversies surrounding tryhard, most insidiously in a memetic permutation of the term via the TriHard emote on Twitch. We will use the case of the meme “tryhard” and the racist deployments of the emote “TriHard” to show how the meme generates meaning from circulation, enabling a variety of interpretations. We argue that claims about banning particular memes or emotes on Twitch are part of this battle over the stability of the meaning of the utterance, not a solution to the potential for memes to carry negative or harmful meanings. The implication is that decisions like banning a meme or restricting its circulation will eliminate the problem of inappropriate meaning. We argue that such policies remove this reconstitutive ability from communities, eliminating the opportunity for rearticulation and, therefore, new definitions.