How livestreaming has changed gaming culture

This morning, our first Ars Unite 2015 feature took a look at how the rise of Twitch and other gaming livestream sites have changed the way that games are being developed. This afternoon, Culture Editor Sam Machkovech joined me for a livestreamed YouTube chat that veered more into the way Twitch and its ilk are affecting gaming culture.

This cultural change has extended to developers themselves, as Sam noted when discussing his visits to many game studios in the Seattle area. “I can’t tell you how many times I go to one of these offices and I see a third monitor on a developer’s’ desk devoted to Twitch,” he said. “I’ve seen that at Valve, I’ve seen that at Turn 10, I’ve seen that at 343 Industries. Game developers have just taken to leaving Twitch streams on of their favorite games… They are slowly becoming as fluent as their fans [in Twitch].”

For Sam, a lot of the appeal of Twitch is a return to the kind of social situation he experienced in the arcades of his youth, where kids would gather around one of the few Street Fighter machines to watch and discuss the best players duking it out. Livestreaming virtualizes this experience, letting spectators chat with other spectators about gameplay that might be well above their level.

“People gathered and they could actually hear each other… the experience of Street Fighter was you’d put your quarter up and wait your turn [to play], or you were little and… terrified of this. There’s this social clique-iness. I don’t fit in,” Sam said.

That socializing can affect the actual gameplay in titles like Party Hard, where chat commands can affect what’s happening to the game being played by the streamer. This can lead to an “us vs. them” mentality that makes even vicious in-game trolling more tolerable.

“If there was some algorithm sending 12 more guys at you [in Party Hard], you’d say ‘Oh, that’s so unfair. Why are you doing that, computer algorithm,’” I said in the chat. “But if it’s someone watching you in chat, and they say, ‘Oh, this is going to be really funny, I’m going to send 12 more guys in right when he’s about to win, you’re going to say, ‘Oh, you guys are just messing with me.’ If there’s a real person behind it, it changes the way you react to these things.”

This might sound odd to people who grew up in a different gaming era. “Sorry, but I fail to see how—if someone loads up a video game that they want to spend time playing and then let 500 other morons take control—how that is considered fun,” commenter fryhole said in response. But as fellow reader Fgumper pointed out in response, “The point for most streamers isn’t just to have an audience passively watch while they play a game without interruption. Watching a good streamer shows that they are basically having a conversation with their viewers (especially those who are regulars). The same way that when you had friends over to play games they were telling you where to go in a level, or otherwise participating, the audience does here as well. For titles where the chat can directly impact the streamer, its like a multiplayer game for them at this point. A friendly us vs. them.”

“Watching gameplay and streaming are nearly as universal for kids 14 and under as Saturday morning cartoons were for those that grew up in the ’80s,” Fgumper continued. “This is their water cooler talk at school. We rave about the latest Walking Dead and Breaking Bad episodes, and they talk about the latest game their favorite ‘YouTuber’ is playing. Minecraft is a ‘thing’ specifically because of this trend.”

A comment asking whether watching Twitch could actually make viewers better at games led commenter jihadjoe to chime in. “It’s always enlightening when you see a creative solution to a puzzle,” jihadjoe said. “It changes the way you think, and future levels or even other games that have something similar go from outright hard to strange yet familiar. Even putting puzzles aside and focusing only on the mechanics side, it’s still educational to see someone do something you might have thought of as impossible. Watching that infamous TAS run of SMB3 where the speedrunner was dancing around pwning all the bombs and cannonballs in World 8 completely changed the way I play the game, and levels I thought were ‘very hard’ before I now find rather easy.”

Legal discussion and the heart of speedrunning

In our livestream, I got a chance to give some more personal reactions to the “Twitch Plays Pokemon” (TPP) phenomenon, which was the real progenitor of this new trend of viewer-controlled gameplay. While the TPP stream felt overly random to me at first, I became interested in the order that the viewers started to impart on this randomness.

“There were whole almost religious sects that came up [through this]… some people legitimately trying to troll everything and try to stop progress, and others trying to come together and make something out of it,” I said. “It’s really that coming together that makes it interesting; it’s not interesting in and of itself; it’s interesting because of the people who came to it and added all sorts of fan art and mythos to the random things happening.”

Our discussion also touched on the laws surrounding livestreaming of games, which give publishers almost complete veto power over streamers. “If Nintendo wanted to say nobody can stream any of our games legally, they could do that, and big services like Twitch would have no recourse but to [take them down],” I pointed out. “The thing is, that would be an incredibly stupid move, and I think almost every developer and publisher realizes that at this point. There’s no way that Twitch is a replacement for buying a game. In fact, the opposite—I think it’s more like free advertising. These games that become big on Twitch, people want to buy them. They want to emulate the YouTubers and Twitchers they see online.”