Amnesia Lane: On the nature of streaming

It’s been more than 5 years since the birth of DC Live. As my thoughts on the whole experience are really too large to squeeze into the Naughty and Nice anniversary feature, I’m going to get them out now.

Streaming has always been weird for me as a spectator. I barely got into Let’s Players on YouTube (just the one Let’s Player, really). This is not to presume that streaming is all about video games in general, but video game streams are the ones I watch and now create (though I was thinking about streaming putting together my Lego NES, that ship has since sailed).

I can’t say I ever was much interested in the big-name streamers as such. Nearly all of what I know of them (even the ones playing video games) was because the news blogs I follow wrote about them now and then. More-or-less the same deal as my knowledge of celebrity-level YouTubers. Though I suppose it’s leaps and bounds more than I know about popular Tik-Tokers. I wonder if those blogs just have an irrational hate for the new kid on the block or if it’s just one thing too many for them.

The second-biggest channel I follow on Twitch (second only because Games Done Quick is a clear outlier) now has around 17k followers, but started with enough to count on one hand after coming out of YouTube game reviewer retirement and trying the newfangled thing. It was the first time I bothered setting up a Twitch account, as I had been watching GDQ’s content entirely through their YouTube uploads. I had not planned my schedule around any program since my freshman year in college, and it felt weird watching live content again.

I rather dislike the larger streams; I like sitting back, typing puns into the chat and interacting with the streamer and any of the other chatters who are game. When the chat is rolling around at the speed of sound, there’s no room for interactivity. You’re just watching a show at that point. Maybe it’s a really good show, and sometimes I AM just there for that (which is what watching GDQ on YouTube amounts to). But what I enjoy the most about a stream are things you can do there that you can’t do in other mediums.

That’s really the imperitus for us having sounds, banners, word triggers, point redemptions, the chatbot trying its utmost to be placed on a watch list, and so on. It’s about keeping a sparsely populated room lively, yes, but primarily so viewers have toys to play with. A variety of ways to interact so each can do as they like.

Sad to say, I haven’t been able to do much about viewing in the past few years. At some point, the number of Twitch channels I followed ballooned to 30, so being a regular for any of them was no longer in the cards; especially with how much my day-to-day life has changed since the peak of the pandemic. Though some of those channels have likewise been changed by the passage of time. Some moved on, others sprang into a new life. Most weeks, if I don’t hang out in a raided channel, I wouldn’t be viewing any streaming at all.

So these days, I’ve been doing more giving than receiving. As for starting the whole thing, my motives are… complex.

You might be surprised to hear that I first became interested in streaming not because of the streams I watched, but because a friend wanted to do an online talk show, but didn’t know how to make a stream. That’s that spark that got me learning how to use the Open Broadcaster Software. While their talk show never did come to fruition, streaming proved to be a handy way to spend a little time with friends I had moved away from.

And over those 5 years, there’s a lot I’ve had to think about the experience. What started as an experiment that occasionally subbed in for my blogging days became a weekly institution. And as much as I was feeling my way through it, I think I learned more from others than I did from myself.

One example of something that stuck with me was Magnus recounting his experience playing Earthbound for the first time ever on stream. Now, Earthbound is a wonderful game, but it is obscure, quirky and has some deliberately antiquated mechanics even for its age. If you’re up for it and get where it’s coming from, Earthbound is an experience like none other. But trying to figure it all out in front of a live studio audience at specific times for specific durations wasn’t going to be the way to get the most out of it.

Come to think of it, Magnus blind-playing SNES games I recommend to him hasn’t gone well in general. Secret of Mana very much ended up on his shit list.

It likewise taught me that just because I enjoy a game and want to share it with others doesn’t mean it’ll make for a good stream (I’m speaking to YOU, Master of Orion II ). Despite a marked shift to using DC Live to chip away at my backlog of unfinished games, I now try to avoid games for which I have no idea what to expect. Not that I never got burned; I was woefully unprepared for the bullshit that awaited me in 3-D Dot Game Heroes despite having played it a fair amount previously.

But as far as it’s all come, there’s plenty I’m still figuring out. I’m trying to find the right balance between keeping and losing my cool. To not getting too absorbed in the game that I lose the chat for a bit, lest it turn into a glorified reaction video. How to use my Stream Deck more often. Those questions have answers, but there’s probably no answer to what the ideal version any stream is.