The world of video games changes beyond all recognition almost every few years, but one of the rare constants has always been the acknowledgement that watching other people play them is boring.
The rise of professional eSports has changed that to a degree, but as a rule of thumb the vast majority would rather play a game than watch someone else do it for them. That it is untilTwitch.
The stats speak for themselves but the success of Twitch has been staggering, generating more peak internet traffic than even Facebook. Despite the service being less than three years old, it’s completely bypassed mainstream media to make video games the most important topic for online socialising.
People may watch increasing little live television nowadays but on Twitch the average viewer watches at least an hour and a half every day.
Although Twitch was officially launched in June 2011, it spun out from the Justin.tv website, which helped to popularise the concept of ‘lifecasting’ by allowing anyone to stream any kind of content they want online.
‘After a couple of years the single largest area of interest on Justin.tv was video games,’ Twitch European director Stuart Saw told Metro. ‘Twitch was a subsidiary at first but now it’s its own entity.’
Exactly what is being streamed via Twitch can vary greatly, from magazine style shows to footage of games with audio commentary from the person playing. But whatever’s going on, each viewer has a chance to chat via text with the stream’s creator and everyone else who is watching.
‘It’s a very interactive experience, it’s a very social experience,’ said Saw. ‘Twitch is not just about watching other people play video games, it’s about interacting with everyone viewing. Whether it’s a popular player, a magazine show, or eSports people are chatting and experiencing it together. So it’s a massive social collaboration experience. And that all kind of led to Twitch Plays Pokémon, which was a truly corroborative experience.’
Twitch Plays Pokémon is exactly what it sounds like, whether that seems to make sense or not. It was an idea dreamt up by an Australian computer programmer, who adapted the Twitch interface to allow fellow users to control an emulation of the original Pokémon Red game from 1996. Because of the simplicity of the original Game Boy controls, and the turn-based nature of the combat, the whole game can be controlled with very simple inputs and requires no quick reactions.
As a result, Twitch players were able to control the game by typing text command in the chat room, with the concept eventually being streamlined to take a poll of other users’ suggestions – essentially allowing the game to be controlled by democratic vote.
The creator of the channel refuses to be named but Metro was able to talk to him under condition of anonymity. ‘Twitch Plays Pokémon was my first time broadcasting on Twitch. Before that I only ever used it to watch the occasional live stream made by YouTube channels that I follow,’ he revealed. ‘At the start I wasn’t sure if many people would care at all and then it exploded in popularity within a few days.’
Again, you only have to look at the stats to see what an understatement this is, although attempts to adapt the concept for other games with real-time action have so far struggled to work as well.
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