Category: twitch

The importance of community

I first stumbled onto SimplySeze‘s twitch stream a year ago today as I was trawling around Jackbox Party Pack streams. As I had been doing for a few days prior to that, I was looking for a friendly, respectful stream run by someone who cultivated a healthy, inclusive community.

I lurked for a bit before jumping in as a rando, probably on a round of Trivia Murder Party, as that was my early favorite. And as had been the case on other TMP rounds on other streams, I did really well, and soon chat was playfully accusing me of cheating.

We all played a few games, I got timed out once or twice by the mighty Moobot for posting links in chat (to jackbox.tv, LUL) and all-in-all had a great time with Seze’s community. I finally dropped a follow at the end of the stream.

Over the next couple months, I would drop in from time to time when Jackbox was being played, or lurk while I played GW2, occasionally reacting to things, suggesting quotes, or cracking jokes. And during that time, I began appearing in chat more and more, and keeping up with her schedule as much as I could.

Then, on her January 5th stream, she decided to pre-empt her scheduled Sims stream for a run of Doki Doki Literature Club. Her normal 3-4 hour stream quickly became a 12-hour epic, and I stayed around almost to the bitter end.

The next day, after watching the last hour of the VOD, I dropped a sub while she was offline.

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Feeling a bit twitchy

For most of this year I’ve been thinking about trying my hand at game streaming on twitch. But the big thing I’m still struggling with (other than the underwhelming nature of my hardware) is that I don’t consider myself that much of a ‘real’ gamer, let alone one that other people would actually want to watch.

Of course, I’ve had some success in the past doing in-person walk-throughs of strategy/exploration games, and I’ve done a few Let’s Plays of times I could con a friend or two into expert-ing for me on KTaNE. But I play mostly a couple of solo and mobile games, and I can’t do FPS (or have good fps) for sh*t, really.

I don’t remember exactly where I first saw someone running a stream of a Jackbox Party Pack on my twitch travels, but dropping in and playing on random people’s Jackbox streams has been a recent pastime/distraction from work. I’ve picked them up now for in-person party gaming and have been s-l-o-w-l-y getting my stuff together to do a stream myself.

But the problem of audience (and a good, decent one) remains. So far, my attempts to drum up interest among people I know IRL has been… underwhelming. Current plan is to just get it going sometime and post in all my socials something along the lines of “HAY GUYZ COME PLAY WIT ME.” We’ll see who shows up.

In the meantime, trying to be a little less of a rando in the streams I visit. Cultivating new social circles among those that already do this sort of thing is probably a good idea too…