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Video games are a beautiful thing. They bring us together, teach us valuable lessons about problem solving and perseverance, and even allow us to experience what it would be like to go on a vicious crime spree without ever putting real-life innocent people in harm’s way—if you’re into that sort of thing.
What isn’t a beautiful thing is being forced to share. What is it with video games these days never having multiplayer? Now, everything is online. You can only snipe that shit-talking 12-year-old from Indiana so many times before it gets old and you’d rather be firing on your buddy sitting right next to you.
When I was a young child, in the age of Super Nintendo, my older brother would create the illusion of a multiplayer experience by letting me “control” the sidekick monkey Abu when we played Aladdin, a decidedly single-player game. Turns out Abu didn’t do shit; he just followed Aladdin around, and I was sitting there pushing buttons like a moron thinking I was doing something. My brother was an asshole. Who wants to sit there and watch someone else play a video game?
Well, lots of people, it turns out. Welcome to Twitch.tv, the five-year-old website to which 9.7 million people flock every day to watch total strangers livestream their video gameplays online. Twitch presents itself as a kind of social net for gamers, claiming over 2 million individual users streaming not only their video game experiences for others, but also tutorials, tournaments (Did you know there are professional video game tournaments?), and even talk shows.
If the sheer size of the Twitch community isn’t enough to convince you it's a full-on movement, consider that Amazon purchased the site for nearly $1 billion in 2014. So what the hell is Twitch, anyway? Let’s dive in with a guide to the basics, from how to host on Twitch to how some people are making a living on the platform.
Anyone Can Host on Twitch
If you’re a PC gamer, a number of free software products exist that allow you to stream your gaming experience to the world, but if you own a PS4 or Xbox One, all you need to do is download the free Twitch app. In both cases, however, a webcam helps. Nobody just wants to watch your screen.
There Are Legitimate Twitch Celebrities
There might be two million Twitch streamers, but several have managed to stand out from the pack, and it’s not just girls who woo the site’s largely male audience by training the webcam on their conspicuously exposed cleavage (although there are a lot of those, too).
Tom Cassell, a 23-year-old man from Manchester, England, parlayed his popular YouTube gaming channel, Syndicate, into an even more popular Twitch channel. Featuring livestreams of himself playing both modern and classic video games, often paired with witty or perturbed commentary, depending on the game, Syndicate’s channel has amassed over 2.4 million followers.
And Syndicate isn’t alone. Thirty-year-old Jaryd Lazar from Colorado, a.k.a. Summit1g, typically focuses on the CounterStrike series and has over 2 million followers. Most popular channels follow a semi-regular schedule, like a broadcast TV show, but followers also have the option to be notified when their favorite accounts go live.
Twitch is Interactive
Unlike TV, Twitch is intentionally designed to be interactive, fostering communication between streamers and the audiences viewing them. All channels feature a live chat function, in which users can communicate with each other and, usually, with the steamers themselves.
Professional Twitch Streaming is a Job
Remember when you wished you could just play video games for a living instead of doing your algebra homework? Twitch power users are living that dream, earning—in some cases—tens of thousands of dollars in donations and paid endorsements. If you get big enough, you can apply to be a Twitch Partner, which allows streamers to receive a cut of the site’s revenue from the audiences they draw to their channels.
IRL Celebrities Twitch, Too
Remember Turtle from Entourage, and his obsession with Fight Night? Turns out actor Jerry Ferrara is a gamer IRL, too, streaming Call of Duty on Twitch, among other games. Smoke more weed, Turtle.
Other celebrities known to Twitch include Snoop Dogg, T-Pain, Thomas Middleditch, Freddie Prinze Jr., Fred Durst, UFC flyweight champ Demetrious Johnson, and San Francisco Giants outfielder Hunter Pence.
Users Get Very Creative
Ever want to see Super Mario take a steel chair to his age-old nemesis, Bowser? Video Game Championship Wrestling is a channel that uses WWE ‘13’s “Create a Wrestler” feature to produce the likenesses of popular video game characters and then have them fight in the wrestling ring.
Another popular channel, BennyFits, seems mostly standard at face value, until you learn it’s hosted by some sort of Jim Henson-reject puppet that can be best described as Cookie Monster fallen on some seriously hard times.
It's Not Just for Gamers
Twitch capitalized on its growth by launching a “Creative” channel, to which artists like Deadmau5, Darude, and—wait for it—painter Bob Ross regularly contribute.
There's An Occasional Dark Side
Like most corners of the internet, Twitch has at times played inadvertent host to every breed of online malcontent from harmless trolls to literal Nazis. Female streamers occasionally report being harassed by users, and the chat boxes on their screens often feature sexist or raunchy messages from other users. In 2016, one user livestreamed himself perpetuating domestic abuse.
Another issue for Twitch has been the practice known as “swatting,” in which pranksters deliberately deceive law enforcement into sending a SWAT team to the house of a Twitch user during his or her live stream, usually by making false terroristic threats.
The Community Comes Together, Too
Perhaps the most famous moment in the platform’s young history has been “Twitch Plays Pokemon.” In February 2014, thousands of users simultaneously played the classic Gameboy game Pokemon Red by typing in commands like “A,” “B,” “Start,” or “Select,” to the chat box, forcing the “controller” to push those buttons. The result was chaotic—at times, as many as 120,000 people were playing the same game at once—but somehow, miraculously, the game was completed after 16 continuous days.
A subsequent experiment paid homage to “Twitch Plays Pokemon.” In 2016, “Fish Plays Pokemon” replaced the thousands of crowd-sourced players with a singular betta fish, which pressed “buttons” by swimming to different corners of its fish tank. Sadly, the fish did not complete the game.