Watching other people play video games is the new entertainment. Let’s Plays, podcasts and streaming have proliferated in a major way in the past nine years. Most people wouldn’t have imagined that the small streaming outlet called Justin.tv would one day rival the monolith of Youtube.com. Now Twitch.tv garners the fourth-largest source of network traffic. That’s amazing, considering Twitch’s monthly active viewer count for 2015 was around two million users. To put this into perspective, YouTube has seen around a billion active monthly users since 2013 and is the second-largest source of network traffic.
I imagine that for the majority of the world, Twitch and other streaming tools are completely off the radar. In fact, it’s hard to capture what’s so interesting about watching other people play video games. Justin.tv was one of the first websites where users could broadcast video online. The gaming portion was so popular that the company set up an entire site dedicated only to broadcasting video games: Twitch.tv. The site gained a lot of popularity in proportion to the growth of eSports. In 2014 the site was purchased by Amazon for just shy of a billion dollars. Though gaming is by far the most popular category of streaming, it’s not the only one. There are streaming outlets for everything from education to music to cooking to painting. Over five million people tuned in to Twitch’s Bob Ross channel, which was dedicated to airing every episode of Bob Ross’s “The Joy of Painting.”
Why would anyone want to watch another person play video games? The entertainment usually has little to do with actual gameplay. We tend to compare YouTube and Twitch because both garner a massive viewer base dedicated to watching videos of other people playing games. But the one-sided nature of YouTube is entirely different from the interactions taking place on Twitch. Streamers have direct contact with their viewer base, and not just through a chatroom. Very often, streamers interact with their viewers through multiplayer games, Skype calls, contests and a variety of other methods. YouTubers are stuck either communicating through email or trying to manage a messy comment system that changes every year. What many would consider a fairly boring video becomes much more interesting when experienced in person.
Twitch creates communities that embrace the non-bodily nature of the digital. User enthusiasm comes simply from watching another person do what they do, like a small crowd of disembodied voices gathered around a single player at an arcade cabinet. It’s really not so different from hanging out with a group of friends, watching another play because it’s a one-player game. However, this is only one side of the coin. There are the small communities, and then there are the massive mega streams. Some Twitch events have become so popular they’ve earned their own Wikipedia pages. Twitch documented that over two million viewers watched livestreams of eSports championships for Dota 2 and League of Legends. In this aspect, streaming is no different than watching any other sporting event on TV. However there are some unique phenomena that draw millions of people for seemingly no reason.
The Twitch Plays Pokémon craze that blew up the Internet exactly one year ago should remind a few people of this. With an average at 80,000 viewers playing Pokémon Red, and at peak hours showing millions of viewers, it was quite the social experiment. In events like these, where communication is literally impossible, you simply enjoy it for the experience. It’s still a mystery why millions of people came to watch Red struggle to escape Pallet Town.