Twitch Streaming & Remote Learning

I recently was invited to speak to a remote class of middle schoolers about coding for fun. I was a little nervous, but their teacher assured me that it would be fine. “It’s like being a Twitch streamer,” she said. “You don’t know who is actually watching, and most folks interact through chat.”

Twitch is a video streaming platform where folks can watch other folks play video games, live. However, not everyone is playing video games on Twitch. Some people knit, some people cook, and some people just chat. Like YouTube, anyone can start their own channel for free, and a lucky few get thousands and thousands of followers.

I’m new to Twitch. After I built my gaming PC, I realized I could easily stream the games I played. I had two monitors, a wired internet connection, a Yeti microphone, and a webcam. It was relatively easy to get started, but very difficult to get the whole process to go seamlessly.

Being a Twitch streamer means you have to be a talk show host, a live video director, and a gamer all at once. As a result, my first couple streams were wrought with technical difficulties. My video feed was inconsistent and choppy. I often would forget to turn my mic on (or off). I had to write myself a little checklist on a Post-It note to make sure that I wasn’t forgetting anything when I went live. Eventually, I Googled my problems, watched some tutorials, and cobbled together a functional stream.

I referenced this article from Suz Hinton a lot. Suz (aka “noopkat”) is a creative programmer that live codes every Sunday. Her advice: have a consistent streaming schedule, and make sure you chat with your audience.

Welcome to My Living Room

Streaming on Twitch is intimate. When I first started out, I had at most 2 viewers (usually friends) who kept my stream open in blind support. It felt odd, talking to no one. Sometimes I would fall silent because I ran out of things to talk about, or I was discouraged that no one found my content interesting. But then I started to re-frame how I thought about the channel.

As a kid, I loved sitting on the couch with my cousins as they played video games. It was casual socializing with very low attentional commitment. I didn’t necessarily have to entertain my viewers, I simply had to make them feel like they were coming over for a chill afternoon. This took off a lot of the pressure to “perform” for my followers. Instead, we were all hanging out.

This also helped me when I was discouraged about how few people visited my stream. I’ve played video games with one or two friends and it was delightful. Honestly, it would feel a little bit overwhelming if a hundred people were tuning into my stream, especially when I was just getting a handle of the platform. So, I took it as a blessing that I had a small, core group of people who consistently showed up to watch me flail around in Sea of Thieves and Rocket League.

Always Be Chatting

When I jump into someone’s Twitch stream, I am immediately bored if the streamer is mostly silent. I am more likely to stay if I get to hear their occasional commentary, and more likely to subscribe if I enjoy listening to them. A silent stream makes me feel uncomfortable in the metaphorical Living Room.

Teaching myself to constantly chat was extremely unnatural. When I’m working, I tend to be silent and focused. For streaming, this wouldn’t work. I played a little bit of Later Alligator, a story-based puzzle game with a lot of quirky characters. I performed the voices in character but quickly grew tired of it. I just didn’t have the energy to play a dozen different people. My partner, Chey, on the other hand, is a trained actor, so she is able to do this kind of thing for four hours straight. But it wasn’t for me.

Playing games online with friends over voice chat was a great way to put on training wheels for idle chatting. In Sea of Thieves, I invited up to four of my friends to play with me, and the banter came easily. My viewership grew as my stream became more engaging, featuring my friends and I talking about our lives and in-game strategy. Viewers also offered their own commentary in chat, which was exciting but I was unable to address them often when socializing with my friends in-game.

I started to look for one-player games that I could talk over without having to perform. A great example is Death Stranding, a game primarily comprised of long stretches of hiking (with supernatural creatures pursuing you). Like in real hiking, there is a ton of opportunity for you to talk about anything. Even though Death Stranding can be a stressful experience, it was perfect for me to stream to an audience.

Back to School

If remote teaching is like streaming on Twitch, what can we do to make our courses more engaging to students? On Twitch, it would be unheard of to demand attention from viewers. Realistically, the students are likely keeping their video chat windows open because they have to, but they are engaging in other stuff during class. What’s new here? When I was in high school, I would doodle in my notebook when I was bored, or daydream, or read. When my teacher talked about something particularly interesting, I paid attention.

Twitch streams are ambient media, which means you play it in the background to make you feel less alone. In quarantine, this is really valuable. Twitch streams (and certain YouTube videos) excel at being the kind of thing you can easily tune in and out of. You can be washing dishes, crafting, or even walking while listening to a Twitch stream. It feels like hanging out with friends, especially when you occasionally pop into the chat.

Of course, public education demands the attention of students. There are important things that children need to learn, like math and history, that require focus. After all, you can’t really learn in a meaningful way from playing a lecture in the background while you’re cooking.

But, if you are an educator looking to improve the way you are connecting with your unseen audience, watching Twitch streamers can potentially give you a lot of ideas of what works and what doesn’t. For example, Chey will sometimes draw on Twitch. As she’s drawing, folks will ask her what tools she uses, or who her favorite artists are. When Noopkat is coding, viewers can ask her in real time what she’s doing, or what a particular function does.

I’m imagining an English teacher who breaks down chapters of a complicated book twice a week over livestream. Or a biology teacher who assembles an anatomically correct skeleton. Once you optimize your content for the medium on which it is being presented, the quality of your content improves. Instead of trying to bring the classroom to the internet, perhaps we should be students of the internet first so that we’re not trying to stick a square block into a round hole.

Appendix

• Ambient Media https://medium.com/@ConnorTheMiller/ambient-media-captures-the-feeling-of-hanging-out-perfectly-183faabaf088
• The Gentle Side of Twitch https://gizmodo.com/the-gentle-side-of-twitch-1834215442
• Suz Hinton’s Lessons from Twitch http://meow.noopkat.com/lessons-from-one-year-of-streaming-on-twitch/
• My Twitch Channel https://www.twitch.tv/connorthemiller