Eye on the game

There's something about Twitch.tv, a site that lets people watch other people play video games. The player broadcasts his gaming and usually overlays it with live stream and commentary from his webcam and mic, respectively. When I visited Twitch, the most striking part was the sheer number of people swarming on the sidelines, watching other people play. Indeed, I had previously thought that when somebody else was playing the video game, it was time to leave the couch, but if you head over to Twitch, you will see huge crowds cheering a video game tournament; even some random kid sitting in Moscow will have more than 1,000 folks watching him annihilate foes in a first-person shooter game, with a big chunk of them deeply engaged in the chat box conversation that runs next to the video content. The site is not necessarily limited to superstar players: even you can go ahead and broadcast your fumblings through Grand Theft Auto, though you're not likely to rack up any more viewers than you did for your YouTube clip. Real attention goes either to the most talented gamers or to the filthy basement dwellers who like to chat up their live-streaming audiences.

A very filthy example of the latter are broadcasters - often just one lone dude with a webcam set up such that the face appears in the lower corner of the screen as the gameplay takes centre stage. They often sound like girls - their 11-year-old voices being prepubescent - and they frequently wear cheap plastic headsets over their ears along with metallic microphones that streak across their jawlines. Whenever there is a break in the game - essentially a breather from SWAT teams in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive - they will squint at the chat box and read aloud the queries posted there with enormous pause and pain: "a--r--e y--o--u g--a--y, h--a--h--a?" To their credit, most broadcasters hold back from engaging with this stuff, not because they had a moral awakening, but because reading is way too much wrestle for their brains.

Also, a lot of viewers seem to relish watching these broadcasters fail: when one called n00bra (Hindi for n00b, a person playing an online video game who knows nothing about it and performs badly) attempted to defuse the bomb in time, the chat box erupted in delight as a sniper took him down. "REKKD", wrote the chatters, over and over, which I think is slang for "wrecked". The 12-year-old threw his hands up, said, "I am done", and cut down the stream abruptly before further humiliation; but the chat box still ran, and many still wrote "REKKD" a few more times.

Solid Cake, another self-styled expert on Counter-Strike, questioned the very nature of the gaming universe in the chat box, moments after his eleventh death in the game. "Is this all there is?" asked Cake, after reincarnating in a storage locker, while two masked men frantically searched for him in the warehouse. "Will I ever escape this endless loop of death?"

Cake was then discovered by the men and cut up.

Cake has been fatally shot 2,143 times in the past six months, and gets disappointed and philosophical with his viewers each time he dies and reincarnates to repeat his military mission. According to an 11-year-old active in chat, Cake's philosophical uncertainty is far from uncommon: "We all wrestle with big questions." So Cake, some sort of military sniper, resumes stealthily to stalk his opponents even as 600 people watching him stream venture guesses in the chat box as to where his enemies have concealed themselves. Sometimes, he consults his map, which pops up on screen, and indicates to us where his opponents might be. But for long stretches, he remains huddled motionless behind a rock, peering through his rifle's telescope. When he delivers a head shot at last, the release is palpable, for all of us.

This is when 12-year-olds start pouring out a language of their own: "He cupcaked that b***h!" - which sounds like an insult, but I am too busy trying to understand what the verb "cupcake" means to be offended. Then, the chats reel with homophobic banter: my ID is guyexplorer0 and they call me gay gunner; beyond that, they offer nothing but puzzlement because they speak a language I don't quite understand: "Liek, u gott4 re3D teh gudieCAREFUl1y and tehn OMG LIEK I AM R0XX0RZ."

It was hard for me to understand why anyone would spend time watching or reading this stuff, let alone sitting and suffering insults directed to him: I guess I am not a like-minded soul.

ashish.sharma@bsmail.in