Please fine NYMG’s official Twitch Stream at twitch.tv/nymg
This evening (Saturday Feb 22) from 4-6pm [edit, actually from 12:30-2:30] Alex will be Twitch streaming Hearthstone. Please join in and check it out!
This past week has been filled with a lot of gaming. No, not Lego Movie (because I beat that, maddeningly quickly). My new game is Hearthstone.
Hearthstone is a card game, much like Magic: The Gathering. However, it’s also completely digital. I’ve played Magic games online before, but there is a high barrier to entry that even though I’ve played games in person was too difficult to make online play enjoyable. Mix that with players who constantly spew racist and sexist remarks and website that warn users that this is not a game for noobs, Magic is all but dead for me, at least in its online version. However, Hearthstone takes the things I love about Magic and puts them into a simple, easy to learn but difficult to master, platform.
But there is another reason I’ve been having so much fun playing Hearthstone this week: Twitch. Twitch.tv is a website set up as a community for people to stream games as they play them. It’s free, to stream and to watch, and it really helps make a community for those of us who play different games, play games alone, or play games at home. For Hearthstone, it loosely is like watching poker on TV. Viewers can see your cards before you play them, and they can follow your moves (silently critiquing them, if they want). It doesn’t make me feeling like a celebrity or anything to Twitch stream a game, often I haven’t even had anyone watching, but the thought that a friend or someone surfing channels on Twitch could stop and watch a few hands is really interesting for me. It makes every game feel important, feel competitive.
One issue that you must face if you decide to Twitch stream a game is whether or not you’ll put up a video along with your gameplay. Most people do use the video feature while streaming (I actually use Xsplit to record the gameplay and Twitch to stream it, but ask me about that through email if you want to know more… ok ask Sam because she set mine up). Video is a topic that has been popular at NYMG in the last few weeks. We had to switch from using Skype to Google Hangouts to do our podcast, and with Google Hangouts comes the possibility of video. Video and audio have traditionally been a problematic thing for women because it marks them as female, something you do NOT want done in most online games. For me, however, after three years of recording the podcast with audio, I really was looking for something new. But most of all, I like seeing the faces of the other podcasters when we record. It allows for more sarcasm, more humor, and sometimes it allows you to see when a topic is really important/scary/disgusting to someone. So, yes, I have been broadcasting a view of me playing the game along with the gameplay. I probably won’t always do that, but for now I like it.
Going through the different screens on Twitch, it is clear that services like this has done something unique in the gaming community. It has allowed us to share the one thing that was (sometimes frustratingly) only yours in a game: your view. Your perception, your HUD, the timing you face, all of these things were only yours to experience. If you spend hours gaming every day, you have probably felt the frustration of trying to explain to another person exactly what was happening at a certain moment and why you reacted as you did. Gaming is so complex. It’s impossible to relate all the details of a given moment. And maybe no one else cares about those moments. But if you aren’t able to share them verbally, they go inside your memory to die. Each moment you’re playing, then, you know no one else will see it, will care about it, or will know it ever existed. But with Twitch, there is a sliver of hope that someone else will be able to share in your gameplay with you. And that’s why I love it.
