Chris “Sacriel” Ball’s computer is worth £20,000 and looms over me like a monolith. It is a completely silent machine, an alien spacecraft, and pulses with orange-yellow tubes of coolant, which keep the graphics card and motherboard from melting out of it like an ice pop. This machine is used to kill people: three, so far, today, but there will be countless more over the next eight hours. Behind there’s a looming greenscreen, as though Ball is an especially violent weather presenter; in front, a bank of four computer screens, each streaming an unending loop of information.
Ball is a gaming streamer. He started seven years ago on YouTube, then pivoted to Twitch. And now it supports him and a team of over 20. His house is the most beautiful home I’ve ever been to. His kitchen is a palace and his dogs are adorable. I wonder briefly if anyone would pay to watch me play Fortnite in just my pants, and what dark, awful things I would do with the ensuing wealth. Ball specialises in tactical combat games where he chillingly explodes the heads of hundreds of competing gamers, and 507 people are watching him do it right now. They are following his antics through Twitch, a website where you can watch people doing things. That’s it, that’s the entire concept. It feeds live from people’s living rooms, bedrooms and dedicated gaming rooms, out to thousands of devices at once. If YouTube is a Fast & Furious-style summer blockbuster, Twitch is the concurrent Big Brother equivalent: live cameras, often at a fixed and unflattering angles, revelling in conversational silence. Though it started out as primarily for gamers, the site has since evolved into a teeming community with people existing, doing, being on camera, and essentially performing anything as long as it is live.
It’s weird that Twitch exists. It is weirder that culture has sharpened to a point where Twitch is a thing. And weirder still that Twitch is now one of the biggest websites on earth, with up to 500,000 performers streaming live on the platform every day and more than 1 million users watching them at any one time. The set-up, if you’re unfamiliar, is this: you point a webcam at yourself and, as long as you remain more-or-less clothed, you are free to broadcast yourself doing whatever it is you do. People can watch for free, subscribe for a small monthly support- the-artist style fee, or just throw money at them in the form of credits, a digital version of pelting wads of cash at a street performer.
Twitch started as a portal to stream games and people-watching-people-playing-video games is still central to the essence of what it is. But in the eight years since it started, the platform has evolved and mutated, a synonymous call and response with the community that helps shape and support it. So now you can stream yourself cooking, for instance, or getting ready to go out, or playing poker, or walking around a city with a GoPro attached to a special rod, whispering, chatting. If you can do it and a camera can be pointed at it, then Twitch can host it. And people will watch it.
Where this differs from other online video platforms is the sheer aliveness of it. If YouTube is for the jump-cut blockbuster movie versions of reality, then Twitch revels in the mediocrity, in the burble of half- conversation. It’s reality without all the boring bits edited out – conversational lulls where a person talking to themselves alone in a room finally runs out of steam; gaps in the broadcast where someone goes out-of-shot to eat their dinner or go to the loo; mic-silences where someone’s mum walks into shot to have a dull, administrative mum conversation with them. And that’s how Twitch elevates from something that, on paper, should be entirely mediocre, but in practice becomes something that’s half-entertainment, half-therapeutic.
I never thought I’d become the kind of person who watches other people play video games: some things, like hard drugs or drag racing, you always assume you are too sensible for. But after a particularly life-uprooting break-up and a period of at-home confinement while I wrote a book, I found myself bizarrely drawn to Twitch, the soothing hypnotism of watching mostly silently men down energy drinks and kill other players, bathed in the blue light of their computer screens. Though I own video games, I suck at them, and watching professional gamers do what they do is akin to watching Lionel Messi weaving through a defence while I try to do 10 kick-ups in a row.
Twitch is characterised by the undulating stream of chat that sits alongside the action: little enclaves of in-jokes, catchphrases and anonymous screen-names, which you at first ignore then, slowly, find yourself drawn to. “Sick kill!” I typed once, into a darkly backlit chatbox, after one of my favourite streamers did a particularly sick kill. And the streamer said back to me: “Thanks.” You can talk to the TV, now, and the TV can talk back. You can ask the TV if it can throw a grenade out of a helicopter.
From a commercial and logical aspect, nothing about Twitch makes much sense. If you pitched the idea of it to TV giants in 2011, you’d be laughed out of the room. But Twitch is indicative of the way the internet is shaping itself into the things people like to consume. It’s a sort of self-fulfilling content machine in which the niche becomes broad. Nothing about fitness coach Joe Wicks made sense until he had a million followers; nothing about cleanfluencer Mrs Hinch made sense until she became a phenomenon. Twitch fits into that same niche. Which means watching other people play videogames is now a multibillion- dollar business.
To understand why this is, I decide to call my cousin Elijah, 12. It is initially hard to get him on the phone because he is too busy on PlayStation. “Do you like Ninja?” I ask him. Ninja is the biggest gaming streamer in the world – he made a reported $10m (£8.2m) last year from streaming himself near wordlessly playing one of the world’s biggest e-sports, Fortnite. Last March, real-world famous person and rapper Drake jumped on a stream with him for an old-world-meets-new-fame crossover event, and the feed quickly became the most viewed single streamer event in history – 677,000 people concurrently watched two men play videogames.
“No,” Elijah answers. “He’s too sweaty.” Essentially that means: Ninja is too good at videogames, to the point that it is no longer fun to watch. “Just launch in, win the game, same same same,” Elijah says. He cites a number of streamers he prefers to watch with completely made up names that I’m too afraid to go back to ask him to clarify in case he laughs at me. But the point is: Twitch isn’t just about being good at headshots. It’s about being good to hang out with, too.
Back next to Ball’s ultra-computer and the chatroom watching with me seems to agree. His fans – self-named “the 42nd” after his dual love of Hitchhiker’s Guide… and the fact it sounds a bit like a regiment – variously use the room as a sounding board, a safe space, a place to tap into some human interaction on days when leaving the house seems too much, an idle chatter zone where someone is always there to listen and, in some cases, a place to make real friends or romantic connections.
“People are dating because they met in our community,” Ball says. “We’ve got people who have struggles – ‘Oh, my dad’s drunk’ – and we’ve had people say, ‘I’ll pay for your plane ticket, come stay with me for a while and we’ll figure it out.’” People can log on after a bad day and find someone to chat to about their mental health. They can also make stupid jokes or sit there in absolute silence.
And that’s when I realised I’d been watching Twitch streams all my life. When I was a teenager, there was a quiet, soothing peace that came with slumping on a sofa in my friends’ houses and watching them shoot heads apart on video games. There, in the half-attention and bathing glow of a screen after midnight, conversations can spool away into something deeper. It’s possible to talk about sharp feelings and hard emotions better when the person you’re talking to isn’t making eye contact.
Looking back on it, there was a two-year period following the release of Unreal Tournament 2003 where I don’t think I saw one of my mate’s faces even once: just the back of their head as they sprinted through lava-strewn maps to capture a digital flag while I lay behind them on a bed, talking about comics, films, overpoweringly raw teenage emotions, girls, worries about the impending doom of the future, exams, money, a lack of money, my dad, my mum, whether I’d get into the right university, whether I’d make friends, why the town we’re in sucks.
There is something close to therapy in there, when someone isn’t really paying attention to you but making the rough sounds as if they are: the occasional “Yup” or “Ahuh” or “How have I died again? How have I died again?” punctuating indulgent teen-boy monologues from the middle of a beanbag placed on a messy floor. And that semi-attentive hypnotic state is useful in my life even now, getting hammered 4-0 on the sofa over Fifa while opening up about a break-up – and my theory is that Twitch taps into that grey, liminal area of half-chat. If you haven’t got someone to listen to you burble on while you both play through the first Metal Gear Solid game, again – or, worse, you’re having one of those days where the sheer idea of actual, by-your-side human company is A Bit Much for you – Twitch is there to fill the void. We worry about violence in videogames, for sure, but we underestimate the hypnotic, head-clearing effect of watching someone else perform it.
The mental health aspect of Twitch goes both ways, too: the strain for performers, having built up an audience and needing to sustain it, is very real. Ball pulls eight-hour days, six days a week and his schedule is rammed with streaming commitments (“We were lucky to get five days off for the wedding,” his wife of a week, Shannon, tells me with a cheerful eye roll. “His day off is chosen by the algorithm. Currently it favours Fridays.”) The issue came into focus earlier this year when YouTuber and streamer Desmond “Etika” Amofah was found dead a week after going missing in New York.
Mental health and technology writer Emily Reynolds recently highlighted how mental health-focused streamers were suffering burnout from becoming the de facto support network for their followers. “It’s pretty rough,” Ball admits. “The mental strain is pretty extreme, which is something that’s being talked more about now.” He has been known to fly to LA, make an appearance, turn around and, six hours later, fly back in time to stream again.
“Momentum is the key word in this industry,” he says. “A lot of the top streamers on Twitch get there because they don’t take time off.” As jobs go, it’s a lucrative, strange and highly pressured one.
I let him turn back to the screen and I drive home, creaking through static gridlock, stopping off for a lengthy lunch. When I finally get home and flop on to my sofa, Ball is still online, streaming. And I watch him, hypnotically, rapt, as he wins three games in a row, knowing at any moment I can reach out as if touching him and whisper: “Sick kill.” I am soothed for the evening. Tomorrow, he wakes up and goes again.
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