I mentioned yesterday that I’ve been trying to livestream more gameplay (currently with a tenuous schedule of Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday @ 8pm, http://twitch.tv/problemmachine ). It’s interesting the sorts of pressures that streaming your gameplay puts on you – it pushes you to play the game in different ways than you probably would left to your own devices, and also pushes you towards different sorts of games than you might otherwise play. It makes you a showman as well as a contestant, playing performance and audience at the same time, trying to balance that experience – to act on the game, then react to its reactions for the crowd.
The experience of playing a game, as with any artistic experience, depends a great deal on the context we engage with that experience in. And, as someone who cares a great deal about games and tries to give each game I play its due, there are a lot of games I simply don’t feel comfortable playing on-stream, that I feel like I wouldn’t be doing justice by talking and joking and generally trying to be as entertaining as possible throughout the playthrough. Additionally, I’m emotionally reserved enough that I’m hesitant to play a really emotional and intense game on-stream, because I’m not super into the idea of sharing those reactions.
Sometimes I worry that trying to stream more means I’ll end up playing less of these games, have fewer introspective and emotional experiences out of games in favor of more systemic and improvisational ones. Sometimes I worry that trying to stream more means that I’ll play some games in a way that is shallower and less meaningful to me. The first is more of a problem than the second, but either way something is lost, and it’s a leap of faith whether what I gain in return is worthwhile.
That’s always the way it is, though. Every time you choose something you give something else up, and wanting everything is a quick shortcut to getting nothing. Right now, I choose to stream: In the future, perhaps I’ll choose otherwise. I’m a greedy man who hates to give anything up: My philosophy when faced with a choice between two things is usually to take both or neither. Still, that’s a philosophy with its limitations, and perhaps it’s just getting older but I feel like I’ve been hitting those limitations more often than I used to.
I suppose there’s a difference between reading a play and watching a play and acting in a play, and these are all precious and worthwhile experiences. However, the way you experience the play for the first time will forever shape your relationship to it, so which of those experiences you favor is based on what you need from your art, what you’re hungry for. Me, I’m always hungry for everything, and I want all the experiences. Dilemmas don’t sit well for me.