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Warning: parents may not be happy, and it’s not as easy as it sounds.
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By Lucas Palmer
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Fandom is a very delicate thing, resistant to sudden change and variations. This goes double for sports fans. On April 26, 2015, many across America tuned their televisions to ESPN2 and found, no, not the Rockets-Mavericks game, which was being aired on TNT instead, but college students playing video games. The live championship match of Blizzard’s “Heroes of the Dorm” competition came complete with animated commentary and was met with many reactions on social media—some hilarious, others furious. Many Tweets criticized ESPN for selling out. These were not athletes, after all. UC Berkeley vs. Arizona State—the 12 college students held one hand on the mouse, the other on the keyboard. Despite ESPN airing the exciting ‘athletics’ of the World Series of Poker every year, many sports fans were questioning, “If major sports networks can show nerds playing video games, where in the hell is this world heading?”
As I witnessed the controversy of this event, scrolling through Tweets and Facebook comments, I couldn’t help but feel a little elated. I realized that my childhood dreams were finally coming true—people could actually play video games for a living. I quickly found Twitch.tv, a popular streaming website created by Justin Kan in 2011. This website was filled with people who made their livings playing video games in front of live audiences. Imagine that on a resumé. Of course I looked into the equipment needed, but I couldn’t help but picture the frowns and rebukes of my grandparents at Thanksgiving if they found out how I was paying my rent. So, I gave up on that venture and decided to pursue a graduate degree in Creative Writing. My grandparents still think I’m studying journalism.
I have always been a fan of Pokémon. What can I say? I love the colorful little monsters. So what if the newly changed “Gotta Catch ‘Em All!” slogan revealed the real intent: Gotta Buy ‘Em All? I’m afraid my inner collector-crazed self hasn’t aged well and, fortunately, I’m not alone.
Dan is a full-time Pokémon streamer living in Danbury, Connecticut. Otherwise known as aDrive, this 25-year-old is one of the most interactive streamers on Twitch. Monday through Saturday, his stream goes live in front of an audience of over 1,000 people. This number typically doubles by the end of the stream. Some of the more well-known streamers such as LIRIK or DansGaming pull an audience of 6,000-plus each day but as far as Pokémon goes, aDrive is one of the biggest names on Twitch. He signs into his streams like a radio DJ.
“Yoooooooooooooooo, what is going on Twitch.tv/A-D-R-I-V-E?! It’s your boy, Dan, AKA aDrive! Bringing you theeeee best in Pokémon streaming content!”
Watching aDrive quickly became an obsession. I was hooked instantly—I decided I would live vicariously through him. There are so many things I love about his streams: his great personality, how he sings the Pokémon theme song to new subscribers, (viewers who pay a recurring five dollar fee to support their favorite streams), his musical talent. aDrive performs songs he’s written on his guitar for every $50 donated. He does all of this while playing my favorite games and responding to the plethora of questions asked in the quick moving chat box of his stream. These questions come in a wide variety. The typical ones are asked ad nauseam: What’s your favorite Pokémon? When do you stream? Are you going to play [insert new game name here]? But then there are the outliers: Do you wear socks when you sleep? What about while you’re in the shower? Dan takes these questions in good humor for the most part. “You have to feed the [internet] trolls, guys. Just enough for them to get by.”
When the questions become too ridiculous or break the rules of his PG-appropriate stream, he breaks out his legendary ban hammer and smites the offender into a muted state of oblivion. It is because of these trolls that Twitch streamers and YouTubers often forgo their last names in favor of an alias to separate their offline life from their online one. These precautions protect them from harassment and prevent strange denizens of the internet from getting ahold of their personal information.
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Maybe it’s because I’m trying to avoid the outdoor-obsessed attitude of Arkansas, or perhaps it’s a refuge from the never-ending grind of graduate school, but you’ll typically find me, CptGravy26, spamming subscriber-only emoticons into aDrive’s chat whenever a viewer subscribes or donates to the stream. I go crazy with the hyped chat whenever aDrive finds a shiny Pokémon, essentially albino versions of the Pocket Monsters found randomly through different in-game methods; Dan’s quest is to capture all 721 existing Pokémon in this palette-swapped form, not to mention all the new Pokémon that will exist after the release of the new games, Pokémon Sun and Pokémon Moon, in November. But there are moments when I wonder what I’m doing—when Dan takes a break to walk Lilli, his miniature Goldendoodle, and the chat spams aChair emotes to worship his GT Omega Racing Office chair while he’s gone, all the while a graphic of a shiny Metapod, the mascot of the New York Metapods (just one of the many teams in various YouTube Pokémon draft leagues, sporting names such as the Chicago Cubchoos, the Boston Red Sawks or Dunspacelona) dances on-screen. It’s moments like this when I wonder how this could ever be someone’s full-time job.
Coordinating schedules to interview aDrive was difficult. At the time, he was busy planning his wedding with his fiancé, editing new YouTube videos (he uploads at least one every day—clips from his streams or new Let’s Play series, episodic playthroughs of a game), and of course, streaming. Forty minutes to chat is asking a lot of someone who could be spending that time streaming, expanding and entertaining his audience. Even as we discussed his career over Skype, I could hear his phone buzzing. He apologized.
“Sorry, I’m working on a big YouTube project right now.”
He has been career streaming for over a year now, leaving his job in March 2015 to pursue YouTube and Twitch as his full-time job.
Dan began streaming in college because the competitive Call of Duty team he was a part of required it. Twitch was an easy way for teams in Major League Gaming (MLG) to prove they had participated in and won a match. “I just enjoyed making content on the internet. Streaming was a different way to do that with live viewers.” Dan had been making YouTube videos for six years at that point. It was a hobby for him to broadcast himself for others to watch, but he had never gone into it with the mentality of making money. “I wish I could tell you why I decided to start streaming Pokémon,” aDrive said, “I think I just wanted to try something different that day.” He continued to play Pokémon when he streamed and as he watched his audience grow, he realized that there was income to be made from this.
“I was having a blast doing it. Surprisingly, people were coming to me saying I had made their day better. I had a positive impact on their day-to-day, which I still have a hard time understanding sometimes.”
Twenty-three years old at the time, Dan figured he was at the right point in his career to make the switch. As he prepared for that career move, he was dedicated to streaming 20 hours a week on Twitch to grow his audience while still working a 50-hours-per-week salaried position. “So I was working 70 hours, 80 hours a week. [but] I knew that if I put the time in, there was an opportunity for me to grow.” aDrive thinks his stream fulfilled the need for a highly interactive stream targeted toward the Pokémon community. This level of interaction is tough, especially when your chat moves at an average of one line of text per second. Between welcoming new followers, singing for new subscribers, promoting his new YouTube content and his recent switch to playing on two 3DS systems at the same time, the fact that he actively responds to his chat is some serious multi-tasking.
There are some incredibly strange things on Twitch. I’ve witnessed men chomping on Gerbil food because of a hefty donation. I’ve swung by the tail end of a 24-hour stream, the sleep-deprived gamer barely capable of tapping the triggers on his PS4 controller. A few years ago there was a phenomenon on Twitch known as TwitchPlaysPokémon. A programmer had designed the stream to use viewer inputs (up, down, a, b, etc.) through the chat box to collectively control the game. After creating elaborate lore to accompany the anarchic nature of their in-game achievements and failures, the 1.1 million participants beat the game after 16 days, seven hours, 45 minutes and 122 million chat messages. Since then, the Twitch community has beaten Dark Souls, a game famous for its difficulty, after 43 days and 904 deaths.
Twitch.tv began as Justin.tv in 2005. Creator Justin Kan intended the site users to broadcast their lives, inviting them to make their own reality show of sorts. This wasn’t very well received, though, and many users began looking for ways to stream themselves playing video games. This was difficult to do in 2005, the equipment and software needed was technologically complex. Kan saw this need and hired a streaming specialist to assist others to begin streaming. This community grew until it became Twitch.tv, a new branch of Justin.tv in 2011. Twitch was purchased by Amazon in 2014 for $970 million dollars in cash.
Today, the popular streaming website falls behind Netflix, Google and Apple as one of the most trafficked sites in the U.S. The average Twitch user is an 18 to 24-year-old Asian male who chose not to attend college, according to quantcast.com. Most users spend more than 20 hours a week watching content on the site and many streamers are looking to capitalize on this demand for entertainment. I’d say that most of these statistics apply just as well to the average Twitch streamer. There seems to be a trend of young people making this switch and it’s not hard to see why. With $38,000 of student debt looming over me as I labor over the keyboard, it’s a simple choice: If you can make money doing this, if you can really get people to watch you and, more importantly, donate, why would you go to college?
GalacticElliot, a 19-year-old Pokémon streamer from Long Island, New York is one such opportunist. He is looking to make a career out of his YouTube content and Twitch streams. Despite his young age, Elliot has more experience than most. He has been making video game-related YouTube videos since he was 8 years old.
“It’s something I never really thought would have the potential to be someone’s full-time job [but] as time goes by, more and more people are looking to it as a viable option.”
There have been setbacks in the past because of his age (YouTube requires all users to be at least 13), but Elliot thinks now is the time to turn his hobby into a career. “If this flops, I have enough money saved up to possibly go to college. If this did work out, I could make this a job and live off it for the next couple of years if not longer than that.”
Elliot said his parents remain a bit skeptical about his decision to pursue YouTube and Twitch full-time. At the time of our interview, Elliot’s parents were unemployed. “Not to talk about actual numbers, but I could probably live paycheck to paycheck with the amount of money I do receive.” Elliot went on to say, if he had to guess, his parents think that college would be a much more promising option for a 19-year-old.
When I asked aDrive about his family and friend’s reactions to his career decision, I received a much different response. “At first, I think [my parents] were very concerned. We had a lot of conversations about it.” Dani, now aDrive’s wife, and her parents were also concerned. “Like, is this guy she’s dating going to able to have a ‘real’ job?” Now, Dani is very involved and supportive of Dan’s career. She appears on stream frequently and has even joined aDrive for a co-operative Let’s Play on YouTube in celebration of their marriage. Now, most of aDrive’s family is on board with his decision to stream full-time. Like GalacticElliot, who frequents aDrive’s streams, Dan came to the conclusion that this was the best time in this life to pursue this as a career. “I’ve got my degree. I had some security in the fact that my job would hire me back if I needed it.” Dan said he still gets some skeptical comments and stares when he tries to explain what he does. “I don’t expect everyone to understand it, because I don’t fully understand it sometimes.”
I imagine it’s very difficult to explain to someone that you’ve decided to make your hobby into a business venture. Most small businesses are built on this premise, but I have often wondered what happens to your hobby when it becomes vital to your income. How do Twitch streamers view their favorite video games now that it’s a tool to make their living? GalacticElliot thinks it all depends on the game. “You’ve got to play the game in a way that other people can play it with you.” On his channel, he does this through viewer battles and trades or retweeting the pictures of shiny Pokémon that his viewers catch. “What happens with speed running (attempting to finish a game as fast as possible), people come through and just watch.” Elliot thinks that Pokémon allows him to connect with his audience much easier than if he played a different game.
The popular role-playing game has always had a social aspect to it. As early as the original games, there has always been two versions of the game—you could not catch every Pokémon by yourself. You had to trade with someone else who owned the other game. Elliot agreed that this is his hobby, but says that it’s a lot more complex than that. People see these streamers as people just playing a video game. “What they don’t realize,” Elliot said, “is that not only are you playing a videogame, but you’re also an entertainer. You’re also being interactive. You’re also trying to make people feel like they’re with you during that experience—that you belong to a community.”
As the match between UC Berkeley and Arizona State continued, social media continued to blow up. However, you can see from the Tweets and the Facebook posts that the longer that audiences spent with the game, the more they found they liked it—whether they understood what was happening or not. Tweets raging about the nerds playing video games on television soon became confessionals; people were interested in the energy of the commentators. They were all watching the same thing, discussing it, enjoying the experience. Then Berkeley triumphed over Arizona in the fifth match, netting the six-man team full scholarships for the rest of their time in college.
The studio audience cheered as confetti fell in a thick downpour from the ceiling. The gamers jumped out of their chairs, fists in the air like champions. Their focus was on the tournament they had just won. They had won it all, together. They couldn’t have known about the backlash the televised event was receiving all over social media. They had simply played their best, knowing that their friends and family were watching, knowing that they would be able to talk about this experience, win or lose, among their teammates afterward. While many have and will continue to resist the prominence of video games in our culture, at least some onlookers had become convinced that day while watching these college students face off in a high stakes competition. For some of us, the question stopped being about nerd vs. jock or about the competitive legitimacy of one activity over the other, but about celebration. Our question became, “What in the world is next?”
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