The Impact Factor

Home For The Holidays, On Twitch

Perspectives

Essentially all of my friends live thousands of miles away. The path to my Ph.D. has taken me across the country and far from home. I’ve always been an insular person, but the few connections I’ve made over the past 10 years or so are incredibly strong. I try to take a step back every once in a while to give thanks to the era I was born in. No longer does geographical distance sever bonds. With e-mail and Facebook and Twitter and so on, there is no shortage of ways to keep your relationships strong. What I never expected when I started The Impact Factor, and Twitch streaming specifically, was that it would be the flash point that rekindled the flame of my time worn bonds.

The Impact Factor started as, and still largely is, a passion project spurred from my love for video games and the dire need to do something that takes my mind off the more stressful parts of my biomedical sciences Ph.D. work. Ask anyone in my field and they’ll probably tell you that 3^rd year is the most challenging & frustrating & stressful & psychologically traumatic of the bunch. You’ve finished most of your classes, you are in your thesis lab, and have a decent idea of what aims you wish to pursue. Sounds great, right? But third year is also the time where you need to figure out what works, a.k.a. what’s worth pursuing. You can find yourself spending weeks, even months, at a time chipping away at something that for one reason or another you need to abandon. It’s a horrible feeling. Luckily my PI is an excellent mentor & boss, I have a friendly lab and, most importantly, I have the most wonderful and supportive fiancée. The Impact Factor was there for me, too. It’s been a great creative outlet.

As the year has gone on, The Impact Factor has grown. And man has it been a lot of fun. In late Spring I began recording a gaming podcast. In the fall, and inspiration behind this article, I began regularly streaming my gameplay on Twitch. Twitch has been a pretty new thing for me. Despite having close friends who are also into gaming, the actual act of playing video games has been a totally closed off experience for me. Throughout childhood and, let’s not lie here, college too, there was nothing I liked more than to shut myself off from the world and play some video games in the quiet of my basement/room respectively. The thought of broadcasting my gameplay while providing commentary seemed to be a massive undertaking. It would be wholly dissimilar to how I traditionally experience games. Streaming on Twitch is all about finding an audience, too. Who would watch me play? Would they want to have conversations with me? I feared harassment from trolls, I feared spamming from bots, I feared I would be terrible at commentating my gameplay and (most of all) I feared I’d be streaming to no one at all. What happened has been miraculous, though.

 

I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I first started streaming to Twitch.

I’m no big Twitch streamer. Far, far from it. In the roughly 4 months that I’ve been streaming I’ve amassed 23 followers. My record simultaneous viewership is something like 13 people. What those numbers don’t show, however, is how engaged those 23 people are in the stream. What they also don’t show? Essentially all of those people are close friends. They are people that I know in real life. For some of them, our friendship goes back over a decade. Others, since I started college. But all are people I consider my closest (and only) friends. This has made streaming games on Twitch more like sitting down on the couch to with friends nearby, rather than sitting down alone in my apartment with a microphone and a controller. Twitch streaming is me and my friends talking about the day, the latest game announcement, trials & tribulations of the adult world, and more. I’ve found Twitch streaming to be transportative in all the best ways. For brief moments, it opens a portal to an alternate reality. A reality in which somehow all of my close friends and I have found a way to live in the same city, and are hanging out for a game night. It’s a feeling I never expected to be honest, especially after what I’d seen from many of Twitch streamers I follow.

 

My Twitch page. Numbers never tell the full story.

More than just having company, Twitch streaming with friends has provided a perfect outlet to strengthen our friendship. People’s lives get busy. Despite having unprecedented access to any number of communication methods, it’s so easy to fall out of the habit of keeping in touch. Everyone has their own schedule and often schedules don’t align well. Setting a regular stream schedule on my Twitch, however, has let people know where, when & how they can talk with me if they feel so inclined. Once there, talking gives me a good chance to see how things are going, what’s good and what’s bad. The routine nature of my stream gives me a view into their life in quasi-real time and without the formality of something like a ‘So this is what’s been happening over the past few months’ e-mail. Or the sometimes-tedious texting back and forth. I say without exaggeration that streaming has brought me closer to people I care about than pretty much anything I’ve done since being in graduate school.

Would I like a big Twitch viewership one day? Maybe. If for nothing else how killer would it be to have custom emotes? For now, though, I enjoy the size of my channel and love the people who come to watch. When a channel gets above a certain size you often see some sort of detachment form between the streamer and the audience. Whether it be putting on a persona, a palpable disdain / disinterest, or whatever. My experience as a hyper small streamer has been exactly the opposite. I feel at my most real. I feel connected and interested. I want to build bonds and strengthen friendships. I treat everyone like a long time friend because, a few exceptions aside, everyone in chat is. I hope to make new ones, too.

 

Playing games with my best friends is awesome.

The Impact Factor and streaming to Twitch has given me a creative outlet, helped to relieve stress, and most importantly, make me feel closer to the people who matter most in my life. On Twitch, I’m home for the holidays.

Thanks RADTrooper, lrota4509, darkemblem3, Tetris4me, Flissofthenorthstar, InsertFail, and of course kitty_jus. You’re the best. Happy holidays!

Thank you everyone. You're the best. Happy Holidays!