I, of course, had no idea who the two players were, but the crowd in the chat box was very familiar with their playing histories, their favoured strategies, their strengths and weaknesses, and so forth. When he at last delivered a fatal head shot, the release was palpable. For long stretches, not a whole lot happened and we watched as his character huddled motionless behind a rock, clad in a Ghillie suit, peering through his riflescope to locate his next quarry. Sometimes he consulted his map, which came up on screen and he indicated to us where he thought these opponents might be.

He wandered over a barren hillside, at one point muttering, 'who left this weehickle here?' when he encountered an abandoned Humvee.Ībout 600 people were watching his stream and they would venture guesses in the chat box as to where his enemies had concealed themselves. As I drank my coffee the following morning, I tuned in to watch an Eastern European man tackle a game in which he played some sort of military sniper who stealthily stalks opponents in the wilderness. I found that there was a calming quality to watching some of the channels. The chat box still ran and many stuck around to write 'REKT' a few more times and post 'I'm laughing so hard that I'm crying' emojis and generally gloat over his crushing defeat. The caster threw his hands up in frustration, said 'I'm done' and cut the stream abruptly before he could suffer further humiliation. 'REKT', wrote the chatters, over and over, which I'm pretty certain is slang for 'wrecked'. When one caster attempted a 'speed run' on a Legend of Zelda game (meaning he was trying to complete the game in record time), the chat box erupted with delight as he died before passing a stage that involved a lot of pixelated chickens.

A lot of Twitchers seem to relish watching the casters fail.

Amazon beats Google to buy Twitch for $970mĪs I settled in, I began to get a feel for the Twitch community.

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