As I don’t have much time any more to sit and play a lot of games on my own, what I am doing in smaller time slices that I still have on my hands, is watch someone else play games. Finding someone who plays the game you are intrigued about, have memories about, are stuck in and can’t progress looking for pointers or simply wondered if it was as good as the advertisement, can easily be found on the internet these days – be it on Youtube, Twitch, or a different platform for video streaming or consumption.
Years ago, long before a pandemic, players started to record themselves while playing and uploading the video footage to Youtube. Similarly but more recently, the same happens via Twitch or Youtube streaming, but in a live event while playing, to be able to have a live audience, engage with them and let them be part of the experience. This evolved from broadcasted tournaments of professional eSports players. These broadcasts would usually come with commentary and show the real pros at work – sponsored teams that play one another for trophies and price money. Platforms such as Twitch and Youtube have democratized this somewhat, giving non-professionals a chance to entertain gaming-interested watchers and thus, monetize on those videos and earn money. There’s a number of full-time content creators that focus on games, taking watchers on “Let’s plays”.
There’s a few games I like to watch – and I’ve found a few streamers or content creators that I like watching. Mainly because they’re sympathetic, or they explain some of the game mechanics or their handling of the game to newer players as they play. Or it’s simply them joking with the live audience; the audience writing in a live chat, debating and discussing, and the streamer reading comments aloud and answering live.
Especially for retro games, where some of the fun is diving into nostalgia again, this format is fantastic. The format allows for not only enjoying these old games without spinning up virtualized hardware, VMs or real retro hardware, but can have additional value, when the streamer has played the game before and can give historical context, reconnect with their memories from playing it before – and asking the audience for their favorite parts of the game, or hidden cheat codes or special tactics of beating the game.
It’s an entirely new form of content if done right.
Enough with the explanatory part – as I am looking at this new form of entertainment supporting the game industry through content creators, I am wondering what traits a new game could and possibly should support, to land well with streamers and this form of streaming and entertainment. Because – let’s be honest – if you look around and your favorite streamer is playing this game and it’s designed for lots of hours of fun streaming, it will be picked up by more streamers and their watchers, doing your marketing for you.
Balanced Pace: As the streamers progress with the game, they usually play for a while, sometimes hours. Style differs per streamer – but most will engage with their audience, engage in banter, chat and discussion, if only lightly, during play. In an ideal world, the game supports different paces and intensity, so that game progression and action with focus on the game and lighter passages with less intensity that allow for chatting, audience engagement and… room for breathing.
Reduce grinding and repetitive actions: streamers play the game to entertain their audience – while some may enjoy “off-time” from the game and go and grind in a classic fashion like you’d do in an old-style role playing game to level up your character, if it comes across as too repetitive, it may put viewers off. Clearly that differs for streamers and their audience. For Youtube recordings, I’ve seen streamers edit the live-stream recording and edit out the long grinding parts, so the uploaded video becomes for entertaining for video-on-demand audiences. While it’s common for a few games to contain “collect x amount of resource Y before you can progress” quests, this type of challenge can take some forms – whereas classic “grinding” in the classic role playing sense may not (really). Especially not if the streamer is stuck in a game section and needs to level up, before progressing.
Voices for characters: some streamers make it their challenge to self-voice characters in a game and read out loud the dialog and written text to their audience. Sometimes even with great pleasure, different voices, accents and stylistic flavors. Others use software to alter their voice, to allow for a variance of characters that they read for – to make following along more entertaining. A valid design element could be to reduce professionally recorded voices through voice actors – or reduce them to cut scenes – or make them configurable. Having the content creator adding their touch, tone and style to dialog that’s – in most cases – tied very closely to the game’s story, can add entertaining value and be fun.
Surprise effects: A number of times, I enjoyed sequences of the game that surprised the streamer – and saw their reaction, either laughing, yelling, screaming, cursing. In some instances, I played the game before and knew what was coming and they didn’t – in other instances, I saw the “surprise” for the first time, and found it funny too. For all these occasions, I found great joy in witnessing the streamer’s reaction and living through the situation. This doesn’t have to be a scary part like in a survival horror game like Resident Evil – these surprises can be small. The last I encountered in a stream I watched was in Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, in the Boss fight with Ganondorf. After a first sequence of fighting, the demon king takes a new form, and their health bar renews. But instead of showing the health bar in the “usual” centered size like the game did for all other enemies in the game before, it would show the health bar, enlarge it, and let it grow up until almost the edge of the screen. A “nice” surprise that had the streamer yell in frustration of unfairness – with extra cursing!
Build for continuity: many streamers stretch the game play across several streams over multiple days, weeks sometimes. Fairly large games like the Zelda games (Breath of the wild and Tears of the Kingdom both) sometimes make 40-50 streams of 2-3 hours each – or some 200 videos of ~30 minutes for some content creators. Keeping the momentum, the audience engaged and keeping the balance of action and focused sections of the game vs. lighter sections is hard in this length. Content creators will naturally cut larger games in more digestible chunks. What helps, is working in clues and hints about game progressing into load screens, the game interface, and recurring places, such that, even if I am not a regular watcher, or have missed a part or two, I can figure out how far someone has gotten with their stream or video of the game, without having to skip and browse back and forth. Again, the Zelda series does this on load screens, by showing statistics of completed shrines, collected artifacts and completed temples. Another form could be slicing the story into chapters with chapter breaks. Also – allow streamers to have and find places to stay and linger for a while, as they take a break, or engage with the audience, or pause the game for until the next stream, easily. There’s even a few games already (e.g. Noita) that integrate with Twitch as the streaming platform, to introduce randomness into the game, based on a streamer’s community’s chat feedback, through polls.
Build a way to compete: if there are ways where streamers and their audience and community can compete with one another, be it mini games, time comparisons for completing sections or finding hidden gems that they can talk about: if there’s a way to compete across the community, it’ll drive engagement amongst the community and help the streamer build a more compelling, entertaining stream. This doesn’t have to be a multiplayer capability per-se. It could be achievements that are tracked in the game, smaller items to collected that are scattered across the game that in the end, can be counted and compared, or a simple “completion” percentage, that measures different “things” someone completed (visited places, defeated enemies, collected items, found hidden places).
Multiple ways, multiple endings: While I may not want to play the same game a number of times, especially if it means to re-play large portions of a game to get there, I may want to try and watch someone play the game once more, and take a different route, a different path than I did, resulting in a different gaming experience or a different ending with a different outcome. Especially for retro games, I had forgotten about some games that had a number of different paths for completion – for example Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.
There’s probably more – but those, I’d count as “design principles to build for” when considering a game that should be a candidate for streaming. Of course there’s countless games that don’t have all of these, maybe even none of these incorporated, and are successfully streamed and watched with great passion. But it will be interesting to see, going forward, how newly developed games evolve, and if they find ways to support the “joint” playing of the game – through an active person, with several watchers in their community, chatting or playing in parallel.
FRICKELSOFT 