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Adventures on Twitch.tv
Apr. 19th, 2019 04:43 pmOr, how my new hobby became watching other people play video games.
Let me begin by saying that this post is neither an endorsement or a recommendation for spending any amount of time on Twitch, although it hasn't been a negative experience for me.
It all started back in February. I listen to the podcast Wonderful, which is Griffin and Rachel McElroy talking about things they enjoy, and in one episode Griffin talked about a Sonic the Hedgehog 1 speedrun from the recent Awesome Games Done Quick charity marathon.
I'd never watched a speedrun before, but I do have a strong nostalgic streak for Sonic. I never had a gaming console growing up, but in the year my family lived in the UK (1993) a lot of my neighbours had Sega MegaDrives (as they were called), and I got very into Sonic 1 and Sonic 2 there. So I watched the speedrun video and had a great time! And then YouTube decided I wanted to see more GDQ content. So I watched some other Sonic runs, including this Sonic Mania race (Sonic Mania being a 2017 game and thus not being a game I've ever played, but which feels very familiar due to its own relentless nostalgia for classic Sonic games). A race! What a great idea! And from that I ended up checking out races for games I'd never heard of, which led me to a Celeste race from SGDQ2018*, which had the actual developers of the game providing commentary and an interview at the end. It was really fascinating and made me want to see more of that particular game.
( It's all downhill from here... )
Let me begin by saying that this post is neither an endorsement or a recommendation for spending any amount of time on Twitch, although it hasn't been a negative experience for me.
It all started back in February. I listen to the podcast Wonderful, which is Griffin and Rachel McElroy talking about things they enjoy, and in one episode Griffin talked about a Sonic the Hedgehog 1 speedrun from the recent Awesome Games Done Quick charity marathon.
I'd never watched a speedrun before, but I do have a strong nostalgic streak for Sonic. I never had a gaming console growing up, but in the year my family lived in the UK (1993) a lot of my neighbours had Sega MegaDrives (as they were called), and I got very into Sonic 1 and Sonic 2 there. So I watched the speedrun video and had a great time! And then YouTube decided I wanted to see more GDQ content. So I watched some other Sonic runs, including this Sonic Mania race (Sonic Mania being a 2017 game and thus not being a game I've ever played, but which feels very familiar due to its own relentless nostalgia for classic Sonic games). A race! What a great idea! And from that I ended up checking out races for games I'd never heard of, which led me to a Celeste race from SGDQ2018*, which had the actual developers of the game providing commentary and an interview at the end. It was really fascinating and made me want to see more of that particular game.
( It's all downhill from here... )