When you think of gaming, usually you would think of the activity of actually playing a game. But for some gamers, watching others play is just as much a part of the experience as playing the game themselves. Twitch.tv is a website focused around live streams of game-play of video games, where millions of viewers around the world will tune into their favorite streamers playing their favorite games. One of twitch.tv's main strengths are its community focused features such as the live chat function, which allows the streamer to directly communicate with their viewers via text and silly emoticons.
The 'Kappa' emoticon, which can be used in stream chat.
For most viewers on twitch, its not just about watching people casually play games, it is about watching live professional E-sports tournaments of their favorite games, favorite teams, and favorite players. This spectatorship can be compared to tuning into FoxSports to watch your favourite English Premier League team play. One of the most famous examples of an E-sports tournament broadcast on twitch was The International 4, a Dota 2 tournament with a prize pool of $11,000,000, which is higher than the US Masters golf tournament. An estimated 20,000,000 viewers tuned into this tounament.
'The International 4' in Key Arena, Seattle.
Besides E-sports, twitch features many smaller communities and types of streams, speedrunning for instance. Speedrunning is the activity of playing a game with the goal of finishing it as fast as possible whilst timing it and streaming it. Streamers will grind at a game for hundreds of hours until they have achieved a personal best time, or even a new world record time in the game that they are speedrunning.But the main draw of speedrunning for the viewers is seeing their favorite games get bent and broken in ways they never knew possible in order to achieve the quickest time possible. Linked is a speedrun of 'The legend of Zelda- Ocarina of Time', and a very good introduction for newcomers to the speedrunning scene.
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