Our small-scale work responded to both the livestream and amateur characteristics. This was our first time livestreaming – we played the video game Fortnite, which pits 100 players against each other in a virtual fight to the death, and also happens to be extremely popular at the moment.

Our lack of experience and affordable/readily available equipment combined with loose structure of the stream responded to the amateur characteristic – it certainly caused a couple of technical hiccups. Six minutes into the livestream it stopped displaying anything for 20 or so seconds but our voices remained. From that point on, I noticed in post that Nat’s voice wasn’t synced with her mouth movements anymore. Aside from that, I noticed my voice was echoing quite a bit throughout the stream. I think this was because Nat didn’t use a headset – it wasn’t something we really thought about but the audio quality definitely could have been better.

So what did we learn from these mistakes? I feel as if a technical check before a livestream is probably a necessity. It should be treated as if cameras are about to roll on a film set. Also maybe wearing a headset or even using a better microphone could go a long way, even if the content is amateur. Amateurs have to improve, right? For a first run, it wasn’t a disaster. We got to do what we planned to do.

However, did our amateur content get lost in the sea of other amateur content? As one could predict, yes. Our peak live viewership of 3 taught us that first hand. Something I guess I may have simply skimmed over was the fact that while there is a lot of amateur content on the internet, a huge chunk of it is barely seen. This fact might put it into perspective: 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Conducting this test, the main thing I think I’ve learnt is that you have to be unique. What we streamed wasn’t necessarily bad in my eyes, no unmitigated disaster that’s for sure. But when there are thousands of people online doing the same thing as you, well why would anyone watch you above someone else?

In my first blog post I talked about how equipment and costs were so low regarding video production and livestreaming. I didn’t acknowledge that this could lead to saturation, therefore I didn’t really focus enough on this being an obstacle we had to overcome. The lack of an audience made it difficult to practice interacting with an audience which was a bit of a shame, but we got to practice most other aspects of the medium, and most importantly learn from our oversights. During my second blog post I spoke about the reading from third week on new media by Manovich, and how it allows us to create infinite versions of the same content with slight variations. While the possibilities are infinite, after our experiencing streaming amateur content my real takeaway is that it is vital not to get lost among the clones.

Going forward I want to be asking myself how I can stand out among the abundance of online screen works. What are the qualities of the most successful ones? How can we draw in viewers to create that sense of interactivity we’re after? How can we create live content that people really want to watch?

Here’s our livestream – or a recording of it. We cut it down a bit to bring the length down. We ended up playing Fortnite, a popular battle royale game, and just chatted a bit.

We plan on livestreaming some time pretty soon on Twitch, so I thought I’d do a quick run down on what we plan to do and how we’ll do it, on top of doing some research. I talked earlier about wanting to find out just how easy or difficult it is for the average person to stream something, as it links it well with the ‘amateur’ characteristic we’re responding to. From what I’ve looked at so far, it seems to be on the easy side.

My partner and I both have a PS4, which has a livestreaming function built in that can work directly with Twitch. Nat has a Playstation camera and we both have microphones – none of this equipment is expensive and we both already had it. It will be interesting to see how it turns out quality-wise and whether we run into any technical difficulties – it’s live so we won’t be able to hide them. I guess without the actual experience under my belt I can’t exactly say whether your average person can livestream yet, but it seems to be the case so far.

However, before we started I thought I’d look into what we might need to prepare. After all, the freely available information on the internet is just another part of what makes livestreaming so easy. Twitch itself has some beginner broadcasting guides, however they’re quite technical and unnecessary, especially for streaming on a console. I looked at some tips and other guides that gave a little bit of direction. There were a couple of useful things in there among the technical PC related talk like tips about what games to play and on-screen presence. Nat has been wanting to start a Twitch channel so she already had a few things made, such as channel art and descriptions, seen below.

Overall I feel as if we’re pretty prepared and have a vision of what we want to do – stream some games and be ourselves on camera then analyse it. This should hopefully respond to the amateur and livestream characteristics sufficiently and give us a lot to reflect upon.

The first project I want to look at could be classified as a social experiment, therefore non-fiction. Twitch Plays Pokemon was a livestream that took place on the 13th of February 2014 until the 1st of March 2014 on Twitch. It was a crowdsourced effort to play and complete the video game Pokemon Red by sending game commands through the Twitch channel’s chat sidebar. Over 1.16 million people participated and the channel got more than 55 million hits during this run.

Twitch Plays Pokemon

To me, this is a very cool niche display of interactive livestreaming. Obviously this was very difficult to pull off – a lot of complex programming was required to do it. However, this demonstrates the potential of an audiences input. Giving the viewers the opportunity to collectively play a game is pretty crazy. While we won’t be able to pull something like this off, I think it is an interesting project that shows that the sky is the limit when lots of viewers are tuned into something online; the ability to communicate instantaneously with thousands or even millions of others creates endless possibilities.

I thought for a work of fiction I’d turn to the class discussions to see what people had posted in previous weeks. I remembered our table discussing Take This Lollipop: A short interactive film that dares you to connect your Facebook (also of course promising your details are confidential). I decided to try it before writing this blog post and the result was fairly impactful. It takes your personal details and photos and shows how almost anybody can access them, depending on your privacy settings. The part that stuck out to me was the interactive side – it flips the switch and does the interactive work, taking your information and using it in the film. It’s an interesting project that has got me thinking about the different ways people can interact with content. The ability to connect an account and take information for consensual use could be something to think about down the track, even possibly for our third assignment.

I want to use this blog post to talk a bit about Manovich’s reading we have been assigned for week 3 and 4, and how some of the ideas discussed by him are worth thinking about in relation to our livestream project. Something that really stuck out to me as I went through it was his thoughts on variability in new media. Manovich (2001, p. 36) said, “A new media object is not something fixed once and for all, but something that can exist in different, potentially infinite versions”. His view on new media is so interesting to me – once you understand that it’s just a bunch of pixels, you see it as play-doh. It can be bent, pulled or squashed into any form; it’s like we have a media multiverse to play with.

As we continued to think about our project, we settled on livestreaming a video game. As I discussed in my last blog post when talking about Twitch, this is now pretty common and pretty damn popular too. The question could be posed: Why do people enjoy watching others play video games so much? Video games in themselves are a form of interactive media – streaming is another layer on top of that. Manovich goes on to say (p. 39) that “New media also allows us to create versions of the same object that differ from each other in more substantial ways”. Hundreds, or even thousands of people could stream the same video game simultaneously, yet create their own distinct content. The interactive nature of games lends itself perfectly here; different people with varying personalities act out and play the game in their own individual ways. Hopefully through our own livestream we let our personalities form the identity of the content as we go.

References

Manovich, L, The Language of New Media, The MIT Press, 2001, p. 36- 39.

This week we were given a brief rundown of what we’re going to be doing for our second assignment coming up. My partner Nat and I spent a fair bit of time talking about what we each wanted to do in terms of characteristics and content. The main thing we wanted to be sure of was that our content would somehow be interactive and unique to the internet. We talked about doing some sort of ‘choose your own adventure’ type of thing – a short story shown through videos that would take you to the next, through the eyes of somebody’s computer.

Our other idea was a livestream: we both enjoy gaming and watching other people play games online, so a livestream would be a great way to combine our interests with an interactive medium. After thinking it through and talking with other groups, we’re leaning towards doing a livestream. It turns out some other groups also had the ‘choose your own adventure’ idea, and while it’s a good one, I think a livestream is better suited to our tastes and the characteristics we explored in our first assignment.

What a typical Twitch livestream looks like

A livestream could be the perfect way to respond to the ‘amateur’ characteristic once again, in combination with obviously the ‘livestream’ characteristic. I think these will intertwine nicely and are quite closely related. Only through the internet can amateur content be shown live around the world – 15 years ago the costs and equipment necessary to do that demanded that only professionals be allowed to create content live. Much of the content currently streamed is rough around the edges or niche. The popular livestream platform Twitch mostly consists of people playing video games and talking over the top of them. We also looked at live feeds of puppies that are circulating online with some classmates. In the next couple of weeks I want to find out just how easy or difficult it is for the average person to livestream, as well as continue thinking about the interactive aspects of livestreaming as we prepare for our project.

For our practical test, we decided to respond to the ‘amateur’ characteristic. A lot of amateur content on YouTube and other platforms is made up of remixes, commentaries and parodies, so we thought doing something along those lines would give us some insight into the creation of amateur content, as well as being simple to create. We took the trailer for a terrible looking video game (Life of Black Tiger) and made a parody trailer for its ‘game of the year edition’, essentially just poking a bit of fun at it with some dramatic music and fake reviews.

While I’ve made some amateur content like this before, I thought more about the process as we created this video and tried to associate it with some of the things we discussed during the first couple of weeks. In particular, Miles’ (2007) reading on network literacy felt relevant. Responding to a video such as the ‘Life of Black Tiger’ trailer, or remixing a video or piece of music, is a way of participating as a peer in an online environment. You don’t need technical skill necessarily, but you need network literacy to go through the necessary steps to navigate your way through those environments.

This also made me think about the Bob Ross Twitch stream that I spoke about in my first blog post. The chat during the stream were all participating in the event, and had one thing in common – they were network literate. Perhaps amateur content is mainly a way for people to communicate online: to tell a joke, send a message or make a commentary. This would align with the disregard for quality and focus on the meaning instead.

I think amateur content is an extremely interesting and huge part of the internet, so it’s difficult to put it all in one basket, however I want to keep exploring it throughout the course. One thing I would love to continue to research is the nature of extremely popular amateur content and how some of it manages to circulate so much, as mentioned in my first blog post, as well as the humour of poorly made content. Until then, I feel as if I’ve scratched the surface of the topic and it has piqued my interest for future assignments.

References: 

Miles, Adrian. “Network Literacy: The New Path to Knowledge.” Screen Education, Autumn.45 (2007): 24-30.

Response to the characteristic: Amateur

Little bit of context: Playstation uploaded a trailer for a game that looks like it belongs in the early 2000s. It wasn’t received too well. This is a parody of that trailer.

Throughout our first week, we’ve had a look at what defines online screen production and what some of its characteristics are. We listed some of these qualities off during class – these included optional anonymity, accessibility from around the globe and easy interactivity with an audience. They helped us think about what content on the internet is made up of and how it is different to that of traditional media. We’ve been asked to respond to one or two of these qualities in the form of a short piece of online media, so I thought I’d prepare for this by taking a look at an example of an online screen production that displays several characteristics that are unique to the online space.

The video I’ve chosen can be found here. This is a 35 second segment of a recorded live stream that took place between the 29th of October and the 6th of November. Twitch, a streaming platform used primarily for gaming. In an effort to promote their new category called ‘Creative’, Twitch ran Bob Ross’ show The Joy of Painting for 9 days straight. The run of the show had a live chat stream directly to the right of the show, allowing the thousands of viewers to discuss the show as it unfolded.

The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross

The chat itself was really what drew in the many thousands of live viewers (approx. 61,000 during this clip). In itself, it was entertainment; the clip I linked above demonstrates this. Quite often when Bob would paint something that looked off initially, the chat would yell “RUINED”. After he had blended or fluffed the stroke, they would bombard the feed with “SAVED”. There were numerous little rituals that the community developed over the course of the 9 days, and the entire run of the show sticks out as an unusually funny instance of something that could only occur in an online space.

The chat during the live stream was the defining characteristic that made the event unique. The community turned something that wouldn’t necessarily be seen as particularly engaging or appropriate for the audience that uses Twitch (younger) into a phenomenon that captured so many due to its hilarity. It is such an obscure thing for so many people to be so involved in, that it could only happen on the internet. The magic of it was the spontaneity; the fact that it wasn’t created in a lab for a particular audience was what made it special. The audience made their own fun.

The importance of the viewers to the entertainment factor also may imply that the stream could, in a way, be considered amateur content, which makes up the majority of online content. This raises the question of why amateur content is frequently extremely popular and well received on the internet, where it is not in other forms of media. Are ‘lightning in a bottle’ events, like the Bob Ross Twitch stream the makeup of amateur online content? Do these only exist due to the over saturation of online videos and simply a case of the Infinite Monkey Theorem? Or are is more amateur content than we think carefully crafted and curated? Furthermore, is the reason some content is funny due to its poor quality? Throughout my second blog post and project work I’ll look into these questions, and hopefully explore the nature of online amateur content a bit more.