Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant Read online

  Twitch is a curious beast: a YouTube-shaped streaming platform that technically can be used to broadcast anything but is almost exclusively used for showing people playing games, Twitch was bought for $970 million by Amazon in August 2014 and is now worth an estimated $20 billion, with its own subcurrency tipping system—the “cheer”—slushing around its network. Fans of streamers can pay $1.40 to buy 100 cheers, which they then donate to their favorite gamers through various in-chat messages (the gamers themselves will get around $1 for every 100 cheers—Twitch needs to take its vig) and emoticons: for a sneak peek at the future of capitalism, there is a single emoji that costs $140 to enact. Alternatively, fans can donate directly to streamers, tipping the odd $5, $10 here and there, or subscribing for a fee every month—thank you, bro, thanks for the sub, thank you guys for the donnoe—with more money going directly to the gamer’s coffers. So to reiterate: Twitch is a website where you can watch someone else play a game and, if you really want to, you can pay the person you are watching to let them let you watch them play a game. At no point in this interaction do you, personally, get to purchase and play the game. You only watch. Some Twitch streamers are multimillionaires. It has previously been impossible to tap into why.

  I know why, and I and I alone have figured out why. In the adolescent years, thirteen thru seventeen—a four-year-long period of emptiness and antsiness and crushing, overpowering horniness I am going to hereby refer to as Wanke’s Inferno—I would go to my friend Matt’s house and watch him play videogames. It wouldn’t matter what time I went over there—2 p.m., 10 p.m., 2 a.m.—Matt would be awake and playing videogames. This is because Matt was a goth, and goths are always up playing videogames. Also his mum was a nurse who worked night shifts, so his house was always best to scratch at the window if an existential crisis hit at 1 a.m. and you just needed to be out of your house and in the vague presence of some company, which very often happens when your body is pulsating with the dual needs to 1. grow, constantly, in every direction and 2. be so horny your head might explode. Everything seems happy and sad at the same time when you are a teen. Psychically it’s like putting your head in a washing machine for eight years.

  Here’s what the back of Matt’s head looks like: an at-home dye job is growing out, so at the crown of his head is a cracker-sized circle of his natural hair color, somewhere between blond and brown, while the rest of his hair was dyed black (see: goth) with a stripe at the front that was electric blue (also see: goth). The stripe didn’t last long, actually—it is hard to maintain an electric blue stripe of hair at the best of times because it requires bleaching the hair and then dyeing over that bleached hair the color of your choice, and bright colors wash out quickly, and being a goth on pocket money is the exact polar opposite of the best of times, so after a while the blue fell out and there was just a sort of pale blond streak remaining. I remember all of this vividly because for an entire summer of my teens I looked fixatedly at the back of Matt’s big goth head while he played Quake 4, Unreal Tournament, and, for some reason, this extended six-week period where we linked an SNES up to an old CRT TV and compulsively played Dr. Mario until the sun came up through the trees.

  I mention all this because going to a friend’s house and watching them play videogames is exceptionally nourishing to teen boys. I mention all this because all those half conversations I would have with the back of Matt’s head while he coldly racked up headshots were some of the best and also least consequential of my life. I would lie on his black bedsheets (goth), play with a skull candle of his (goth), flap at the blackout curtains (goth goth goth), occasionally disassemble an old Warhammer model of his (nerd) or read a comic (nerd) by Jhonen Vasquez (goth), and Matt would still be there, spine curled, hand on the mouse, headshot after headshot, while I unloaded. It was as close to therapy as two teen boys can get: chatting, and chatting, and chatting, every worry and every gripe, every girl we liked and every hope for the future, who we wanted to be, what we feared, how scared we were to grow up, all without a scrap of eye contact, conversation occasionally just falling into a lull of grunts and occasional laughs as heads exploded and arms came off in geysers of blood. Occasionally I would fall asleep on a Sonic beanbag on his floor, and have to be wearily stirred awake again at 4, 5 a.m., when I would wander home in my shirtsleeves through the chill. As I grow older, I am more deeply aware than ever that, essentially, a very large part of me has always wanted to retreat back into the nerve-jangling terror-womb of adolescence, whether in search of a hard reset, or a time when life was consequence-free, or just to be seventeen again and actually learn to drive this time. I feel most men, given the option to go back and revisit their teen years with an adult mind, would for some reason jump at the chance. It is a time when your body is lithe and willowy and full of potential, and way less hairy. The most exciting thing that can happen to you is you can distantly see a girl you are in love with—and who is unaware you are alive—at the mall. It is a horrible, terrifying, high-adrenaline time to be alive, and I miss it with every atom of my body. Watching my friends play videogames emulates that feeling of distorted comfort all over again. Doing so with some Dutch guy called Jord over Twitch allows me to wallow in a black-bedsheeted pit of nostalgia from the comfort of my desk at work.

  Twitch taps into a new media landscape that makes absolutely no sense to fucking anyone, but that seems to be the way things are going, and Twitch is only one strange facet of that. Example: I recently had lunch with a friend and he told me about his obsession with Dr. Sandra Lee, or “Dr. Pimple Popper,” a woman with an immaculate bedside manner and a preternatural gift for lancing cysts who lives both in her medical office and also on YouTube. Every video she has ever done goes like this: a floating, eerie midzoom of the boil or zit or massive tumor-esque mass she is about to explode, which she prods at with rubber-coated fingers, purring and describing it in a cheerfully clinical tone. Then: then a jump cut to the boil or whatever swabbed in surgical cloth. And then, using either her fingers or precise metal tools, she slices it open and squeezes out all the yellow gunk inside. It is horrible and fascinating: watching poison ooze out of humans, thick custardy torrents of it, then stitched neatly up and dabbed over with surgical spirit. My friend, a neat freak with OCD, says it taps into his compulsive need for things to be clean, tidied, free of chaos. “I watch them while I’m eating my breakfast,” he says, the maniac. “Muesli, yogurt, zits.”

  Or: I found myself in a cab recently having one of those conversations you only seem to have when you’re shouting from one end of the car to another, and in it I was explaining the concept of ASMR. ASMR, or “autonomous sensory meridian response,” is this tingling effect some people get in their ears when they hear certain sounds—paper crinkling, soft finger clicking, whispering—something close to synesthesia. YouTube has thousands of hours of videos dedicated to ASMR triggers, and a small-but-dedicated audience hungry for more, but obviously it’s very hard to just whisper for thirty minutes straight, so you find these performances quickly veer into something very weird—they are all recorded at 4 a.m., when outside static noise is at its lowest, and the performers all do these weird drama-class ad-libs, talking to themselves through various whispered scenarios. So like: one guy does this bit where he is an extremely rude waiter, talking down to you about a reservation you didn’t make, uninterrupted for forty fucking minutes. Or: there is this one guy, Tony Bomboni, who looks sort of like a LazyTown villain come to life, and I once watched a video of him in the scenario of “a gum store,” where he would chew and taste various bubble gums on your behalf to offer advice on a very serious gum purchase you (the viewer) were going to make, again something that went on, whispered, for like three-quarters of an hour. So I mean, go to TV and say, “Hey: I’ve got a half-hour video of a lad chewing gum to himself and urgently whispering. You, uh…you want that?” and TV will say: No thank you. But the Internet has carved out its own weird niche of antimedia. Some people just like watching
people do mad and boring shit. Some people like to watch skin erupt, or maniacs whispering. I, for example, I can only relax to headshots.

  As best I can tell there are four or five species of Twitchers (I do not know if “Twitchers” is a word or the accepted term: we are just going to have to assume that it is), which can be categorized thusly:

  Extremely Hyperactive Kid Who You Just Know Got Put Bodily into Some Lockers at School: These are of course my least favorite Twitchers, because they are boys who fundamentally did not fit into the intended hierarchy of the world of school or work—they were down at the bottom, punching fodder for jocks and so on, not smart enough to be genuine nerds, not physically dexterous enough to fight anyone off, doomed forever to be henpecked and unhappy—but then found their niche (streaming videogames to an audience of millions) and so jumped up through several social strata and became as obnoxious as possible in a short period of time, so they have adopted the sort of bro-y discourse of actual bros, and say things like “fam” and “you guys” and “wuh-POW!” and “[Every single irritating sound effect a human being can make with their mouth]” and gurn to the camera, and develop their own little catchphrases and routines, and behind them is a plethora of sort of wide-tire nerd-culture ephemera—anime posters, figurines from popular adult cartoons, Monster-branded green-neon-lit minifridges, extremely complicated gaming chair/microphone rigs—and then they act in front of it, and they are extremely annoying, these people, on the surface, but also very much you can see not even very deep within them the vulnerabilities and frailties within, and I just know that every single one of them I could make cry with an accurately timed “your momma” joke, and that’s no way to respect another adult, is it—

  Quiet Ph.D. Student Type Who Just Loves Exploding Digital Heads: These ones are my favorite, because they transcend the idea of performative streaming—i.e., the idea that streaming videogames is about anything other than the videogame and the skill they possess at the videogame—and for them being a personality is secondary, tertiary, to having quick mouse-response times and unerring accuracy with a sniper rifle, and these are the guys who take it closest to a sport. There is a narrative, in sport, of showboaters and not: the lads who have hot new hairstyles, and tattoos, and take selfies on Instagram, and still ascend to the very top of the game (in soccer: Neymar, Beckham, C. Ronaldo), and they infuriate your dad because of it, and then you have those who don’t, head-down-and-score-a-lot-of-goals lads (again soccer: Messi, Shearer, Xavi), who your dad adores. That’s the split in sports: that being good at sport—at being one of the five very best people on the planet at kicking a soccer ball—but also having ego around that, at being happy to be nearly supernaturally good at something, is somehow profane. In sports, I love these showboaters; when it comes to watching them play shoot-’em-ups, they tire me out. Give me a quiet Dutch lad who is killing it forty minutes before he does his homework any day of the week—

  “The Character”: Some streamers dress in wigs and wraparound shades and ’80s-style leather jackets and the like and maintain all these catchphrases and go-to sayings and stuff like that, and in one way I very much admire them for developing a character and sticking to it, unbreakably, like a mid-’80s American shock jock, and in another far deeper way I cannot watch even one minute of them playing videogames, holy Jesus, I am never in a thousand timelines going to be wired out on Red Bull enough to find that funny—

  Girl Streamers, who unfortunately have this horribly uphill battle to Prove Themselves to Be Sincere. The gamer boys are so primed to watch girls in like calf-high socks and pigtails and full-face anime-inspired makeup kill dudes in battle royale settings and do kawaii peace signs to the camera, gestures that are sort of bait as well as red rags to these dudes, dudes both wanting very much to sexually conquer them—the chat that runs alongside Girl Gamers being, essentially, pornographically explicit—as well as mad at them for liking their safe little male thing, intruding into their world, so Girl Gamers are seen as a sort of strange curiosity in a male-dominated sport (even for male-dominated sports, e-sports is a male-dominated sport), but also I find the associated energy that goes after them fundamentally fatiguing, so I cannot watch them for very long, and that is my cross to bear, sorry, ladies—

  or: The Audience Will Eat Itself Eventually

  Like religion, the audience makes this something bigger than it is. Without a flock, preachers shout to an empty room, and Twitch is similar: streamers have a symbiotic relationship with their audience; they shape them and are shaped by them, a constant feedback loop with a clear hierarchy, gods and believers. The geography of the classic Twitch screen goes a little like this: down at the left-hand bottom of the screen, you have a fixed three-quarter view of your chosen gamer’s face, blank with concentration; to the right, a chat box trickles constantly along. In the middle of the screen, prime real estate, is where the bulk of the gaming action happens, and occasionally our mighty overseers will flick their eyes over to the chat—“What we saying, chat? Where’s that sniper at?”—but mostly they are fixed on their jobs, which is to explode people’s digital heads. And so there is this subeconomy of attention that goes on: for subscribing to their favorite gamer, fans’ names are briefly displayed on-screen, where they often earn a shout-out; by donating five or ten bucks, they can have a message displayed in the middle of the heads-up display, right where their hero is aiming, as close as they can get to god. So here’s where you get these weird little one-sided conversations, as followers yell praise to on high: “Thanks Shroud, you’re the best!” they say. Or: “Hey Shroud: what hair product do you use?” (They want to be him the same way kids want to be Ronaldo, the way men want to smell like David Beckham.) You see how weird humanity can get when left alone for too long in the same room. “Hey Shroud,” one donor says. “Noticed your submachine gun shooting rhythm matches the drumbeat to an intro on my favorite anime.” This person is insane. “That deliberate? :)” Or: you gain insight into who is watching, and where, and why: “Hey man,” one donor writes. “Stationed in Afghanistan right now and missing my games. Watching you keeps me going. Rock on.” In many ways, Twitch is a long-distance friendship simulator, the humming sound of male bonding. A big ding, an animation, a series of catchphrases and in-jokes, long developed with a community that is at once guarded and open: someone has donated $3,100. The gamer reels back in his chair. “Wow,” he says, barely flickering with emotion. “Hey, man, wow. Thank you.” Without the audience, the Twitch streamer is nothing, and audience members run the gamut from fanatical to removed, but always, there, there is this bubbling economy: in a world where artists struggle to sell honest-to-goodness CDs, and where movies are torrents and books are downloaded, Twitch streamers just sit there and shoot, their own little subniche of entertainment, and their fans are breathless to hand them money for it.

  And so obviously, I pay to watch a man shoot. I’ve been watching Shroud for weeks, the grace of his movements, the way no ounce of motion is wasted, as slick and refined a professional gamer as it is possible to be. I watch highlight reels when he’s not online and find myself rewatching explicit kills on my lunch break. One day, I see Shroud, midway through a seven-hour stream, do the most audacious move: he throws a grenade from about two hundred yards away, then runs into the building just as it tinkles to the ground and explodes, slipping through a concrete bunker window and violently wounding the two players inside, who he finishes off with a single one-two pelt from his shotgun. I literally go into work the next day and describe all this to the IT guys as if we were talking about a soccer game. There is something hypnotic about it, something soothing—something that takes me back to the womb of adolescence, sitting in a room silent but for the occasional jagged explosion sound, the piercing shrill of digital screaming, a punching noise run through two cheap portable speakers; something that takes me back to fifteen, staring at the back of a head, rapt with it. Twitch, on the surface, very much
doesn’t make sense—the entire model of it seems wholly unsustainable, like selling one-way tickets into the heart of the sun—and maybe in five years, or ten, gamers will have to drop their handles, go by their real names, slink into the corporate world of work. Or maybe it’s something else: a weird cusp of a mega-economy, one that will create celebrities and gods for generations to come. All I know is, I sign up to connect my Twitch account to my PayPal account. And that I wait for the right time when Shroud is looking at the screen (a lull between two games, when, after a top-three finish that ends with an outta-nowhere sniper kill, he clicks back to the lobby to reflexively find another game). And then I push the button on donating $10. “Hey Shroud,” I say. “Thanks for the headshots.” And he turns to the screen and reads my name aloud. And I feel like I have been touched by a god.

  Ribs

  Show me a boy who didn’t once between the ages of thirteen and twenty-one try and suck his own dick, and I will show you a liar. My method, which I was convinced was the one to finally crack this case, was to lie on my back lengthways against my bed and, raising my back and my legs against the wall adjacent to it, slowly push my lower half against the solidity of the bed frame, slowly folding myself in half like a dick-sucking sandwich or falafel wrap. I mean obviously this did not work. All it really did was leave a perfectly straight purple bruise perpendicular to my spine that didn’t go away for weeks. But I think I tapped into something there, in the gray dark of my bedroom at night, desperately trying to press my dick down into my mouth: I unlocked a certain spirit of adventure, the same one that pulsated through more heroic men before me, the ones who unlocked pyramids and discovered America. The same yearning to push myself to the very limits to see if I could suck myself off is, in many ways, the same urge that first sent man to the moon.