Twitch, Gaming and the Left

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitch stream with Hasan Piker, Jagmeet Singh, and Rep. Ilhan Omar. [AOC/Twitch]

By Sam Adler-Bell

For many years, the concept of Twitch-streaming baffled me. Why would I want to watch someone else play video games on the internet?

The value-add of gaming is interactivity; if I have no control over the action, why not watch something with a good story, with better acting and fewer repetitive fight scenes – say, a movie or a TV-show? What’s more, if I wanted to get a sense of a particular game, there were plenty of edited and curated playthroughs on YouTube, with none of the awkward dead air, loading screens and distractions (ever-scrolling chat; glazed, blue-lit faces) of the Twitch experience.

But at some point last year, I saw the light. In early April 2020, my friend Pat Blanchfield, a journalist and academic, embarked on what seemed an absurd undertaking, one in keeping with the gonzo creativity of early quarantine: He set out to play through every entry in the immensely popular Call of Duty franchise, explaining in real-time on Twitch their distortions of actual events in the history of warfare. 

His goal, he told me, was to untangle the nefarious means by which the games metabolize the violent American past and manufacture consent, if not enthusiasm, for the U.S. war machine. This sounded like my kind of stream. And like many people in that period of petrified stasis – when the passage of time was compressed and elongated, vivid with motion and static, like an HD film of a bullet traveling underwater – passivity felt like the only bearable posture. In other words, I wasn‘t doing much. So I tuned in.

Pat’s project was not entirely novel. Game critics have increasingly sought to incorporate analysis of the ideological effects of gaming, as well as the (often dire) material conditions of the video game industry, into their work. (I wrote recently for Dissent magazine about these efforts.) Twitch itself has attracted, in recent years, a small but influential community of left-wing streamers. In fact, the most popular Twitch account is held by Hasan Piker, nephew of “The Young Turks” co-founder Cenk Uygur and now a left media powerhouse in his own right. 

Piker is brawny and handsome – BuzzFeed once deemed him a “woke bae” – with the look and affect of a jock who prefers the company of nerds. His streams often feature gaming, but also hours upon hours of idle chatter, banal stretches in which Piker eats lunch or responds to comments in the chat. He has an impish charm and lack of sanctimony that make his unwavering left-wing politics more attractive to his audience of irony-poisoned gamers. He understands his medium intuitively. “I am pretty much an AM radio host,” he said in an interview with New York Times reporters Kevin Roose and Charlie Warzel last year, “like a conservative talk show host. Rush Limbaugh, but a leftist. And for Gen Z and millennials.”

When last fall Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) announced on Twitter she was looking to play Among Us – a 2018 multiplayer that spiked in popularity during the pandemic – Piker and his team pounced; in coordination with her office, they hosted a stream during which AOC, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Piker and other popular streamers played the game, talked about the stakes of the 2020 election and reached millions of viewers. AOC, a veritable Instagram star in her own right, shares Piker’s ease with online performance – which is to say, the performance of nonperformance. After the stream, game recognized game. As Piker put it, the stream was successful, in large part, because “she’s a natural.”

Given the conservative reputation of the gaming community – 2014’s “Gamergate” fiasco is considered a precursor to the online alt-right; Steve Bannon was explicit about seeking to manipulate the gamer sensibility to generate online foot soldiers for Trumpism – the number of prominent left-wing streamers on Twitch is improbably large. In addition to Piker, there’s whistleblower Chelsea Manning, the hosts of the left-wing podcast Chapo Trap House, Ian Kochinski (aka Vaush), Harris Brewis (aka Hbomberguy) and many smaller streamers with passionate fan bases. Indeed, many left-wing streamers explicitly identify their project with a form of joyful counterprogramming – giving gamers a place to congregate, stew in and absorb progressive rather than reactionary ideas.

Such efforts are especially important, Pat reminded me, because the content of the most popular video game titles is so ideologically noxious. Many installments in the Call of Duty franchise, he says, “chart a series of nostalgic operations,” mining the Great War as a means of “metabolizing and reconciling us to the forever wars” of the present. Hundreds of millions of (mostly) young men will only encounter certain historical events – African wars of decolonization, Cold War proxy conflicts and even war crimes committed by U.S. troops (often symptomatically remixed with culpability reassigned to Russian or Iranian perpetrators) – through their depiction in Call of Duty.

The irony of Pat’s project, however, is that the task he’s setting for himself – playing the game while staying alive to its insidious moral and historical recalibrations – is deliberately foreclosed by the game’s design. The thin jingoistic gruel of Call of Duty, Pat told me, is “delivered to the player through this constant brain lavage of gunfire, where you actually can’t think as it’s happening.” Thus, many of Pat’s streams chart a gradual devolution of his capacity to deliver the carefully prepared historical and analytical remarks he has prepared, as the necessity of not getting shot overwhelms his ability to stay focused on the pedagogical task at hand. 

“I become increasingly desperate and angry,” he says, his mindset warped in precisely the manner intended by the game’s mechanisms for discipline and reward. “It’s like Kafka’s hunger artist,” he continues, ruefully. His onlookers, myself included, brace ourselves around his digital cage, not daring to move away.

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