Twitch might not be around much longer. Amazon announcing that they are cutting 35% of their workforce is grim news indeed. It is hard for me to believe it’s doing so poorly since I have always thought Twitch was an underdeveloped idea.
I was very lucky to talk to Twitch staff years ago by offering them a debate practice course that was streamed on their main Twitch channel. They brought me to San Francisco for this, and I toured the offices. Impressive down to every detail – a room called the “library” stocked with large wood tables and oversized leather couches and chairs where no talking was allowed; a stadium seating room with massive screen for regular multiplayer games (one staffer told me they have a regular lunch league game in his division); numerous library carts with huge CPUs that move easily through the office to wherever one wants to plug in and do some work; stocked snack rooms, drawers, refrigerators, endless cereal and ice cream; it goes on and on. At the point when I was beyond impressed, I was told by my tour guide that this was soon to be the “old office,” and a new one was being built a few blocks away.
I was invited out because I suggested to Twitch that focusing on streaming video games was a sideshow compared to the public sphere and rhetoric work the platform could be doing. I saw Twitch as an easy-to-access and engaging forum for rhetorical arts – primarily the art of debate – where the chat, the technology, and the ease of production could create a debate series where Twitch could offer the technological hub and center for all this. I suggested hosting some debates with a format of their own design that streamers could participate in, and based on views and interactivity they could assemble a Twitch debate “team” that could be challenged, or offer plenary programming on a Twitch official channel to spark the creation of more and varied responses and arguments about whatever issues Twitch felt needed to be discussed among their viewers/streamers/community.
My talk wasn’t very good, it wasn’t well received. Looking back on it, I realize now that one has to do a lot of work to pry apart the assumption that one debates to find the truth or one debates once one has discovered/uncovered the truth. Debate is the distribution channel of truth discovered via other means; a way to make people who haven’t done the research look stupid. This assumption is so deeply rooted in nearly everyone’s assumptions that calling attention to it isn’t enough; it has to be carefully dissected and dialectically analyzed before one can move forward in the celebration of debating.
Debating involves the creation and public sharing of reasons because reason is not designed for individual use – they are designed to be shared, always. People are extremely bad at thinking through things alone. We need to share reasons we think are good with others for pushback or we will be satisfied with whatever we come up with. Debate is not a showcase of the power and triumph of the human being ruminating on issues alone; it’s the place where innovation, development, and good thinking is produced. Making good reasons in the context of opposition and with an audience who is skeptical, or pushing back on what is being said, is how reasoning is designed to work. From that forum we can then branch out into discussion, reflection, and other modes of supposed good discourse (even intergroup dialogue) but it must have debate as the root.
Our politics today result from the ideology that the best and only way to discover the truth is to ponder it alone and deeply until you have an a-hah moment. We have low-quality or non-existent public discourse on important matters because we believe the truth has been discovered privately and now must be accepted by our interlocutors. We do not believe that our opponents are there for anything other than conversion to the truth.
Twitch could have cut into this by generating some official streaming channels and then letting users do their own thing on the theme, topic, or even on rebuttal to the official stream content. This might take time to catch on. It would generate interest due to the variety of interesting arguments, statements, and thoughts being shared concerning whatever is produced.
What I’m suggesting is a risky idea. It’s also not what happened. Although Twitch did tell me when I was there they were interested in moving into the “educational space,” Twitch decided to go a different way entirely by offering big contracts to big streamers, working on something that I saw more as a Hollywood star system from the early 20th century. Retaining talent on a contract basis might have been a way to convince advertisers that there would always be eyeballs on the screen that wouldn’t click away – star power would keep them tuned in.
I’m not sure how other people used Twitch, but I enjoyed finding a game I hadn’t played in a while and seeing who was streaming it or finding a brand new game and seeing what players were doing with it. I also felt that Twitch should have left video games behind and would have naturally – people were coming up and are coming up with creative ways to stream, yes, including hot tub streamers – this sort of innovation, however distasteful, seems part of the direction of the platform if it’s to be governed by creation and actions of those using it.
Twitch might go away or might be bought, again, by another company. It seems everyone involved is realizing what every heterosexual woman already knows – you can’t pretend that it’s fun to watch someone play a video game for very long. I think that the label of Twitch as a video game streaming platform is unfortunate because it is so well adhered to the platform. What would it take to reconsider Twitch as a space for public discourse, creative discourse, and engagement with ideas in a productive way – the way debate should be considered?