Somebody’s Watching You

A few weeks ago I was dip­ping my toe in the world of “stream­ing,” or broad­cast­ing myself play­ing and com­ment­ing on a videogame. I most­ly streamed Crypt of the NecroDancer, but I also spent a lit­tle bit of time stream­ing some weird niche games like Receiver and, most impor­tant­ly, Spooky’s House of Jump Scares. Despite the fact that I have zero stream­ing cred and the pre­pos­ter­ous­ly small audi­ence for weird indie games like these, a few peo­ple logged in to watch me play.

Spooky’s House of Jump Scares is a weird lit­tle free indie offer­ing on Steam where you explore one thou­sand some­what ran­dom­ly gen­er­at­ed rooms, each often tak­ing about five or ten sec­onds to tra­verse. In most of the rooms, absolute­ly noth­ing hap­pens. In sev­er­al of the rooms, one of the afore­men­tioned “jump scares” occurs, usu­al­ly a card­board cutout of a cute car­toony ghost or spi­der jump­ing out at the cam­era. Sometimes, how­ev­er, you uncov­er clues that there is some­thing much dark­er going on in Spooky’s House. Occasionally, hor­ri­ble, bleed­ing mon­sters or J‑Horror Ringu girls will pur­sue you through the hall­ways. Then, you have no choice but to run.

This goofy jux­ta­po­si­tion between harm­less but star­tling jump scares and legit­i­mate­ly dis­con­cert­ing moments of pur­suit results in a game which keeps you com­plete­ly off-balance. In most of the thou­sand rooms, noth­ing at all will hap­pen. Most of the ene­mies are fair­ly easy to avoid. But as time goes by, they start to vary up their strat­e­gy, with some ene­mies oper­at­ing on a Slender-style only-moving-when-you’re-not-looking rou­tine and oth­ers just chas­ing you very, very quick­ly. It’s pret­ty neat, and since it’s free, it’s worth check­ing out. I haven’t even come close to fin­ish­ing the game, so I can’t vouch for the lat­ter half, but I’ve found the first half worth explor­ing.

But more to the point, I found that most of the peo­ple who watched me play Spooky’s House of Jump Scares already knew every­thing about the game, and were watch­ing just to “go back through” parts of it again. Weird lit­tle in-jokes appeared in my chat, folks told me about how they had to close their eyes or leave the room dur­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly upset­ting moments. They noted small changes since the most recent update, and sev­er­al of them talked about how they love the game, but can­not bear to play it them­selves.

Let’s Plays of hor­ror games, par­tic­u­lar­ly Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Slender, are super pop­u­lar, because stream­ers train them­selves to react to jump scares with loud and osten­si­bly humor­ous shout­ing and rant­i­ng. This isn’t real­ly my thing, but I get the appeal. But that doesn’t explain why folks were watch­ing me. See, I’m a bad stream­er. I don’t “freak out” enough to be enter­tain­ing. Spooky’s jump scares fre­quent­ly “got” me, but after the ini­tial star­tle, I tend­ed to make a lousy joke and then audi­bly sigh. I can’t imag­ine most of the folks watch­ing me were real­ly watch­ing me, so much as watch­ing the game with­out hav­ing to play it them­selves.

Even a mediocre hor­ror game can get under your skin in a way that a mediocre hor­ror movie can’t, because you are in con­trol of the main char­ac­ter. Accordingly, when the hor­ri­ble mon­ster leaps out at the pro­tag­o­nist and roars, you have to main­tain your com­po­sure enough to steer the pro­tag­o­nist away from it or shoot it in the face before it cuts him or her in twain. In a hor­ror movie, no mat­ter whether you close your eyes or stead­fast­ly watch or scream or run away, whatever’s going to hap­pen is going to hap­pen. The movie will march on, slic­ing and dic­ing mon­sters and peo­ple until it ends, or it will stop when you pause it. But there is no chang­ing what hap­pens. But if you lose your com­po­sure in a game, your pro­tag­o­nist will die, and you’ll have to do that scene again, and maybe lose a lot of progress.

This is a lot of pres­sure, and it appears to be too much for some peo­ple. I get this: it took me about six months to play through Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and I still haven’t fin­ished A Machine for Pigs, which I have owned for about a year. I have to be in exact­ly the right kind of mood to play a game like that, and that mood only comes around about once every two months. But I can’t imag­ine watch­ing some­body else play through A Machine for Pigs unless I had already played through it first. I want to expe­ri­ence the game myself, even though I may not actu­al­ly do that until some­time in 2018.

More to the point, how­ev­er, I can­not imag­ine stream­ing a more “seri­ous” hor­ror game like Amnesia: The Dark Descent, at least not the first time I played through it. Streaming is per­for­ma­tive, and the way I do it (which doesn’t count for very much, of course), I am usu­al­ly talk­ing with who­ev­er is in the chat, or nar­rat­ing my choic­es, or try­ing (and usu­al­ly fail­ing) to come up with witty remarks. This is fine for a goofi­er game like Spooky’s House, where the frights are short and sharp, but would ruin the more nuanced and care­ful ambiance of A Machine for Pigs. When I final­ly do sit down and work through Mandus’ jour­ney, I want to do it right. I will do it at night, after a few cups of cof­fee and with my back to a win­dow, giv­ing it my full atten­tion, not scan­ning back and forth between that and goofy antics in a chat win­dow, hop­ing I’m putting on a good enough show for the three or four peo­ple who are watch­ing.

(Oh, and on the off-chance you want to watch me stream stuff, which I do with absolute­ly no regard for sched­ule, usu­al­ly quite a bit for a week or two and then not at all for sev­er­al months, you can fol­low me here: http://​www​.twitch​.tv/​w​o​m​b​a​t​o​f​d​o​o​m42)