Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

I'm a business owner, dad, amatuer athlete, and watch a LOT of Twitch.

It plays in the background when I'm grinding on work stuff late at night, or when I want to do SOMETHING that isn't watching TV. Much less commitment and effort than the games themselves, and feels about the same.

I streamed myself programming several times. Just having to narrate what I am doing kept me in focus. As a programmer, it is fairly hard to get "in the zone" and stay there, especially when there are rare interruptions. Streaming helped me keep chugging along creating more and more code and TDD without falling to the seduction of visiting social news sites.

What I am saying, is that I was streaming for myself mostly. Got lots of value from it. It didn't really matter if there were viewers or not.

Sort of. I've been making art for a long time, went to school for it.

People want to see themselves in whatever you produce for them. It's that simple. They want something they identify with.

Artists and content developers can have more fun playing with it because they have different meaning spaces - they see connections across content that is still self identity, it's just across a different set of things. It can be competitive and draining though, so one must use their energy wisely.

Crowds can be fickle in general, so it can as well be exhausting staying plugged into them, producing just for them, without any way of receiving meaningful feedback.

It's not that people are narcissists at heart, it's just that they don't want to pay attention to things to things that don't make sense to them on any level. That's pretty normal.

I watched your video and I think you would do a lot better if you used your real voice instead of a computer generated voice. The content is great though.

I actually found myself doing somewhat similar when playing digital card games like Magic: The Gathering online and Shadowverse: I would "think out loud" and talk through the lines I was considering them ("Hmm, if I attack like this, then he probably double blocks me, so I don't want to do that...") and also audibly reacting to things that were happening in the game ("...oh, I totally didn't expect that. I got greedy, and my opponent was in a position to punish me. I should have been playing more conservatively.") Whenever I do this, it really forces me to stop playing on "auto-pilot" and actually think about the lines I'm taking, and also better internalize the lessons I'm learning through experience.

The difference is that I don't actually stream myself as I'm doing this: I talk the same way a streamer would talk, but the walls of my home office are the only audience. I actually kind of "learned" this approach from watching Magic: The Gathering Youtubers and streamers, who do the "thinking out loud" approach as a way of teaching strategy, but one of the lessons I picked up is that in the process of thinking out loud, these players sometimes seem to talk themselves out of making inadvisable plays, so I decided to try it for myself, minus the audience, and found that it often caused me to play better and learn better. (Of course, this "skill" doesn't really translate over quite as well to tournament Magic when you're sitting across a table from your opponent, but playing better in online practice often translates into playing better in a tournament setting.)

Third-hand story: friend of friend has a nephew who spends a lot of time playing Minecraft (grade school age), and as he explores the world, he narrates everything he does in a calm British accent. It's kind of surreal that this genre of Youtube videos (Mincraft Let's Plays by Englishmen speaking with a David Attenborough-like cadence) has taught a generation of kids that this is how people play Minecraft. It reminds me a bit of kids I've seen in youth sports leagues who sometimes make a big show of stomping off in a huff or yelling a soft expletive like "Darn!" when something doesn't go their way, not because they're actually frustrated or invested in the outcome of the game, but because they're mimicking the kind of behavior they've seen from professional athletes on TV. (That's not to say that there aren't kids who get genuinely frustrated during these games, but the more time I spend observing kids in "organized recreation," the more I come to realize just how much of their behavior is performative.)