Game streaming has now become a popular and engaging way of entertainment. Platforms like Twitch or Youtube Live have now formed their own gaming communities with different types of streamers. I am also a huge fan of watching streams, especially when it comes to my favorite game genres like competitive first-person shooters and platformers. Recalling my experience of watching streamers play Super Mario 3D world in the past, one interesting point I noticed is how the spectatorship elicits my embodiment of playing the game. For example, when I was watching the streamer controlling Mario running and jumping, my fingers also moved and reacted as if I myself was holding the Wii U controller. While it was fun imagining myself playing the game, it was also fun to see how the streamer interacts with the chat, responding to comments, emotes, or even strange requests. This made me think about how spectatorship functions and contributes to a unique mode of interaction between the watcher and the game as well as between the watcher and the player.
When it comes to the case of Stardew Valley, the experience of spectatorship was completely different from that of watching platformer games on Twitch. Playing a platformer game can be really hard because it requires high precision and good timing. The players need to repeat dying and dying until they have perfect control of the character and are able to land on a small hitbox without being hit by all the enemies along the way. Stardew Valley, however, does not require that high level of control. Most of the mechanics a player would engage with are walking, farming, talking, and picking up items. Though one could argue that fishing and fighting require some skills and demands practicing, there is no penalty when the player fails in these actions, unlike the death penalty in platformer games. Thus when I was watching my friends playing on the switch, I did not feel the same level of embodiment. My mind focused more on all the micro decision-making in the game instead of the execution of certain controls. The most question I thought about during spectatorship was why did the player choose to buy these seeds compared to other ones? Why did he make this decision? How would I decide differently? These questions also led to our later discussion about motivations and objectives. It turned out that he was thinking more from an aesthetic perspective, considering how to make the whole farm look better with colorful plants while I was thinking from a purely economic perspective. It was through understanding each other’s incentives that we better understood each others’ preferences or even values in some cases, and spectatorship of gaming becomes the bridge.
Watching another person playing Stardew Valley in the same physical space was also a unique experience for me. If I was watching on Twitch, I would send out comments and emotes whenever I feel like doing so. There were so many commentators at the same time that my message soon disappeared and was refreshed from the chatbox. However, I simply could not find out how frequently I should talk to the player when we were in the same space playing Stardew Valley since I did not want to disturb his playing experience. Thus the interaction between him and me was mainly his reactions to the game first, and then my response to his reactions second. There was an interesting tension between his gameplay and my spectatorship. Both of us were concerning the presence of the other. He sometimes asked me what kind of decision I would prefer to make while I asked him whether my words would distract him from playing. The spectatorship in the actual physical space led to a certain level of social pressure that was not necessarily disturbing but actually engaging in the sense that we are fully aware of the social presence of each other and care for the feeling and experience of the other.
