During this week, I watched a streamer called “少年Pi” on a Chinese streaming platform called Bilibili. He played different games, including single-player ones and multi-player ones where he had different kinds of interactions with the audience.
Monster Hunter World was one of his most played games and it requires skills, combinations of armors, and a lot of exercises to kill the dragons more efficiently. As a result, most communications between him and the audience are tips of controlling the character and suggestions in creating armor sets. Other than these, he managed to bring more entertaining elements to the gameplay so that the audience would not be overwhelmed by all the technical talks. Sometimes he created armor sets just for fun or figure out showy controls and then test them out on the monsters. For example, he tried to use the hit recover and the stunned period to kill the Dragon of Steel with only the Spirit Thrust of the longsword. It was very entertaining just to see the dragon struggling to get up and then fell back to the ground again and again but all the audience knew that it’s hard to do that by themselves. Of course not all of the showy things worked, but those moments really made me laughed and so did many other audiences.
Slay the Spire, a turn-based rogue-like card game, led to more communications about weird tricks and interesting card combinations that again, would not always lead to success but are very fun to watch. For example, there is a relic in the game called “Snecko Eye” that randomly changes the cost of the cards from 0 to 3 every time you draw them from the deck. Most players would hesitate when seeing it, but most of the time he would pick this relic as soon as it showed up because he knew that this randomness can create entertaining effects adding to the fact that he was known for his good luck.
When he was playing Minecraft with his friends who are also streamers, most of the communications became comments and jokes about his actions because it’s already entertaining enough just to watch these streamers play together. For example, in the game, other streamers lived in a village but he created a secret home that stored his diamonds and coins.
I think a new interaction that will be added to performative play can be that the audience can create a map/a boss for the streamer and let him/her play without knowing what he’s about to see. An interaction that will phase out may be the audience asking about basic information about the game like the game’s name and how much it is.
