There are also daily professional matches, or esports, starring gamers so good that others watch just to marvel at their skill. That might sound inherently limiting (games are just games, right?) but it turns out the permutations are nearly limitless.Īt any given time on Twitch, people separated by thousands of miles are watching each other play games, the same way kids in earlier generations watched their buddies play Sonic or Mario from the couch. You can think of the site as a window into an alternate cultural and media universe, all centered around people watching other people play games.
If you’re not a gamer, there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of Twitch. It’s a running joke that no one knows where anything is yet. When a couple of his coworkers soon join us, the map is a common accessory. We round a few corners before winding up in “The Citadel,” named after a setting for the Half-Life series. Or at least, Chase, the company’s public relations director, thinks that’s the name. It turns out famous video game cities is a theme here. Inside, there’s a fake fireplace and some high-backed, Victorian-style chairs. “This is our Rapture,” he says, referring to the underwater city in the popular first-person shooter BioShock. It makes the offices look like the level layout for a first-person shooter, except instead of kill rooms and sniper camps, there are conference rooms and a cafeteria.Ĭhase points to one glass-encased space as we brush past. We’re walking past typical flora and fauna of the San Francisco tech scene-rows of programmers lost in screenfuls of code, ping-pong, a stray dude cruising on a scooter-and he keeps referencing this folded piece of paper. Chase needs a map to navigate the Twitch headquarters.