Teaching on Twitch was a ‘mild disaster’ for one games professor

Robert Yang has just said the magic number. Twitch chat suddenly has an echo, and it sounds like “nice. ” Yang, a developer and New York University Game Center professor, is teaching a course about the sociology of streaming and Twitch by streaming on Twitch, with mixed results. “69 is the weed drug number,” one person helpfully declares.

(420 is the weed drug number; 69 is the sex number. ) Anyway, class is in session. Yang doesn’t typically stream his classes. Today is, unfortunately, special.

The novel coronavirus — now elevated to pandemic status — is pushing everything from political events to game conferences into streaming. Offices and schools are temporarily closing their doors, and NYU is no different. Faced with remote classes, one student joked that Yang should use Twitch to teach his class. “A terrible idea,” Yang says.

“But I thought it would be instructive to make students sit through why it’s a terrible idea, to aid in our academic study of streaming platforms. ” The NYU Game Center typically takes a more hands-on approach to its education, and it puts a lot of emphasis on community. Remote teaching removes key context for education, whether it’s checking in on if students are engaged or seeing who needs help. “It’s hard to read emotions in a chat channel filled with emote spam,” says Yang.

He references the concept of context collapse: “When you don’t know who’s reading your tweets or watching your stream ... your audience is illegible. ” That can make it difficult for students to want to participate via video when they don’t know who they’re talking to.

“Some are naturals on Twitch or TikTok.”

“For many others,” he adds, “making video is a complicated negotiation of production value and personal boundaries. ” Yang’s material focuses on T. L. Taylor’s Watch Me Play.