The Streamer Awards Highlighted (and Became) Performance Art

The Streamer Awards offered a glimpse into a possible future of awards shows, and I have to say it was a lot more fun and meaningful than the stodgy yesteryear glamour of the Oscars. Not to be confused with the broader scope of the Streamy Awards, The Streamer Awards honed in specifically on live streaming and – well – takes itself a lot less seriously.

Don’t get me wrong, their production values are night and day. Created and hosted by Twitch streamer QTCinderella, The Streamer Awards were hosted at a small venue, the Fonda Theater in Los Angeles. They were weighted toward online voting, which accounted for 70% of the voting for winners. While the ads on Twitch are thankfully fewer than on live TV, the hosts hawked the show’s sponsors so often it turned into a running joke. You could see some of the technical seams showing, but this is part of what streaming is all about.

Streaming is off the cuff, a strange performance art that’s a marriage of scripted and unscripted, stagecraft and improv. It’s often funniest when chat and the audience are in on the joke and can see how it’s done. Every scuff becomes a feature that highlights how streaming is a participatory conversation between streamer and viewer. When it comes to streaming, seeing how the magic trick is done makes you part of it. Laughing at how it’s screwed up means both performer and viewer are laughing alongside each other at the same thing.

That’s how streaming takes advantage of the internet to convey its performance art in a way other mediums can’t. Does that mean it’s all great? Of course not – just like every other storytelling and performance medium. What’s important is what makes it unique, what it can do that other mediums can’t.

Of the hosts, presenters, and winners, many of them were visibly nervous and unused to a theatrical production. A streamer talking to a few thousand people in chat still has the benefit of distance, guard, and the buffer of the technology they’re using. They have the freedom to pull the plug at a moment’s notice if they want. Speaking live in front of a few hundred people can be a lot more tenuous, and was clearly something not all of them had training to do.

The more transparently scuffed nature of the very first Streamer Awards doesn’t mean that they’re niche. The show’s peak viewership was 380,000, and in fewer than two days, 4 million have watched the VOD on Twitch and 275,000 on YouTube. Each medium measures its views a little differently, but compare it to the 11th Streamy Awards, which has seen 9.6 million views since it aired four months ago. Now compare these to the 2021 Golden Globes telecast, watched by 6.9 million, or even last year’s Oscars telecast, which dropped to a record-low 10.4 million viewers.

Every success made The Streamer Awards as a whole a success. And yet every failure, every joke that bombed or moment of cringe, also made it a success because that’s what streaming is. Watching a community and its chat appreciate the work, and empathize with the intent regardless of whether it’s pulled off, is such a different experience from watching the Oscars and knowing that every dress, punchline, and even people’s attentiveness throughout a three-hour-plus show will be rated.

Here, QTCinderella scolded the audience when they talked too loudly through her co-host Maya, and Maya called out the jokes she didn’t think would work but QT insisted remain. The cameras cut to two streamers making out late in the show. No one gave a shit. It wasn’t a moment that sparked gossip or angry letters. It didn’t stain some nonsense perception of elegance, etiquette, or proper carriage.

The other part of this is the path streamers take to popularity. The typical view of streaming is that it centers on gamers who never leave their room. There are certainly places where that’s true, and The Streamer Awards were quick to use this joke every time a streamer who wasn’t present won an award. Yet this overlooks some powerful performance art created this year, as well as a number of IRL streams.

Take co-host Maya, or Maya Higa, who started streaming in 2019. From the beginning, her streaming content has centered on conservation. She started by getting permission from the zoo she worked at to feature her work in raptor rehab and falconry. Her Twitch following caught fire in a clip where she featured an injured hawk she was rehabilitating. She’s since expanded into conservation podcasts, and founded a non-profit animal sanctuary and education center.

Like Maya, most streamers who make it big expand into some level of variety streaming. They need a diverse range of content to be able to fill hours, which means working with other streamers, cooking, chatting, making music, the list goes on. The point is that there’s no one way into streaming. Many play games, many like Maya barely play any. Both are valuable.

In fact, the Twitch streamer with the most subscriptions today is Ironmouse, a Puerto Rican streamer with CVID, an immunodeficiency disorder that keeps her on oxygen. She’s a VTuber, meaning she uses an animated avatar (in this case, an anime-styled devil) controlled by motion capture software. A talent for voice over and training in singing serves the VTuber approach well, and she balances gaming and chatting streams with her talk show “Speak of the Devil”, where she interviews other VTubers in character.

Like many, my initial reaction to VTubers a few years back was that it was off-putting. It hadn’t occurred to me then just how useful a tool it can be for performers who are disabled, cope with anxiety, or want to control their own image for a variety of reasons, including safety concerns. Ironmouse has spoken in interviews about how streaming through an avatar allows her to do things she otherwise couldn’t when bedbound for long periods of time.

The scope of what can be accomplished in motion capture also hadn’t occurred to me. The Streamer Awards had a category for VTubers, though Ironmouse was beaten by CodeMiko, Youna Kang’s cutting edge blend of motion-captured character, CGI environments, Cronenbergian interpretations of memes, and live content (when Kang doesn’t feel like putting on her motion capture suit and plays the character’s technician instead).

I think what appeals to me most about The Streamer Awards is that it didn’t merely recognize the boundary-breaking elements of its medium, it highlighted them. The category League of Their Own featured four geniuses in performance art:

Kitboga streams his interactions with those aggravating scam callers who’ve made us all refuse to pick up the phone the last several years. After finding out his grandmother had fallen prey to a scam in 2017, he built a career around scamming scammers. He utilizes a voice changer to play characters. When scammers want access to his PC, he runs a virtual machine off his computer that’s spoofed to look like a unique PC. He even created a fake banking website that’s extraordinarily difficult for scammers to navigate and that gives him control of the financial transactions.

Ibai is a Spanish streamer who invented a whole new international sport: the Balloon World Cup. Based on the game where you have to keep a balloon off the ground, each player gets one touch to keep it afloat. If the other player can’t touch it to keep it afloat, you score a point. It sounds silly, but put it on an obstacle course and the final product becomes intense, athletic, and a lot more exciting than most professional sports.

The Sushi Dragon livestreams…well, the making of his livestream. The hell’s that mean? He uses a device on his wrist to edit the stream as it happens. He turns his live recording of daily life into an immersive experimental film.

The winner was Jerma985, who rented out a warehouse, built a complete sitcom-styled set, and employed a film crew to offer viewers the chance to control his stream as if he were a character on The Sims. They could decide how he looked, what he did, what he bought, what events happened to him, and influence his emotional state, complete with stagehands who upgraded his house during intermissions, and used props to represent housefires.

Awards shows that take themselves more seriously don’t do this. There’s no Oscar award for who fucked up film the best this year, for those who changed our understanding of what it can even be in the first place. In fact, I’d argue the people who did exactly that, such as Julia Ducournau (“Titane”), Prano Bailey-Bond (“Censor”), and Michael Sarnoski (“Pig”) saw a grand total of zero nominations for their films in any category.

In another vein, we saw an award for Best Philanthropic Streamer. This was won by Irish streamer Jacksepticeye, who raised $7.6 million to combat homelessness in 2021. When was the last time we saw an award for Best Philanthropic Actor, or Film that Caused the Most Change?

The Streamer Awards also featured an inclusive range of presenters, nominees, and winners – something the Oscars and other awards shows still can’t manage reliably.

But look – this article? It’s only kind of about the Oscars. It’s really about streaming as a medium. The Oscars are the jumping off point. As it shears away some of its most interesting awards in the pursuit of making the telecast shorter, it misses the point that it should be diving deeper to catch up with how people view film and become interested in the medium’s storytelling. I mean, hell, the quickest fix is to look at what the Independent Spirit Awards did with Aubrey Plaza hosting, but the longer fix is to figure out what forms communities around film, and how to feature and appreciate this.

The Streamer Awards already has that down when it comes to live streaming. It felt like a community that appreciated each other, that acted like a community even as the awards show was happening. It didn’t matter if there were technical issues or a third of the jokes clunked. It mattered that as the show went on, it became a downright sweet appreciation for the performers others marveled at, a celebration of just how far communities enable performers to take their art.

There was no regality. The awards both mattered to the point where streamers were moved to receive them, and didn’t matter to the point where they accidentally broke or forgot them. That both these aspects are true defines the weird landscape of streaming, where the audience is in on the joke but participates in the performance by taking it seriously.

If that seems like a dangerous form of art, that’s because it is. We live in a dangerous reality, where enough of the population believes bullshit that they’ll refuse to get life-saving vaccines, refuse to wear a mask, that they’ll frenzy to take school lunches from children, celebrate politicians who take money from enemies, the list goes disappointingly on.

If we understand that play is a type of processing and practice for real life that everyone needs – including adults – when we look at the gaslit world we’re in…we need a medium where we can see the joke from inside and out, understand how that participation works and how to recognize it, where we can practice at turning it into empathy, into wanting to see someone else succeed, into celebrating what gives others access, or a voice, or challenges the status quo.

Awards shows are ads, and The Streamer Awards certainly had those. They have a choice what to be beyond that, whether they’re rubber stamp approvals of the way things are, or they genuinely seek to push the boundary of what can be and platform those pushing hardest. Any piece of art has to have a reason for being, and awards shows don’t even think of themselves as a piece of art. That excuses them from having a purpose. Give an awards show a purpose, create it with that expectation, and it can become a piece of art. At that point, what it says starts mattering a lot more than whether it pulls it off or not. People want to see art, even if it has ads stuffed into it. They don’t want to see ads with more ads stuffed in.

The Streamer Awards were scuffed because they were willing to be, and they were willing to be transparent about what they aspired to. Audiences are smart enough to fill in the blanks when they’re entrusted to do so, and that enabled this awards show to have a point, a purpose, to argue for streaming as the largest medium we’ve ever had for performance art, and to point us in the direction of a diverse range of performers who challenge our ideas of what art is, who can make it, and what our participation in it looks and feels like.

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Chess is Getting Me Through the Pandemic

We all saw those memes. They told us we should pick up a new skill during the pandemic, as if we were at summer camp wondering if we should take the option for orienteering or keep our evenings free. What a time to survive, and have all this trauma-infused free time to be guilted over inefficiency.

Yeah, I already picked up a hobby – it’s called wondering when the pandemic will be over and I’m really good at it. Oh, conservatives don’t want to wear a mask, it’s gonna be another winter of COVID! I guess my new skill is being the Pennsylvania Dutch to these groundhog motherfuckers.

Yet a lot of time being stuck in one place wears on you. Avoiding travel and socializing because I don’t think a weekend of glamping is worth someone’s grandma’s life means you’ve got to find something new to dodge the cabin fever.

Lo and behold: chess. I only arrived at one of the earliest hobbies known to humankind.

I’d tried to get into chess before. The problem is that as a beginner, it means losing a lot before I was any good. It’s discouraging to struggle with level 5 of “Chessmaster” and realize there are 20 more levels beyond it that I may never beat. It doesn’t help that I feel a pressure to be perfectionist and I’m really self-critical when I fail at something. It doesn’t help that games are my outlet for my competitiveness in the first place. That doesn’t plug in well when I’m sitting three levels above the picture of the A.I. Chimpanzee. If you start playing chess, it means losing a lot if you want to get any better. That’s just the reality.

As a beginner, it’s also hard to view chess as anything other than win-loss. Without knowing the game well, it’s hard to recognize that mitigating a disadvantage or drawing out a loss with smart plays is a kind of victory when it comes to getting better at the game. Getting a draw or quality loss where you couldn’t before is a huge mark of improvement.

There are two big things that finally got me over the intimidating learning curve of chess. Let’s start with the trendier one:

Chess on Twitch

I like Twitch, or rather I like that the platform exists. The company itself is a mess, but that’s another conversation. Streaming as a whole is the single biggest and most accessible medium for performance art the human race has ever had. Just like video games, movies, TV, theatre, and literature, it means a lot of good, a lot of bad, and a lot of mediocre mixed in.

The way streamers create narratives and content is often very connective. It means a lot of leaping from one channel to another. I can’t quite remember how I got to BotezLive, but I’m guessing it’s through JustaMinx, a foul-mouthed Irish streamer who often embraces the performance art aspect of streaming and who’s one of the platform’s most talented comedians. I started watching her because she was the funniest person on AustinShow’s “Love or Host”, a weird satire of dating shows where 80% of the cast is the same every episode, which I watched (and was surprisingly entertained by) because a friend was on an episode.

That four-layered path brought me to BotezLive, a chess channel where two sisters break down games. I started watching it at length when Woman’s Master Alexandra Botez and (combined) Grandmaster Robert Hess were covering the Chess9LX tournament in September 2020. That tournament featured some of the best players in the world, including the legendary Garry Kasparov. He retired from competitive chess in 2005, in large part to involve himself in activism opposing Russian President Vladimir Putin. This saw him jailed and beaten after attending a verdict reading in support of activist punk band Pussy Riot. After increasingly fearing for his life, Kasparov would become naturalized in Croatia and essentially live in exile.

Since retiring, he’s also coached some of the biggest names in chess, including Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura – who were also playing in the online Chess9LX tournament. Why Chess9LX?

The tournament refers to a version of chess usually called Chess 9LX, Chess 960, or Fischer Random Chess. In this variation, the home rank pieces for both players are randomized. In other words, rooks, bishops, knights, queen, and king are shuffled within their row. You still need bishops on opposite colored squares, you still have to have a rook on either side of the king to allow castling, and the players’ positions have to mirror the other. The variation leads to 960 unique starting positions, hence the nickname.

One example of a randomized starting position in Chess 960.

The randomization of starting positions undermines the effectiveness of traditional chess openings, and is often viewed as forcing riskier, more creative games.

Alexandra Botez and Hess were an exceptionally good casting team, helping to break down the game in ways that are easy for a beginning player such as myself to understand.

The really useful thing about chess on Twitch is that there are streamers who cater to every level of the game. As I’ve found since, Alexandra Botez and her younger sister Andrea do a superb job of describing opening theory and basic strategic guidelines that can help a beginning or intermediate player improve. As sisters, they play off each other well, with one slowing the other down when they start getting ahead of the audience on analyzing games.

This helps especially when it comes to popular blitz, bullet, or lightning styles – those chess games that typically only allow five minutes or fewer for each player to make all their moves. Often, these lead to a losing opponent with more time on the clock simply running their opponent’s clock down – which results in a win. This adds another layer of strategy, and helps educate beginning and intermediate players in how to mitigate a disadvantage. Drawing out a game you’re losing might seem rude, but prolonging a loss can help create opportunities to even things out.

The speed of these chess types makes them a popular spectator sport online, but both Botez sisters think about the game much faster than I can follow. It’s their skill as analysts, at breaking a game down more deliberately, showing where someone created an opening or how a mistake was telegraphed – that all helps me start to apply my fledgling pattern recognition to their games.

Chess casting isn’t just educational about the game, but has gotten genuinely good. Because it’s so focused on in-game strategy, I’d say it’s much better than the commentating for major league sports. When a sport isn’t at the viewership level of one of the major leagues and is still building its audience, there’s a vested interest in commentators teaching the game – how to play it, how to view it, where and when to pay attention. Even moves that seem inconsequential can help set up later strategies. In teaching an audience to recognize this, you teach them how to knowledgeably watch your sport – how to become as excited about a pawn moving a space as you are about a sacrificed queen.

BotezLive got me into chess because they helped make understanding the game the exciting part of playing – not whether I won or lost. I started getting better at the game only once I found it more interesting and full of possibility. It made chess more of a process and less of a competition – a game I can pick up and play during a quiet moment, set aside a few days without playing, and then watch and play for hours on a weekend. Both sisters are very good at describing strategy for beginners, and Alexandra Botez is often recognized as a popular, up-and-coming commentator.

There’s a wealth of good chess streamers today. As I said, they cater to many different levels. As I’ve shifted more squarely into an intermediate level (an ongoing process), I still mainly watch the Botezes, but I’ve been able to start following streamers like International Masters Anna Rudolf, Levy Rozman, and Grandmaster Robert Hess without becoming befuddled. This is by no means a complete rundown of chess streamers, just the few I’ve found most interesting and accessible as a beginner into intermediate player.

It’s not a coincidence that they all commentate as well. As chess grows in popularity, there are opportunities in casting live events beyond the sphere of diehard players and to a wider, more general audience of spectators. You can see a notable difference in younger commentators explaining the game in a way new players understand vs. older commentators going denser with the assumption their audience is more knowledgeable. Neither’s a better approach, they just serve different audiences. As a newer player, I’m obviously going to gravitate to the former.

Chess Games are Everywhere

The other element is the preponderance of chess games that are available. I’d join a local chess club, except: pandemic. I also like a good mix of A.I. opponents and the option to play others online. I can train specific aspects of my game and learn to avoid my most common blunders against an A.I., and then take what I’ve learned into live games against other players. You can’t go back three moves to see how you set up your own blunder while a real opponent is waiting for your move; an A.I. opponent is as patient as you need it to be. That breadth of ways to play is a lot to ask, but luckily we’re not wanting for options:

Chess.com may be the most complete answer. Its free version allows play against online opponents, offers a lot of historical and more recent game variants, as well as a limited number of A.I. opponents and daily puzzles. It has various paid tiers, but the basic one ($29 a year) eliminates ads and opens up 67 A.I. opponents with different habits, as well as various analytical tools for their system to describe to me exactly why I suck and where I started sucking most. It’s a good investment if you’re going to use it a lot. If you’re dabbling, the free version already outpaces most paid chess games if you just want to play chess against other people and a few A.I.s.

“Chessmaster” is a game I bought on Steam ages ago – in 2011 or something, which was approximately 30 years ago. They don’t even sell it any more. It displays in a little 800×600 window and just stretches everything miserably when you ask it to go full-screen. Yet it is beautiful, with one of the best training modes I’ve seen, endlessly generated puzzles, and a roster of absolutely vicious A.I. opponents who each have preferred styles:

Beginner opponent Sonja overvalues queens, whereas the next rung up features Jonesie, who likes queen trades. Some opponents will have good opening knowledge, whereas others are strong in the middle and endgame. You have to adjust your game as you get good enough to face each new opponent. Chess.com is clearly better on most fronts, but “Chessmaster” is like a warm blanket I never want to give up. I’ve also never felt the keenly burning hatred toward Chess.com’s overly friendly A.I.s that I have toward the silent, smugly smirking faces on Chessmaster.

“Chess Ultra”: For when your GPU wants to play chess, too.

“Chess Ultra” is at the other end of the spectrum, favoring visuals over everything. The game can be played the way I do on a traditional monitor, but it’s designed for VR. Its strength is its various settings: it’s great to play in a luxury cabin as the wintry winds howl outside, in an apartment overlooking Mulholland, or on the Santa Monica beach, especially in a year where we’ve had to stick in place and avoid traveling. It features beautifully detailed chess sets and locations, many as overpriced DLC. No, I’m not paying $5 for a set where you can’t tell the pieces apart; I’m playing chess, not wearing it to the Met.

“Chess Ultra” is easily the most graphically-demanding chess game I own and will not work on a tablet or laptop with an integrated GPU. Its limited range of tutorials and puzzles feel like an afterthought, its ratings system is nonsensical, and the game’s frozen on me once or twice…but the base game regularly sells for $5 and includes a few settings and piece sets. In terms of playing chess in a satisfying, responsive way, it’s OK. In terms of pretending I’m chessing it up on a buggy Holodeck, it’s the best.

Chess is also playful. “The Chess Variants Club” is a $5 game on Steam that collects a huge range of chess variants from across history. It’s early access, which means it’s available to play now but still in active development. I love it. It has Microchess and Demi Chess, variants that take place on small boards using a fraction of the pieces. It has the aforementioned Chess 960.

That’s all before the really weird shit: Atomic Chess involves destroying both the capturing and captured piece, as well as certain pieces on any bordering space. Circe chess involves captured pieces getting reborn in their starting positions. Dunsany’s Chess is an asymmetric variety featuring a traditional set of Black pieces, but the White pieces just being 32 pawns. Want six knights a player? Play Knight Supreme Chess.

My favorite might be Aleut Chess, wherein the Aleut people were found to have adapted Russian chess into a whole new game where two asymmetric forces are staggered across the entire board.

The asymmetric starting positions of Aleut Chess in “The Chess Variants Club”.

The list goes on, and while Chess.com has a slightly more gimmicky selection of variants, “The Chess Variants Club” dives into historical variety. Some of the more limited variants are more curiosities than anything else. There are only so many possible sequences in the 4×4 Silverman chess, for instance. It’s interesting to sample, but once you know the trick, it’s solved. Most of the variants are deeply involving and challenging in new ways, though. They’ve also helped my midgame a lot by forcing me to get more creative and recognize less predictable development. Its selection of puzzles isn’t bad either.

“The Chess Variants Club” is under construction, adding in new variants while quashing bugs. It lacks a 2D option, has only one set design so far, plays the same (super-awesome) song over and over, and only has three levels of difficulty. I’ve also encountered rare bugs with the A.I. not allowing a move that should be available. A lot of the A.I. is being designed for new variants that haven’t been programmed before, so this is to be expected. All in all, though, it’s an expanding collection that develops my game in this amazing, exciting notional museum of playable chess variants.

That’s not even getting into “5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel”. This hurts my brain. An average game involves pieces traveling back in time to create new universes where they existed earlier on the same board. Eventually, you’re playing forward in multiple universes. It may be advantageous to create a universe where you have two queens on the board, but that means the one who escaped this universe is no longer there to help it.

Pieces can move through multiverses in ways that reflect how they move in chess. A bishop can move up or down a universe, but only once for every square they move into the past. In other words, their travel through universes and time is always diagonal. A knight can travel two universes away, but only one board into the past; or two into the past, but only one universe away. It reflects the knight’s classic L-movement. Needless to say, things get complicated and mind-bendingly hard to track quickly.

Welcome to Hell.

I haven’t even tried with the set of new pieces with new rules designed specifically for multiverse time travel because every time I try to wrap my head around the normal variety, it goes all the way around, meets itself, and thinks, “Oh, you’re here, too?” Writing about it sends a chill of awe down my spine at how much there is to learn that I haven’t yet.

Hell, I haven’t even tried “Four Kings One War”, a free game where two players each control two sets of pieces that descend on a central board from all four sides, setting up a modern “guerilla chess”.

I’ve also got a traditional game on my phone that’s limited in scope but has a good range of A.I. levels. Take your pick, there are a thousand free, mobile chess games, and each of them has ads more annoying than the last.

As good as chess is, I don’t think I would have gotten into it if I hadn’t found chess streamers who are good at breaking the game down and teaching what about it keeps them interested and excited. As good as chess streamers are, I wouldn’t have kept playing without a bunch of different options to do so. Chess.com is great, but sometimes I want to take my new skills back to “Chessmaster” and show 1229-rated A.I. Miranda what’s up. Yeah, I got better while you’re stuck in 10th Edition “Chessmaster” forever neglecting the center. Who’s up next? Oh no, not 1365-rated “Josh – Age 7”, that dude has no heart.

And sometimes I want to play shitty chess while the wind buffets my luxury library-cabin. And then rove around a museum playing five different variants. And then name my bishop Kyle Reese and send him back through time to protect my queen in an alternate dimension long enough for her to travel back to this one and open up a can. If I get frustrated or hit a wall where I don’t feel I’m learning well in one mode, I can just watch an entertaining streamer teach, or hit another chess game with a different presentation or variant, and it feels fresh again.

You can’t get cabin fever when you keep moving around. Even if you’re stuck in the same place, oh what ways we have to move around. This last year has sucked, and chess for me isn’t a new hobby or skill. It’s a vast range of landscapes, perspectives, connections, experiments, histories. It’s a whole field of art and sport and invention to appreciate that I know how to look at in a way I didn’t before.

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