Читать книгу Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant - Joel Golby - Страница 8

#.

I got to tell you that there is something singularly amusing about watching a Dutch teenager swear in a flurry of American slang. Fucking shit bro, fuck man. Jord is swearing. Fucking shit man, my mom. Jord just got down to the last five of the game – 100 players whittled down to a handful over a grinding 35 minutes – and the circle draws ever tighter, pushing those last few remaining players in, and they are all concentrated on this one small patch of bushgrass, and Jord is just lining up his shot, he’ll go through the back of the head of this guy then hop over and loot his ammo then use it to take out the final two players a little over the ridge, this is a very high tension thing – and then his mum stumbles in and the mic is abruptly muted and we watch, thousands of us, in silent horror, as Jord’s entire head is shot to pieces while he pliantly talks to his mum. He turns back to the screen and sees himself as a mess of blood and ammo. Fuck man, my mom, he explains. Fuck. He rubs his eyes and regains composure. No man, she— I don’t mean that. She means well. Exit to Lobby, new game, the tide washes in with the moon.

OR: JASONR needs to piss. It is midgame – that gauzy time when the initial flurry of desperate gun-hunting and easy-pickings inner-city kills have quietened down, and so now it is a case of picking your way through the expanse, picking up improved helmets and gun sights and vehicles, taking tactical positions up on hills and the roofs of houses – and he is swimming across a small river to get to the other side of the island. But he isn’t: Jason has left his character automatically swimming – ‘I gotta pee, man’ – and everyone in the chat is deliriously tense in his absence. I seen Jason die like this, one chatter says. Another: it’s a long shot but he can take him out. Jason’s teammate, some guy a thousand miles across the country, pings to no one on the audio chat. Jason? Jase. Jase. He’s gone a really, really long time. He bobs in the water. When he returns from his piss I am once again allowed to breathe.

OR: Shroud is falling apart. ‘My eye is twitching guys, I don’t know why.’ The chat moves so fast you can hardly see it: it’s caffeine, the chat says, or you need special blue-lens glasses to play in. Shroud is hardly watching because he is focussing on just ruining the brains of the schoolyard of players who have landed around him, so his fans take it into their own hands: donations of $10 or more get read out over the screen by a robotic voice, and they use it to communicate with their god. ‘I’m not buying those blue glasses,’ he tells one donor. Another message flashes up on screen: you have a magnesium deficiency, it says. You need to buy supplements. Shroud mulls this over while he kills two guys, perfect headshots, boom. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Maybe you’re right.’ He stares at the screen without blinking for five more hours. What sustains him also kills him.

OR: Shroud, again, mid-game, again, and he’s talking about his living arrangement. How he couldn’t rent this place – he gestures around him, the immaculate unfurnished flat wall behind him – because he had no credit history. But it turns out the landlord’s daughter knew who he was, how he made money, how much of it he banked, so they agreed to let the apartment to him, figuring he wouldn’t make much noise anyway. Boom, pshht, headshot out of nowhere. ‘Well, didn’t see that,’ he says, reloading the game all over again. Piss, eyes, moms, rent. Heads exploding without warning. Periodic reminders that our gods are still mortal.

#1.

I have to tell you that I am really into watching people play videogames now. I want to be clear about this: I own the means with which to play videogames myself. I have a console and a controller and a TV and games. I can, if I want to, play the videogames. But that is like saying I have a football in my garden, so why do I have to bother watching Messi. Yes, I can play videogames. I can take back the means of control. But also I am very bad at them, in a way I cannot communicate to you. I can play videogames, but it is actually far better to watch people who are good.

Twitch is a website where you watch other people play games, and I did not understand it until I got Really Into Watching Other People Play Games. The game I am obsessed with watching is Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, which Jord and Shroud and JASONR are fantastic at, and I am appallingly bad. Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, in short: a 100-man battle royale set across a digital island, where you parachute in and loot empty buildings until you find enough guns and lickspittle armour to mount an attack on your fellow players. The game’s active area slowly shrinks – this adds a vital layer of urgency to proceedings, to stop people camping out and games lasting eight to nine hours each – until, after about 35 minutes, the once island-sized game map is crushed into the size of a single field, and it becomes a kill-or-be-killed hellscape. The first time I played it I died within one minute and proclaimed the game to be ‘bad’ or ‘shit’ (I forget which). Second time I made it until about three minutes in, before I was cleanly dispatched by an uzi for an overall ranking of around #89. My friend Max then took over, and came #2 overall, after a 40-minute stand-off, a Jeep chase, an exquisite sniper takeout and this one time where he threw a grenade into a room. The final battle saw him and one other fight for supremacy around the edge of a hill, and he was taken out by a single bullet to the side of the head. Here is an impression of me, sat on a computer chair at Max’s shoulder, trying not to breathe too loudly and so put him off his aim: ‘[Hands held over mouth, breath held, voice coming out strangled and high pitched] Fuck! Shit shit shit! Fuck!’ It was the most exhilarating gaming moment I had ever seen. I mean, Christ man. I live a relatively empty life. It was possibly the most exhilarating anything moment I had ever seen. So you see now how instantly I was hooked.

But as we have discussed I am terrible at the game (my simple mind cannot, however way I try, get my head around the W–A–S–D keyboard movement system, and for now PUBG is PC-only), so instead I watch Jord play it on Twitch. Or: I watch Shroud on Twitch, because his American time zone means it’s easier to watch in the evenings (at weekends, when I want to wake up and watch someone playing videogames who isn’t me, I watch American streamers who stay up deliberately late in their time zone to catch the European early morning audience, and they all wear caps and have obnoxious catchphrases, and I universally hate all of them). I watch some guy called JASONR sometimes, and though I don’t like him as a human, I respect him as a player: all three of them have this preternatural reaction time, a kind of hardwired cold-bloodedness and resistance to panic, unerring accuracy with digital rifles even over long distances, and also this relentlessness: they wear their rare losses lightly, so when their heads explode in the middle of a grey-brown field they, instead of wail and gnash with the sting of loss, boot up the game and go again. Essentially: the mindset of highly tuned professional athletes, but in the bodies of slightly awkward nerd teens. Twitch is a curious beast: a YouTube-shaped streaming platform that technically can be used to broadcast anything but is almost exclusively used for showing people playing games, Twitch was bought for $970 million by Amazon in August 2014 and is now worth an estimated $20 billion, with its own sub-currency tipping system – the ‘Cheer’ – slushing around its network. Fans of streamers can pay $1.40 to buy 100 ‘Cheers’ which they then donate to their favourite gamers through various in-chat messages (the gamer themselves will get around $1 for every 100 cheers – Twitch needs to take its vig) and emoticons: for a sneak peek at the future of capitalism, there is a single emoji that costs $140 to enact. Alternatively, fans can donate directly to streamers – tipping the odd $5, $10 here and there, or subscribing for a fee every month, thank you bro, thanks for the sub, thank you guys for the donnoe – with more money going directly to the gamer’s coffers. So to reiterate: Twitch is a website where you can watch someone else play a game and, if you really want to, you can pay the person you are watching to let them let you watch them play a game. At no point in this interaction do you, personally, get to purchase and play the game. You only watch. Some Twitch streamers are multi-millionaires. It has previously been impossible to tap into why.

#2.

I know why, and I and I alone have figured out why. In the adolescence years 13 thru 17 – a four-year long feeling of emptiness and antsiness and crushing, overpowering horniness I am going to nominally refer to as Wanke’s Inferno – I would go to my friend Matt’s house and watch him play videogames. It wouldn’t matter what time I would go over there – 2 p.m., 10 p.m., 2 a.m. – Matt would be awake, and playing videogames. This is because Matt was a goth, and goths are always up playing videogames. Also his mum was a nurse who worked nightshifts so his house was always best to scratch at the window if an existential crisis hit at 1 a.m. and you just needed to be out of your house and in the vague presence of some company, which very often happens when your body is pulsating with the dual needs to i. grow, constantly, in every direction and ii. be so horny your head might explode. Everything seems happy and sad at the same time when you are a teen. Psychically it’s like putting your head in a washing machine, for eight years.

Here’s what the back of Matt’s head looks like: an at-home dye job is growing out, so at the crown of his head is a digestive biscuit-sized circle of his natural hair colour, somewhere between blond and brown, while the rest of his hair was dyed black (see: goth) with a stripe at the front that was electric blue (also see: goth). The stripe didn’t last long, actually – it is hard to maintain an electric blue stripe of hair at the best of times because it requires bleaching the hair and then dyeing over the top of that bleached hair in the colour of your choice, and bright colours wash out quickly, and being a goth on pocket money is the exact polar opposite of the best of times, so after a while the blue fell out and there was just a sort of pale blonde streak remaining. I remember all of this vividly because for an entire summer of my teens I looked fixatedly at the back of Matt’s big goth head while he played Quake 4, Unreal Tournament, and, for some reason, this extended six-week period where we linked a SNES up to an old CRT TV and compulsively played Dr. Mario until the sun came up through the trees.

I mention all this because going to a friend’s house and watching them play videogames is exceptionally nourishing to teen boys. I mention all this because all those half-conversations I would have with the back of Matt’s head while he coldly racked up headshots were some of the best and also least consequential of my life. I would lay on his black bedsheets (goth), play with a skull candle of his (goth), flap at the blackout curtains (goth goth goth), occasionally disassemble an old Warhammer model of his (nerd) or read a comic (nerd) by Jhonen Vasquez (goth), and Matt would still be that, spine curled, hand on the mouse, headshot after headshot, while I unloaded. It was as close to therapy as two teen boys can get: chatting, and chatting, and chatting, every worry and every gripe, every girl we liked and every hope for the future, who we wanted to be, what we feared, how scared we were to grow up: all without a scrap of eye contact, conversation occasionally just falling into a lull, of grunts and occasional laughs, as heads exploded and arms came off in geysers of blood. Occasionally I would fall asleep on a Sonic beanbag on his floor, and have to be wearily stirred awake again at 4, 5 a.m., when I would wander home in my shirtsleeves through the chill. As I grow older, I am more deeply aware than ever that, essentially, a very large part of me has always wanted to retreat back into the nerve-jangling terror womb of adolescence, whether in search of a hard reset, or a time when life was consequence free, or just to be 17 again and actually learn to drive this time. I feel most men, given the option to go back and revisit their teen years with an adult mind, would for some reason jump at the chance. It was a time when your body is lithe and willowy and full of potential, and way less hairy. The most exciting thing that can happen to you is you can distantly see a girl you are in love with – and who is unaware you are alive – at the mall. It is a horrible, terrifying, high adrenaline time to be alive and I miss it with every atom of my body. Watching my friends play videogames emulates that feeling of distorted comfort all over again. Doing so with some Dutch guy called Jord over Twitch allows me to wallow in a black bedsheeted pit of nostalgia from the comfort of my desk at work.

#3.

Twitch taps into a new media landscape that makes absolutely no sense to fucking anyone, but that seems to be the way things are going, and Twitch is only one strange facet of that. Example: I recently had lunch with a friend and he told me about his obsession with Dr. Sandra Lee, or ‘Dr. Pimple Popper’, a woman with an immaculate bedside manner and a preternatural gift for lancing cysts, who lives both in her doctor’s office and also on YouTube. Every video she has ever done goes like this: a floating, eerie mid-zoom of the boil or zit or massive tumour-esque mass she is about to explode, which she prods at with rubber-coated fingers, purring and describing it in a cheerfully clinical tone. Then: then a jump-cut to the boil or whatever swabbed in surgical cloth. And then, using either her fingers or precise metal tools, she slices it open and squeezes out all the yellow gunk inside. It is horrible and fascinating: watching poison ooze out of humans, thick custardy torrents of it, then stitched neatly up and dabbed over with surgical spirit. My friend, a neat freak with OCD, says it taps into his compulsive need for things to be clean, tidied, free of chaos. ‘I watch them while I’m eating my breakfast,’ he says, the maniac. ‘Muesli, yoghurt, zits.’

OR: I found myself in a cab recently having one of those conversations you only seem to have when you’re shouting from one end of the car to another, and in it I was explaining the concept of ASMR. ASMR, or ‘autonomous sensory meridian response’, is this tingling effect some people get in their ears when they hear certain sounds – paper crinkling, soft finger clicking, whispering – something close to synaesthesia. YouTube has thousands of hours of videos dedicated to ASMR triggers, and a small-but-dedicated audience hungry for more, but obviously it’s very hard to just whisper for 30 minutes straight, so you find these performances quickly veer into something very weird – they are all recorded at 4am, when outside static noise is at its lowest, and the performers all do these weird drama class ad-libs, talking to themselves through various whispered scenarios. So like: one guy does this bit where he is an extremely rude waiter, talking down to you about a reservation you didn’t make uninterrupted for 40 fucking minutes. Or: there is this one guy, Toni Bomboni, who looks sort of like a LazyTown villain come to life, and I once watched a video of him in the scenario of ‘a gum store’, where he would chew and taste various bubblegums on your behalf to help advise a very serious gum purchase you (the viewer) were going to make, again something that went on, whispered, for like three-quarters of an hour. So I mean go to TV and say, ‘Hey: I’ve got a half-hour video of a lad chewing gum to himself and urgently whispering. You uh … you want that?’ and TV will say: no thank you. But the Internet has carved out its own weird niche of anti-media. Some people just like watching people do mad and boring shit. Some people like to watch skin erupt, or maniacs whispering. I, for example, I can only relax to headshots.

#4.

As best I can tell there are four or five species of Twitchers (I do not know if ‘Twitchers’ is a word or the accepted term: we are just going to have to assume that it is), which can be categorised as thus:

— Extremely Hyperactive Kid Who You Just Know Got Put Bodily Into Some Lockers At School: these are of course my least favourite Twitchers, because they are boys who fundamentally did not fit in to the intended hierarchy of the world of school or work – they were down at the bottom, punching fodder for jocks and so on, not smart enough to be genuine nerds, not physically dextrous enough to fight anyone off, doomed forever to be henpecked and unhappy – but then who found their niche (streaming videogames to an audience of millions) and so jumped up through their expected social stratas and became as obnoxious as possible in as short a period of time, so they have adopted the sort of bro-y discourse of actual bros, and say things like ‘fam’ and ‘you guys’ and ‘wuh–POW!’ and ‘[every single irritating sound effect a human being can make with their mouth]’, and gurn to the camera, and develop their own little catchphrases and routines, and behind them is a plethora of sort of wide-tyre nerd culture ephemera – anime posters, figurines from popular adult cartoons, Monster-branded green neon-lit mini-fridges, extremely complicated gaming chair/gaming headset set-up – and then they act in front of it, and they are extremely annoying, these people, on the surface, but also very much you can see not even very deep within them to see the vulnerabilities and frailties within, and I just know that every single one of them I could make cry with an accurately timed ‘your momma’ joke, and that’s no way to respect another adult, is it—

— Quiet PhD Student Type Who Just Loves Exploding Digital Heads: these ones are my favourite, because they transcend the idea of performative streaming – i.e. the idea that streaming videogames is about anything other than the videogame and the skill they possess at the videogame – that being a personality is secondary, tertiary, to having quick mouse response times and unerring accuracy with a sniper rifle, and these are the guys who take it closest to a sport. There is a narrative, in sport, of showboaters and not: the lads who have hot new hairstyles, and tattoos, and take selfies on Instagram, and still ascend to the very top of the game (in football: Neymar, Beckham, C. Ronaldo), and they infuriate your dad because of it, and then you have those who don’t, head-down-and-score-a-lot-of-goals lads (again football: Messi, Shearer, Xavi), who your dad adores. That’s the split in sports: that being good at sport – at being one of the five very best people on the planet at kicking a football – but also having ego around that, at being happy to be nearly supernaturally good at something, is somehow profane. In sports, I love these showboaters: when it comes to watching them play shoot-em-ups, they tire me out. Give me a quiet Dutch lad who is killing 40 minutes before he does his homework any day of the week.

— ‘The Character’. Some streamers dress in wigs and wraparound shades and eighties-style leather jackets and the like and maintain all these catchphrases and go-to sayings and stuff like that and in one way I very much admire them for developing a character and sticking to it, unbreakably, like a mid-eighties American shock jock, and in another far deeper way I cannot watch even one minute of them playing videogames, holy jesus, I am never in a thousand timelines going to be wired-out on Red Bull enough to find that funny—

— Girl Streamers, who unfortunately have this horribly uphill battle to Prove Themselves To Be Sincere, the gamer boys who are so primed to watch girls in like calf-high socks and pigtails and full-face anime-inspired make-up kill dudes in battle royale settings and do kawaii peace signs to the camera being sort of bait as well as red rags to these dudes, dudes both wanting very much to sexually conquer them – the chat that runs alongside Girl Gamers being, essentially, pornographically explicit – as well as mad at them for liking their safe little male thing, intruding into their world, so Girl Gamers are seen as a sort of strange curiosity in a male-dominated sport (even for male-dominated sports e-sports is a male-dominated sports), but also I find the associated energy that goes after them fundamentally fatiguing, so I cannot watch them for very long, and that is my cross to bear, sorry ladies—

#5, OR: THE AUDIENCE WILL EAT ITSELF EVENTUALLY

Like religion, the audience makes this something bigger than it is. Without a flock, preachers shout to an empty room, and Twitch is similar: streamers have a symbiotic relationship with their audience, they shape them and are shaped by them, a constant feedback loop with a clear hierarchy, gods and believers. The geography of the classic Twitch screen goes a little like this: down to the left-hand bottom of the screen, you have a fixed three-quarter view of your chosen gamers face, blank with concentration: to the right, a chatbox trickles constantly along. In the middle of the screen, prime real estate, is where the bulk of the gaming action happens, and occasionally our mighty overseers will flick their eyes over to the chat – ‘What we saying, chat? Where’s that sniper at?’ – but mostly they are fixed on their jobs, which is to explode people’s digital heads. And so there is this sub-economy of attention that goes on: for subscribing to their favourite gamer, fans’ names are briefly displayed on-screen, where they often earn a shout-out; by donating five or ten bucks, they can have a message displayed in the middle of the heads-up display, right where their hero is aiming, as close as they can get to god. So here’s where you get these weird little one-sided conversations, as followers yell praise to on high: ‘Thanks Shroud, you’re the best!’ they say. Or: ‘Hey Shroud: what hair product do you use?’ (They want to be him the same way kids want to be Ronaldo, the way men want to smell like David Beckham.) You see how weird humanity can get when left alone for too long in the same room. ‘Hey Shroud,’ one donor says. ‘Noticed your submachine gun shooting rhythm matches the drumbeat to an intro on my favourite anime.’ This person is insane. ‘That deliberate? :)’ Or: you gain insight into who is watching, and where, and why: ‘Hey man,’ one donor writes. ‘Stationed in Afghanistan right now and missing my games. Watching you keeps me going. Rock on.’ In many ways, Twitch is a long-distance friendship simulator, the humming sound of male bonding. A big ding, an animation, a series of catchphrases and in-jokes, long developed with a community that is at once guarded and open: someone has donated $3,100. The gamer reels back in his chair. ‘Wow,’ he says, barely flickering with emotion. ‘Hey man, wow. Thank you.’ Without the audience, the Twitch streamer is nothing, and they run the gamut from fanatical to removed, but always, there, there is this bubbling economy: in a world where artists struggle to sell honest-to-goodness CDs, and where movies are torrents and books are downloaded, Twitch streamers just sit there and shoot, their own little sub-niche of entertainment, and their fans are breathless to hand them money for it.

#6.

And so obviously, I pay to watch a man shoot. I’ve been watching Shroud for weeks, the grace of his movements, the way no ounce of motion is wasted, as slick and refined a professional gamer as it is possible to be. I watch highlight reels when he’s not online and find myself re-watching explicit kills on my lunch break. One day, I see Shroud, midway through a seven-hour stream, do the most audacious move: he throws a grenade from about 200 yards away then runs into the building just as it tinkles to the ground and explodes, slipping through a concrete bunker window and violently wounding the two players inside, who he finishes off with a single one-two pelt from his shotgun. I literally go into work the next day and describe all this to the IT guys as if we were talking about a football game. There is something hypnotic, about it, something soothing – something that takes me back to the womb of adolescence, sitting in a room silent but for the occasional jagged explosion sound, the pierce shrill of digital screaming, a punching noise run through two cheap portable speakers – takes me back to 15, staring at the back of a head, rapt with it. Twitch, on the surface, very much doesn’t make sense – the entire model of it seems wholly unsustainable, like selling one-way tickets into the heart of the sun – and that maybe in five years, or ten, gamers will have to drop their handles, go by their real names, slink into the corporate world of work. Or maybe it’s something else: a weird cusp of a mega-economy, one that will create celebrities and gods for generations to come. All I know is, I sign up to connect my Twitch account to my PayPal account. And that I wait for the right time when Shroud is looking at the screen (a lull between two games, when, after a top-three finish that ends with an outta-nowhere sniper kill, he clicks back to the lobby to reflexively find another game). And then I push the button on donating $10. ‘Hey Shroud,’ I say. ‘Thanks for the headshots.’ And he turns to the screen and reads my name aloud. And I feel like I have been touched by god.