Why I Stopped: Reflecting on Three Years of Twitch Streaming

Streaming has become an integral part of my daily life, a form of community and conversation that has almost entirely had a positive impact on my mental health — at least until this past year. I am sincerely glad that I have dedicated thousands of hours of my life to playing video games and talking about them with people who share my enthusiasm for the medium. I began my efforts here at Epilogue with the intention to validate my passion for gaming, specifically the emotional impact that their storytelling can bring, and I think my time on Twitch has been a natural and fulfilling extension of that desire.  

Looking Back

A quick glance at my first anniversary article reveals the positive feedback that streaming immediately gave me. As soon as I picked up the hobby, I made lasting connections with people who I still consider core pillars of my friend group today, even though the primary goal of starting a Twitch channel was comparatively asocial. Streaming validated the amount of time that I integrated gaming into my free time, for the social impetus to spend time talking with people – the parasocial relationship has certainly gone both ways for me – made me believe the rhetoric that I had spent so much time writing here on the website. Not only were video games mature examples of storytelling and art, and therefore not a waste of time, but video games were ways to bond with friends. The social dynamics of Twitch have been, if nothing else, a justification to keep streaming.  

I am no stranger to making friends online, but I think Twitch would have felt like a particularly uninviting place to me if not for the olive branch of Epilogue’s Ben Vollmer and his welcoming community. The combination of knowing someone in real life and tacitly joining their extended circle of online friends can be delicate, and is something I will never take for granted. A number of my other “real life” friends also joined aboard the platform around a similar timeframe, so it made the time I was spending with “online” friends feel otherwise natural.  

Whereas I’ve seen dozens of casters come and go in that short time span of three years, I always wondered why I was able to keep going. Until the month of writing this, I’ve never stepped away from my channel for more than a week, many times streaming every day for weeks without interruption. I think these aforementioned friends have largely kept me returning each week, at times more so than the games that were ostensibly the reason I streamed in the first place.  

Stepping Away From Twitch

So here we are, three years deep into Twitch streaming, and I’ve decided to take a hiatus away from the channel. (At the moment of this article’s publication, it will have been more than four weeks since I went “live.”) I still have almost entirely positive things to say about my streaming experience; I’m not walking away because something negative happened. I have simply felt an internal shift over the past year or so, slowly losing enthusiasm and motivation to combine the personality theatrics of streaming with the games I want to dedicate my attention towards. I no longer feel like Twitch is something I desire to be a part of my everyday life.  

This has been a slow shift, happening like a cruise ship attempting to swerve around an iceberg at the last moment. Part of the shift for me has involved vainly chasing the “high” of masterclass games like Persona 5 Royal and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, both of which I consider apex streaming experiences that connected me deeper to both the people I spent time with on Twitch and the gaming medium itself. Every time I stream a game that doesn’t meet that mental threshold for significance, I feel doubt creeping in the back of my mind. I start to ask myself why I feel the need to chase the next metaphorical dragon, why I’m not content simply to play games that look interesting to me. I wonder if my next game of choice will be a “good stream game,” which is a term I hear almost every streamer use in passing.

What I’m saying is that I’ve watched a sort of split consciousness emerge as I’ve streamed on Twitch. There’s the innate part of my personality that only thinks as far as “Ooh, shiny!” before trying out a new game. There’s another, learned part of my personality that always asks if playing this game right now is a good decision to make as it concerns the idea of entertaining people on Twitch. These two notions in my head have slowly grown apart over time, leaving me feeling divided within myself on a number of occasions. 

But again, I don’t think of this split consciousness as an inherent negative, I just think I’ve become suspicious of the motivations that I notice myself calculating and thinking about absentmindedly whenever I consider what game I want to play next – on Twitch or otherwise. I don’t want to speak for any other Twitch streamers while writing this, save for this one insight: I think every streamer of single-player games battles with internal guilt as a result of taking their hobby and making it a public offering. That is, I know plenty of casters who have publicly worried that they might be shortchanging either themselves or their audience if they choose to play a game offline. At the very least, you feel guilty for not streaming because you miss the opportunity for funny clips and quotable moments. But on a more pernicious end of that spectrum, you worry that you’re letting people down (or equally pernicious, like you’re missing an opportunity for channel growth) by keeping a playthrough to yourself. 

How I Arrived at This Realization

I think these above realizations were gradual on my end, accelerated by the fact that I’m lucky enough to receive advance review copies of certain games. In these cases – I think of my reviews of Bugsnax, Heaven’s Vault, and Genesis Noir as recent examples – the agreed embargo requires me not to stream the game for other people. Thus, unintentionally, I have found myself playing certain games that would have otherwise been shared. And, in these cases, I have noticed myself playing games with different motivations. There’s a different level of engagement which results in a more intense degree of reflection about the aspects of the experience that matter most to me: art, story, characters, and so on. Then I post my review, return to Twitch streaming, and I instantly feel the inherent distraction pulling my focus away, even if my appreciation remains happily intact as I converse with people watching the stream.  

As I started articulating these realizations to myself, I discovered that I felt trapped by my own success. Since my stream had become a regular place for a group of friends to hang out at an expected time each week, I didn’t want to let people down. I simultaneously feared that my disappearance – temporary or otherwise – would result in people going away, leaving and finding other people to watch. This is both an irrational and emotionally unhealthy thought process, but I have not been able to quiet this part of my brain, whether through meditation, journaling, exercise, or other such self-help methods. I created a double-bind for myself: on one hand, a self-important image wanting to be the center of attention, and on the other, a shriveled self-image entirely dependent on external feedback and approval from others. 

I have tugged at these self-inflicted manacles I’ve forged for myself to no avail. I have tried integrating multiplayer games in order to eliminate the insecurity of taking time away from Twitch but still giving myself space to play the single-player games that I wasn’t intending to stream. I have replayed games, hoping that the familiarity would take away the pressure to comprehend both chat conversations and the game’s story at the same time. The various things I have tried have not quieted the lizard brain that wants to see the numbers go up on Twitch. I have become beholden to an artificial idea that I’ve created in my head. By sharing that artifice with the world, I hope that I can finally give myself permission to rest these worries.  

To be clear, what I am experiencing isn’t necessarily burnout, impostor syndrome, or depression – although it might be considered a bitter cocktail of all three at times. All three of those feelings have surfaced over the years, but it’s the combination that I will not tolerate any longer. I have not spoken to a single person who confirms my anxieties and insecurities about leaving Twitch. Instead, when I have expressed these worries, every single response has been filled with encouragement. So I’m a fool if I don’t take them at their word, trust them (and myself!) enough to take the break that I feel I need. I have been so worried about going away that I’ve warped it into a perverse kind of fantasy vacation. I also think about how absurd that is: I’ve been getting imaginative pleasure when considering the idea of taking away a hobby that I, on paper, love.  

I realize my brain is a slave to the algorithm; instead of lamenting it, I’m rejecting it. This is no one’s fault but mine for allowing the unhealthy mental processes to metastasize unchecked for this long. I do not think negatively about Twitch or the wonderful people I’ve met through the platform. I hope I have made that caveat clear.  

Plans to Return

With the exception of official Epilogue events, I have no plans to fully return once I’ve stepped away from Twitch. That doesn’t mean my brain has decided to forever block out the platform as a possibility for myself. But it means that I’m not thinking about the next time I might get the itch to share a game I’m playing, to talk about it in real time and compare opinions. It means that I’m leaving the keys on the counter. We’ll see if the door is unlocked if my path leads me back home again one day.  

I began writing this article in late February or early March of this year, and I deleted each draft along the way because I didn’t quite capture my feelings in a way that felt accurate. As I make this final attempt to collect my thoughts in this reflective article, I want to bring things full circle to the other articles I’ve written as each of my Twitch anniversaries have come around. Every time a year has passed on Twitch, I’ve looked back at the dozens of games I’ve streamed, narrowed that list down to ten, and talked about why I found each game rewarding to stream.  

But as I look at the list of games I streamed to completion over the past twelve months, I realize that I’ve already written about nearly all the games that would make this list. When I published my article about the 20 Best Games I Played in 2020 at the end of last year, I hadn’t quite admitted my need to step away from Twitch. And since I don’t want to simply repeat myself, I’ll link you to that article – as it’s full of amazing games, many of which were excellent streaming experiences – and instead discuss something different, which I think is even more fitting: the games I’m glad I didn’t stream in their entirety last year.  

The Top 5 Best Games I Decided to Play Offline

As I bring things to a standstill on my Twitch channel, I think it’s worth discussing how keeping some experiences to myself has been rewarding, cementing my conviction that it’s a healthy idea for me to take time away. Some of these games were playthroughs I started on stream before immediately realizing that I should play them offline, which I did. These five games were incredibly remarkable for different reasons, but they would all receive my highest recommendations as games that are rewarding to play by yourself:  

5. Hades

I started playing Hades as a charity incentive during our winter event, the Epilogue Gaming 48 Hour (EG48) marathon for the AbleGamers charity. Though I knew roguelikes were not my forte, I couldn’t ignore the incessant praise awarded to Hades even as it contended toe-to-toe with AAA games with hundred-fold marketing budgets. The fact that Hades still persisted as many people’s 2020 game of the year choice was enough to get me interested. To that end, I am so incredibly glad that I stepped out of my perceived comfort zone, because Hades has earned every single ounce of praise it received. I cannot sincerely criticize any aspect of the experience – the gameplay loop, the bottomless writing, the beautiful characters, the addictive soundtrack, literally any other aspect I can devise. Hades deserves its superfluous accolades. 

Playing the majority of Hades offline was a great decision for me, even as I slowly rotated in Hades runs to my then-ongoing stream, because it is a perfect casual game to play while doing something else. Sometimes I’d turn on a podcast or a YouTube talk while playing, other times I’d watch a friend on their own Twitch channel while playing, and other times Hades was simply enough to captivate my undivided attention. Though the credits have rolled, I’m still not done playing it, which should be enough of an advertisement on its own. Hades will give back every ounce of time, effort, and attention that you put into it.  

4. Yakuza: Like a Dragon

I streamed Yakuza 0 through Yakuza 6 practically back-to-back in the second half of 2020, which made me worry that my Twitch audience was a bit tired of those games. With that sentiment in mind, I decided to play both Judgment, the spinoff, and Yakuza: Like a Dragon offline. While my time with Judgment didn’t quite take in the same way, perhaps having to do with it being the only game in the series/universe in which I played with English voice acting, my time with Like a Dragon was incredibly valuable. Like a Dragon rivals Yakuza 0 for my favorite in the series – and yes, after finishing the game, I now see why it fits into the mainline Yakuza series – which is incredibly surprising considering how many risks the game takes: a new protagonist, a new setting, turn-based combat, and so on. Yakuza: Like a Dragon is an equally fun jumping-in point for anyone sitting on the sidelines, wondering if they should try out the Yakuza series. With the exception of some difficulty spikes incurring unnecessary grinding segments towards the end, I think almost anyone could enjoy this game. 

As for playing it offline, the part of me I described above that immediately thinks “aw, that would have been a hilarious clip,” was often active throughout my Like a Dragon playthrough. But I felt like I took my time with this game in a way that I never did on stream, since so many Yakuza achievements aren’t linked directly to the story, and in that respect, I got a lot of value from the experience that I wouldn’t have found if I streamed the entire game. Overcoming the True Final Millennium Tower was the single most absurdly difficult challenge I’ve ever accepted in gaming, and I did the impossible (entailing nearly 40 hours of post-game grind) by myself without anyone bearing witness.

3. Kentucky Route Zero

Kentucky Route Zero is the first game I decided to play offline from start-to-finish once I began to realize my feelings about streaming. It’s kind of magical how well this game translated into an offline setting when I was doubting myself. Kentucky Route Zero is unwieldy to describe, which explains why seemingly every podcast that covers the game feels the need to cover each act (including interludes) independently. You can’t really talk about Kentucky Route Zero in a cohesive, unified way, because the game is such a pastiche. I keep comparing the game to the “great American novels,” as Epilogue writer Preston Johnston has, and this comparison serves to highlight the tone, setting, themes, and vocabulary present throughout the game. Kentucky Route Zero sparked something profound in the seat of my soul, which, for the first time in my life as a games writer, intimidates me. 

I don’t think I will ever write something of equal merit about this game. It’s not that Kentucky Route Zero is the best-written game ever, it’s that I was able to sink into it with the same teeth that I usually sharpen for literature. I spend a ton of time at Epilogue talking about how games are art, but not as much time drilling into the literature comparison. (I’m not kidding. I sent this game’s interlude, “The Entertainment,” to my favorite literature professor from university, asking him to consider teaching it in his experimental literature class next semester.) If you want to see how games can function as literature, look no further than Kentucky Route Zero; like literature, it’s best to read this text on your own before delving into conversations about it – which are equally important – with others.  

2. NieR Replicant

Since I have already spent several thousand words reviewing my experience with this game on the Epilogue website, allow me to narrow my discussion of NieR Replicant to the offline experience. Whereas I streamed endings B through E of NieR: Automata when I first played it, a game which instantly spiked to the top of my favorite games list, I knew that I would want my time with Replicant to be personal. In fact, my hiatus from Twitch began the week of NieR Replicant’s release so that there was no ambiguity or pretense of trying to do both, so to speak, meaning play this brand-new game and maintain my streaming schedule. And I’m no stranger to crying on stream in front of other people, but I was a wreck throughout my Replicant playthrough, so it was best for me and my makeup collection that I kept this gem to myself.

1. Disco Elysium

It’s kind of shocking that my gut tells me to place Disco Elysium over NieR Replicant in this list of games that were rewarding to play alone, but it’s the truth: Disco Elysium is a game that I could have only ever fully appreciated by myself. I have since watched other streamers play the game and see the potential for viewer interaction, especially as choice is concerned, but Disco Elysium is so incredibly well-written that I would genuinely feel disrespectful to the dialogue and descriptions if part of my attention was anywhere else. It’s no exaggeration to say that Disco Elysium is the single most articulate game I have ever played, full stop. Obviously these are esoteric terms, but a quick glance through my phone’s screenshots reveals that I had to look up “abyssopelagic zone” and “Franconigerian” respectively. As someone who trades in literature, usually dense critical theory or continental philosophy when reading for fun, I often consider myself to have a well-developed vocabulary. But it wasn’t the sheer breadth of various diction that impressed me, it was also the implementation of the writing. 

Not only does Disco Elysium wield easily my favorite vocabulary of any written game, it has a brilliant vision that every single character and plot contrivance aligns with and delivers on. Part of that implementation bleeds through what might be the most genius aspect of Disco Elysium: its role-playing systems. As an RPG, you level up stats like Empathy and Perception, but also less common ones like Rhetoric and Visual Calculus, which are ultimately a thousand times more engaging than the customarily infinite skill trees of the trite AAA open-world formula. I had a blast role-playing a radical communist in my first playthrough of Disco Elysium and no doubt would love to see things unfold as a cryptofascist or a fence-sitting moralist, etc. I might have been late to the Disco, so to speak, but Elysium was waiting patiently for my post-streaming playthrough. Thank goodness for the Final Cut update, too, which brought so much life to the already-great writing. Considering I didn’t share this playthrough with anybody, Disco Elysium feels like my best-kept gaming secret – but not anymore! Go play it! 

Final Thoughts

Morbid and navel-gazing though it may be, an article like this needs to be written honestly: my constant presence on Twitch has become unhealthy and I have uncovered a need to reclaim single-player experiences as my own. At the same time, I also didn’t want to abandon the annual tradition of reflecting on my previous year streaming on Twitch, which has always been a valuable introspective exercise — something akin to people evaluating and setting New Year’s resolutions. 

Writing these articles is always enjoyable because I get to curate games that had an impact on me, which I hope serves as a useful series of guideposts for the next person who inevitably gets stuck in a streaming rut. Whether you’re also doubting yourself as a streamer or you’re simply running out of ideas for what to play next, please consider some of what I have laid out above. And if any of the psychological concerns I’ve identified in myself apply to you, consider also taking a break. It might keep you going longer than I’ve been able to. 

Inevitably, someone will reference this article when I next stream, which, at the very least, is something I intend to revisit for our annual charity marathons, also known as EG48. Since tradition dictates that I helm EG48 with its co-organizer, Nina Salenius, you’ll see me during those events as long as they continue. And, if anything, I think I will take Ben Vollmer’s advice and think of my Twitch channel as a place for “events,” whatever form that eventually takes — EG48 or otherwise. But urgently prioritizing streams every day or every week, especially with the intention for audience growth, is no longer on the table as a personal possibility. 

This line in the sand has been worth drawing for the sake of self-experimentation. As I step away from Twitch for however long, there will always be an abundance of wonderfully entertaining people to watch in the Epilogue community. If you haven’t already, I encourage everyone reading this to join our Discord so you can participate in one of the friendliest communities of people I’ve ever met. And to everyone still streaming in our community who is reading this, I’ll be there. You got this. 

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