Streaming as a Solo Traveler

The Twitch Playbook: Tips for Twitch Streamers · 207 - Streaming as a Solo Traveler

As we all head toward the new year, you may be planning to take some big trips sometime in the next twelve months. You might be going out of state, out of country, or out of continent. You could be visiting someone, embarking on a cruise, or buying a package tour. Your interests may vary, from museums to scenery to local cuisine. Your group of companions may be large or small. No matter what configuration your trip takes, I’m sure you’re going to have a great time. In past entries like How to Stream While Traveling Anywhere I’ve talked about going live while traveling with someone else. In ones like Travel with an IRL Streaming Backpack I’ve covered the various tech options available, and in the entry Streaming from Japan I covered my specific anecdotes as a Twitch streamer in Tokyo. This time, I want to further explore a particular type of trip that I’ve recently come to love: solo travel. And furthermore, we’ll explore how I take advantage of this method's strengths for my Twitch streams. 

➢ GOING WITH NO PLAN

This year, I’ve been incredibly lucky to have taken three separate trips outside the US, first going to Athens, Greece and then going to Tokyo, Japan twice. I approached all three of these in the same way: simply arriving in one single city and existing. I didn’t plan to go to any other parts of the countries I was in, despite both locations having numerous gorgeous locales outside their capitals rich in history and culture. I didn’t even look at where others would recommend to visit in those cities, other than a few cursory glances. I’d just get a small local hotel room near the center of town (or near a train line) and figure out what to do as I went along. 

As a solo traveler, you can spend as 
much time as you want, doing what 
you want to do.

I realize that this particular method of travel is a major turn-off for many. Lots of us reason that since we only plan to visit wherever we’re going once in our lives, we’d prefer to see everything we can see in a single whirlwind trip. I certainly understand the logic, and I’ve had plenty of amazing trips of that style as well, but there are some distinct advantages to my kind of unplanned traveling. The biggest benefit is also the simplest: when you have no plan, you’re open to many more things. In Greece I found out from locals about events, landmarks and interesting parts of town that easily became my evening or next day’s objective. In Japan, being able to speak the language I was able to get even more spontaneous. I took someone I met in a bar to their first maid cafe, I went to karaoke with a fellow lover of movie musicals, and met friends on the first trip who invited me to events on the second trip. Since there was never anything on my schedule, there were no limits to what I was available to do on a moment’s notice. 

A fear of missing things can always creep up when on vacation to another country. If I’m in Greece, can I really miss out on the amazing history of Crete or the beauty of Santorini? In Japan, do I not care about seeing Mount Fuji or visiting a hot spring? I combat this anxiety however, by simply telling myself that the trip I’m on is only the first trip, not the only one. With Japan, this ended up coming true even within the same year. Greece is less likely on that front, but even if I never came back I’d be more than satisfied with the experience I had. I saw so many amazing things, and I found a lot of places I wouldn’t have found if I were rushing from bullet point to bullet point. 

➢ SOLO TRAVEL STREAMING

My trip to the Mall of America was 
pretty much like this, but with 
fewer zombies.

As a Twitch streamer, it can be very uncomfortable to go live when others are with you, if they aren’t a part of the shows you make. Depending on who your traveling companions are, this may even make you uncomfortable enough not to want to go live at all. Having traveling companions who all have their own interests and desired destinations can also make it difficult to decide what to do and where to go. This can create a lot of tension and indecision among the group, and by the time you’re on the way to wherever you’re going there might not really be enough time for a broadcast. Conversely, as a solo traveler you’re given complete freedom in when you go live, where you want to go and what you want to do. The trip is completely yours, and you can take as much time as you need to fiddle with your stream (something that can be awkward when others are with you and don’t want to wait), talk to chat (outright rude when you’re with a group and having a separate conversation with virtual people they can’t see), and do whatever kinds of show-hosting activities you like to do on stream. 

Interestingly, as I continued making these kinds of shows on my trips this past year, I came to the realization that I conduct my solo travel streams in much the same way that I play singleplayer video games. In an open world game like GTA, Elden Ring or Spider-Man, I’m often more interested in pursuing side quests, appreciating artwork, and reading random text entries that I find than I am in accomplishing the actual objective. My style of solo travel streams allow me the same level of independence and exploration, and that’s why I find them so fulfilling. 

➢ THE OPEN WORLD

Of course, when traveling alone it’s important to be extra careful. Make sure you know how to call the local police, and take a look online at which parts of town you should avoid. Like with any travel experience, it’s also important to pay attention to how you handle your money, and where you keep your money. Pickpockets and scams are common in pretty much all tourist destinations, and you can find out about some of the biggest issues wherever you’re going with a quick online search. I like to keep a bit of ‘emergency money’ in different places. Most stays in my wallet, but I keep a bit of cash in my streaming backpack, and a bit more cash, along with one of my credit cards, in my hotel room, just in case. That way, if something does happen to my wallet, or even to the bag I’m carrying, I’ll at least have something. 

As long as you’re paying attention and using common sense, you’ll be fine. Travel is such a rewarding experience, because you really gain perspective about how other people live. Especially after going outside the country, you may even end up reconsidering what you think of as ‘normal’ when back home. Most of the tips in this entry have been specific to my preferred method of solo travel as a Twitch streamer. But again, no matter how you like to take your trips, or whether you stream while taking them, you’re going to have a great time. There’s a whole world out there to explore. Go out and make some unforgettable memories! 

Read Between the Lines of Your Twitch Chat

The Twitch Playbook: Tips for Twitch Streamers · 205 - Read Between the Lines of Your Twitch Chat

Comments from viewers are a big part of the Twitch streaming experience. In the entry Up Your Showmanship on Stream, I spoke about how you can always give a dynamic response to even the least dynamic chat messages. This is a subject worth exploring a bit more, however. Many streamers take chat messages too literally in my opinion. Just because the question someone asked only really warrants a one-word answer doesn’t mean your answer actually has to be one word. It’s your stream, and you can talk about whatever you want. This person’s question is merely a jumping-off point for whatever you want to talk about. In my view, questions on a livestream aren’t really meant to be taken literally, but rather as a suggestion for larger conversations. In this entry, we’ll look into how you can read between the lines of your Twitch chat.

Many people aren’t naturally very talkative, and this applies to Twitch chat as well. Sometimes they can’t express what they really mean. I often try to see the intention behind whatever the person said, and instead of responding to the question they asked, I respond to the question they wish they asked. Even if someone asks what you think of as a stupid question, it’s always within your power to lift them up, instead of pointing out their question’s flaw and knocking them down. The entry How to Flesh Out Stream Ideas touched on how standup comedians use the philosophy of ‘Yes, and…’ to ensure they’re always building on the jokes of others, rather than shooting down ideas. This is a hugely helpful mindset when dealing with comments on a Twitch stream. 

➢ SPINNING NEGATIVITY

I got a lot of hate when playing 
this one. 

In the past, when I used to work for another company and each broadcast would have anywhere from 100 to 1,000 concurrent viewers, the comments would fly very quickly, and they weren’t always very nice. From early on however, I decided that I would try not to shut down even the nasty remarks. I was trying to help grow the company’s brand, and I wanted to ensure that everyone felt like a part of the show. I also knew that when people say mean things, they aren’t necessarily mean people at heart. So I’d take a comment in which someone said, “You’re horrible at this game. Please stop trying,” and instead of reading the comment word for word, I’d say something like, “[viewer username] sees room for improvement in my playstyle. Definitely let me know if you have any tips!” Not with irony or condescension, but with real genuine interest.

For some reason, people would also get really mad that I had a job where I played video games for a living. They’d say, “This guy is terrible. He’s so annoying. Why did [company] ever pick him to do these videos?” and several much more vitriolic versions of the same idea. This of course hurts to hear, but I’d try to take it in stride. I recognized that these comments often had a deeper unspoken meaning, and I’d respond with something like, “[viewer username] has a great point, I’m lucky enough to get to do what I love each day and get paid to do it!” And then I’d go into a story about how I was able to build a body of work and get hired by a company to make these kinds of videos. I’d give tips for other viewers who might want to start a career doing the same thing. I wouldn’t brag, preach or put down the original commenter, but would actually thank them for bringing up such a helpful subject. 

➢ SPREADING POSTIVITY

These kinds of responses would usually have one of two effects. First, they would often get the original commenter to turn their attitude around. Many people on the internet don’t really consider the consequences of what they say, because they feel anonymous. But when you put their comment in the limelight and give them a bit of attention, they quickly realize that they’re having an effect. Believing the best in someone is also a strong motivator for change. Notice that in the above examples, even though the original comments were pretty mean, I wouldn’t treat the commenter like a mean person. Rather, I treat them as someone nice who maybe asked a question they didn’t intend to be hurtful. I ask the question hidden within their question, rather than the question itself. And psychologically, if others see the good in us, we want to meet those expectations. This causes the chatter to come around, start posting other more positive comments, and sometimes even apologize, even though I never said they did anything wrong. 

Paint the chat however you want. 

The second effect of this kind of response is sometimes even more important than the first. Because of the way I phrase my answer, the chat becomes flooded with a higher volume of positive comments than negative. In the first example, I asked for the commenter’s tips for the game. This often gets other viewers talking about their own strategies, in addition to the person I asked, and populates the chat with more constructive comments. In the second example, by talking about my own tips and tricks for becoming a professional livestream producer and video host, people are more interested in asking about how to get into that world themselves. People in the chat are suddenly engaged in talking about something far more interesting, and might even begin to police themselves. If the original commenter persists in being negative, other chatters (who are now more interested in the new topic than the previous negative one) would actually ask the negative person to stop. By creating a topic where positivity is more engaging than negativity, you’re turning that negative person into a minority within the chat. And it’s much more difficult for that negativity to gain a foothold when nobody else is on their side. 

The way you respond to a comment is kind of like planting a seed. If your most recent response is negative or dismissive, negativity is going to grow. But if you plant the seeds for interesting conversations, you’ll soon see the positive effects of that choice.  

➢ POSSIBLE AT ANY SIZE

Since starting my own personal Twitch channel, these kinds of mean comments very seldom come in anymore. The amount of viewers and chatters is much smaller, and I don’t really have to go out of my way to please everyone watching either. But the same principles often come in handy for me, even at a smaller scale. Whether someone asks a question that only really requires a one-word answer, or they make some unintentionally cruel remark like ‘You look/sound really tired,’ I’m always able to spin it into something more interesting. Don’t forget however, that just because something can be spun into a better topic, doesn’t mean that you have to spin it, or deal with it at all. I put up with a lot when I was working at that high level of streaming, and I found ways to make the job easier to take. But that kind of constant negative bombardment still takes its toll, even if you spin it to make the show itself better. In my personal streams, I don’t care as much whether every single chatter stays around. If someone is being intentionally mean, I will often timeout or ban them. Like I mention often throughout this podcast, stay true to the priorities of whatever kind of show you’re trying to make. And if you want to raise engagement on your streams, try keeping this subject in mind. It’s always better to read between the lines of your chat. 

Pay Your Streams Forward

The Twitch Playbook: Tips for Twitch Streamers · 196 - Pay Your Streams Forward

So you’ve streaming for a while. You have hundreds of broadcasts under your belt, and the amount of mistakes you make on stream has dropped significantly. You’re in a pretty comfortable place with your shows. If this is the case, it might be a good time to pay back the goodwill you’ve received throughout your Twitch journey by helping others. 

Whether you create YouTube tutorials, write hardware buying guides, interview other streamers on a podcast, or just answer questions about how to stream in your Twitch chat, there are many ways you can use your experiences to help other streamers create better content. Almost four years ago, I created this podcast. It’s gone on to help more streamers than I ever could have imagined I’d reach. I’m glad to know I’ve brought so much value to so many people. What you yourself are interested in talking about, and what form your own helpful content takes may be different, but I think you’ll find a similar gratification from helping others no matter how you choose to do it. 

➢ WHAT TO SAY

If you were going to teach others about streaming, what happens if your lessons don’t all resonate with people? The first thing to understand is that they won’t. Not always. There’s no way for all of your teachings to apply to everyone. But then again, why should they? We all learn a huge amount of lessons when we stream on Twitch. Many of them can only truly be internalized when we’ve experienced them for ourselves. Some lessons you’ve learned may be too advanced for beginners, but will come in handy for more seasoned streamers. And in the case of streamers who have done it even longer than you have, certain lessons might no longer be helpful at their level. In many cases, you may simply have different goals in streaming than someone else, and one of your lessons may not apply. If you’ve been listening to this podcast for example, think about how many episodes have really spoken to you. It’s likely that number isn’t close to 100%. You probably felt some entries were more useful than others. Certain ones may even seem to make no sense at all. Maybe you feel I contradict myself, or that I take a weak stance on certain issues and too strong a stance on others. And yet, you’ve hopefully found something of value in hearing my stories and the lessons I’ve learned along the way. Everything I say is true to my own experience, and it’s true to my beliefs about streaming at the time I write it. But it’s not necessarily all true to your experience or beliefs. And that’s okay. We’re all different. We all go down different paths. But there will always be certain points where our paths intersect. 

Everybody has a different approach 
to their craft.

If you choose to make some helpful content of your own, I suggest embracing that idea. What you want to teach will never be 100% applicable to the next person. But just because they don’t take all your advice doesn’t mean they won’t benefit from some of it. Rather than just advising, I also try to focus on sharing my experience. I think it’s useful to be as candid as possible about what I've done on Twitch, both good and bad. I try not to focus too much on the positive or glamorous aspects, but really show the times when I’ve failed, or felt bad about what I was doing. This hopefully helps others to get a realistic impression of what it’s like, without being overly preachy. I also try to explain complex concepts, both technical (like setting up a greenscreen) and spiritual (like losing motivation when overpromising) by using examples and stories I personally find inspiring. I can’t know what others will respond to, but I can know what I would respond to if I were listening. And I try to go by that. If I start getting excited about a metaphor or anecdote in an entry, I know I’m on the right track. 

Whatever you choose to make, you don’t need to approach it from a solely altruistic point of view either. You’re choosing to sacrifice a chunk of your time making something outside of your streams, after all. Yes, it’ll help other streamers, but you will also find it helps you just as much. In the entry Chronicle Your Twitch Progress, I spoke about how you can better understand streaming by writing about streaming. What’s going well on your streams? What’s not going well? Where is there a specific issue? What might solve it? You’ll find there’s a lot of power in writing, or even just talking openly about things like this, because your own thoughts become more lucid when you clarify them. In addition, this educational side-project can help your Twitch channel if you want it to. Plenty of YouTubers and Twitch streamers have made names for themselves by helping up-and-coming creators get off the ground. If you want to make this educational project part of your brand, it can become a powerful source of growth. 

➢ WHAT NOT TO SAY

You can take whatever approach you want when helping other Twitch streamers, but I would advise against a few particular avenues. Denigrating other streamers is not a very nice thing to do. It’s certainly rude to do this to someone’s face by mocking their content in their own chat, but it shouldn’t even be done indirectly. You’ll notice for example, that I take care never to use the content or styles of other specific streamers as negative examples in this podcast. I may talk about paradigms in streaming I don’t like, or traits to avoid, but I simply don’t believe in talking badly about someone else’s work. Everyone is in this together, trying their best to create whatever content is meaningful for them, and we shouldn’t be putting each other down. After all, the whole point of this project would be to lift other streamers up. It wouldn’t make much sense if you were making someone feel bad in order to do it. 

Even if you think you're being helpful, 
don't offer advice where it isn't 
specifically asked for.

I also strongly advise against offering your advice where it isn’t asked for. Many streamers, especially new ones, feel the need to criticize other streamers in their live chats. This unhelpful kind of advice typically only serves to grate on the recipient, and make the advisor look bad. If someone asks you what you think, that’s one thing. If they didn’t ask you, it’s rude and presumptuous to try to impose your own will on them. If you find the line between solicited and unsolicited advice difficult to manage, you can’t go wrong with simply creating content instead. When you make something pre-packaged of your own, like a video or podcast that’s intended to help others, people will come to it specifically because they’re looking for guidance. Like you did when finding this podcast. I’m offering my opinions and experiences here, and telling you what I think is good or bad, but you signed up to hear those things. I’m not entering your stream’s chat and rattling off what I think needs to change about your channel. For more of my thoughts on giving unsolicited advice, see the entry How to Learn from Other Streamers (And How Not To).

➢ SHARE YOUR WISDOM

If you’ve been streaming on Twitch for a while, you’ve had all sorts of experiences. You’ve faced challenges and you overcame them. You’ve started projects, abandoned others, changed your channel’s course and revised ideas. All of these things have taught you valuable lessons. Why not share those with others? Who knows who you might help by doing so? You might even help yourself. Pay your streams forward. You never know what those seeds of positivity might grow into. 

Streaming in the Face of Futility

The Twitch Playbook: Tips for Twitch Streamers · 193 - Streaming in the Face of Futility

What happens when you find it futile to go live? When every part of you feels you have nothing interesting left to do or say, and you just want to give up? This happens to all of us at various points throughout our Twitch careers. Most streamers experience such a feeling when they’re new, because they might be awkward on camera, often making technical mistakes and embarrassing themselves in front of viewers. Then, once we’ve settled into a groove there comes a time when things are a little too familiar. The act of streaming becomes boring, and there’s no longer any spice left. Once we’re established, we can also let our egos interfere with our broadcasts. If everything isn’t up to its usual quality standard, we shudder at the thought of letting ourselves put on inferior shows, and would prefer not to stream at all that day if faced with the prospect. You even might be in one of these situations on your channel right now. My advice for any of these scenarios is ultimately the same: just go live anyway. 

➢ SHARE YOUR JOURNEY

It’s been a long time since I started streaming, but I can still identify with streamers who feel self-conscious about their lack of experience. While I have thousands of video game shows under my belt, I wasn’t so experienced as an IRL streamer until relatively recently. Even since then, I wouldn’t say I’ve done more than a hundred of those shows, so in the grand scheme I'm still pretty inexperienced. I’m significantly more prone to make mistakes when I’m going live from a phone or streaming backpack, as I do for these broadcasts. And that makes perfect sense, because the entire process is different. Similarly, while I studied art throughout high school and college, whenever I do art streams on my Twitch channel I typically try styles and media that I’m not comfortable with. This requires me to get used to making what is often terrible artwork live in front of anyone watching. A few years ago, I also began livestreaming my Japanese studies on Duolingo. I started streaming my learning from the literal first day of my streak, and of course I had to face the constant humiliation of getting a huge amount of the answers wrong every day. 

All three of these shows forced me back into a ‘novice’ role in different ways, and they have all caused me significant embarrassment throughout my time streaming them. In each of these three categories, I’ve often wrestled with the entire identity of what the shows were. What was I trying to accomplish? Was I teaching Japanese to others, when I could barely speak it myself? Did anyone actually want to watch me fumble through horrible timed figure drawings and environment sketches? What was the point of streaming from a restaurant if I was just eating my food, and not showing the place off to everyone watching? These are all legitimate concerns, but I eventually realized they were merely my self-doubt searching for an excuse to make me quit.

I recently played through the Japanese 
version of Metal Gear Solid as well.

I found that it was enough just to focus on my own self-improvement at these crafts. I would stream Japanese learning not to teach others, but to let others watch me learn. I would stream my art practice and IRL adventures for the same reason. I offered these shows (and still do) without expectation, and respect viewers enough to let them choose what they want to do with it. And then a funny thing happened. I really did get better, right in front of everyone’s eyes. Over the course of a few hundred art episodes, I taught myself about Greek pottery painting and illustrated a whole book in that style live on stream. I took my IRL experience and went to other countries. I’ve learned enough Japanese that I play import games that never even got localized into English. These end results are valuable, but the journey itself is valuable as well. I couldn’t see that when I was starting out in each discipline, but now that I’ve reached these milestones it’s become obvious. It’s important to let others see you grow. Not just to help you, but to inspire them. Viewers have contacted me about my Japanese Duolingo streams inspiring them to keep going on their own language journeys. For myself, I’ve been able to go back and watch my art grow from nothing all the way to finished illustrations. Whenever I try new skills on stream, I try to think about these experiences, and how vulnerable I felt in the beginning. Knowing that the journey is worth it helps me carry on, and hopefully this knowledge will help you too.  

➢ MEET IN THE MIDDLE

As an experienced streamer, my instincts also push back against compromising my production value. As I’ve mentioned in many other entries, I often travel for work. Since it would hardly be practical to lug my games PC everywhere, this means I have to go live from a totally different setup, and do different things on stream. When I’m traveling, I go live directly from an iPad or iPhone, with no microphone attached. The audio is pretty poor compared to my normal shows. Internet fluctuation is also a fact of life when staying in hotels, so my streams will often cut out. And on top of that, I go live for much shorter lengths of time while I’m on the road. These three points scared me to death when I was first finding my stride on Twitch. I used to try everything I could to fight against them. I carried a wired mic around with me in my briefcase. I’d get premium hotel internet and stress when there was any interruption. I’d go live for extended lengths of time, even to the detriment of other things I had to do. 

This was grueling, and my limited mindset about travel streams made business trips, which were often in very interesting cities, no fun at all. Slowly, I began to accept that it was okay to have issues like these appear on my broadcasts. Travel streams could just be their own thing, and it’s totally understandable if they aren’t the same quality as my normal streams. This new mindset has freed me up to try more ideas on stream, go live from different places, and most importantly, enjoy myself more when I’m in interesting locations. 

Not this kind of flying. 

You might not be flying around the country all the time like I do, but you may encounter other similar challenges. Maybe your microphone breaks, and you can’t get a replacement until the following week. Maybe your home internet speed drops without warning, and you’d need to stream at a low-quality bitrate if you want to keep going live. Maybe you just have big plans and don’t have time for a full-length show. Don’t let your pride cause you to miss a day of streaming. Just compromise and go live anyway. Use whatever tools are available to you and make a show. Any show. Later, you’ll be thankful you didn’t allow yourself to lapse. 

If you want to keep a habit like streaming, the most important thing you can do is also the simplest: just continue doing it. No matter what it takes. Sometimes that means powering through your inexperience and self-doubt. Sometimes that means putting aside your ego. Trust in your dream, and don’t listen to that voice in the back of your mind telling you to give up or miss a day. In the face of futility, stream! 

Growth Check-In: Keep Your Streams Going

The Twitch Playbook: Tips for Twitch Streamers · 184 - Growth Check-In: Keep Your Streams Going

When learning about Twitch streaming, most people want to know about the glamourous stuff. How do you make your channel grow faster? Can you get the streams to look more professional? What can you say to make your chat more engaged? How do you make money? These are all very useful topics, and I’ve covered them all several times in the past. But the most important subject for a Twitch streamer is one that new content creators usually don’t think about: keeping your habit alive. 

This simple subject, despite being less popular (and probably less interesting), is the one we come up against the most often on Twitch. Our channels are constantly under attack. And the enemy is within ourselves. For any number of reasons, you will see streamers begin to falter in their broadcast regularity, until eventually they take long breaks and then give up altogether. In this growth check-in entry we’ll look back at a few of the recent Twitch Playbook tips dealing with this topic. If you utilize the advice within, I’m confident you’ll be able to keep your streams going for that much longer. 

➢ FIND YOUR INSPIRATION

The easiest way to stick to a habit is to truly love what you’re doing. When you’re excited to go live each day, you’ll feel much less friction when preparing to do your broadcast. Many streamers however, confuse loving what they’re doing with loving the attention they get from what they’re doing. Both of these can help you keep going, but only the former can propel you even through the worst of times. If you’re confused as to which motivating factor is driving your stream, ask yourself the following question: If your channel never grew, and every broadcast had zero viewers, would you still enjoy what you're doing? In entries like Streaming For Yourself, I spoke about how even positive feedback like channel growth or chat activity can skew your view of your own content, and potentially stunt your overall enjoyment of the craft. 

Keep your habit afloat.

Now, what if you really do end up in a slump like I described above? Whether it’s your viewership, chat engagement, or performance while playing games that are inexplicably drying up, you might find that this recession in momentum starts to erode your will to stream. These spans of decreased activity on a Twitch channel are the most common reasons a streamer might throw in the towel. Don’t let a temporary setback become a permanent failure. In the entry Survive the Streaming Doldrums, I spoke about how you can overcome your reliance on the fickle ‘winds’ of outside factors, and instead use the self-propulsion of a strong creative vision to drive your channel forward. 

No matter how passionate and driven you are about streaming however, you will still have your off days. You might wake up to find that your confidence is simply drained, or your computer is suddenly having problems. These things can’t be predicted or prevented, but they can be planned for. In the entry Stream With the Hand You’re Dealt, I compared Twitch streaming to playing an eternal game of poker. Each day the cards might be good or bad, but even in the worst scenario you can protect your interests. And sometimes, in streaming as in poker, you can have major success even with a terrible hand. 

➢ SETTING UP SYSTEMS

It helps to create smaller routines for yourself within your streaming habit. A few interlocking micro-habits working in concert can do wonders for keeping a larger habit alive. The entry Cut Down on Stream Errors will help you to break down your most troublesome weaknesses and prevent you from falling into various creative traps. Creating a Pre-Stream Checklist will help you to automate the setup time before your show begins, ensuring that you don’t forget or botch any of the steps. Strengthen Your Twitch Habits goes into detail about how to retrain your brain to replace any bad habit with a good one. All of these things involve solving small problems on a Twitch channel, but you’d be surprised how much these improvements can help your overall streaming habit. When you often make little mistakes, that embarrassment and frustration can keep compounding until you don’t want to stream anymore. Being able to go live without worries removes all that friction. 

More ingredients doesn't always mean 
a better dish. 

Finally, in the recent entry Build a Better Streaming Habit, I talked about how implementing good ideas at the wrong time can be very harmful to a Twitch channel, especially for new streamers. We can get overly ambitious, whether we’re trying to implement daily or weekly show concepts, widgets and plugins for our chat’s enjoyment, raffles and contests, or other features we think might help our channels. None of these are bad ideas in themselves, but they can bring harmful results if you’re biting off more than you can chew. Just because something can be implemented doesn’t always mean it should. Each feature we add to our Twitch channels attaches baggage to our streams. If you add too much, you may not be able to carry that weight each time you go live. 

➢ STAY IN THE GAME

Being a Twitch streamer means constantly trying to stop yourself from giving up. This isn’t what most prospective streamers want to hear (and many won’t even believe it until they’ve streamed themselves), but it’s the reality that everyone should hear. If you can keep your broadcasting habit going, even if you don’t do anything special to improve your content as you go, you’ll already be doing better than the majority of other streamers to ever grace the platform. The most common Twitch channel is a flash in the pan- a lot of big ideas and excitement in the beginning, only to disappear as quickly as it came. Instead, aim to keep your flame alive for years to come, and build something that stands the test of time. 

Choosing Communication Methods on Stream

The Twitch Playbook: Tips for Twitch Streamers · 182 - Choosing Communication Methods on Stream

There are several ways to communicate the same point to your viewers on a livestream. No method is inherently wrong or right, but it’s more about what you want to get across with the method itself. In this entry we’ll explore a few different styles I’ve used on my stream over the years to communicate the same specific rule, and how each has helped in its own way. 

➢ PLAYING ON YOUR OWN TERMS

To set the scene, let’s talk about the rule I was trying to set up, and why I needed it. As I’ve mentioned in previous Twitch Playbook entries, I like to play games without hearing spoilers. But that description is a bit of an oversimplification, which I’ve used for the sake of writing these entries more clearly. In reality, I like to know literally nothing when going into a game. I don’t look at trailers or screenshots, I don’t watch other streams of the game, and I don’t read anything about it. I enter with as few pre-existing notions of what to expect as possible, and I like to preserve that ignorance throughout the time I play the game. In my opinion, this makes the playthrough more exciting. I may miss an entire section of an open world game if I’m not paying attention, and I could lose my favorite character in an RPG because I didn’t know what was best to do to prevent that outcome. Because my play habits for a game will form essentially in a vacuum, it can make a playthrough much more unique. In 2018, there was a popular story about how the Twitch streamer negaoryx played The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for 95 hours, beating most of the major bosses, before ever finding the tutorial and learning to do certain basic moves. This is the kind of thing that can’t happen when you’re receiving help, and it’s the type of thing I aspire to in any playthrough of a game. 

Now, there’s not really a tag on Twitch, or a pre-existing term in existence, to describe this specific kind of playthrough. Most people would hear about the way I like to play and equate it to the closest concept they’ve heard of before: no spoilers. And that’s true, I don’t want to know what’s coming up in the story. But the term ‘spoiler’ is very limited in scope. I also don’t want to hear anyone’s tips for how to get through an area, or hear what weapon they think is best, or even know what kind of choices they made for their own character. All of those things would seem to be okay if someone thinks that I want to play without spoilers, and it’s understandable if they make the mistake. But I needed a better means of communication for my own streams. 

The Souls games have a great community,
but it's not so great for the way I like to
play video games.

There are certain kinds of games where people are much more likely to come in and tell me things, and it can become a big problem. FromSoftware titles for example (Dark Souls, Demon’s Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro, and most recently, Elden Ring) have the largest and most aggressive community of people entering a stream and offering unsolicited advice. I guess it’s because those games are so difficult that many people who have finished the game just take it for granted that other players will want any tips they can get. Certain Twitch tags, like ‘First Playthrough’ or ‘No Spoilers’ only attract this kind of attention even more, like throwing chum into shark-infested waters. Some streamers I know, who play games the same way I do, actually refuse to stream FromSoftware games, because it’s nearly impossible to prevent the game’s community from constantly trying to influence the experience. I adore those games too much not to play them on stream, and have gone through many methods to try to communicate my channel’s rules in the past few years. Some with more success than others. Below are a few of the communication methods I’ve tried, along with the pros and cons of each. 

➢ ALTERNATE PATHWAYS

The first, and clearest, way to communicate anything is to simply tell it to someone. This involves verbally saying what you’re trying to say to the chatter in question, and explaining what you’re trying to get across. Assuming you’re being nice about it, this way is most likely to get them to understand your meaning, and it’s least likely to offend them. However, this doesn’t necessarily work at scale. When I play a Dark Souls game for example, someone like this comes in several times every episode, and having to intricately explain the rules every single time someone breaks them can get old very quickly. Plus, this method also requires that the person break the rules before you explain them. Depending on the rule itself, you may not want to wait. 

Second, you can use your preferred chatbot software to set up a command explaining the rule. This would merely require that you or a moderator enter the command in your chat, and then the new viewer would be able to read it for themselves. This saves you the trouble of having to explain the rule every time you want to communicate it, but it also feels less personal. Depending on the chatter, they might even feel like they’re being singled out and attacked. For this reason, you’ll want to use rules commands delicately. 

The unsolicited tips got so bad while I was 
playing Bloodborne that the auto-responses 
were going off all the time.

Third, certain chatbot software can actually auto-respond to flagged terms and instantly spit out a message of your choosing. So in my case, I noticed that if someone heard my rules and responded with, “Got it. I won’t say any spoilers,” that usually meant they were still likely to break my rules, because they thought I was only asking them not to post spoilers. So at one point I had the word ‘spoiler’ and all its variations flagged, which would spit out a “It sounds like you read our rules and thought we’re only asking for no spoilers” message, which would then further explain the rules to anyone who said the offending word. This got messy really quickly, and didn’t make people feel very welcome. I don’t recommend it for arbitrary rules like mine, but you could certainly imagine this method being very useful to auto-ban anyone who says actual bad or hurtful words. 

In addition, you can set up a message for anyone who joins your chat, which they have to agree to before entering. This is usually just white noise to a Twitch viewer, and I don’t think people read them very often, but it may help in certain cases. On top of that, there are tags you can set, which I find are most useful when helping people find a community of like-minded people, rather than telling them what not to do. 

➢ MY CURRENT STYLE

Luckily, the number of people entering my chat just to tell me how to play Elden Ring this year has been much smaller than the amount of chatters who would do the same when I played Bloodborne or Dark Souls a few years back. The way I communicate my rules has changed accordingly. When I was playing Bloodborne and new viewers would almost vindictively come in every few minutes trying to tell me their protips, I had all the strictest tools in place. The automod would instantly warn them if they talked about spoilers, and my human moderators would often have to time out and ban repeat offenders. 

These days, there’s a simple message for anyone who enters my chat, which says, “Hello! I like to play games and know absolutely nothing about them. Here, the only thing we DON'T talk about in chat is the game itself.” I figure this pretty much covers all the bases. When someone does come through and offer help, I try to be diplomatic. Even though they’re breaking my own rules, I thank them for their enthusiasm, and explain calmly about how I like to play without knowing anything. I also tell them I’m aware that’s not how everyone streams, and I know it’s not how everyone likes to watch streams, so I understand if that’s not their thing. However, if they do choose to stick around, I’d love to get to know them. This usually gets its point across, and using this method I’ve found a much higher rate of people who initially came in to offer help actually staying to join the show. When someone does try to offer help even after the explanation, that’s when I’ll post the chatbot message explaining the rules (and the consequences for breaking them again) more fully. Typically, when someone sees this after we’ve explained the rules, they understand where we’re coming from. Plus, seeing there’s a whole command for that specific scenario, they realize how big a problem it must be for us, and they join the chat normally.  

I’ve worked hard to come up with clear communication about my channel’s particular playthrough rules. Even now it’s still not perfect, but I’m proud of its evolution. You may not have the same interest in playing games without getting advice on your own streams, but consider anything you’ve struggled to communicate on your channel. How can the various communication methods I’ve mentioned help you in getting your point across? Are there scenarios where you could do more personal one-on-one explaining, or are there some things that would benefit from the colder strictness of a chat command? No matter what you choose to do, remember that there isn’t just one way to communicate the same idea on stream. You could be just a few revisions away from perfection. 

Archiving Your Twitch Streams

The Twitch Playbook: Tips for Twitch Streamers · 179 - Archiving Your Twitch Streams

In the entry Using YouTube as a Twitch Streamer, I spoke about how to get the most out of YouTube as a satellite platform to support your streams. There, I discussed several ideas for Affiliates or Partners, as well as a few extras for those who haven’t signed a contract with Twitch. But as I mentioned in that episode, my personal favorite use for YouTube is as a permanent stream archive. Any Twitch streamer can do this, regardless of Affiliate status, and it can be very useful in several ways. In this entry I’m going to cover the reasons I love archiving my streams, and take you through the various methods I tried when perfecting my workflow. 

➢ SAVING YOUR SHOWS

So first of all, what are stream archives good for? Right off the bat, as you’ll know if you’ve been following The Twitch Playbook, I’m a big fan of watching old episodes to keep track of progress. And while it’s possible for a Twitch channel to save past broadcasts, they don’t get saved forever. They’ll stick around for a maximum of two months, possibly shorter depending on your channel, and after that they’re gone. I like to have my oldest streams around, just in case I want to watch them again later for some reason. I’ve found a lot of use from periodically revisiting episodes from a long time ago. Sometimes I can simply reassure myself how much better I’ve gotten, but other times I use those old shows to remind myself of a great feature I used to have, and possibly inspire something to implement on my current channel. 

For my kind of content, it's nice to have a
library of videos that viewers can browse.

Second, viewers can watch your archived streams. Based on the kind of content you make, the usefulness of this will vary. On my shows, since I play through singleplayer games and focus on the plot, viewers often like to catch up with the story’s progress by watching old episodes between streams. If I start on a sequel for example, the previous game may have appeared on my channel six months ago, and the stream wouldn’t stay on Twitch as a past broadcast for that long. Having an archive can be really useful for that. If you mostly do competitive games, entire stream archives won’t be as useful for viewers to watch in order to catch up with your streams, but they can be great to have in case you ever want to make compilation videos or track the improvement of your skills. Artists and musicians can find a similar use for this feature, being able to make timelapses or other clips from old paintings or performances without worrying about whether they’ll expire. 

And why put them on YouTube rather than Twitch? There are good arguments to be made for keeping your content stored on either platform. For me, YouTube is cleaner. There are better tools for sorting your content, editing after the fact, and adding descriptions, links and other information. Even though it’s nice to have everything all in one place on a Twitch channel, I personally think it’s better not to have my Twitch page cluttered with highlights alongside each stream. Plus, the way I archive to YouTube, the whole process is much more automated. 

➢ AUTOMATING THE ARCHIVES

Sometimes you need to let the machines
do the heavy lifting so you can focus
on more important things.

If you think about the amount of content I produce (now over 6,000 videos since starting my channel!), you could imagine it getting prohibitively time-consuming pretty quickly if I wanted to archive all my shows manually. For that reason, I worked hard to get all my episodes to YouTube in a way that requires the least input on my side, while still allowing the shows to be nicely formatted, well-organized, and uploaded in a timely manner. In order to reach that goal, I explored several different options: 

1. Saving Locally - In streaming software like OBS, it’s possible to actually save a video of your stream to your computer while it’s broadcasting. This is technically the safest option for archiving, because if you have network issues during the show, all the content is still there in the local video file. However, this was overkill for my purposes, and the added time of uploading each file later would have taken too long.
   
   

2. Highlighting on Twitch - As I mentioned before, you can actually make a Twitch highlight of a full stream, which will save it forever on your channel. But Twitch doesn’t have a great way to display large amounts of playlists, and there aren’t many good organization features for viewers looking through hundreds or thousands of old episodes.
   
   

3. Download and Save - If you don’t want to save files locally while streaming, you could always download the stream from Twitch after it’s over, then post it on YouTube. This takes a lot of time however, and unlike the local saves, it will still show any network issues in the video you get from it.
   
   

4. Video Export - As I mentioned in previous entries, you can actually click the ‘Export’ button on any stream in the Creator Dashboard, and Twitch will send it to your linked YouTube channel. This works well, but it takes time to encode and send to YouTube, and I personally don’t like having to remember to click that button after each stream.
   
   

5. Multistreaming in Software - Within streaming software like Streamlabs OBS, you can actually go live to two platforms at once, right from the app. This only requires linking the two accounts (in my case, Twitch and YouTube) and hitting the Go Live button. It’s even possible to set the YouTube broadcast to private if you’re Affiliate, so it doesn’t break the 24-hour exclusivity clause in the Twitch contract. However, this doesn’t account for when you’re streaming outside of the software. And that’s what led me to my current method.
   
   

6. Multistreaming with an Intermediate API - The solution I finally arrived at was to use the free intermediate service Restream, which would send my broadcast to Twitch and YouTube from its side. Now, you might think this sounds like it serves the same function as multistreaming from Streamlabs OBS, but it has one big bonus: my show gets archived, no matter what device I stream from. So whether I go live from my games PC, do a quick show from my phone, make art while capturing my iPad screen, or broadcast from an IRL streaming backpack, they all simply send the signal to Restream, and Restream does the work of sending the show to Twitch and YouTube. No need to set up all the specific settings on each device before I go live.

Depending on the setup of your channel, you may not need to use the same workflow I use. Even the options that were imperfect for my own streams might be what works for yours. If you want to archive your shows, make sure to consider what you actually need, and tailor your choices to those criteria. Just like I did when coming up with my solution. But no matter what kind of content you make, I think you’ll find some use from having your old streams around. Whether you curate them for others to watch, or you just keep them private to watch on your own and make videos from, consider archiving the streams you make on Twitch.