Also in Developer Stories
(Virtual) reality check
When the pandemic hit in early 2020, everything went virtual and remote. Those who could work remotely did, and Zoom was suddenly the happening place for birthday parties, happy hours, and family gatherings. But Zoom just didn’t work for me.
Having spent so much of my life researching (and playing) video games and virtual spaces, Zoom made me feel like I was miles apart from my friends and family, and students. With gaming platforms, you share a virtual space, and it feels like you’re actually standing next to one another. Instead of teaching my classes on Zoom, I used Twitch, and my normal lecture audience ballooned from the usual 140 students to more than 400. I quickly realized that the features designed for gaming were perfect for interacting in the same ways I’d become accustomed to as a livestreaming gamer.
Pirker shared her experience at GitHub Universe 2022, where she explained why Twitch, and gaming spaces in general, can offer benefits over traditional ways of interacting online. Check out the video below.
In this Video Guide, you will learn:
How online games offer an in-person experience not available in videoconferencing.
Why moving to Twitch to teach online courses was more interactive and open.
How you can replace your own approach to online interaction with games and gaming software.
Transcript
Thank you so much and welcome to my presentation. I'm very excited to be part of this event. My name is Johanna Pirker and I'm a professor at Graz University of Technology. I'm an, at the moment, also visiting professor at ETH in Munich, and I'm very excited to talk about one of my favorite topics, namely the world of games and game related technologies. You can also find me on different social media platforms, mainly Twitter and GitHub. Of course, I'm with [inaudible 00:00:36] in Austria. Just to give you a little bit of a context that I'm very motivated by the world of teaching and research, I want to spread a little bit also the main idea of what my research group is about. So we tackle all the topics in the field of games, gamification research, but I'm also super excited to just use games as a tool to engage people, but also of the game and the entertainment world.
And I strongly believe that the current media technology, which we have and often motivated through the games industry, can be used for so many other seeds as well. So when we look at this slide, we see three logos, which we probably all have seen at some point. We have TikTok, we have Twitch, and we have Fortnite. And all three of them, I think if we think of those companies or technologies, I immediately only think about entertainment and fun, and I don't know, maybe short news, short messages or whatever. However, when I think of those technologies, when I use them, I think of something entirely different, namely education. What we see on this slide, this is how those technologies are actually misused, not for entertainment but for educational purposes. There are educational contents on how to teach with Fortnite and what you can see at the bottom right, this is me actually misusing Twitch for my lectures.
A little bit of a spoiler. I did also use Twitch for gaming and I'm still using it for gaming, but the way how Twitch is used is so motivating for so many people and the way how we interact via Twitch and livestreaming can be very different. And I see so many new possibilities in so many fields, not only for education, but we'll talk about this in a bit. Before, I want to spread more ideas for how you can use Twitch or other livestreaming services, maybe also for computer science education or for showing your programming projects. I actually want to go one step before, so basically what did motivate me to use a platform like Twitch, and there I need to point out, I would always say the elephant in the room, namely the pandemic. So I think the pandemic was a life changer for so many of us.
There have been so many terrible happenings around the pandemic and the lockdowns, but also positive aspects. Especially how we are able to work these days has been pretty much reshaped by the lockdowns. All of a sudden the digitalization has been pushed forward quite a lot, and for me, being in the realm of IT, sometimes was a really positive push. So we had the possibility to all of a sudden work from home, avoid a lot of flying around all around the world from meetings and just be together online. And especially also for the world of games it was quite a push, because all of a sudden games were not only this medium of, it's all of all about addiction, it's all about violence. It was actually the opposite. Games brought people together.
And what we can see on this slide, there were so many companies and organizations, including the WHO actually, recommending to play video games, especially all health related games, so that you can still also fit at home during the lockdowns, but especially also the social experiences. Because what many people do not know, the world of games is something which is very social. In games, most of us against all the biases we have, most of us like to play with friends and many of the platforms we have around games are very social.
Just think of this world of Zoom we are currently living in. I'm a doctor in computer science, but I start still every Zoom call with, "Hello, can you hear me? Does it work? Does mic work?" And it never works. And if we think however of a game like World of Warcraft, this is out there for more than 10 years and it just works. Thousands of people can play with each other in a 3D world and fight with thousands of others through the [inaudible 00:05:18] digital drinks, and this is crazy. This is such a nice technology and it just works like that. And we don't go in World of Warcraft, "Does my weapon work?" It just works. And I think there are so many technologies we can actually use from the game realm also in other social spaces.
What we also see in this slide, how those technologies were done also, again, sort of misused not only for entertainment purposes, but again to just bring people together. Because at the end of the day it's really nice, when we have a call or the presentation like this, you can see me, I can maybe see you, but it's so obvious that I am in my home office and you are in yours. And even though we can see each other, we are physically very apart. In a game or in those social spaces however, we are sort of standing next to each other and we can spend time together. And that's why, what you can also see on this slide, where you can see this game animal crossing, and you create this small tiny avatars, you create your island and you can create a virtual museum and then you just invite friends over. And you can spend time digitally in this virtual world.
And this does something to our head, because all of a sudden we are next to each other. And that's what we can see here, Animal Crossing was misused not only for gaming but for having virtual weddings, birthday parties. This is World of Warcraft actually, a large memorial service for a famous World of Warcraft player who died during the pandemic. And those are just really powerful tools to bring us together. And something else changed thanks to the pandemic, but basically also the game space was brought to the broader public. On this slide you can actually see how the world of sports all of a sudden made use of eSports and for the first time I was invited to sports TV to talk about eSports and give interviews about how people are competing against eSport people, against traditional sport people in things like Formula One or what you can see here also in cycling games.
And this is really nice to see, how actually the pandemic also had positive impacts on how we perceive technology on the one hand, how all of a sudden also the traditional work structures was reshaped and was becoming more inviting for many of us. So far, especially for me as a woman trying to get a nice career, it's so much nicer to be able to also work from home or have more flexible work hours and this is something we should really try to focus on. In terms of work, I have a group of around 14 people working with me, and this was also of course something which is very difficult to handle during the pandemic, but also us, we learned to work with game-like technologies to still spend time online together. So on this slide you can actually see us celebrating Christmas together, playing Among Us to have still a good social time or arranging our virtual office space to still be next to each other in a virtual office, in this game-like environment called Gather Town.
One thing which I was most scared of were my lectures. I really love to teach, and this is something which was always really important to me and the way how I want to, I don't know, have a little bit of an impact in our world, that I can spread my knowledge. And the way I teach is usually very interactive. In my course I teach different subjects. One of them is game development. I have also more mathematical fields, but in my game design course there are 140 people. And the thing I love when I teach at the university, that usually the doors are open for everyone. Those lectures are open and the new, the people who were also not studying at our university would just join because they wanted to gather, gain a little bit of this knowledge, be part of the lectures and just maybe listen.
And the next thing, I always wanted to talk and discuss with my students. I know with 140 students, this is sometimes a little bit challenging, but you can still can ask them to raise their hands to get a little bit of opinions. You can start small discussions also with 140 people. And I was really scared that I'm going to lose all of the things I love about teaching, this openness, this interactive character. And that's why I moved to Twitch. Twitch is originally a gaming platform usually used by, traditionally used by gamers and they play video games and other people come to the chat and watch this person. It's very similar to going to a football stadium for instance. There's also like, you have someone competing down there or playing a game, and then there are people sitting in the stadium and watching. And what you can see on this slide, this is me, maybe just to explain this a little bit, and in the middle you can actually see how I am streaming my lecture content.
You can see this tiny image of me at the bottom right. I always try to still have both, to have this lecture slides on the one hand, but also to see me, my reactions. And I use a software called OBS for that. And on the right-hand side, you can actually see how people are interacting with me through the chat, or with each other. They add emojis, they talk about the content, they talk with each other. And that's quite interesting to observe, the nature of Twitch is very interactive. So people come there not to only talk to the streamer, but also to other people in the chat. And conversations become very, very vivid. And so what happened? I moved, at the very first lockdown, I pulled a lot of all-nighters, because it was pretty much at the same time and I tried to move all my lectures to Twitch.
I did this because, big warning ahead, I had previous experience in streaming games on Twitch. So I knew the platform, I knew the potential, but I knew also the potential dangers. I will talk about this later. And what happened, instead of 140 students at the same time in my lecture, I had 400 students sitting there from all around the world, talking with me about the content, discussing with each other the lectures. And instead of, let's say, 30 minutes of content, all of a sudden the same lecture would last 90 minutes. Why is that? Because there were so many interactions in the chat, so many more questions I ever got in lecture hall, so many more discussions with me or with each other, so many more good examples they wanted to put. And this was the best teaching experience for me, that all of a sudden everyone got really excited, dared to ask questions they might not have dared to ask in a real lecture, in an onsite lecture.
And this was my best teaching experience. And now I want to discuss a little bit the potential for Twitch in general. What we can see here in this graph, that actually similar to the games industry, also Twitch got quite a boost in terms of viewership, but also people who are streaming on Twitch. So we can see that the pandemic had quite an influence here. And while traditional TV mediums are slowly losing viewership, livestreaming services such as Twitch and YouTube are constantly gaining. Because the interesting thing is, somehow everyone is all of a sudden their own show, their own TV show. And this reflects really a lot how the internet in general was reshaped over the past years, because if we look back how the web started, it was just a few people putting content onto web pages, just a few people and a lot, I mean back then it was not a lot yet, but a lot of people reading content.
With Web 2.0 however, it changed already. Because all of a sudden we wanted to become the creators. I was able to create my first home page on, I don't know, with a few lines of code. Then it became so much easier, everyone got their home pages on MySpace, everyone got their photo galleries on Facebook. Now everyone becomes a video editor with TikTok and with YouTube. It's becoming crazy, incredible, easy to also be part and share content. We are all becoming content creators. And with Twitch and with livestreamer services like YouTube Live, we all become our own TV show hosts. And this really also reflects in so many different fields. Like here, this is how the science and technology realm on Twitch was pushed. You can also see Twitch is becoming so much more than only talking about games. It's cooking shows, it's podcasts, it's again people talking about science, or as we can see us on this slide, people making music, making live concerts, training with each other.
So it's getting so much more diverse. I think we saw, especially also during the pandemic, how important this is as a medium as an alternative, for instance, to show their art, to show concerts, to make music and so on and so forth. And there's an own category called Software and Game Development. And this is one of my favorite categories. So more and more game developers, software developers are moving towards Twitch, for several reasons. On the one hand, it's a very nice way to... If you code, that you are sort of code together, these people. There are also streams or people that are just there to work together and you have for instance, this tomato timer, if you think of the Pomodoro technique, and you code and then after 25 minutes you would talk with the people in the chat and so you have a shared working environment.
So they're really lovely streams doing that. But then of course also to spread knowledge. Many companies are out there, such as also Unreal, Unity and of course, also GitHub what I saw, to actually use this platform to spread knowledge, to talk about what you're actually doing and it's a very social experience all of a sudden. It's basically peer programming eventually with thousands of viewers. And you can also see the category around software and game developers had quite a boost, also a little bit thanks to the pandemic, but you can see this is quite growing. In the last part, I want to also quickly talk about my personal experience in the course, what worked well and what worked not so well. Because I get the question quite often, because I taught game design on Twitch, which seems to be a little bit more related to the gaming platform.
However, other colleagues from our university actually talked, taught on Twitch Programming 101 a course to teach bachelor's in computer science how to program. And on this slide I brought a few statistics for you. This is actually based on a scientific publication. We published a couple about one year ago on a conference called ATC, and what you can see here, there were way more students in the course on programming. However, it was still so active, there were so many unique chaters, so many people even also here, so many more viewers compared to the traditional lecture. So also for teaching programming, which has... It's not this traditional game space, it was a very, very successful experience onto which... What we also tried to look into, we were very interested in terms of our students, who are the demographics of our students and if they are used to use Twitch.
And what we can see here was medium well distributed. Some used Twitch quite often, many of them have not used it before, most of them were actually using it while being locked in. And this is relevant because you don't want to exclude anyone. One of my fears was actually, when I move my lectures to Twitch that I might exclude students because they don't want to register to Twitch or they don't want to use their actual accounts. But what we found, that most people logged in, which gives them also the possibility to write in the chat. They can always read the chat, but only if they're locked in they can also write the chat. And then we were really interested in what would they use the chat for. Because from my experience, this interaction with the chat is the most exciting thing for me when teaching with Twitch, because all of a sudden people are really starting to discuss the content and this is the environment I want to create when teaching.
I don't want to be the person like I tell you what's right or what's wrong and everyone else is listening. I want to have people interact with me. For instance, just me sitting there, giving a lecture and I'm the professor and I say, "No, the earth is flat." And then at a traditional lecture hall, maybe everyone would look weird but maybe nobody would dare to tell me that I'm wrong. But in an interactive structure, like on Twitch chat, all of a sudden so many people would start to auger, would share links, would try to prove me wrong. And this is something which I really like, to challenge people to think and to discuss. And what we can see here in this slide, that many people actually did not only ask me as a lecturer through the chat about specific things, but actually use the chat also a lot to chat with the others.
We can also see that most of the people actually mentioned that they ask more questions compared to a traditional lecture. And this is something which I find super exciting. Also, if you think you do programming courses, or if you just share your programming content on Twitch, that people might dare to ask questions which they might not ask in a different environment. They also mentioned that they were not distracted. This was one of our concerns too, that people might got more distracted by the chat and whatnot, would not listen to my lectures anymore, but this was certainly also not the case. I want to share a few of the advantages I see when using Twitch for different purposes. For me, I know I'm speaking from this educators wise, because this is the main experience I made, even though I also shared my game development progresses sometimes, then I had podcast formats on Twitch but I want to summarize a little bit where I see the potentials in Twitch.
On the one hand, this interactive character of Twitch is very strong. If you come to a chat and there's already interaction going on, people will start to interact also with the others or with you as a streamer. I think it's very important to also think of different features, how to eventually encourage your viewers to interact with you or with others. For instance, on my slides, I constantly had also questions sometimes where I would ask them, "Who of you has this experience?" Then put a one into the chat. If not, put a zero into the chat. To get them started with the interactions. And then also all the interactions alive and synchronous. For me, it was a little bit easier because I had streaming experience in the past. I was streaming my game experiences, so I was able to, or used to read the chat while I'm playing games at the same time.
So it was also easier for me to do this during my lectures. What I would recommend, however, for you if you get started, that you for instance, try out formats where you really focus a certain amount of time on your content and then try to make a habit out of reacting on the chat. The Pomodoro technique works really nicely there, where you really have this timer and you should also have the timer maybe on your screen for 25 minutes of programming for instance, and then interacting with the chat. Or that you build this habit that after if you present something, after a slide that you constantly look at the chat again. One of the nice things also about Twitch that is watchable for a certain amount of time, pending on what status do you have on Twitch, if you're an affiliate or a partner, but the Twitch videos are usually available to rewatch for a couple of days after you screen them, which is really nice, again, for this sort of content.
Twitch is very easy you to use, whether you people are logged in or not. I like to use a lot also polls, so you can actually ask specific question and have the viewers react on them. It's open to everyone. I already mentioned this, that I really love open content and open knowledge, open education, and this is for me the best case, that Twitch is open to everyone, and it's quite known as a platform. There are also downsides of course. Many people do not use of course, which is absolutely fine and important, not the real names and I would never force my students to use their real names on a platform like Twitch. So often it's not really personal, which also invites trolls and so on and so forth. You don't have a voice chat. Nice alternatives for smaller communities are still Zoom, and WebEx, and so on and so forth, because you can actually use similar techniques which do work for you on Twitch.
But in a platform like WebEx where you really encourage people, "Who believes this works?" And everyone puts a one into there or zero. And so you can really try to also have this interactive nature there and eventually also connect through voice chat. Of course there's always the technical potential issues. I recommend using software technologies like OBS, works for me quite well. But again, there are many tools out there who help you streaming. Seriousness, the nature of Twitch is... At the end of the day it's a platform originating from the game space. Of course, sometimes, especially if it's open to everyone, it will still invite trolls eventually. There are still commercials, there are many, many potential issues. So I would really recommend training a little bit before you actually go full live with your audience, that you make small streams and see a little bit how Twitch works, and definitely use bots.
And for my lectures, because I knew that I have a lot of students, it was very important that I have moderators as well. So I had moderators in the chat, who make sure that no illegal content is posted or no harassing content and so on and so forth. Videos are nice but they're limited. If you want to conserve your videos, you still want to download them or record them at the same time, which you can also do with OBS, to actually preserve them for later. Here's a little bit a summary. What are the most common challenges we observed and what we did to actually fight them? For instance, in terms of spam and bot, because at the end of day it's the internet, so what can go possibly wrong going with your lecturers live on stream or with the content? That's why moderations or using own bots, but you can also get creative, where people can actually interact through commands in the chat with, I don't know your camera for instance, but again, own chatbots and experimenting a little bit with that can also make it a very, very safe environment as well.
Then in terms of interactions, it's important to keep people engaged, to motivate them to... Ask them questions. I tend to ask questions in a game lecture, what games do you think would fit this specific game mechanic? Or who believes this game element can be found in this specific game? And I motivate them to answer with ones and zeros for instance, if they believe or don't believe, I use quizzes and so on and so forth. So really try to make a lot of interaction happening, because as soon as someone new joins they see many things are going on in this stream. In terms of technical issues, I did upgrade my internet connection specifically for streaming from home, because you want to have a well-working setup, eventually with a nice camera, with a proper light setup. But I think the most important thing is really that the internet is stable and people hear you well.
So a good microphone would be lovely, and definitely make tests before you really stream, stream, stream to your full audience. Make small streams first, experiment a little bit. And of course the stream organization. So things like an agenda helps, if you are just get into streaming and you want people to be aware of what you're doing, it certainly helps if you have a specific agenda where people know that every Friday evening you will talk for an... Or do a little bit of a peer programming, or crowd programming in this case, on your tool for three hours at nine o'clock. And things like this just help to build your community. Because at the end of the day, Twitch's just a very perfect platform, also, not only to excite people about your content, to educate them, but also to build the community. And this is what I love about Twitch. And I hope I was able to spread a little bit also my excitement and some of you might consider this also for your work. Thank you so much.
