Welcome to Ars UNITE, our week-long virtual conference on the ways that innovation brings unusual pairings together. Today, we look at how live streaming has changed how games are played (and watched!) by modern audiences. Join us this afternoon at 1pm Eastern (10am Pacific) for a live discussion on the topic with article author Kyle Orland and his expert guests; your comments and questions are welcome.

As recently as five years ago, the only time you were likely to watch someone else play a video game live was if you were stuck in the same room with a game that didn't support enough players to let you join in. Today, livestreaming sites like Twitch have revolutionized video game spectating to the tune of millions of viewers and $970 million acquisitions. An entire e-sports industry has grown up around the idea of gaming as a spectator sport, and streaming subcultures have developed around everything from speedruns to jump scares to Minecraft.

But the rise of Twitch and competitors like Google's YouTube Gaming has done more than change the way we watch games. Developers and publishers are increasingly taking notice of the livestreaming revolution and altering the way their games are developed, marketed, and played in order to take specific advantage of the Twitch audience.

From watching to playing

The famous Twitch Plays Pokémon experiment was among the earliest and most public signs that livestreaming was creating entirely new forms of play. The popular stream leveraged Twitch's IRC chat channel to let viewers control the action indirectly, crowdsourcing input from what could be thousands of viewers at a time. The result was a chaotic, slow slog that bears only a passing resemblance to the game as it's "meant to be played," but the experiment drew massive attention (and countless imitators ) nonetheless.

It's unlikely that most of those curious viewers would have had much interest in a decades-old Pokémon game if not for the social glue of Twitch. "The only reason any of us were there was because of everyone else," said Alex Rose, moderator of the Twitch Plays Pokémon subreddit. "I wouldn't have just sat and played Pokémon Red.... It was a nostalgia trip where everyone had a little bit of input almost anonymously. So Internet culture came out of it I guess. Or went into it."

While Rose first checked out Twitch Plays Pokémon as a curious spectator, he soon got sucked into what he calls a "humongous social experiment." To Rose, the chaos and lack of direct control was part of the appeal. "Once it got to tens of thousands of people, the actions of one person stop mattering a lot," he said. "As long as a decent percent of the people are trying to do the correct thing, it counterbalances the basically random input of everyone else, so it's a bit like a giant weighted random input experiment."

As important as the semi-random gameplay itself, though, was the social metagame that grew around the chat itself. As the channel evolved, viewers fought over whether the stream should accept all inputs immediately ("anarchy") or pause briefly to allow viewers to vote for the best input ("democracy"). The back-and-forth battle between the two sides took on an almost religious fervor, Rose said.

"[The anarchy vs. democracy system] instantly splits everyone into two factions of 'We want to be there and complete the game' and 'We want to see funny stuff happen,'" he said. "Everyone took on invented religions, but I would even argue there were specific acts of actual religious extremism within the game," such as deliberately throwing away key items or Pokémon that had come to represent the other side.

"There was a lot of arguing and debating, and for me it was great doing the live commentary on the updater, there were a bunch of people just literally watching my text updates at work because they couldn't access Twitch," he added.

The children of Twitch Plays Pokémon

The designers of Pokémon obviously never could have conceived of their game being played through a massively social livestreamed video channel. Today, though, developers are increasingly taking the lessons of Twitch Plays Pokemon to heart, explicitly designing their games to be at least partially controlled by viewers watching live.

Rose, a game developer himself, is among those so inspired. He's working to integrate Twitch viewer control into his own current game project, a tough-as-nails platformer called Super Rude Bear Resurrection (SRBR). The game will insert viewers' chat messages into the stream itself so the player can read them without looking away. Viewers will also be able to vote on random events every 60 seconds, deciding whether the player gets a barrage of homing missiles or a helpful reduction in gravity, for instance.

"So people could vote in, largely if they want to be nice to the player or mean, and the player tries to keep playing while the chat is fiddling with their game experience," he said.

Rose isn't the first developer to work Twitch into a game in this way. A trio of PS4 zombie games were among the first to experiment with Twitch viewer interaction last year. Daylight lets viewers enter chat channel commands to activate everything from a scream sound effect to flickering lights in the game. #killallzombies and Dead Nation: Apocalypse Edition let viewers have more direct control over the gameplay, voting on effects such as what weapons will be available and the difficulty level facing the player.

This summer, a game called Choice Chamber took those ideas to the next level, building an entire game around the idea of viewer control. In Choice Chamber, viewers control practically every aspect of the game the streamer is experiencing in front of them. Viewers can edit enemy attributes, give the player new abilities, create warp zones, summon "gizmos" to help the player, edit weapon effects, and more. The result tends to be a lot of streamers screaming at their audience for help, or at least for less harm.

This being the Internet, you might think putting your gaming fate in the hands of a bunch of trolling strangers might be more frustrating than fun. In practice, though, letting a bunch of random jerks control the game ends up being pretty engaging for both sides.

"It's just really funny to be a dick to the player," Tiny Build CEO Alex Nichiporchik said of the Twitch integration in his company's game Party Hard (which asks the player to murder all the attendees at a party without being seen). "We quickly found that even with five people in the chat, it's really funny to mess with the player... You would think that it would break the game, but it's an experience. It's something where you engage with your fans."

And if there are more than five people watching, it's just like being in a really crowded, rambunctious living room. "When a streamer has a couple of thousand people, the chat starts playing against the streamer," Nichiporchik said. "Sometime you can trigger events that help the streamer win, but then you'll see these situations where there are two people left on the map and they need to get those, and then the chat triggers a convoy to arrive with a dozen people to join the party."

"Most of those people who are watching you, if you have a huge fan base, they are more or less your friends," he added. "You know the streamers that are in there and they know you."