I’m about to come off old and crotchety admitting this, but I don’t enjoy watching people play single-player games on Twitch. My intolerance for playthrough videos doesn’t come from being one of those game writers who is secretly “anti-YouTuber.” I don’t find the proliferation of Internet video personalities and their content threatening to the written word (or at least my contribution to it). It’s just that my preference when absorbing a single-player title is to play it, not watch it.
In the grand scheme of things, my inability to “get it” is inconsequential. Livestreaming has enabled thousands of people to share in the frustrating experience of sitting in a living room watching a sibling or friend (or fish) playing a video game with the only controller. It’s just one small example of technological convenience gone mad.
Poor Ugly Dwarf is, however, tweaking this play-gawking fad and putting some much needed interaction into the hands of Twitch chat room bystanders with Dick Starr Conquers Mars — the kind of interaction that’s not just spamming insults and threats at the broadcaster through the chat box. Although I had discussed the potential of this new crowd-play shooter concept back in July, I was finally able to join a play session last week. I dove in ready to troll the fuck out of some poor shoot-em-up players.
Democracy of destruction
Above: Doom-and-gloom options are mysteriously absent from this poll.
I activate my Twitch account and leap into the Poor Ugly Dwarf’s Dick Starr Conquers Mars livestream. I find one one of the female developers is trying to defeat the first few waves of alien ships. On the lower right is a picture-in-picture view of the participants — all members of the Dick Starr development team. Not being a Twitch broadcaster myself, I’m not sure how to graduate from a chat box-only lurker to one of the special talking heads. Their chatter about how well the player is doing, what play strategies will work best, and what items she needs overlaid the game audio.
She has no idea how much I am going to try and screw her game up.
A vote selection pops up in the upper right, asking for the chat room to vote for one of four possible items to throw at the player. The first two options are supportive in nature, such as increasing the power of her main weapon or adding a “buddy” that orbits the ship and doubles her firing power. The other two options have a sabotaging nature. I can throw some asteroids in her path or have the enemy lay out a minefield up ahead. All the voting system requires from me is to type into the chat any of the keywords representing the different selections within a given time frame. Once the timer expires, the votes are tallied and the player is presented with either a power-up or doom.
I choose doom and vote for minefield.
Several others in the chat room follow suit, with “minefield” pulling ahead and winning the poll. The barrage of exploding projectiles mixed with enemy ships does serious damage to the Dick Starr rocket, yet the player pulls through it. She howls victoriously over the audio feed as her little craft barely escapes death. Her gloating motivates me to vote for harder situations.
Tools for the disenfranchised
Above: I am definitely backing the “death” initiative this election.
In this early build of Dick Starr Conquers Mars, voting isn’t the only way to throw obstacles or helpful items into the playing field. You can also type secret code words into the chat box to activate other elements. Only two code words seem to exist right now: “burnt toast” and “cookies.” “Burnt toast” activates a supportive weapon that soaks up bullets and ships with a … well … burnt piece of toast. “Cookies” will spawn a randomly generated asteroid field. The name becomes obvious when you see the artwork for the asteroids, which closely resemble chocolate chip cookies. Each of the chat room participants can use one instance of either, so a person can’t just spam “cookies” all day long to try and kill the player off. I need to be calculative and wait for the perfect opportunity to activate my cookies of death.
The opportunity I am waiting for eventually presents itself when we are told of an enemy minefield that is coming up, and we need to vote on its difficulty level. Obviously, I choose the hardest difficulty: “death.”
Then, as the vote is tallied and “death” wins out, I type “cookies.” An impenetrable sheet of enemy mines and rocks comes tumbling down onto the player.
She can handle only so many barrages, and eventually, the chat room works together to destroy the last of her ships.
A twist in the polls
Above: Always vote “rockfall.”
We restart the game, and I stick to my original vote-to-kill strategy. As the developer progresses through the waves, the chat room seems to be voting for more helpful items, such as improved weapons and more 1UPs. My death-leaning agenda occasionally captures the swing voters, but it is getting more difficult to win at the polls with doom and gloom.
As the player loses ships yet resiliently pushes through the challenges, I begin to see why. My cold, trolling heart starts to melt as empathy takes over. I begin hypocritically voting to help her get through the later waves and obstacles. I become a traitor to my cause for the sake of seeing the game through.
Above: Want some milk with those?
It’s an unexpected shift in my motivations. I spent that first attempt playing out my frustrations from the past on this poor Dick Starr player,. I vented over all those damned man hours spent sitting on my butt on the hard living room floor as I watched someone hoard the Nintendo Entertainment System. Those days, I was wishing I could alter the flight path of the ducks in Duck Hunt or that I could control Bowser at the lava bridge in Super Mario Bros. During this Twitch session, I was going to make Dick Starr’s flight to Mars as difficult as possible.
Yet, the thing I didn’t expect was eventually … slowly … wanting to help the player make it to her destination. As I voted for more weapon upgrades and extra lives, her completion of every wave became a group reward. Her gloating after each success that vibrated in my headphones became less of a taunt and more of an affirmation that we were working together. When the last Dick Starr ship finally careened into a bullet, everyone shared in the frustration. Maybe we could have collectively done something to help her make it to the end.
Rallying the power of trolls
For being in an early experimental stage, Dick Starr Conquers Mars has a lot of potential. I enjoy design foundations that take a single-player genre of play and mold it so another player can alter the experience in real time. The second player becomes an on-the-fly designer. By enabling an entire chat room of participants to make obstacle and power-up decisions, Dick Starr Conquers Mars is taking an already underrepresented idea in a unique direction.
Another interesting twist is how Dick Starr Conquers Mars takes the most powerful concentration of evil in the universe — Internet trolls — and turns it into a positive force. The worst thing anyone can accomplish by being an anonymous jerk in Dick Starr is making the obstacles more challenging.
Poor Ugly Dwarf may be onto something larger than making livestreaming tolerable. This could be the first step to taking the ugliness of Internet trolling, turning it into a resource, and converting it into something useful.