Trui

When I started streaming, there was nobody watching. I had no gamer friends, and you might be at this point right now. You’ve been streaming a couple of times, or even a month, or two months, or three months, and there’s just nobody coming. You just sit there and ask yourself, "Should I still talk because there’s nobody listening?" Over the years, I’ve grown my streams, so I’m not really at the point anymore where there’s nobody listening or watching, and I’m talking to myself. But sometimes, even now, there’s nobody talking. There are people viewing, but I’m not sure they’re there because they’re just lurking or not saying anything. A couple of times, Twitch chat has been broken, and I was talking to myself, thinking there was nobody there, but actually, my Twitch chat was broken. I thought nobody was typing, but people were typing all the time, and I just didn’t see it because my Twitch chat was broken. Even though it’s going better with my stream now and I do have people in my chat talking, I still remember those days when I was streaming and nobody was there. Those times were super, super difficult, and I was just wondering why I was doing it. I really wanted to make something to entertain somebody, but how could I entertain someone if nobody was there to entertain? You might be at this point because you are watching this video right now. But I’m going to give you some tips on how to talk to yourself when nobody’s watching, or at least when you think nobody’s watching because sometimes people are watching even if you think there’s nobody.

The first tip I have for you is to turn off your viewer count. Turn off your viewer count because if you do not see that zero the whole time, it means you’re not super focused on the fact that there’s nobody there. Twitch can be a little bit late on updating the view count, so sometimes it says zero, but there’s actually somebody there. Someone might decide within the first 30 seconds to leave your stream again if you do not say anything, or Twitch might not have updated the viewer count within the first 30 seconds that this person came in. This means you see the zero, but there’s actually somebody there. That person decides to leave because you did not interact with them, and you never noticed that they were there. If you focus on the fact that there’s nobody there to deliver content, to deliver entertainment, to deliver value, then you’re going to miss out on people who will click away in the first 30 seconds because you’re not delivering value. The zero is also very, very discouraging, which is a second issue. Seeing the zero constantly is going to mentally drain you, so having that view count off is going to be mentally a lot better for you.

You have only about 30 seconds to make that first impression on someone. You don’t want to be quiet for 30 seconds. Yes, you can pause in between sentences or be quiet to listen to a cutscene if something important is going on in the game, and you don’t want to talk through it. Those 30 seconds are spent well if there’s something engaging going on in the stream. But if there’s 30 seconds in the stream where nothing engaging, entertaining, or valuable is happening, someone might come in, see nothing engaging for 30 seconds, and then leave because they didn’t see anything that caught their eye. People’s time is valuable, and they don’t like wasting it. If they don’t know you, they don’t owe you anything, meaning they won’t give you much time if they don’t know you. As soon as they know you, they’re going to give you many more chances. If they already follow you or subscribe to you, they might wait around for 10 minutes of nothingness because they know there’s going to be good content in the end. But if they don’t know you, and they’ve never seen you before, they’ll click on you, and if you don’t deliver content immediately, why wouldn’t they click on one of the other 10 million streamers? There are literally 10 million other streamers, by the way.

We all have bad days sometimes, right? Everyone has a bad day. One day, I’m very talkative, and sometimes I just like to be lying on the couch under a blanket. A lot of days, I like to lie on the couch under a blanket. I’m not going to lie. On days like that, what you could do is write down things that you can talk about. If you already have stories in your mind or written down, you can have a list next to you with some keywords that you can talk about. It’s easier to come up with stories this way. For example, what did you do today? What are the things you’ve been doing? For example, today I went to the supermarket. What are the things that I’ve seen today in the supermarket? It can be super specific. It doesn’t have to be anything major. There was a girl asking for a discounted item, for example, but she couldn’t find it. They had already switched out the discounts for next week, so they had these signs hanging up, but they’d just done it already. You can talk about that and ask people, "Hey, does your supermarket do that too? Do they switch the discounts already and then just put up a sign saying it’s not actually discounted yet, it’s discounted tomorrow? Do they do that in your supermarket?" Then you already have something to talk about with other people. It’s like, "Hey, I did this today, I noticed this. Do they do that in your area? Have you experienced this as well?" I went to the hairdresser recently. Have you recently got a haircut? Or, "Do you like my haircut?" or something like that. I didn’t want to go to the hairdresser, but something like that. Or maybe you did something when you were younger. I used to go to a theme park called The Efteling here in the neighborhood. You can talk about theme parks now. Are there any theme parks in your neighborhood? Maybe people have been to The Efteling as well, which is a pretty well-known theme park in the Netherlands. Maybe people from outside the Netherlands have come to The Efteling as well. If they haven’t, you can show pictures of The Efteling and explain what it is. There are plenty of things to talk about—that’s what I’m trying to say. You can always think about interesting stories to fall back on that you can talk about. If you have bad days, it’s good to have a list of things you can talk about. If you’re not yet trained in coming up with stories on the spot, it’s good to write them down as a backup.

A book recommendation for this, by the way, is Long Story Short. This is a book about telling stories, and stories are great to tell on stream because who doesn’t like to hear a good story?

You can also talk about the things happening in-game. What do you see happening in the game? Is there a funny character walking about? Is there a nice view? What is this story about? You can talk about everything you see in-game, basically. But also, game tactics. For example, in multiplayer games, you can talk about Overwatch: "I’m going to resurrect this person," or "Genji is flanking," or "I’m going to go for a flank myself," something like that. But also, if you’re playing a management game, you can talk about the tactics you’re implementing there. Or you can say, "This is the way I got to this point in the game by implementing this and this strategy." Game tactics and strategies to get to a certain point. Then you can either talk about games you already know, so people can learn from that, or games you don’t know yet, and then people can help you optimize your strategy. This way, you can tell people your thought patterns behind the choices you made, and then people can say, "Oh, but that wasn’t really optimal. The way you thought about it was great, but that wasn’t the optimal choice because of this and this reason." Then you can basically discuss why things can go a certain way in the game or not. You can always decide for yourself if you want game spoilers or not. For management games, spoilers are not really a thing usually, but for story games, you can always say, "Hey, no spoilers, guys. I want to figure out this game for myself," or, "You can give me spoilers if you want to."

Another thing you can do is get into the details of the game. What’s the history of the game? Who’s the developer? You can talk about what games the developer made before, how the game has been doing, and whether it’s a new game or not. If it’s an older game, you can talk about the history of the game. Has the game had an interesting evolution? Did they make any changes or patches to the game? You can discuss those things. Are there any other games in this series? You can compare the game with the other games in the series or with other games in the genre. There’s plenty of stuff you can talk about in a game itself, even if you have no viewers. You can also write down a script of some things you can say. Maybe you’ve already done some research beforehand, and you already know that this is a certain tactic in the game or that this game has an interesting history. You can just write it down and talk about it on stream. It might sound very unnatural in the beginning, and I totally get that. But over time, you’re going to get better at it, and you’re going to get better at improvising things to talk about on stream.

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