You’ll Never Believe What I, Not-a-Streamer, Think of this Game Designed for Streaming !
Choice Chamber is a game designed for streamers! The player/streamer enjoys a rudimentary action-platformer, and the viewers get to vote in chat on things that happen throughout the game, such as what weapon the player/streamer should use, and what powers the enemies should have, and how the player should be rewarded/punished as they go. It was released in 2015, perhaps as the first game with in-built Twitch.tv integration (and indeed, Twitch partially funded its development).
But alas. In this timeline, List Oriented is just a blog, not a streaming dynasty. What it’s like to play this game to a large contingent of chat-willing fans is not something I can document or accurately comment upon.
What I can say is that my experience of Choice Chamber in offline mode was pretty miserable. Without the interactive chaos generator of a live audience, the modifiers the game progressively heaped on me were exposed for their lack of inherent variability and purpose. The game’s enemies were sluggish but arbitrarily difficult in a tedious way, rather than a “this is a fun exercise” way or even a “ha-ha” way. The boxy room designs did little for the imaginative adventure or the platforming challenge – it rarely seemed to want to make use of vertical space, for instance, so a lot of rooms just required me to move around a flat plane, poking or shooting a blob a couple of times, backing away, repeating until all were dead and I could move on to the next room, much the same. I never got that far in it – the low health meter and random modifiers do make it a challenging game – but I also think that’s because it was hard for me to sustain enough interest, or to care when I died enough to avoid it. Getting through an hour of playtime was challenge enough.
The conceit alone seems interesting and good in the way that a joke can be good just by virtue of a lot of people being in on it, the comfort of shared experience etc. But having watched a few videos of actual/popular streamers playing it back when it launched, I think the parameters of this kind of thing are pretty limited on their own, that it relies on a performance of, like, being fucked over and pretending to be surprised by it. Sure, the dynamic of an audience fucking over their host is good for a laugh or two, but it’s hard to buy into it for any length of time when the game underneath it lacks substance. But if we look at this as a prototype then, well, sure, do what you will. Since Choice Chamber’s release, more games have integrated elements of stream-participation – I can see the merit of this when it’s done as an extra asset rather than the game’s whole reason for existing.
Info: Choice Chamber was made by Studio Bean [webplace] and released in 2015. I got it in mid-2016 in the Humble Revelmode Bundle. Revelmode was apparently a youtube network formed by youtube person Pe*D*ePi* in partnership with Disney’s Maker Studios, and was apparently “shut down” in 2017 after P*wDi*Pi* made some anti-Semitic jokes. I think at the time of getting this bundle I was somehow blissfully ignorant of who PDP even was, a state of being I kind of wish I could get back to. Studio Bean more recently released the curious rhythm game, Overpass.
