Twitch

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Twitch is a platform designed for gaming livestreamers; Celine Song dramaturgically integrated this audience engagement for her 2020 New York Theater Workshop production, Seagull in the Sims 4. Song used her rigorous academic knowledge of Chekhov’s play The Seagull to use the character settings in The Sims 4 to recreate the personalities in the 19th century play; the Seagull-Sims were then set loose on each other to determine if they would stage the play with the game’s algorithm. The show was never fully restaged, but hilarity ensued as the audience engaged Song and each other in the Twitch chat to discuss strange interactions as possible interpretations of The Seagull. The audience engagement with interpretation of the Sims’ performance through Twitch was not only an integral part of this specific performance, but a theatrical approach to using Twitch as a platform and as an online culture.

Other theatre makers used Twitch for more conventional forms of livestreaming, but still integrated the live presenter-audience engagement that is the foundation of the platform. For example, Clavin created a show called Glamour Hobo Bedtime Tales as an evening show to spend time with her audience via discussion, reading books aloud, and eventually writing stories together (See also: Televisual Theatre).