Cohh Carnage is a professional Twitch streamer, and I had a chance to catch up with him at PAX West after he had a chance to scout out the expo floor for games that he’s interested in streaming. As streamer, he has to cultivate a sense of presence when he plays in order to have as authentic of a reaction as he possibly can. He talks about his process and philosophy behind his streaming, and the importance of audience engagement and participation. With that in mind, he talks about some of the challenges and opportunities that streaming VR games presents to streamers. We also talk a bit about game genres, and some of the emerging VR game genres.
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[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. My name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. So way back in 2007, I started watching some of the very early first broadcasts of JustinTV. So Justin Khan and some of his co-founders started just live streaming their lives and going around San Francisco, and mostly it was just them in their apartment working on their startup called JustinTV. Well, Justin.tv had a small section of their website that was focused on gaming, and that was the thing that actually took off the most, where people were live-streaming themselves as they were playing these games. And so, eventually, that was so successful that they spun that off into Twitch, which was eventually sold to Amazon. And so now there's a whole new class of people who basically play video games for their living. And mostly they've been playing 2D games, but they've been starting to get into VR a little bit. And so today I talked to a very popular variety Twitch streamer named CoCarnage. about some of his process of what he thinks makes a good professional streamer, and some of his thoughts about the future of virtual reality. And so that's what we'll be talking about on today's episode of the Voices of the Hour podcast. But first, a quick word from our sponsor. This is a paid sponsored ad by the Intel Core i7 processor. You might be asking, what's the CPU have to do with VR? Well, it processes all the game logic and multiplayer data, physics simulation, and spatialized audio. It also calculates the positional tracking, which is only going to increase as more and more objects are tracked. It also runs all of your other PC apps that you may be running when you're within a virtualized desktop environment. And there's probably a lot of other things that it'll do in VR that we don't even know about yet. So Intel asked me to share my process, which is that I decided to future-proof my PC by selecting the Intel Core i7 processor. So this interview with Ko happened at PAX West, which was happening in Seattle, Washington, from September 2nd to 5th. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:15.631] Cohh Carnage: My name is Ko Carnage. I am a variety broadcaster on Twitch.tv, which means I play all sorts of different games, mainly new releases, classics, 100% runs, franchise playthroughs, that kind of thing, and a big focus on community. Our tagline is happy, helpful, respectful, and really just a focus on positivity and good vibes.
[00:02:31.416] Kent Bye: Awesome. And so when I look at streaming, there seems to be an element of authenticity that is underlying it. So maybe you could talk about that for what you think are some of the key ingredients that you try to incorporate in your own streamer, or what are the things that kind of make up a good streamer?
[00:02:46.390] Cohh Carnage: Sure, and it's really interesting because these days it's a very fine line to walk for a lot of streamers. Twitch is just now getting to the point where we're seeing serious sponsorships come in and companies with a lot of money wanting us to represent their products. So it's important for us that we not only make sure that we're genuine, but that we really kind of believe in what we're representing, what we're playing, that kind of thing. Personally, I know I speak for a lot of streamers when I say I only take sponsorships that I use and things of that nature. I only really play games that I have a fun time playing. You know, you won't see me doing a sponsored stream for like a sports game or anything like that. But at the same time, it also kind of goes right into the next thing, which is making sure that your stream is also genuine. So a lot of people, you know, I'm a very reactive person and I'm very reactive on stream. One of the things when I started streaming was I noticed that when I would kind of see myself and talk to people watching me that they'd say, oh, you know, you're kind of muted. We kind of see you there, but you're not really, you're just kind of there in the corner. So going back to some stuff I learned actually in acting from high school, back in the Shakespearean era, when they were doing their performances on stages and people were sitting at sometimes hundreds of feet back because they had to, Shakespearean performers would really kind of accentuate their gestures. They wouldn't necessarily, you know, do something they wouldn't do, but they'd kind of make a show of it. They'd kind of make a big smile when they're happy, or, you know, they'd really kind of do a whole face feature cringe when they do that. And I started kind of implementing that into my stream. So it's not that I'm doing something that I wouldn't feel or believe in, but it's doing something more, it's just accentuating what's already there. And I found that that can kind of really help, not only kind of, you know, me just enjoying what I'm doing, but it kind of really adds a higher energy to the entire thing.
[00:04:15.556] Kent Bye: Yeah, the thing that that reminds me of that's kind of connected to virtual reality directly is presence and that you're trying to, in a lot of sense, become fully present to the experience of receiving the video game and then authentically reacting to it with a full emotional range.
[00:04:30.466] Cohh Carnage: That's exactly right. And when people come to Twitch, you know, you can go to YouTube whenever you want and you can watch a game get played. You can watch trailers, you know, you can play the game yourself, you can do all this stuff. But when people come to Twitch, they're looking for something a little bit more than that. They're not only looking for the game experience, they're looking to be entertained. And rolling all that together into the ball that is a Twitch stream is kind of what a lot of times will separate the streamers at the very top from the streamers that are having trouble kind of getting to that point.
[00:04:56.650] Kent Bye: So you just spent four days here at PAX West scouting out a lot of the new titles that are coming out. How do you start to select the different games that you see are going to have a specific arc that are going to be interesting to you to be able to play, but also interesting for the audience to be able to actually watch and spectate?
[00:05:12.834] Cohh Carnage: That is a great question. It's kind of like spinning plates sometimes, where there's multiple different factors that you need to kind of look into before selecting them. The first and primary thing for me personally is, will I have fun playing this game? If I'm not going to enjoy playing a game, then I'm not going to enjoy myself on that stream. It's going to be forced. It's going to be, a lot of times, uncomfortable for me. It's just not something I do. So I decided very early that no game that I play is either going to be A, one that I wouldn't have fun playing, or B, one that I would at least want to try, if there's an interesting mechanic in it, if there's something that is kind of new about it that I'd like to at least experience once. And sometimes with those streams, for instance, I played a game that was kind of a hybrid MOBA game. And I don't normally play MOBAs. But a company said, hey, we want to sponsor you to play this game, and check it out. So I told them, I don't really play MOBAs. But they said, well, there's all these other features. And I kind of went, well, I don't play MOBAs, but, ah. The other stuff sounds kind of cool, so I'll check that game out. On that same line, I've had many companies approach me that are MOBAs and gone, we'd like you to stream our game. And I just go, you know what? Not interested. There's not really enough there to make it that I'm really kind of interested and engaged in it. So yeah, that's really how it is. Making sure that you're interested in the game, making sure that the game lines up with your channel. For instance, you know, I'm a safe for work, streamer, so I wouldn't want to be, you know, streaming, like, there's a lot of those graphic novel games that are kind of popular on Twitch right now, would avoid those, even though I do sometimes play more adult-oriented games that, you know, the content of the game is adult, I like to keep myself kind of safe for work, you know, I don't do any kind of You completely ban homophobic racial slurs. I don't personally drop f-bombs. We don't have them in the chat, you know, that kind of stuff. So really it's just finding products that line up with not only your image and what you're doing, but ones that you enjoy and ones that you could really see kind of, in many cases, going far on Twitch, which is another big indicator on if I'll stream a game or not in many ways.
[00:07:00.276] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts about genres and video games that you see and how you make sense of it. Because you said you're a variety streamer, which means you stream everything. And then there's all these things that you just said that you don't stream with, like mobiles and sports. And so it's like, well, are you still a variety streamer? I'm just more interested in the big genres and types of games that are out there and if that's reflected in the type of streamers there are.
[00:07:25.013] Cohh Carnage: Another good question. When I say I'm a variety streamer, and it's interesting that you say this because a lot of times I forget that people that are not like in the Twitch sphere, kind of a lot of these terms have definitions that are very Twitch internal. So when I say that I'm a variety streamer, what I basically mean is I play lots of different games and they're not all the same genre. It doesn't necessarily mean that I play all games. For instance, I am not a sports game fan. As I just mentioned, I don't play MOBAs. I generally don't play games that are super established, like World of Warcraft or Counter-Strike. When I say I'm a variety streamer, what I mean is that if a new release comes out, if I'm interested in it, you will most likely see it on my channel. If a new release comes out that has predecessor games, I'll probably do a franchise playthrough. If it's a single-player RPG, those are my bread and butter, and you'll probably see me doing a 100% run, as we call them on the channels, where we do everything we can in a single playthrough. But for me personally, it's variety broadcaster, and then the caveat is, but he has to be interested. And that's basically how that goes.
[00:08:21.101] Kent Bye: So when you're here at PAX and seeing all the different genres of games, how do you kind of break them down into like the big emerging trends that are here at PAX West and the kind of the big different types of games that you see represented here?
[00:08:35.232] Cohh Carnage: Well, for the different genres, I kind of break them down more on a per-game basis. I've found that especially at a place like PAX, even games that look similar can sometimes not only be targeting completely different groups, but really, even though on the surface their gameplay may look similar, the core mechanics of it, as all of these game devs are trying to make the next big unique thing, can sometimes really separate the games out. So even though I'll kind of approach the genre problem as kind of like, OK, is this a genre of the game I like? Let me look into it further. I'm still definitely kind of going outside of my comfort zone a lot of times to be like, OK, I may not look at this game originally, but let's kind of burrow down in the mechanics and see if there's any genre elements in there that I may enjoy, and then kind of going on from there.
[00:09:13.024] Kent Bye: So I'm curious to hear some of your thoughts on VR and some of the new emerging genres that you see developing there, and if you see that you may be starting to dabble more in VR in the future.
[00:09:23.091] Cohh Carnage: VR is a very interesting beast right now. It is very popular on Twitch, and if I had the capability, I probably would already be streaming it. Unfortunately, at my current residence, I've had kind of a hard time getting my VR room set up due to more of a space issue, and also when I first got my Vive hooked up, I was having some major issues getting it to work with my glasses. I later learned a lot of tricks to get around that, but since I didn't really have a room set up for it, I kind of said, you know what, we'll put all that on hold. However, I'm currently under contract on a new house and I've already claimed a VR room from my wife. So she gets the horses outside and I get my VR room inside. And I am very much looking forward to diving back into VR. I'm extremely excited to experience some of the things that I know are just filled with juicy quality content like the Fallout 4 VR coming out later this year. And I think as VR kind of picks up, becomes more mainstream, as the prices drop and we see more people picking it up, I'm really hoping we're going to see more very quality titles like Fallout 4, Doom, Abduction, and that kind of stuff move into the VR realm. Because personally, I can't wait to play them.
[00:10:19.820] Kent Bye: Yeah, for me, so there isn't a lot of levels of abstraction in some of the different games that I tend to enjoy playing, but yeah, I know for people who are more identified as gamers, they are completely comfortable with a lot of those gamepad control mechanisms. So I'm just curious to hear from you, as you've been playing these different games, if you've been primarily focused on the mouse and keyboard, or if you've been also playing with like an Xbox controller and how you think some of those, just in the normal 2D games, those levels of abstraction and being able to have those trade-offs of that abstraction allows you to do all these other amazing sort of gameplay mechanics.
[00:10:56.929] Cohh Carnage: So, for me, I'm primarily mouse and keyboard. If I have the option to use mouse and keyboard, I probably am. The only kind of exception there is if it's any kind of game where you may want to have more control over your movement, say like a car game is a perfect example. You know, if you're using a keyboard, you're either doing hard left or hard right. But if you're using a controller, then you can do that slight lean or full lean or half lean, and you really have more control of your experience. If I'm ever playing a game where that's a factor, then I'll generally use a controller. If it involves any degree of aiming, then I will throw that controller against the wall because I cannot aim with a controller, unfortunately. But with VR, I found it to be very interesting because it felt not only extremely natural to be able to use my body, but in the short time I've used VR, for instance, when I first set up my Vive, I played a game called The Solus Project. which is a fantastic player experience. And I found in just a matter of minutes, I was fully kind of connected with the controllers, I was figuring out exactly how I wanted to do things, and it all just kind of clicked. The gaming side of it, with the peripherals, I was already used to that with my controller experience. The moving around was natural, because funny enough, I've done that for 32 years with my body. And it all just kind of came together to a really rewarding gaming experience. I'm kind of frustrated I could never get my Vive working how I wanted it to. I've actually sent them ordered contacts because I was worried it was my glasses. But yeah, once I get that all set up, you're going to see a lot of that. And from a control aspect, I've really enjoyed it. Kind of the hybrid of both of them. The real world body movement, at the same time the kind of controller aspect as well.
[00:12:22.099] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I think that's going to be interesting to see how that plays out because I think that some developers have been kind of leaning away from doing too many of the complicated button interactions, especially for the motion track controllers. I think for the games that are on the Xbox controller, then I think it's a little bit easier to do some of that more complicated gameplay mechanics. But I feel like there's actually a lot of gameplay that's taken away with VR games just because It may not be as intuitive, because you're trying to have presence, and whenever you're having a lot of levels of abstraction with these exterior freedom controllers, then I think it starts to break presence for some people who may not have a lot of experience with gaming or these new controllers, because I feel like it's like a new muscle memory that has to be cultivated and generated. And there's a learning curve there that I think that it'll be interesting, I think, to see whether or not people will start to use all the capacity of those buttons or if they start to dial it down in order to create more levels of immersion by using your body rather than doing all these different gameplay mechanics.
[00:13:22.369] Cohh Carnage: Oh, for sure. And one of the things I'm really interested to see is already companies have some very interesting peripherals that people are using to interact with their VR experience. But one of the things I'm really interested to see is as this develops, what are we going to see that are just going to tie virtual controls to the real world? For instance, when are we going to get to the point where we just put on two gloves and every movement of our finger translates into the VR world, where you're casting spells by actually doing complex finger movements like in the movies and books that we've read? This is all stuff that could really happen someday. And seeing how people kind of get to that point, how they manage it when they get there, and how they interact with it is going to be a really fun experience.
[00:13:58.978] Kent Bye: Great. So what's next for you coming up this upcoming year for your stream?
[00:14:04.128] Cohh Carnage: For me, we've got a bunch of games coming out at the end of the year. Final Fantasy XV, I'm currently working through a total conversion of Skyrim called Enderal, which is a fantastic experience. Also, the Fallout 4 expansion has been great. I also have a Nope-tober, which is what we named our October event, where I play a whole bunch of scary games. That's coming up as well. But really, for me, it's just going to be the slew of new releases that we've kind of been hearing throughout the year, and we're going to see them as we pile up and get closer to Christmas. Companies just shipping out as much as they can to get to that Christmas season push, and you're going to see me at the front of a lot of those games.
[00:14:32.742] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:14:40.584] Cohh Carnage: For me, I'm extremely excited to see where VR goes with the aspect of, really it's the social aspect. VR gives us the capability to interact with people. in ways that we really haven't been able to do. One of the things that I'm really interested in doing at some point is having virtual get-togethers. When I go to cons and things like that, it's great to be able to see people in real life, but how cool would it be to say, okay, this time, two weeks from now, we're having a virtual get-together at a virtual place, everyone that has a headset in my community, join in, we can have events and stuff in there, contests, we can do maybe special events, announcements, just doing these kind of big, large events in VR. So everyone kind of feels like they're there to a degree, but at the same time, none of us have to travel. And that's honestly the biggest roadblock for most people. Also social gaming, being able to play like maybe down the road an MMO in virtual reality where you actually go to a virtual tavern and hang out and do events and stuff in there. But really just, it's going to be really interesting to see the connectivity, the networking, and how that's all going to come together to kind of make these experiences that frankly we've never had the opportunity to have before.
[00:15:44.225] Kent Bye: Yeah, the thing that that reminds me of is that, you know, you do a lot of engagement with your audience in your Twitch streams. And so I can imagine a time when you're actually doing kind of virtual meetups with your fans in some way where you can actually talk to them directly and cultivate this sense of social presence. But to me, there seems to be an interactive component that's part of the live stream that's unique from watching a recording of it, say, on YouTube. And so For you, how do you think about that audience engagement, and then do you see a future where you might be able to actually do deeper levels of engagement with VR?
[00:16:16.069] Cohh Carnage: Well, it's a great question. One of the things that I'm really excited about, when VR first came out, I was a little concerned about just that. I wouldn't be able to see Twitch chat. I wouldn't be able to read back to them. There wouldn't be any tools for me to interact with my audience. All they would see me is bumbling and most likely falling around and running into things in a room. So one of the things that is really cool is, already at this point companies are coming up with ways to get around that. There's some companies already that have made it so you can pipe in a video feed and in your virtual environment you can have your full running game in front of you at all of its 1080p glory at the max settings and you can have in your virtual environment your twitch chat on your right side your dashboard information on your left so you are actually playing a game in VR while being able to get to all the resources that you would need to get to without a headset. Seeing that kind of integration is huge for a streamer because it is kind of concerning to me to think that a lot of these games, I'm just going to be cut off. I am going to become a YouTube video to where there will be no interaction. There will be none of that. So as more of these overlays come out that allow us to put Twitch chat over any VR thing, as more of these tools come out that let us, just let us put Twitch chat in our virtual environments, Those are the things that, honestly, for me, I'm probably going to be prioritizing over the other things. So it's a big deal for us for that kind of stuff. And I think there's also a lot of applications for this kind of stuff for people that don't stream. Being able to see around you the kind of AR aspects of it, of utilizing the camera to have a little picture of what you're looking at in front of you. All this kind of stuff, I think, will kind of play into much larger and deeper features as we kind of move forward.
[00:17:44.187] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much.
[00:17:45.387] Cohh Carnage: Thank you.
[00:17:45.888] Kent Bye: Thank you very much for having me. So that was Coe Carnage. He's a professional Twitch streamer at twitch.tv slash Coe Carnage. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, I think the major takeaway here for me is that what streamers are trying to do is just be completely present and in the moment as they are playing and enjoying their video game. They have to be kind of authentically enjoying what they're doing, but also narrate and entertain as they're doing it. I think that anybody could go out and play the video game themselves, but there's something about watching other people play it and doing it within a community and watching it and being able to actually participate and interact and do it with a personality that you find entertaining. And I think that's something that I really was taking away from Ko is that just his process and container that he's created to be able to have these different boundaries that allow him to really just fully drop in and be completely present in the moment as he's playing. And as I've watched a number of different Twitch streamers over the last couple of weeks, I've just noticed how they engage the audiences in different ways, whether it's just reading the chat and, you know, picking out specific comments and then kind of replying to them on their stream. Or they make call outs for people who have been subscribing to their channel or donating money or different events that alert them and then they just kind of give a call out to their name. So one of the biggest open questions for a lot of these Twitch streamers is how are they going to be able to continue to engage with their audience when they're actually immersed within a VR experience? So vReal has also had the capability to be able to pipe some of these chats within the immersive VR experience. And at this point, there's the risk of bringing up the chat and having it occlude whatever you're actually watching and looking at during the experience. I know a lot of Twitch streamers do this thing where they have a full monitor where they're watching what's actually playing and going on. And then they have a separate monitor that has the chat that they can kind of glance over and look at it. So I think there are some solutions within VR, but there's the whole question of them maintaining presence within the experience, but yet still kind of getting out of the experience and be able to participate and see what's happening within community and be able to comment on things. And so I think it's just going to be a little bit more difficult to do within VR, but not impossible with some of the tools that are emerging. And perhaps we'll move away from some of these text-based chats, and it'll be a little bit more interactive with something like VRO, which allows people to, in smaller groups, go and kind of watch what's unfolding within a co-located VR experience. I think scale is probably the biggest open question, because you could have thousands of people within a chat, but within a VR experience, it comes up to a certain point where it's just not really feasible to have that many people within the same experience. I'd imagine the same event unfolding, but having kind of different viewing rooms as people can enjoy the experience with different people that are their friends. You know, the issue of scale may actually still come out and be a similar problem within text because, you know, sometimes when I've watched some Twitch streams, there's just a wall of text and I have no ability to be able to actually track any type of conversation just because there's so much that's happening. And maybe they already have some different filtering processes to be able to help people kind of focus in on things that are really relevant. So I'll actually be going to TwitchCon this weekend and seeing a little bit more of what's happening about VR and Twitch streaming, and see also some updates from vRail as well, since they seem to be a contender in terms of a new system and a whole new paradigm for doing streaming that just is a little bit more native to virtual reality experiences. So instead of just showing a 2D version of whatever someone's seeing and playing a 2D game within Twitch, you're kind of fully immersed within the experience yourself and then use that integration to be able to actually see in real time what people are also seeing. So it'll be interesting to see how that unfolds. So that's all that I have for today. I wanted to just thank you for joining me on the Voices of VR podcast. And if you'd like to support the podcast, then spread the word, tell your friends and become a donor at patreon.com slash Voices of VR.
