Farewell Geralt! Hello Geralt! Jammie Points!

Last Wednesday was an emotional stream. I finished Witcher 1. So many people told me to not even play it and it turned out to be one of my favorite games. I am one of those empathetic types that cries at stories - movies, books, games. I easily get immersed in the fictional universe and attached to the characters. I never want the stories to end and so always feel a sense of sadness at finales. This happened with the Witcher - even though I know there are two more games in the series for me to play.

As it happens, the ending of Witcher 1 also got more intense than earlier parts of the game and so I was displaying emotions other than sadness as well - as seen in the clip below.

As an added bonus, the emotional rollercoaster of the Witcher finale played out well with chat too. I had a higher than normal average and more people were chatting. Afterward, a couple of friends told me it had been my best stream to date because of the outpouring of so much passion. (Or maybe it was my reactions that day? Here's another clip for fun.)

It is hard to tell how much of this was due to my sentimentality though, or to the jammie points that were introduced for the 1st time during that day.

Jammie points? Sounds ridiculous right? That's kind of the idea. I almost always stream in my PJs and so I have decided to use a pajama/slumber party theme for my channel. Earlier I had thought about dressing up for stream, but at the end of the day I like being in my PJs and I don't want to spend that many hours in my house being dressed when I don't have to. PJs are me. It's a Malone women thing - my mom and sister are the same way. As soon as we get home we immediately get out of our clothes and into pajamas. Deciding on this theme was a decision to keep my "streamer" identity very close to who I am rather than being more of a performance. (Of course its still a performance to some degree - a la Austin - but I already talked about that.) I digress.

Twitch has these things called channel points, but streamers can rename them to fit the theme of their channel - hence jammie points. These are earned by viewers for watching channels and then more can be earned for engagement beyond watching - chatting, joining a raid, subbing, etc. Viewers can then redeem those points for an assortment of things as set up by the streamer. Some of these are encoded into Twitch, such as "highlight my message" which highlights 1 chat message. Others are not encoded, but are actions taken by the streamer, such as "make me dab." Some streamers set up rewards that are self-care reminders, such as "hydrate" or "posture check." I decided to set up a range of these including examples from all 3 of those categories. There is also a "community challenge" which is a larger challenge that requires multiple viewers to contribute to a community pot of points over a set period of time. I set that one up as I will cosplay for a stream as the reward.

I wasn't sure if these would go over well or not, but it turns out that people were really into it - especially the community challenge which has become the topic of conversation since then. The excitement of the new jammie points - a new level of engagement with the channel - and the emotional response of myself to the ending of Witcher 1 created, I think, a moment of bonding for those present. I feel like my goal of creating a community here just leveled up for perhaps the first time.