It's the 21st century, which means—er, well, all sorts of existential horrors. But it also means that the media landscape, a term I typically shudder to use but is genuinely applicable here, has changed. A lot of the younger generations get their news from social media and streaming platforms, including online personalities—and archetypically, the government is behind the times.

Well, New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who is NYC's first gamer mayor (finally, some representation) will be streaming regularly on Twitch. What's more, the news has broken via an exclusive on Polygon. The future is now.

The series, dubbed "Talk With the People", will begin May 21 on Twitch as well as other streaming platforms, including YouTube and Instagram, at 4 pm EDT / 9 pm BST. Mamdani told Polygon:

"With the launch of 'Talk with the People' we’re bringing City Hall to the platforms where New Yorkers already are—speaking directly with the people, "By launching the country’s first recurring cross-platform stream hosted by an elected official, where I’ll answer New Yorkers’ questions live on Twitch, we’re opening up a direct line of conversation between our government and the people, especially younger generations who’ve been ignored for too long."

The name is based on "Talk to the People", a radio show by former New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia during his term—it aired from 1941 to 1945, and the parallel Mamdani is drawing are relatively obvious.

The WNYC only started operating in 1924, just 20 years prior to Guardia's use of it. Given the internet took off in the late '90s-early 2000s, the period of time between widespread use of the tech and a NYC Mayor using it to speak to the public is pleasingly familiar.

And hey, listen. If the current US president can have his own social media platform or gold phone or cryptocurrency or whatever, I think Mamdani using Twitch to talk to young people is eminently reasonable. He might have to brush up on his gamer metaphors, but I'm all for it—the only question is what category it'll be considered on Twitch.

I mean, it's "Just Chatting", right? Unless Mamdani wants to surprise the nation with a no-hit saxophone speedrun of Elden Ring, which I imagine would make him leader of the free world by default.

Outside of the mining and crafting, Minecraft is all about customising your avatar. The marketplace is home to a tonne of skins and accessories, but if you're already tired of everything in your closet the new Tiny Takeover Twitch drops will come in handy. There are some swanky new hats which are exclusive to this event, and to celebrate the game's newest drop: Tiny Takeover.

There are three rewards up for grabs, and you've got a decent bit of time to redeem them. So, be sure to tune in and get them before they disappear. Here's what you need to do to cash in your ticket to a new hat.

All Minecraft Tiny Takeover Twitch drops

The Minecraft Tiny Takeover Twitch drops event will take place from April 6 to April 15, 2027. It's plenty of time really, but you will need to redeem any rewards you've earned before that deadline. There are three twitch drops currently available during the Tiny Takeover Twitch drops event:

There's also a Baby Chick Chat Badge available, but you'll need to buy or gift a Twitch Prime subscription to get one.

How to redeem Minecraft Tiny Takeover drops

All you need to do to earn the Tiny Takeover Twitch drops is watch five minutes of a live Minecraft stream while the event is on. You'll be given a random reward code in your Twitch inbox after five minutes have passed, which you'll be able to redeem on minecraft.net/redeem for your Minecraft account.

When you want to equip your new gear, go to the character customization screen in Minecraft, and your new accessories should appear. Once you've popped them onto your avatar you'll be able to swan about showing off your new gear while playing with an adorable set of new critters in-game.

Ah yes, identity verification, the potential bellwether of digital ID and our future dystopia—fun stuff. If one could sum up the current digital world, it would probably be encapsulated by incessant AI content and talk about said content, 6–7 brain rot, and identity verification. One place that now seemingly houses all three of these is Twitch, and when it comes to age verification, the third-party provider the company is opting for is a little problematic.

Twitch streamer and Bluesky user Tawny Code Cat says Twitch is requiring new Affiliate streamers to verify their identity using third-party ID-checker Persona before they can get paid for the first time. They share a screenshot of a Twitch message explaining this.

The message says: "In order to receive your payout, you need to verify your identity through Persona, Twitch's identity verification service."

Twitch confirms this is the case in its first payout walkthrough, though it looks like this is only required for streamers whose payment is "on hold":

"Some streamers may be required to verify their identity before receiving their first payout. If your payout is on hold, you'll see a message in your Payout Eligibility Panel and receive email notifications with instructions to complete identity verification through Persona, Twitch's verification service."

Twitch is requiring new Affiliates, before their first payment, to give government photo ID and a separate photo to Persona, the same Persona that has connections to government mass surveillance programs. When I asked Twitch support for another option, they said there isn't one. #twitch #persona 1/4

— @tawnycodecat.bsky.social (@tawnycodecat.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-02-24T11:43:47.529Z

The problem isn't just that Twitch requiring additional ID verification on top of the information it already has—although that is in issue in itself—but also with the third-party service it's using to perform these checks: Persona.

Many have been rightly concerned about Persona over the past few months. That's in no small part because the company has received a large chunk of its investor money from Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel. And because it doesn't seem to be just an ID verification tool, but also appears to have ties with the government to help with surveillance.

The ID verifier has been on people's lips lately because Discord recently announced it will have age verification restrictions, and part of that roll-out has coincided with a Persona-tinged "experiment" on UK users. The company said UK users "may be part of an experiment where your information will be processed by an age-assurance vendor, Persona."

While this experiment has now finished, it's nevertheless brought attention to the ID verification program and caused a collective raising of eyebrows.

We've already seen tons of people looking for Discord alternatives in the wake of the new ID verification rules, so I wonder whether we'll see the same with Twitch. I suppose the difference here is that this verification is just for streamers, not viewers, and even then it's just a subset of streamers who are becoming Affiliates.

If there's one good thing about it, it's that it might get more people thinking about the problems with ID verification and different providers.

Streamer Emiru says that, among other things, Twitch has agreed to donate $100,000 to an unspecified violence protection charity following her assault at TwitchCon.

Things initially kicked off back in mid-October when, during a TwitchCon meet and greet, a man was able to bypass security and the line to approach Emiru and pull her into a hug before attempting to kiss her. Emiru released a statement the day after the incident saying that TwitchCon staff "did not react and let the guy walk away," with a member of her own security team being the one to handle the assaulter.

Twitch CEO Dan Clancy's initial response was heavily criticised when he appeared in an interview with Taylor Lorenz who asked him about Emiru's assault. "What happened yesterday obviously was something that we deeply care about," he said before following up with "I do think that when you're livestreaming, in many ways, since you control your community and can ban people, you can make it so that those people you don't want engaging with you and participating aren't there."

He also made comments that seemed to be at odds with Emiru's proclamation that she had actually wanted to cancel her meet and greet, but was unable to due to contractual obligations. Clancy later released a formal apology via the Twitch X account saying: "We failed, both in allowing it to occur, and in our response following."

Now, Emiru says, the streaming platform plans to donate $100,000 to charity as per her request. "I didn't really wanna drag it out, and I also wanted there to be some kind of public resolution since it was a public issue. And then if you take things to court they tend to become private, and that's not really what I wanna do," she told her viewers during a November 11 livestream.

"So I basically asked them for a list of things, and they agreed to all of them. And I think you guys probably saw some of the tweets that they made—they mentioned it on one of the tweets—but one of the things I asked for that was important to me, I asked if they would do a $100,000 donation to a violence protection charity and they said yes. And they're probably going to do that in about a month, and they'll post about that when they do that."

Twitch did indeed post about the donation back on November 7, writing: "In recognition of Emiru's advocacy, Twitch will be making a donation to support non-profit organizations working to prevent sexual violence." It certainly won't change what happened, but it does seem like Twitch is committed to making things right with one of its biggest stars.

Matthew 'Mizkif' Rinaudo, one of the most popular streamers on Twitch, has filed a lawsuit against Emily 'Emiru' Schunk and Zack 'Asmongold' Hoyt alongside three media companies for defamation and breach of contract.

As reported by KXAN, the suit follows allegations made against Mizkif by Emiru in which she accused him of "psychological and domestic abuse, stalking, harassment, sexual assault, and threats of blackmail" during an October 24 livestream.

During the stream, Emiru alleges that Mizkif had "been indirectly threatening me through my friends and people that I work with," claiming that "his plan was to claim that I kill animals and that I killed my own rabbits."

She told her stream: "I think everyone who paid attention knew that he was very controlling over what I wore, to a degree who I was friends with, and even when I would stream." Allegations included having plastic bottles thrown at her, a phone thrown at her eye, and aggressive behaviour.

She also afforded sparse details of the "extremely private relationship" the two engaged in between 2022 and 2025, along with allegations of an incident that took place where Mizkif "tried to comfort me by hugging me while I was sitting on the couch, and holding me really close to him," before "he started kissing me in my face. And I let him do it, I was still sobbing a lot. And then, suddenly, he tried to climb on top of me and aggressively shoved his hand down my pants and I screamed. And when I screamed, he jumped off me like a cat. And instead of apologising and checking if I was okay he said 'I feel weird now. I feel like I did something wrong. I have to go,' and he immediately left my house while I was still crying.

Shortly after, Mizkif responded with a stream of his own where he admitted: "I told her to dress older, to stop wearing pajamas, and to stop talking about stalkers as a whole, stop talking about past relationships—and yes, I didn't want her to travel without me. I also said that I didn't want her to hang out with specific people. This is because I didn't want her to get hurt."

He also claimed: "Emi[ru] was also violent. She would throw clothes or plushies at me and I punched holes in the walls or slammed doors in aggression."

These interactions appear to be the basis of Mizkif's lawsuit, which says Emiru's October 24 stream contained "slanderous accusations" which "were made live before an audience of tens of thousands and have since been viewed millions of times across various platforms." The suit also, among other things, claims that "Schunk would dress and behave in ways that Rinaudo thought made her unsafe in light of the ongoing stalking from some of her followers."

He also has beef with media company One True King, which he helped co-found in 2020 and which Emiru joined as a co-owner in 2023, Mythic Talent Management, and King Gaming Labs. The suit claims that OTK rescinded Mizkif's remaining shares following Emiru's allegations—essentially removing him from the company entirely—with Mythic Talent Management chasing him up for $600,000 in breached contract management fees and King Gaming Labs seeking payment for violation of an agreement and further breaches.

"Mythic, King, and OTK made no serious investigation or inquiry into the basis for or truth of Shunk's allegations before repudiating their agreements with [Mizkif]," the suit alleges. It continues: "Indeed, Mythic, King, and OTK did not even ask Rinaudo for comment or any information in his possession disproving the allegations."

But wait, where does Asmongold come into all this? Well, he's next up on the chopping block in the suit. The suit claims he has "continuously defamed Rinaudo on a near daily basis" since Emiru's allegations, writing that Asmongold has among other things stated Mizkif "should be in jail, claimed he was abusing and manipulating others, hurting other people, and becoming an aggressor."

Mizkif's suit also complains that Asmongold "falsely accused Rinaudo of threatening Schunk's employees at TwitchCon" and claims that Asmongold "has enriched himself personally by advertising revenues and subscription fees garnered from his smear campaign against Rinaudo."

The whole thing is one big mess wrapped up in years of different Twitch dramas and niche sub-community instances, and with defamation cases usually putting a pretty big burden of proof onto the accuser (so Mizkif in this instance) I'd be surprised to see this case going beyond a settlement.

Arc Raiders is an online videogame launching in 2025, which means it has a store, a (free) battle pass, and, of course, promotions to unlock in-game items by doing things outside the game. That's right gamers, I'm talking about Arc Raiders Twitch Drops!

By watching your favorite streamer play Arc Raiders (or by leaving a random stream playing in the bottom right-hand corner of your second monitor while you go about your day) you can unlock several small, free cosmetics. And that's not Arc Raiders' only promotion: there's also a Discord Quest waiting for you in your chat app.

For both you'll have to link your Embark account with those services to claim the rewards. I'll quickly run through how to do that and what you can get from Twitch and Discord in Arc Raiders during the launch period.

Connect Discord and Twitch to your Embark ID

You'll likely have already linked your Steam, Epic or Xbox account to the Embark ID that Arc Raiders prompts you to create when you first start the game. The process for linking up either Twitch or Discord is the same.

1. Head to the Embark ID connected platforms page
2. Clink "link" next to Twitch and/or Discord
3. Login to those services in your browser if you aren't already. Read the terms of service and click agree if you're okay with the data being shared

That's it! Now you're ready to collect your freebies.

Arc Raiders Twitch Drops

The Twitch Drops for Arc Raiders aren't going to revolutionize your wardrobe, but three out of the four are very easy to get, so you might as well grab 'em if you don't mind leaving a twitch stream open.

The Arc Raiders Twitch Drop campaign runs until November 13 at 11:59 PM PST, giving you two weeks from launch to collect.

Note that only the first two are for use in Arc Raiders; the latter two are for Twitch chat.

When you've put in enough time to get one of the drops, you should get a message in your Twitch inbox. Make sure to check the message and click claim on your item to add it to your account.

Arc Raiders Discord Quest item

The Arc Raiders Discord Quest only rewards one item, and it's only available until November 5, so you'll want to hop to it. Thankfully it only takes 15 minutes.

Here's a link to the quest in Discord, though you can also find it by navigating to your DMs, selecting Quests from the top of the menu, and scrolling down to find Arc Raiders. Click Accept Quest and choose your platform (desktop or console) where you're playing Arc Raiders.

Then hop in and do a run.

Twitch already has plenty of vtubers streaming on it daily, some of whom are incredibly successful. But it doesn't have hololive, the biggest group of vtubers in the world. A few of its members have streamed on it here and there in the past, but now it's going to be a regular spot to watch the most popular anime girls play games.

COVER, owner of the hololive vtuber agency, has entered a partnership with Twitch for its talents to regularly stream on the platform. If you've ever seen a clip of an anime dog girl or a shark girl playing a game, it was probably a hololive vtuber. One of its most popular English-speaking vtubers, Calliope Mori, has over 2.5 million subscribers on YouTube, and several of its Japanese talents have even more.

They won't abandon their home on YouTube, but simultaneous streams on both platforms will be more common as each vtuber makes the transition. It probably won't be long until you see hololive vtubers showing up under the most popular game categories, likely giving Twitch a significant boost in viewership.

The deal is another part of COVER's expansion into the West after hololive exploded in popularity in 2020. Its vtubers are popping up everywhere, whether it's a Dodgers game or an anime convention. Rift of the Necrodancer has hololive DLC. You can't escape them, and that's pretty much the point, Cover's international PR team manager Alberto Moreno tells PC Gamer.

COVER's goal is pretty simple: expose more people to vtubers until they're watching clip compilations and buying merch. It really doesn't take much to fall down the rabbit hole and find yourself jokingly referring to normal human streamers as "fleshtubers". Not that I have personal experience with this or anything.

Moreno says it'll be up to the talents on how they want to incorporate Twitch into their streaming schedules. Part of the deal was to establish a way for the vtubers to stream on the platform in the safest way possible given that hololive talents operate much like the idol industry and keep most of their personal lives and identities anonymous.

Right now, safety is a major concern for Twitch streamers after popular creator Emily-Beth "Emiru" Schunk was assaulted at the recent TwitchCon event in San Diego. Twitch CEO Dan Clancy apologized for failing to prevent the incident, and said the company is reviewing how it conducts its in-person events for the future.

The risk is a little different for vtubers, who usually attend events remotely and greet fans on big screens rather than showing up directly. That said, Moreno says COVER's top priority is "providing a safe environment where the talents feel comfortable to perform their activities," and that it won't be involved in any events where that could be a problem. I doubt you'll see a major hololive presence at the next TwitchCon unless Twitch gets its stuff together.

Hololive's official debut on Twitch will kick off with a streaming event on November 20 called "Holoday", where several of its biggest vtubers will be on the front page.

In response to the assault of streamer Emiru at last weekend's TwitchCon, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy has issued an apology from the streaming platform's official account on X (formerly Twitter). Clancy apologized for security lapses, and promised improvements at future events. He also expressed regret for his prior comments about the incident, seemingly referring to an interview with Taylor Lorenz at the convention.

"First, I want to be upfront and take accountability for the security incident that occurred during Emiru’s Meet and Greet," Clancy said in the official statement. "It shouldn’t have happened and we take that very seriously. We failed, both in allowing it to occur, and in our response following. We mismanaged our communications about the incident, and that includes the comments I made. I apologize to Emiru for all that took place."

Clancy promised that Twitch would conduct a formal analysis of the incident, as well as a review of TwitchCon's security as a whole. The CEO also said that the company would look into stricter rules on IRL streaming⁠—man on the street-style content with a mobile setup⁠—at the event, as well as a review of accessibility for future events.

Clancy's allusion to his own prior comments is likely in reference to what he said in his interview with Lorenz, held at the convention but uploaded a few days later on Wednesday, October 22. The interview touched on a host of topics, including free speech, viewership, and demographics on the streaming platform, but Lorenz also asked Clancy about the assault of Emiru.

While Clancy said that "What happened yesterday obviously was something that we care deeply about," professed his friendship with Emiru, and promised a review of security, he defended Twitch's trust and safety practices, and also argued that the incident was part of a wider social trend beyond Twitch. Some commenters also interpreted him as saying it was Emiru's responsibility to remove threatening viewers from her community to prevent incidents like this.

"The challenge we face is a challenge in today's society, it's not limited to Twitch, it extends throughout our society," Clancy told Lorenz. "I do think that when you're livestreaming, in many ways, since you control your community and can ban people, you can make it so that those people you don't want engaging with you and participating with you aren't there.

"The reality is that, even as you do a lot in terms of security, in today's world, there are challenges that can present themselves, especially when someone is putting themselves out there. We try to work very closely with each creator about what they want to do, and works for them."

That final statement touches on an aspect of the incident not addressed in Clancy's apology: Emiru alleged prior to the meet and great that she did not want to hold the event due to security concerns, but had to go through with it, as it was contractually obligated to hold a show later at the convention.

Emiru has not yet made a public response to the apology or Clancy's interview at the time of writing, and commenters remain critical of and unsatisfied with Twitch's official response. The platform's safety policies, streamers' trust in them, and the future of its in-person convention are all still part of a developing story.

Streamer Emily-Beth "Emiru" Schunk has released a statement criticizing ubiquitous streaming platform Twitch after she was assaulted at a TwitchCon meet and greet on October 17. This incident comes as high profile streamers, mostly women, have dealt with increasingly common incidents of in-person stalking and harassment by viewers.

Streamer shenAndygans shared a video of the incident to X (formerly Twitter). In it, a large man approaches Emiru, pulls her into a forceful hug, and tries to kiss her. A bodyguard Emiru personally hired for TwitchCon then rushes in to pull the man off and shove him away, with the video ending as the man walks back into the crowd.

Twitch released a statement earlier today calling the incident "completely unacceptable and deeply upsetting." The company said that it has banned the offending individual from the convention, Twitch itself, and future in-person events. Twitch said that it has also increased security at its meet and greets.

Emiru released her own statement several hours later, criticizing Twitch's treatment of her, and disputing part of its official statement. "I'm obviously shaken up by what happened and it's not the first time I've dealt with something like this," Emiru wrote. "But to tell you honestly, I am a lot more hurt and upset by how Twitch handled it during and after the fact."

Emiru disputes Twitch's assertion that the offending individual was dealt with "immediately," calling it a "blatant lie." As can be seen in the video, the man is able to walk away from the meet and greet with no intervention from event staff.

"He was allowed to walk away from my meet and greet and I didn't hear he was caught until hours after he attacked me," said Emiru. "And it felt like this only happened because of my manager pressing for it, not because TwitchCon staff present thought it was a big deal."

Emiru also stated that she was not checked on afterward by TwitchCon staff. Streaming news account @Awk20000 further shared a video clip from before the incident where Emiru says "I kept my meet and greet because I wanted to keep my show." It's explained that her contract with TwitchCon meant that she was unable to cancel the meet and greet, despite wanting to over security concerns, without also cancelling her other event at the convention.

In March, Emiru and fellow streamers Valkyrae and Cinna were stalked and harassed on camera during a livestreamed event, with the individual even making death threats against them. Last month, Dexerto reported on how prominent streamers like Valkyrae, Pokimane, and QTCinderella were publicly expressing reservations about attending TwitchCon due to anxiety over violent and obsessive viewers.

Twitch's failure to adequately prepare for this incident despite so much advance warning, coupled with Emiru's sharp criticism of the company after the assault, means that the platform will have to deliver more substantial changes to win back trust and goodwill from some of its biggest streamers.

The limits of Minecraft's procedural-generation math become apparent the further away you get from your starting position. First you cross into the jitters, a region where movement gets all, well, jittery. Keep going and eventually you'll reach the Far Lands, an alien landscape where patterns of blocks stop resolving into pleasant hills and streams, instead forming gigantic sky-dominating structures that reach to the topmost limit of block-generation where they're sheared flat, with dark crevices running between them.

Kurt J. Mac began his long walk to the Far Lands in March of 2011, and on October 4, 2025, he finally arrived. He's been streaming his journey as Far Lands or Bust on Twitch, taking donations for charity as he goes and raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for Child's Play, Direct Relief, the Progressive Animal Welfare Society, the Equal Justice Initiative, and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East over the years.

Finally arriving at the Far Lands, kurtjmac climbed to the top of them to take some screenshots, briefly experiencing existential horror when he saw his completely dark character model in the third-person view. "Aah! I don't exist!"

Climbing back down to the ground, he assembled a sign to memorialize the spot. "Here Farlanders First Set Foot upon Far Lands! October 4, 2025" it says. Accompanied by his dog Wolfie, kurtjmac has since continued exploring, meeting a Far Lands cow and trying not to get eaten by spiders. "Now we've gotta play Minecraft," as he put it.

Probably my most impressive single achievement in videogames is, hm, platinum'ing Spelunky, maybe? Which isn't very impressive, the observant among you may note, and feels all the more unremarkable now people are out here 100% beating Hollow Knight: Silksong on a saxophone.

By "people," I meant "Dr Doot—the guy famous for beating hard videogames with a saxophone," so I guess I shouldn't feel too bad about the whole thing. Indeed, we've met Doot MD before: that time he beat Elden Ring on his sax and that time he beat Shadow of the Erdtree on it. Plus, he regularly dips into games like Dark Souls and (the original) Hollow Knight to keep himself sharp.

So I suppose I'm not too surprised, but I am impressed. Silksong hasn't even been out for a full month yet, and here this guy is literally freestyling his way through it in its entirety, on his first playthrough of the game.

In a chat with Polygon, he explained how it all works. First up, I guess that thing isn't technically a sax, but rather an "electronic wind instrument with the same key layout as a saxophone." On its back sits a "mod wheel" that controls movement, and there's a bit of translation software that acts to convert his doots into, you know, actual KBAM inputs. Oh, and if you're wondering—it's not the hardest game he's done this with. He says that honour goes to Lies of P.

It is not, you might be shocked to hear, a perfect system, and the sax can sometimes miss inputs or mistake things which shouldn't be inputs for commands. Which, you know, good. Otherwise, beating FromSoft games and Silksong on a wind instrument would be too easy.

It's quite the achievement, and it means only one thing: we are surely just days or weeks away from someone beating this thing with their brain.

I've spent a not-insignificant portion of my waking hours the last few weeks thinking (and writing) about Hollow Knight: Silksong, but I may have actually spent more time replaying a description of the game from streamer Northernlion in my head over and over again like a Nick at Nite rerun.

While Silksong was the focal point of online gaming conversation from its late August release date announcement up until the launch of Borderlands 4, Northernlion not only cheerily avoided streaming it alongside other big Twitch channels, but spent the Silksong hype period roasting viewers who asked why he wasn't playing it.

"Have metroidvania fans ever considered that walking back is not as much fun as walking forward? I guess I'm just a different kind of beast'," he joked a few days before Silksong's release. "You can do metroidvanias if you want, but once I finish with something I'm done with it. I'm moving on. Greener pastures. Oh, you need a double-jump to access that door up there? Well, I guess god doesn't want me to go up there. I'll be moving to the right. I'll be moving to the right and jumping onto platforms that are approximately one times my height above me. That's about it, man. That's about it."

In the early 2010s Northernlion amassed a fanbase on YouTube with let's play videos of The Binding of Isaac, but in recent years has become better known for live interactions with his audience on Twitch streams. At some point his ability to riff on basically any topic started generating a consistent stream of viral goofs, rants, and unbelievable moments—enough to earn him a reputation as "your favorite streamer's favorite streamer."

So it was perfectly in character when, straight off the dome, he delivered a perfect stream-of-consciousness takedown of metroidvanias as the gaming equivalent of getting to your car and realizing you forgot your car keys.

You can watch it here, but I will now transcribe the quote in its entirety for your reading pleasure:

"We will not be playing Silksong. Regardless of its reviews, we are being indifferent to Silksong. The reason is, I hate going back for stuff. I hate when I get to my car and then I forgot about my car keys. I'm like, what the hell, now I have to go back to the house?

"They made a whole game about getting to your car but you don't have car keys, so now you have to go into your basement and get a fucking pogo stick that lets you jump up to the shelf where you've got your car keys, only oh wait, your garage door opener is inside something you have to become really tiny to get into, you have to get into your crawlspace to get the garage door opener, and then you go to click it but there's no batteries, to get the batteries you've got to use the pogo stick to get a key that goes into a lock that unlocks to get the batteries but you don't have the screwdriver to unlock the back of the garage door opener to put the batteries in so you've got a use a shovel to dig a hole, you gotta use your pogo stick and get really small in order to get to the shovel that you use to dig up the screwdriver to unscrew the back to put the batteries in to use the garage door opener to get into your car to use your car keys to drive to work.

"They made a game about that, and you can't wait for it? You're excited for that? Are you crazy?"

This is a perfect bit. It is immaculately conceived comedy with an unimpeachable narrative throughline that would leave stand-up comedians who've spent months polishing the delivery of worse jokes reeling. Per-second it has delivered me substantially more joy than any of the 20 hours I've put into Silksong so far, and I love the game.

The best part is that this is not just a bit; it's a bit-inside-a-bit, just one moment inside the meta joke of games he plays instead of Silksong, as highlighted in this compilation of subsequent streams.

"i can’t believe in the middle of the ragebait he plays a puppygirl game out of no where," reads one of the YouTube comments, reacting to Northernlion booting up a clicker game.

Northernlion's fanbase has picked up his flair for multilayered and ironic reference-filled in-jokes, as another comment on that same video demonstrates:

"Pro tip: The Lion of the North frequently attempts to Ragebait against the current of the popular. If you do not have the prerequisite endurance or Thick Skin charm, counter by purposefully ignoring his cinema references or feigning absolute indifference towards it. The glass canon nature of this interaction will flip the Soyjak-Gigachad equilibrium to your favour, and soon enough NL will be the irate lion screaming at the calm and composed monkey that is you."

You can no doubt find an army of YouTubers and Twitch streamers out there currently not playing Silksong, or making videos about why its difficulty is a crime against gamers. But only one who has the composure to blurt out "Shitsong!" and then segue to a diss of James Blunt's You're Beautiful. Truly a different kind of beast.

Congressman James Comer, chair of the US House Oversight and Government Reform committee (HOGR), yesterday invited Valve president Gabe Newell, Discord CEO Humam Sakhnini, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy, and Reddit CEO Steve Huffman to testify before a HOGR hearing on October 8.

The hearing, per a press release from HOGR itself, "will examine the radicalization of online forum users, including instances of open incitement to commit politically motivated acts," and if you're wondering if that's a roundabout way of saying it's tied to the September 10 assassination of American far-right activist Charlie Kirk—it is.

"The politically motivated assassination of Charlie Kirk claimed the life of a husband, father, and American patriot," reads a statement from Comer (the motivation for Kirk's murder is yet to be definitively established). "In the wake of this tragedy, and amid other acts of politically motivated violence, Congress has a duty to oversee the online platforms that radicals have used to advance political violence."

Comer says that the above-named execs "must appear before the Oversight Committee and explain what actions they will take to ensure their platforms are not exploited for nefarious purposes."

A Discord spokesperson said to the BBC that Tyler Robinson—the 22-year-old who has been charged with Kirk's murder—seemingly took responsibility for the shooting in a Discord server not long after it occurred. "It was me at [Utah Valley University, the site of Kirk's shooting] yesterday. im sorry for all of this," wrote an account alleged to belong to Robinson on the platform.

Perhaps it was this that led HOGR to issue its request for testimony to Discord's CEO, but even so, there is little evidence that Robinson was radicalised by any online platform he's alleged to have been on.

Records obtained by independent journalist Ken Klippenstein appear to show the same account which made the aforementioned confession only ever seemed apolitical, mostly discussing games like Helldivers 2 and Deep Rock Galactic. "I think the main thing that’s caused so much confusion is that he was always generally apolitical for the most part," an anonymous friend of Robinson's told Klippenstein.

There is even less obvious reason for HOGR's invitations to the bosses of Twitch, Valve, and Reddit. While it's undoubtedly true that teenagers have been—and continue to be—radicalised by extremists on gaming platforms, there is not yet evidence to suggest this led to Kirk's assassination.

In the absence of a sure explanation, theories and conspiracies abound, and with figures like health and human services secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr making claims reminiscent of the heyday of anti-videogame lawyer Jack Thompson—that there is a link between gaming and US mass shootings—it feels like the attempt to put a spotlight on online gaming spaces is less about a serious attempt to tackle online radicalisation, and more about finding a scapegoat.

Even gaming's strongest warriors lose their way once in a while.

As skilled as we are at following checklists of things to collect and arrows that point us to our precise destination, sometimes a shiny object in the distance catches our eye and lures us away from our destiny as the one true savior of the realm. Sometimes, instead of staying devoted to our highest purpose as videogame enthusiasts—typing the words "Half-Life 3?" into the Twitch or YouTube chat box during any and every livestreamed event—we get distracted.

Hollow Knight: Silksong was very distracting. Announced, then vanished, then resurfaced and re-vanished in such a way as to inspire waves of hope, despair and development hell conspiracy theories. Half-Life 3 had to earn its place as the mystical ur-announcement, the unlikeliest of hoped-for "One last thing" bombshells to trot out at the end of a Game Awards or E3 keynote, by not existing for decades. Silksong took a mere five years to run the same cycle. And the whole time it was a real game!

That realness made the possibility of Silksong popping up in every single Nintendo Direct, Gamescom Opening Night Live, or Sony State of Play seem so tantalizingly possible. How could anyone under those conditions not type "Silksong?" into the chat of any and every Twitch stream?

How could that infection of the mind not spread into ever-more-desperate permutations?

Silksong when?

Silksong where?

📢SKONG📢

Silksong??? 🤡

🤡

🤡🤡🤡

🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡

🪡SKONG🪡SKONG🪡SKONG🪡SKONG🪡SKONG🪡SKONG🪡SKONG🪡SKONG🪡SKONG🪡SKONG🪡SKONG🪡SKONG🪡SKONG🪡SKONG🪡SKONG🪡SKONG

Deep down, everyone who's typed Silksong into chat over the last five years has known that they'd diverged from the critical path. They were on a sidequest, and it was taking a lot longer than they expected it to.

Of course that fosters a nervous, even manic energy. We are masters of efficiency! We live to complete objectives! The sooner we could stop typing Silksong into chat, the sooner we could get back to our one true duty of typing "Half-Life 3?" and knowing we are answering our true calling.

Team Cherry has done gamers the world over a great service by releasing Silksong. That it is seemingly a pretty dang good game is ultimately superfluous. We're all now free to, undistracted, focus on what we can't and will probably never have, which is far more important than enjoying what we're fortunate enough to possess.

I know you may be rusty after half a decade, but it's time to get your mojo back. It's only a few months until The Game Awards, so you're going to have to start practicing now, so that the letters and that tricky hyphen flow out of you as instinctively as a Mario hop.

Go ahead and open a random Twitch chat. Refamiliarize yourself with the endless rush of messages. Don't let all those emotes and colored names distract you. Just start typing: Maybe a tentative "HL3?" to test that Silksong is fully out of your system. That you have the focus for the full name.

Keep typing it! Over and over again. I'm sure the streamer won't mind! They'll love it, actually. So will the other chatters, because even without a distraction as powerful as Silksong, there's always something else to momentarily snare our attention away. A rupee. A bad hair day. A streamer not knowing how to pronounce "Lichdragon Fortissax."

Once everyone sees your absolute commitment in typing it again and again I'm sure they'll thank you for your vision. Soon everyone will be typing it too, snapped back to the path of destiny by your guiding hand:

Half-Life 3?

Is this Half-Life 3?

Half-Life 3 when?

Half-Life 3 when?

In case you missed the news, let me get you up to speed—payment processors like Visa and Mastercard have, likely at the behest of anti-porn group Collective Shout, pressured both Steam and Itch.io to either delist or limit 'adult' games.

These blanket bans not only sweep erotic and NSFW works into their net, but have also impacted anything with a whisper or adulthood or severe themes—particularly on Itch.io, which has deindexed thousands of games as part of its preliminary actions to comply.

I reached out to developers who were affected, including Robert Yang, who's been making games since 2011, and is known for exploring gay culture in his games like the Tearoom.

This isn't his first rodeo, though. His game Rinse & Repeat was banned on Twitch in 2015, given the site's policy at the time that nudity can't be a "core focus or feature of the game". Its current policy is even more restrictive and hyper-specific.

"Twitch did treat me rather poorly," he writes to me in an email. "Even if we make progress, it can always be erased later—see the ongoing erosion of trans rights in the US and UK, despite the widespread support and consensus years ago."

When it comes to Itch, Yang notes that the site "hosts a lot of LGBTQ games and content, not just my games, and if we're all permanently deindexed (or deleted) then we have nowhere else to go, really."

I also talked to Jenny Jiao Hsia, who, for a time, believed that Consume Me was caught up in the wave of delisted games. This has since been confirmed not to be the case by Itch.io founder Leaf Corcoran, who has said he will make indexing requirements clearer "when the dust settles".

For posterity's sake, I've kept Hsia's comments intact, especially since the initial confusion over which games were and weren't deindexed (something Corcoran admits needs work) is a testament to how suddenly and unexpectedly this situation developed.

Consume Me won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize for Best Independent Game this year, and follows a teenage girl dealing with the stresses and trials of an oppressive, patriarchal, and expectation-laden society.

Hsia—who replied in a jointly-written email with her colleague AP Thomson, so I'll be referring to them as Hsia/Thomson from here on out—told me at the time that it was "unlikely Consume Me will ultimately be negatively impacted by these changes. Itch was already going to be a very small percentage of our revenue and our Steam presence currently remains unaffected.

"We think we'll be fine, but that is absolutely not the case for many other developers out there."

'The same song and dance'

Collective Shout's mission statement is geared towards protecting women and children—and while it has since put out a post claiming that Itch.io and Steam's responses weren't proportional to its intent, the group was far less timid when some of its members claimed victory earlier in the month on social media, with one dubbing quite a few people "porn sick brain rotted pedo gamer fetishists".

As an aside, payment processors withdrawing their support and causing problems for marginalised communities is not a new thing, and I'm skeptical it was an unexpected outcome—in 2021, the ACLU argued that Mastercard's policies against "high-risk" platforms harmed the safety of sex workers by "pushing the industry deeper into the shadows."

Both Yang and Hsia/Thomson are also entirely unconvinced: "This is the same song and dance performed by every anti-porn, anti-sex-work, and anti-LGBTQ+ organization going back decades," Hsia/Thomson says.

"There are many many women who consume and enjoy adult content. There are many many women who produce adult content and deserve to be fairly compensated for their work. Cutting these women off from income streams and audiences does nothing to 'protect' them."

Yang, meanwhile, tells me that: "Collective Shout is acting in a typical conservative anti-LGBTQ tradition with a familiar pattern: culture war morality campaigns to brand everything they dislike as pornography and obscenity.

"In the US, there's an especially strong anti-woman and anti-feminist component to the anti-obscenity campaigns, where US conservatives want to use an old zombie law called the Comstock Law to ban not just LGBTQ expression but also abortion and birth control as 'obscene.'"

It's a chilling comparison to make. The Comstock Act of 1873 was initially targeted at the postal service, making it illegal to send "obscene, lewd or lascivious" in the mail—which included any materials relating to abortion or birth control.

The law's been revised several times over the years—and while it's sometimes used for severe and indefensible crimes, such as in 2022, he's not wrong in that US conservatives are attempting to weaponise it to cut off access to abortion.

We might not get videogames in the mail, but in a way, digital distributors are a postal service of their own—and asking payment processors to intervene in the place of any democratically-elected government seems even more dire.

Yang puts it in far blunter terms: "This is their ultimate goal: they want to erase the public life and autonomy of LGBTQ people and women."

Everybody loses

The trifecta of poorly thought-out decisions (by Collective Shout, payment processors, and the platforms they're pressuring) results in even more harm being done to indie developers, says Hsia/Thomson. The problem being, there's just "no clear definition of what constitutes 'NSFW content'.

"We rely on cultural norms which are loose and always being renegotiated. Naturally, right-wing groups frequently attempt to expand this cultural understanding of 'NSFW' content to include any speech they disagree with."

While this is a huge problem for minorities, including LGBTQ artwork and political speech, there's a huge weight of artistic restriction being pushed here, too. In other words, you should probably be allowed to make and sell artwork about adult topics, whether it's smut or subversive:

"Sex is a natural part of life and culture. It just is! For many people it's a fundamental part of the human experience and as such intersects with artistic expression in a multitude of ways! Treating it as a completely taboo subject that cannot reach the public eye protects no one and mostly helps contribute to regressive attitudes surrounding sex and sexuality."

Yang concurs: "There's of course a concrete material harm: many LGBTQ game makers have unstable living and housing situations, and a few hundred dollars a month of income can make or break their lives.

"There's also a general harm against our free speech rights. Many of my experimental art games explore gay sexuality, and it’s difficult to make art about that topic without some nudity. A unilateral ban on NSFW content amounts to a ban on LGBTQ communities from engaging in political speech."

Yang, in particular, expresses a deep frustration with what he sees as selectively championing free speech from industry titans. "The larger commercial game industry champions free speech often only at their convenience. Corporate game industry lobbyists will gladly fight government regulation of violent video games and gambling, but they're strangely silent when LGBTQ indie game makers are in the crosshairs like this."

But what about hate speech? The paradox of tolerance is giving me a huge headache lately—while payment processors' actions seem untenable in a democratic society (I certainly didn't vote for any of these CEOs) the target Collective Shout used to rally its campaign, No Mercy, did glorify some repugnant stuff.

Hsia/Thomson, however, argues that—outside the news cycle of moral panics—these games tend to sputter out on their own.

"Neither of us had even heard of No Mercy prior to this recent news cycle. We still don’t know what that game is or is about and the impression we get is that it's another one of those games that's attempting to capitalise largely on extreme shock value. There seem to be a few of those every year and none of them amount to much even when left alone."

While "questions like this do highlight the importance of nuance. Our feeling is that any blanket ban is going to ensnare a whole lot of legitimate artistic expression while malicious shock-content will continue to be produced, often just sidestepping the ban entirely."

Yang more-or-less agrees: "Listen, I'm not saying this is easy to figure out or talk about. Sexuality is complicated. But Collective Shout and its right wing allies exploit this complexity in bad faith to justify imposing their conservative morality on all of us."

It was never easy

While these recent moves are troubling, Hsia/Thomson explain to me that adult game creators—whether making material that's titillating, challenging, or both—have never had it easy.

"Covering adult topics introduces new and exciting pitfalls," I'm told, such as Apple having banned adult content from its app stores for some time, "in explicit contrast to how it handles books and music. Their official policy is the games are different from other art and must be censored."

There's also, as previously mentioned with Yang's Rinse & Repeat, the issue of adult games being forbidden on Twitch or demonetised on YouTube. These policies "often result in demonetization on places like YouTube or shadowbanning on places like TikTok, meaning that curators and influencers are heavily disincentivized from covering your work." Which, as one imagines, is a death knell for any struggling indie.

As part of our conversation, Hisa/Thomson recommended some of Robert Yang's work, alongside Christine Love's games—Ladykiller in a Bind (that also won an award in 2017) has been deindexed on Itch.io—and the work of Nina Freeman.

But what, if anything, can be done from here?

"Individual developers don't have a lot of recourse," Hsia/Thomson write, "especially since we basically never deal with payment processors directly. Even platform holders don't seem to have a lot of recourse given the way they're responding to pressure.

"Right now it seems like the most immediate course of action is to get as many people as possible to complain to the payment processors."

Both Yang, Hsia, and Thomson highlighted the aptly-named site yellat.money as a place to start, alongside an ACLU petition that's nearing its goal of 150,000 signatures. Yang also noted that "if Collective Shout is going to wage culture war against LGBTQ people and 'obscene' women, perhaps it should drop its fake charity status."

Australian charity law is a little complex when it comes to a group like Collective Shout, but to be a charity, you must be operating for the public benefit and have a charitable purpose—qualifiers Yang and his contemporaries argue aren't being fulfilled. Charities advocating for specific political parties are forbidden, but those with specific political aims aren't. Regardless, anyone can complain to the ACNC if they so wish.

Hsia/Thomson hope that, "given that Collective Shout was allegedly able to spur this action with only 1000 people, it stands to reason that a much larger group of people issuing sustained complaints might elicit at least some response."

VShojo, the vtuber agency that was called out in a video on Monday by Ironmouse—who is arguably the biggest vtuber on Twitch—for failing to pay her "a significant amount of funds" and withholding a $515,000 donation to charity, is shutting down.

After hearing her story, almost every other vtuber who was part of VShojo decided to leave as well, which included popular streamers like Kson, Projekt Melody, and Henya.

With its reputation in shambles and memes about its apparent death all over X, VShojo CEO Justin "Gunrun" Ignacio posted a statement today admitting that he royally screwed up.

"VShojo has failed, and I've mismanaged the company into the situation you're all witnessing," he wrote on X. "So today I am sharing the difficult news that VShojo is shutting down, and I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us to this point."

Ignacio says despite raising "around $11 million" to run VShojo, it never made enough revenue to support the cost of, well, running a talent agency. Paying creators, investing in onboarding new ones, planning concerts and events, and paying staff emptied the bank and forced him to spend the "past few months" looking for ways to keep it afloat.

While focused on securing "additional investment capital" last year, the company spent some of the $515,000 raised by Ironmouse's 30-day "subathon" stream for the Immune Deficiency Foundation—which was so popular she broke the record for the most subscriptions on Twitch. Ignacio says he "later learned" that it was intended for charity and "firmly believed" VShojo would be able to make up the money once outside funding came through, but that those efforts were unsuccessful.

The statement doesn't indicate if any of the charity funds are left and if any of it will be donated as originally intended.

"I am deeply sorry to all the talents, staff, friends, and community members who believed in our brand. You did not deserve this," he wrote.

Ignacio's statement doesn't acknowledge the reports of VShojo also failing to pay artists and vtubers who hadn't publicly announced their affiliation with the agency. X users have also found evidence that Ignacio retweeted posts about Ironmouse's fundraising stream on his personal account, which suggests he did know about the money she raised before spending it.

The statement also doesn't mention anything about paying any of the former VShojo vtubers the money they've allegedly been owed for months, and in one case an entire year.

Ironmouse, who has been open about her rare immune disorder and personal connection to the Immune Deficiency Foundation, started another fundraising campaign to make up for what was lost by VShojo. So far, it has managed to raise over $1.2 million, more than doubling the amount from before.

Withholding serious amounts of money from the most popular vtubers on Twitch isn't a great idea, it turns out. Ironmouse, who is probably the biggest vtuber on the streaming platform, published a video Monday in which she alleges that her former agency, VShojo, withheld a $515,000 donation to charity along with "a significant amount of funds" that she's owed personally.

Last year, Ironmouse broke the record for the most subscriptions on Twitch during a 30-day "subathon" stream to raise money for the Immune Deficiency Foundation. That was also the stream that raised $515,000. But because the contributions weren't made through Twitch's fundraising platform Tiltify, it was on VShojo to make the donation on her behalf.

In the new video, Ironmouse claims the agency still hasn't followed through with the donation over a year later and it's one of the reasons she has decided to leave and go independent.

"I wish I could tell you more, but right now I have been advised to wait for legal proceedings," she said. "As of right now, I am an independent vtuber. I am at a loss of what to do right now."

For most of her streaming career, Ironmouse has talked about her struggles with a rare immune disorder called common variable immunodeficiency, which left her prone to getting sick and being bedridden for most of her life. Ironmouse says the Immune Deficiency Foundation helped her immensely and it's why the charity is so important to her.

"This entire situation has broken me," she said. "I just wanted to do something good and to give back to a community that helped me."

Since posting the video, there's been an overwhelming outpouring of support for Ironmouse's decision from the vtuber community, including other VShojo members. Kson, Projekt Melody, AmaLee, Hime Hajime, Kuro, and Michi Mochievee have all announced that they will be leaving VShojo immediately. During a stream discussing the news, Kson claimed the company hasn't paid her since September 2024.

Fans have also noticed that almost all of the vtubers associated with VShojo have removed the agency's name from their X profiles, suggesting that all of them will be cutting ties with it.

In the wake of losing several of its most popular streamers while more claims of missed payments continue to come out, VShojo hasn't made any official comments on the situation.

The only bit of good news here is that Ironmouse opened a Tiltify campaign for the Immune Deficiency Foundation to try to make up for the money VShojo withheld—and it's already raised over $539,000 against a humble goal of $10,000, matching the original sum from last year's month-long subathon in roughly 24 hours.

I guess this is what happens when you piss off some of the most popular vtubers on Twitch and their loyal audiences. To me, this is a clear case of VShojo facing the consequences of those actions, also known as "finding out".

This feels like a weird nostalgia pull for a PC gaming site, but think back to the first time you really struggled in a Pokémon game—I bet the bleating of your caught companion's dwindling health bar still makes your palms sweat. Well, it turns out Gemini starts to make questionable choices when its Pokémon team is on the ropes too.

While bigging up the Gemini 2.X model family in their latest report, Google DeepMind highlights a surprising case study—namely, the Twitch channel Gemini_Plays_Pokemon. This project comes from Joel Zhang, an engineer unaffiliated with Google. However, during the AI's two runs through Pokémon Blue (going with Squirtle as its starter Pokémon both times), the Gemini team at DeepMind observed an interesting phenomenon they describe in the appendix as 'Agent Panic'.

Basically, as soon as things start to look a bit dicey, the AI agent attempts to get the heck out of Dodge. When Gemini 2.5 Pro's party is either low in health or Power Points, the team observed, "model performance appears to correlate with a qualitatively observable degradation in the model’s reasoning capability – for instance, completely forgetting to use the pathfinder tool in stretches of gameplay while this condition persists."

Due to this (plus a fixation on a hallucinated Tea item that exists in the remake but not the original 90s game), it took the AI agent over 813 hours to finish Pokémon Blue for the first time. After some tweaking by Zhang, the AI agent shaved off hundreds of hours from its second run through…clocking in at a playtime of 406.5 hours.

While playing and replaying these games definitely made these games feel expansive in my youth, it's worth noting that the main story of Pokémon Blue can be completed in about 26 hours according to How Long to Beat. So, no, Gemini is not very good at playing a children's video game that is now more than a quarter of a century old.

While I enjoy this report's cracking scatter graphs charting the AI's lengthy progress towards beating the Elite Four, I'm less enthused by many other aspects of this exercise. For one, AI agents playing videogames in an attempt to benchmark their abilities just fills me with existential despair—why make anything if a robot is just going to chew it up and spit it out again? All of that also goes without saying just how little these 'AI benchmarking' attempts actually tell us (though TechCrunch does a good job of delving into this).

Then there's the term "Agent Panic" itself, a not-so-subtle attempt to humanise the AI that is bolstered by seeing it 'struggle' through a videogame intended for children. It's important to underline that AI agents do not experience emotions such as 'panic' or even really think, and these seemingly hasty decisions could simply be Gemini mimicking patterns found in whatever training data it's been fed.

It's a neat novelty to see an AI agent play a beloved videogame badly, but that doesn't mean anyone outside of Deepmind needs to breathlessly pat Gemini on its strictly metaphorical back.

PerriKaryal is a tech creator on Twitch with a Master's degree in psychology, and she ain't afraid to use it. Her latest headlining project is a largely hands-free control scheme using an EEG. The brain cap detects distinct peaks of brain activity, which the streamer's brain-computer-interface coding then interprets as gamepad inputs. So, yes, of course, she's used it to beat multiple Elden Ring bosses in 'mind control' challenge runs.

I recently chatted to the Twitch streamer about taking on Elden Ring Nightreign with her big brain, but what I neglected to mention in my earlier feature was that this demo was a PlayStation 5 exclusive. This presented its own obstacle to navigate, as PerriKaryal's control setup is largely locked to PC.

She says, "I had to go all around the houses [to get it to] work on different consoles. But now that I've got that, I can do it on any console. Now the mind control will work on Nintendo! It will work on a phone, which is very cool… I don't know if Nintendo will let me, but maybe."

No, I didn't ask the streamer, 'Mind control on the Switch 2 when?'—but I am thinking about 'mind control in Splatoon' very strongly now. At any rate, maybe this means we'll see a 'mind control' run of The Duskbloods sometime soon.

Still, nothing about PerriKaryals' setup comes easily. For one thing, all of the in-game actions are on a one-second delay due to latency, complicating even basic coordination with online teammates in Nightreign.

She elaborates, "Something I have to do in Soulslike games, that I don't necessarily have to do in other games, is really know what's coming next one whole second before [in-game enemies] do it. And sometimes I get it wrong, and sometimes it just doesn't work."

After all, imagining pushing a block to dodge and spinning a plate to attack is all well and good in Shadow of the Erdtree—but as the brain-computer-interface software can't tell the difference between two separate thoughts, a hectic boss fight like the Divine Beast Dancing Lion requires a huge amount of focus.

The Twitch streamer elaborates, "Like there's a really clear attack that this boss is doing, and he's definitely 100% about to beat me up. And I can see it coming, and I'm trying to dodge or block or whatever. Well, now it's not working for whatever reason, probably because there's a big, beefy man who's about to hit me, and I'm a little bit stressed out about it!"

For these reasons, it took the tech creator about seven hours to defeat the Divine Beast Dancing Lion boss in the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, while Malenia in the base game took far, far longer. After revealing the rot goddess took over 14 hours to beat on stream, plus hours of training besides, PerriKaryal jokes, "I think there might be something wrong with me, honestly."

As someone who never managed to get good at Soulslikes myself, I'm compelled to ask what keeps the streamer going through attempt, after attempt, after attempt to beat an Elden Ring boss with just her brain.

She admits the EEG can uncomfortably press on her skull during longer streams, and that juggling the abstract mental commands required by her BCI software used to be draining. However, after so much practice, "even Soulslike games become quite meditative."

She tells me, "Honestly, it's the same as any Dark Souls player, really. It's the reward of mastery…you know that you can do it, and you kind of have to. And I think, as a person, I'm quite like that anyway; if I say I'm going to do something, I'm going to do it. If it's within my wheelhouse, I can't not."

If I've learnt anything from 64 hours with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33—other than my index knuckle probably shouldn't twinge like that—it's that I can definitely learn to parry. Perhaps I can take inspiration from PerriKaryal's determination and finally give Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice another go.

Most gamers have at least entertained the fantasy of going full Jesse Faden, tearing up the Oldest House in Control, and playing videogames with just your mind. Exceedingly few actually embark on a tech project that makes that a reality. Twitch streamer PerriKaryal has defeated many of FromSoftware's toughest customers using predominantly the power of her thoughts alone.

When I speak to PerriKaryal shortly before she flies to Rotterdam for TwitchCon Europe, I ask who has been her favourite Soulsborne boss to beat with her big brain. "Rykard [from Elden Ring]. 100% Rykard," she answers, going on to add that using mind control to dodge during the snake-face's second phase, "feels like flying."

"If you watch the live streams, I have a smile on my face the entire time."

Across PerriKaryal's various online bios, she offers the phrase "I do ✨projects✨" by way of self-description, with her most wellknown tech adventure incorporating a consumer-grade EEG from Emotiv for a largely hands-free control scheme. Using Emotiv's brain-computer interface software, the streamer has essentially keybound specific spikes of brain activity to inputs on a virtual gamepad that has allowed her to beat Elden Ring using 'mind control'.

All of that said, it's nowhere near as straightforward as thinking about dodging and witnessing thy Tarnished instantly begin rolling all over the shop.

"There's a misconception that it's easy and that it's really intuitive because it's in your brain, it's your thoughts—and it's kind of the opposite," PerriKaryal says. The tech creator goes on to explain that rather than the steep cost of the EEG or the technical challenge of coding being the main obstacles, the reason you don't see more folks playing games with brain-computer-interface control schemes is simply "because it's really, really, really hard to do."

In order for the EmotivBCI software to register PerriKaryal's thoughts, the brain activity has to be markedly distinct. Thinking thoughts that activate distinct parts of the brain often requires a layer of abstraction; in Elden Ring: Nightreign, PerriKaryal imagines pushing a block forward to dodge and a cricket jumping while also pulsing her inner ear muscles to attack. But, as you may already be aware, this multiplayer game requires far more than just those two inputs.

A decidedly different beast compared to Elden Ring, Nightreign features a battle royale-style shrinking ring. You'll blitz through foes in the hopes of harvesting enough XP to take on the bosses that lie at the map's centre. For PerriKaryal, 1000 ms ping from her EEG device complicates even basic co-ordination with her teammates. But Nightreign is a step-up for the 'mind control' setup in particular as there's also "way more buttons"; different button combinations conjure different skills, but as the EEG control scheme can't register more than one input at a time, Nightreign is basically impossible to play purely via brain activity.

PerriKaryal's full setup can incorporate voice commands to manage trickier inputs, while eye and head tracking offer hands-free camera control. Still, watching PerriKaryal play Nightreign with this predominantly hands-free setup is no less impressive—especially as getting just one of these brain activity inputs to work even semi-reliably is far from a solved problem in the wider neurotech space.

"I've [spoken to] neurotech companies specifically about how the hell I've managed to get so many inputs working at the same time—they're like, 'We don't know how you've done this,'" the streamer shares, going on to add, "The answer is just sheer practice and willpower—and clearly, you know, too much time on my hands."

Brain Training

Besides time, PerriKaryal also has a Master's in Psychology. Alongside beating Elden Ring's bosses with just her brain, the streamer also shares her neuroscience knowledge with her Twitch audience through educational Just Chatting streams, taking things "trapped away in the steel box of rigorous academic institutions" and making them more accessible.

"I like to take news and analyse the psychology of it without forcing people to read academic papers," She explains, then jokes, "I read the papers and then I make it Girly Pop."

Despite what you may expect, the streamer describes her experiences on Twitch as being largely positive.

"Twitch is a very interesting platform, and you get a lot of good apples with [the] bad apples, as you do on all social media. And there is an opportunity when something's live for people to try and mess it up for you," she concedes, before then adding, "But my experience has actually been really, really positive, especially since I started doing tech projects like the mind control—people are really hyped for it in general! I really like the community that I built, because I think I've managed to drag people with similar interests into one place, and people are really nice."

Indeed, during mind control challenge runs, it's not uncommon to see the streamer's chat flooded with encouraging messages to the tune of 'Go, Perri, go!' and 'You've got this!' Besides educational lectures and her headlining 'mind control' setup, the tech creator has also presented an interactive '3D stream' to her audience.

"Basically you can go around a [holographic] point cloud [representation of] me. All of the comments on Instagram [were like], 'Why is no one, you know, dive bombing into certain areas?' [...] There was, like, maybe 30, 40 people on the stream. There was no one doing that, because they were all very respectful. And that's kind of the community, and I really like it."

PerriKaryal streamed live from this year's TwitchCon Europe, playing Elden Ring: Nightreign at Bandai Namco's booth. The tech creator has also previously run 'mind control competitions' at similar in-person events.

For instance, during the long running annual LAN party The Gathering in Norway, PerriKaryal invited eventgoers to try their brain at a simplified Doom-like game.

She recalls this first tournament of thoughts, "People would just put on the headset— I taught them how to just get the one command fairly quickly, because that's not too tricky to do. It's not perfect, but it's doable! And then they tried the game a couple times, and whoever got the high score won a little headset that Emotiv gave me to hand out—which was really nice of them as well. And we were going all day, which was really, really, really fun."

She laughs when she remembers, "There was this guy that got really obsessed with it. I only let people have half an hour sessions, to be fair, but he just kept coming back—had to start again, but just kept coming back! He won, and he deserved it, so that was very, very fun."

Chipping In

The origin story behind both her streaming career and her 'mind control' setup began in her uni days.

"I got super into brain-computer-interfaces, because that's something I didn't do at uni. I just used the EEG to record data when people were scared or whatever it was [...] But BCI is really, really interesting."

For instance, a team at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in New York have created a two-way BCI that not only allows patients to move paralysed limbs, but returns sensation as well. As for non-invasive BCI developments, Cognixion's Axon-R headset is attempting to leverage AR alongside machine learning to give locked-in-syndrome patients a voice again.

But alongside these scientific advancements that may genuinely help more people one day, Elon Musk's Neuralink brain chip or Gabe Newell's BCI company Starfish have enjoyed big tech business buzz in recent years. I ask PerriKaryal about big tech's recent infatuation with so-called 'brain chips.' Though excited about the wider scientific field, she's also cautious, saying, "We're seeing [it a lot] with AI as well, [but] I think sometimes there's this big rush to do as much tech, tech, tech as possible, and not enough pulling back with safety. So I don't know about you, but I'm a little bit concerned about getting a chip in my head."

She's definitely not the only one. Still, BCIs continue to be a source of fascination for the Twitch streamer.

"And so I got super into that, and realised, 'Okay, you can make it record your pattern of brain activity. It can remember it. You can keybind it,'" she explains, before quipping, "And it just spiraled out of control."

Three female Twitch streamers midway through a weeklong marathon stream were followed, harassed and then threatened by a man calling himself "Russell" live from Santa Monica's Pacific Park.

Content creators Cinna, Valkyrae and Emiru had just listened to the man sing when he asked for Emiru's phone number. After she refused, and refused to enter it into his phone, the man moved aggressively towards the group, appearing to focus on Emiru, and said "I'll kill you right now, I'll kill you right now."

The streamers moved away in panic while calling for security, their cameraman physically intervened to stop the man, and a nearby security guard moved over as the women ran away. The stream stopped shortly afterwards. Here is a clip of the incident. Santa Monica police subsequently escorted the streamers, took a report and conducted a search for the man, who has not yet been found or identified.

It has since emerged that the man had been following the group for a period of time beforehand. The fact this was a livestream also means there's no shortage of footage of both the incident and the lead-up. This seemingly innocuous clip shows him approaching the group and taking a selfie with both them and the cameraman.

This clip occurs shortly afterwards (the on-screen sub count is a few hundred higher) and shows the man, who has now removed his hoodie, singing to the group before asking Emiru for her number, to which she responds that she doesn't have her phone, after which he tries to get her to enter the number into his phone. Emiru deflects the request but things have clearly gotten awkward, at which point the man says "I'm just going to keep following her."

The escalation occurs almost immediately after this: The streamers move away, joking they don't need any more stalkers, pulling up their hoods and putting on sunglasses, and talking about what just happened. The man can then be heard shouting off-camera and says "I'll fucking fight you right now", at which point the women become visibly shaken, begin calling security, and try to move away together.

This is when the man approaches before aggressively moving towards the group while making repeated death threats. The incoming presence of the security guard, and the streamers' cameraman putting himself bodily between the man and the three women, stops the man from reaching the group. The women run away from the scene. Shortly afterwards the stream ends.

"We are aware of video footage circulating online related to the incident and are reviewing the information that has been shared publicly," a spokesperson for the Santa Monica police told the BBC.

"I'm sorry for not saying anything sooner I've just been in shock," Emiru later posted on X. "I was streaming with Rae and Cinna last night and a man asked for my phone number. I turned him down, and he started following our group and threatening to kill us.

"I wish I could say this was some kind of one-in-a-million incident, but the truth is, it is not. This is what life is like for girls. I hope if anything, people see what happened and realize how much of a reality it is for women and content creators as a whole."

"We are all OK and have been with police," said Valkyrae, explaining the group had decided to just end the subathon. "No means no. You’re not entitled to anybody. The fact that this man threatened our lives after being rejected while we were in a group, in public and live on-stream just shows the harsh reality women live in. This happens off-camera to women all the time."

Valkyrae is angered by commentators "accusing my friends and I for faking this and blaming us instead of questioning the man's behavior ... some men will hate women and blame women no matter the situation."

Cinna said on a later stream with Valkyrae that the clip circulating online "does not do it justice for how scary it was… It is an attempt on our life and we are taking it very seriously. He said he was going to kill us, he kept trying to get something out of his pocket. We had to run into a store screaming that somebody was going to kill us."

Cinna has subsequently shared a message asking for the internet sleuths to stay away from trying to identify the individual and leave it up to police. "We don't want a false match to cause harm to anyone and want to make sure we take the precautions to find the guy the right way," said Cinna on X. "We are getting the police a ton of info and also making sure we can press maximum charges.

"Don't even feel like I have to say this but holy fuck some of you are terrible human beings and having to be harassed for this while we're in absolute shock at an attempt on our lives is fucking insane.

"It sucks that a marathon that was to highlight women streamers is unfortunately ending up on one of the worst things that can happen to a female streamer. We're very thankful it didn't end with one of us getting seriously hurt."

Twitch streamer Hasan Piker has been banned, again, apparently for suggesting that if the Republican Party was serious about combating Medicare fraud, they would "kill Rick Scott," the former governor of Florida who now sits as a Republican senator.

The statement came during a stream in which Hasan was reacting to an interview with US House Speaker Mike Johnson, who said the US government, presumably through Elon Musk's DOGE agency, is going to investigate social security, medicare and medicaid, and "carve out the fraud, waste, and abuse, and find efficiencies."

"Fraud is not coming from individuals, it's coming from providers," Piker said during his stream.

"They're not tackling providers, they're not actually going after false billing. They are trying to cut recipients. [Fraud] is not happening at the point of recipient. If you cared about Medicare fraud, or Medicaid fraud, you would kill Rick Scott. You wouldn't make Rick Scott—former governor of Florida Rick Scott—you wouldn't make him ... a prominent part of the Republican party.

It's definitely not the most well-considered choice of words, but Piker justified his point—put more temperately, that Scott is more responsible for Medicare fraud than its end users—by noting that Scott's healthcare company Columbia/HCA was fined a total of more than $1.7 billion following, as Scott's now-defunct website (which you can still see via the Wayback Machine) put it, an "investigation into Columbia/HCA’s Medicare billing" while he was CEO.

Twitch doesn't comment on the reasons for individual account suspensions so I can't say for certain that Piker was suspended for the Rick Scott statement, but it seems pretty likely, particularly given the firestorm of controversy his remark generated on X—amplified by existing criticism of his vocal support for Palestine.

Piker himself suggested the Rick Scott comment was the cause for the suspension, although he was not exactly contrite about it.

"I'm sorry!" Piker wrote following the suspension. "I'll choose my words carefully next time and say 'if Mike Johnson cares abt Medicare fraud (since he wants to cut 800m from Medicaid/Medicare) he’d call for MAX PUNISHMENT for current FL GOP senator/former gov Rick Scott—who has done the most medicare fraud in us history!"

How long Piker will be suspended from Twitch remains to be seen, but this isn't his first such rodeo: According to StreamerBans, this is his fifth suspension, the longest previous suspension lasting for seven days.

A recent update to Twitch's enforcement system saw the process of punishing violations change. Instead of maintaining strikes against your account indefinitely, they will now disappear after various lengths of time to "reduce the risk that streamers lose their communities and livelihoods for low severity violations."

Despite only 4% of active streamers receiving any sort of suspension, Twitch seems to think that the current policy concerning violations is too harsh. "Before today, every violation counted against your account permanently, even minor violations of our rules," the blog post says. "This system disproportionately impacted longtime streamers, as over time, multiple minor infractions could result in an indefinite suspension. This process could be overly punitive and was one that didn’t acknowledge community members who had learned from their past mistakes." Now, if you violate the Twitch community guidelines, you'll be able to track the enforcement on the Appeals Portal.

You'll be able to use this to see what kind of violation you committed and when this strike on your profile will expire. Most violations, like cheating in online games, are labelled low-severity and will expire after 90 days. However, high-severity violations like hateful conduct will stick around for one to two years. However, that doesn't mean Twitch is going to go easy on repeat offenders.

Individuals who repeatedly break the community guidelines will face escalating consequences. If you violate the same policy multiple times within the expiration window, your suspension will increase: "For example, if you receive a stream sniping violation and then stream snipe someone else in a month (before the prior violation has expired), you will receive a longer suspension the second time because it was the same type of violation."

The end punishment for repeat offenders will also still be indefinite suspensions. "The most severe harms will still result in immediate indefinite suspensions," the post says. "If you are indefinitely suspended due to accumulating multiple violations within a short time period, you are able to apply for reinstatement after six months."

Other than making it easier to skirt punishment for community guideline violations, Twitch is also adding a helpful feature that'll make finding what you were punished for more straightforward. Instead of leaving streamers to sift through hours of footage, Twitch will now provide the chat message or snippet of the stream that violated policy. "Further down the line, if a violation takes place on-stream or in a VOD, we’ll provide a clip for you to review," the post adds. "We’ll have more to share about these changes in the coming months."

While there may be some scope to use these temporary violations maliciously to skirt permanent punishment, all in all, it does seem like a sensible change, especially for streamers who have been on Twitch for years.

Typically I open these news stories with a quippy hook or an interesting bit of imagery—something to get you into the right mindset. In this case, however, I am stunned into metaphorical silence, because goddamn, this might be one of the most impressive challenge runs I've ever seen.

Souls streamer dinossindgeil, also known as Nico, has successfully beaten every mainline base Souls game (Dark Souls 1-3, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Bloodborne, Elden Ring, and Demons Souls) without getting hit. Back-to-back. Without levelling up in any of them. This genuinely awe-inspiring achievement was managed on a Stream over the weekend, though you can watch his final moments of triumph on the streamer's YouTube channel below.

After finally snuffing out the Soul of Cinder in Dark Souls 3, Nico immediately bursts into tears—his partner rushes over to hug him: "We did it," he pretty much weeps. "Almost two years, almost two years. Oh my god, we did it … that was perfect RNG, literally perfect RNG, it couldn't have been any better."

It's hard to overstate how titanic of an achievement this is. I cannot even possibly fathom the mental fortitude it takes to beat seven entire souls games without taking a single hit. What's mad is that this is actually something Nico has done before, just without the level 1 limitation.

Back in 2022, he completed the same challenge—with the aid of levels and items aplenty, of course. It took him about 120 days back then. It's not at all surprising that this one took longer, though—limiting your power progression in these games is a challenge on its own, requiring you to use specific items and builds to combat the uphill struggle. Let alone doing it seven times. In a row. Without getting hit. The full VoD, just to put it in perspective, is about 11 hours long—that's a herculean amount of focus to sustain for that amount of time. The mind boggles.

Once Nico's had time to calm down and, understandably, work out the catharsis through his eyeducts, he asks his viewership: "That was good entertainment, right?" Before dedicating the run to Lilly, his late cat. "I promised to myself that I'm gonna finish it for her, no matter what happens. I didn't want to stop doing it because I kinda promised it." Jeez, now I'm getting all choked up.

As for what's next? "I'm gonna do something different now, guys." Fair enough. "Some are souls [runs] of course, some variety sh*t as well … I will figure something out guys, I'm not 100% sure." I reckon a nap's in order, and maybe some therapy. "What a day," Nico concludes, before signing off. "I wanna just get naked and run around the city right now."

It's 2025 and somehow we've still yet to see a Twitch stream happening from space—until next week, that is. NASA has announced it'll be doing a livestream a whole 250 miles from Earth aboard the International Space Station, on Wednesday 12 February.

The stream will be happening on the official NASA Twitch and is set to feature astronauts like Don Pettit and Matt Dominick—my astronaut knowledge is appalling but they both have Wikipedia entries so I can only assume they're important based off that metric alone—with Twitch chat having the opportunity to ask all sorts of questions about what it's actually like being up in space.

Now the cynical part of me can't help but automatically go to the absolute worst-case scenario on how that Twitch chat is actually going to look. I can only assume it's going to go somewhat feral, and I do wonder if seasoned astronauts are ready to deal with an undiluted internet chatroom happening in real-time. I'm sure they'll have plenty to talk about regardless though, with NASA promising all sorts of insight into day-to-day life aboard the space station while spending a hefty amount of time plugging their various programmes and research.

NASA communications director Brittany Brown called it "the first of many" Twitch streams the government agency intends to do from the cosmos and you know what? Hell yeah. I'm all for cool stuff like this happening on social and streaming platforms, and I'm sure NASA has already calculated the positive exposure it'll have on their end.

It does perhaps spell bad news for the notorious streamer IShowSpeed, who just a couple of months ago had announced his grand ambitions to go live from space. "I want to stream in space one day," he told Forbes in December last year. "Once I talk to Elon Musk, it's happening."

I mean, I guess that's still a possibility, but I can't help but wonder if he'll be a bit miffed that he's not the first one to do it. I'd like to proclaim from my high horse that I wouldn't be, but I probably would. Especially if I'd just so happened to very recently proclaim my desires to stream from space, only to have Big Space itself do it first.

Regardless, it's an exciting concept. It might be far more boring in practice than I'm building it up in my head to be. But hey, it's a first, and that's pretty neat. The event is set to kick off at 8:45am PT / 11:45am ET / 4:45pm GMT on February 12.

Over the weekend, Marvel Rivals put on one of the first tournaments that the new hero shooter has seen in conjunction with Twitch, and while it was certainly set out to be a big success, some of the streamers involved had some not-so-nice things to say about it.

YouTuber Rachel "Valkyrae" Hofstetter was one of the streamers that played in this Twitch Rivals tournament, and after a bunch of tough games, she flipped out just a little bit about how poorly balanced all the team match-ups were.

"Which Twitch staff member do I need to talk to? I don't understand how this happened," Valkyrae says during her Twitch stream. "I need to say something. I waited five years to play in a Twitch Rival for this shit to happen? This is insane. Who planned this garbage?"

The main issue arose after Twitch apparently changed the rules of the tournament to allow teams of multiple GM+ ranked players: "For context, the upcoming Twitch Rivals had a two-player limit for GM+ players, but they changed it to four players just a week before the tournament," a streamer known as bogur says. "Now it's just a bunch of eternity sweats (like us) with over 3,000 hours stomping on streamers who are just there for fun.

"At this point, it's more of a pro tournament where the high-rated players will game, and everyone else will be AFK. Twitch Rivals, in my honest opinion, should be about content creators learning the game, competing, and having fun, but how are they supposed to do any of that if every game is a stomp?... Right now, it's coughing baby vs hydrogen bomb."

Twitch Rivals is intended to be a spectacle in which people can watch some of their favourite streamers team up and compete against each other, but it's also a competition.

There's a $200,000 prize pool to win from, with the first-place team getting $21,000, second place getting $18,000, and third place getting $12,000. So, I understand why some teams would want to stack as many high-level players as possible to increase the odds of winning and taking the prize money for themselves. Teams even get $750 for winning and $450 when they lose, so I don't feel too bad for all involved. Even still, it's true that some of the games didn't seem particularly fair.

I was watching Shroud's Twitch Rivals stream, and even then, there were a couple of moments where he and his team were completely outmatched. One game in the Hydra Charteris Base map saw Shroud go up against who he thought was the best player in Marvel Rivals. This person was playing Black Panther and, at one point, was able to tear through the enemy team.

"This is much better than the last team we played against," Shroud says after reviewing the kill cam. After one of his teammates tries to keep the morale up by saying that they only lost one team fight, Shroud replies: "No, I don't think you understand what that Black Panther just did. That player is better than everyone in this videogame. That is the best player, bro—I don't think you understand what I just saw."

There were more than a few humbling moments for a lot of streamers involved, but after a few days of matches, the final winner ended up being Team Hogzmr. The team actually dedicated their win to their former captain, Dokibird, who had to drop out 24 hours before the tournament due to yet another change to the rule book. This time, Twitch said that each team had to reduce the amount of GM+ players on their team, meaning Dokibird had to cut two players from Team Hogzmr.

"Unfortunately, there will be no Marvel Rivals Twitch Rivals tournament from me tomorrow," Dokibird says. "I had to drop out as captain because I was forced to cut two of my teammates who have peaked Eternity and above. I made the decision to cut myself out because my teammates deserve the money and exposure more."

Players who had to drop out of the tournament due to this rule change were apparently compensated, but it was still a massive disappointment for those who couldn't take part. "Putting me in the pro category is always such a detriment to any team I join because I cannot perform at a level like that, if ever," Dokibird continues. "I'm just a competitive person, but I'm not at a level [you'd] call professional. There's so little opportunities to compete for those who are content creators but aren't as skilled as regular pros but are grouped within that category, and I just want to experience a competitive environment again for a game I was really passionate about."

All in all, while the Twitch Rivals tournament was definitely entertaining to watch, it seems like it was pretty messy for all involved. But it's not the first time a Twitch Rivals tournament has had its fair share of challenges. Back in 2021 a Warzone tournament was shaken up by hacking allegations, and before that, xQc was even suspended from Twitch for stream-sniping during a Fall Guys tournament. But who knows, maybe Twitch will learn from this Marvel Rivals tournament and set more concrete rules about player ranks and who can and cannot play from the get-go, just so everyone's on the same page.

Streamer and former pro FPS player Michael "Shroud" Grzesiek has announced a January "Fragathon" for charity, with the main event being a promise to donate $1 (with potential multipliers) for every kill he scores on-stream over the coming month.

"Last year, I lost my dad to cancer, and ever since I've been looking for ways I could support people going through similar situations," Shroud said in an announcement video on Twitter. "For the entire month of January, I'm going to be going live with a frag counter, for each elimination on stream, one dollar's gonna be going to charity.

"Subs and donations are gonna be increasing this multiplier, making each frag worth more and more. But I won't be alone. I'm inviting all my friends to come by and donate frags in person at a LAN center that I'm building in my house."

That in-person element will also mean additional live variety events and challenges the streamer has planned for January. What's more, Shroud has committed to donating most of the stream's revenue to charity for the next month as well. Shroud's section for the event on his Twitch page specifies that the donations will be going to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

"In addition to the frag counter, 100% of proceeds from subs, donations, and bits will be going to an amazing charity," Shroud said. "So I hope you'll join me in January to help raise money for a great cause in the most gamer fashion ever."

The announcement video ends with a very sweet moment: A clip of Shroud's father walking in while he's streaming in classic "Are ya winning son?" fashion. When Shroud asks if Grzesiek the elder has anything he wants to say to the stream's Polish viewers, he thanks them in Polish for supporting his son. The event's inaugural stream occurred last night, but you'll be able to tune in for more over the course of January.

Twitch has changed its hateful conduct policy to prohibit the use of the term "Zionist" to attack or demean individuals or groups.

"As part of our Hateful Conduct policy, we prohibit the use of terms that may not be harmful or abusive in isolation, but can be used as a slur or to denigrate others in certain contexts," Twitch wrote. "In line with that approach, starting today, using the term 'Zionist' to attack or demean another individual or group of people on the basis of their background or religious belief is against our rules."

Using the term in its political context, however—Zionism, simply put, is a modern political movement that advocates for an explicitly Jewish Israeli state—will not be against the rules, even if applied critically. Twitch's community guidelines now specify that calling someone a "Zionist [animal]" is prohibited, for instance, but saying "Zionist settlers keep encroaching Palestinian borders" is allowed.

"Our goal isn't to stifle conversation about or criticism of an institution or ideology, but to prevent coded hate directed at individuals and groups of people," Twitch wrote.

The Anti-Defamation League, which pressured Twitch into banning several Arab streamers in October over a month-old TwitchCon panel, took credit for this change as well.

"We are glad Twitch acted on our recommendation to make this change," the ADL wrote on X. "However, policy is only as strong as enforcement, and we will be vigilant and appropriately skeptical about Twitch's enforcement of this new policy."

The ADL's stance on the issue is that "anti-Zionists are antisemitic." The org says it "believes, strongly, that you cannot separate the fight for civil rights from the fight for the Jewish people's right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland."

Enforcement will indeed be a bugbear for Twitch, which will have to disentangle valid criticism from personal attack, and then convince people on both sides of the argument that its decision was correct.

Streamer Kai Cenat has overtaken VTuber Ironmouse to break the Twitch subscriber record, the second time he's achieved the feat. It's all down to the ongoing "Mafiathon 2", a demonstration of livestream endurance that will see Cenat streaming for around a month: Cenat refers to his fans as the "Kai Mafia", hence the name.

Cenat had been dethroned by Ironmouse on October 2, 2024, who achieved 326,252 subscribers during her own subathon, which lasted nearly 40 days. The latter is a popular format among Twitch streamers, and in most cases sees the individual livestream constantly over a long period of time: In Ironmouse's case even appearing on-camera at Twitchcon, whereas her content is normally presented by her cartoon avatar.

In recent times the record has been held by various popular streamers, including Cenat himself, Ninja, and Ludwig all of whom have over 150,000 subscribers. This metric is distinct from a straight follower count (Cenat has 14.1 million followers) and prized because it represents fans paying a monthly fee to the content creator and Twitch for ad-free viewing and extras like emotes. Just to add one more wrinkle, the number can obviously go down as well as up.

Cenat sailed past Ironmouse on November 11, day 11 of Mafiathon 2, and reacted in archetypical streamer fashion by screaming a lot before his mates joined in and ripped his top off. Per Twitchtracker Cenat's subs now stand at just over 350,000, which does represent the all-time record, with a considerable stretch of the subathon to go.

"Lost #1 a month & some change ago completely planned another one in less than two months and came back and we got the world record again," said Cenat on X. "I love all my supporters from the bottom of my heart job still not finished only day 11!" Cenat later celebrated the 340,000 and 350,000 milestones, saying he feels "blessed."

For her part, Ironmouse congratulated Cenat and predicted he has a chance of making it to one million: "I bet he makes it to a million…" she said on-stream, "he hasn’t even done the whole month yet."

The whole Mafiathon 2 idea is hugely well-resourced, complete with a real-world advertising campaign. A building in LA was painted over with a link to Cenat's Twitch channel, and accompanied by a trailer starring Kim Kardashian as the streamer's therapist. Explaining Mafiathon to her, Cenat says "I stream for 30 days straight, 24 hours every single day [...] They watch me eat, sleep, shower, on camera, the whole entire time."

The stream began on November 1 and is planned to last until the end of the month. It got off to a bad start, with Cenat being swatted on day one: Not the first time this has happened to the streamer, though thankfully his profile is now such that law enforcement responded appropriately. But since then the personality has used his sway to call in all sorts of celebrity favours and maintain viewer interest, including a visit to Snoop Dogg's recording studio on November 4 (during which Cenat got the tour and was gifted a large marijuana joint). Rapper Lil Uzi Vert performed, GloRilla joined Cenat for a spot of cooking, and other guests have included Serena Williams, Miranda Cosgrove, Kodak Black, Denzel Curry and Quavo.

Cenat's "Mafiathon 2" has already been nominated for Best Marathon Stream at the upcoming Streamer Awards, and no doubt November will just see him pushing that record-breaking number even higher. He's still got a way to go to overhaul Ninja's astonishing 19 million followers though: Cenat's follower count stands at just over 13 million, making him the fifth most-watched personality on the platform.

Less than a week after rolling out a new rule requiring streams covering "politics and sensitive social issues" to carry a content classification label, Twitch has modified the policy to exempt streamers talking about their "lived experience."

"We have made some updates to our policy language to better clarify what needs a "Politics and Sensitive Social Issues" Content Classification Label (CCL)," Twitch wrote on X. "We want to make clear that you don’t need to label your stream if you’re talking about your lived experience. We’ve made this clearer in our CCL guidelines, which are linked below. We’ve also clarified that a label is only required if discussion of the listed topics is the focus of the stream.

"Our goal here, as with any CCL, is to give viewers and brands more info about what’s happening on a particular stream, so that they can make an informed decision about what to watch and where to engage."

The original policy on sensitive content was implemented after a month of escalating back-and-forth claims of Islamophobia and antisemitism on the platform, which resulted in a two-week ban of Zack "Asmongold" Hoyt over a racist tirade against Palestinians, as well as several Arab streamers who took part in a TwitchCon panel in which they ranked other streamers on a scale of "Arab" to "loves Sabra."

Twitch CEO Dan Clancy said at the time that "there is no place on Twitch for racism, hatred, or harassment of any kind, including antisemitism and Islamophobia," but the new rules raised the ire of LGBTQ+ streamers angry that the simple fact of their existence was suddenly considered "political." There were also concerns that they could suffer revenue losses as advertisers can, and often do, avoid streams with content warning labels, regardless of why they're applied.

The updated rules are aimed at addressing those concerns. Two of the examples cited as sensitive content in the original guidelines, "discussing ideological or socio-political views on topics like gender, race, sexuality, or religion" and "discussing legislation related to a sensitive social issue such as reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, or immigration," have been removed. In their place is a single bullet point saying a warning label is required for "streams focused on discussing topics like gender, race, sexuality, or religion in a polarizing or inflammatory manner."

It's an improvement of sorts, if only because it removes the explicit politicization of reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights—human rights, in other words—and immigration, but it doesn't seem to have calmed the waters. Numerous replies to the announcement on X see the update as a change in wording but not in effect, in that it continues to center on the LGBTQ+ community. There are also questions about who will decide what qualifies as "polarizing or inflammatory": One commenter said trans people merely advocating for their own rights will be perceived and reported as such by right-wing Twitch viewers, and that the vague terminology in the updated guidelines doesn't remove the target placed on them.

A post on Twitch's UserVoice feedback forum calling for the initial "sensitive social issues" bullet point to be removed attracted more than 38,000 votes before Twitch closed the comments and announced the updated rules. A new post calling for the point to "be removed, not clarified," is now live and has thus far drawn more than 2,200 votes.

"It doesn't matter how much you 'clarify' the point of the final two bullets, they are not fit for the political category especially when contrasted with the other things in the category," the post states. "Putting peoples' rights in there opens up marginalized groups to hate and bigotry.

"At what point does something go from 'personal experience' to 'too political'? If a streamer talks about their own right to an abortion being taken away where they live, is that personal experience or political? It is entirely subjective. Is a trans person talking about their experiences with HRT 'fact based'? Who determines this? The bigots who will undoubtedly mass report said streamers to shut them up?"

Twitch's efforts to moderate political content come as the platform faces growing pressure over how it handles speech concerning Israel and Palestine, from streamers on the platform as well as outside organizations.

"I think the implementation of a separate category for politics in order to combat antisemitism is a faulty premise," streamer Austin "Gremloe" MacNamara told Aftermath. "Existence as a minority person, especially in a predominantly white male space, is a political act.

"If Twitch were serious about combating hate speech on the platform, the five banned Arab content creators are a perfect set of people to speak to about it, given that all of them have been begging Twitch to add [Middle East and North Africa] to their Twitch census data to no avail. It's cynical at best and cowardly at worst."

Ironically, at least some of its current troubles could have been avoided if Twitch had simply not opted to define LGBTQ+ rights as political. But it did, and now here we are, and I strongly suspect—as I did when the new rules were first rolled out—that this won't be the end of it.

Twitch has added a new category to its content classification guidelines covering "politics and sensitive social issues," meaning that streams discussing topics such as "elections, civic integrity, war or military conflict, and civil rights" will need to labelled as such to ensure viewers don't accidentally stumble into them and be exposed to content they might find offensive.

Content classification labels are required for streams that don't violate Twitch's community guidelines but contain material that might not be "appropriate for everyone, including younger viewers." In the past, that's included things like M-rated games, sexual themes, drug use, violence, and gambling. Now added to that list is a new, vaguely-defined category encompassing "discussions and debates about political or sensitive social issues."

The new content category comes in the wake of an ugly month for Twitch. Popular streamer Zack "Asmongold" Hoyt was suspended for two weeks following a racist tirade in which he described Palestinians as "terrible people" who come from "an inferior culture." (He's back now, by the way.) A week later, Twitch banned several Arab streamers over a month-old TwitchCon panel in which they ranked other streamers on an "Arab" to "loves Sabra" scale, Sabra being a brand of hummus owned by Israeli-American partnership.

At around the same time, it came to light that Twitch had quietly stopped taking email-verified signups from Israel and Palestine more than a year prior. Twitch quickly apologized for the "unacceptable miss and the confusion it has caused," saying it initially disabled signups with email verification in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 "to prevent uploads of graphic material," and somehow forgot to switch them back on.

The events put Twitch's policies under the microscope, as the platform was accused by various parties of antisemitism, Islamophobia, and/or gross negligence or straight-up incompetence.

Spurred by those accusations, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy posted a message today saying "there is no place on Twitch for racism, hatred, or harassment of any kind, including antisemitism and Islamophobia," and that when Twitch discovers content that breaks its rules, it takes "immediate enforcement action."

"Millions of streamers, with a wide variety of views and perspectives, spend time on Twitch," Clancy wrote. "We recognize that some content, while allowed on our service, may be objectionable to some members of our community. The views shared by streamers on Twitch are not the views of Twitch nor are they my personal views.

"We’re grateful for the feedback and input from our community. Our safety approach continues to build and evolve, as our service grows. We want to ensure that anyone can find their place on Twitch, and remain committed to ensuring that hate and harassment have no place here."

It's a very standard, bland "zero tolerance" sort of thing, but it does come alongside some new rules—or, more specifically, the new content category for "politics and sensitive issues," which will require classification labels on streams dealing with such topics. Examples cited by Twitch include:

• Streams featuring former or current political officials if the content includes discussions with these individuals around public policies
• Live coverage or commentary on elections, civic processes, or election-related disputes
• Livestreams of protests, rallies, or civil unrest related to civil rights issues or government policies
• Discussing military conflicts, foreign policy decisions, or national security matters
• Discussing ideological or socio-political views on topics like gender, race, sexuality, or religion
• Discussing legislation related to a sensitive social issue such as reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, or immigration

Content labels will not be required for streams "containing informational or educational content that aim to share knowledge in a neutral, fact-based manner, rather than engaging in any kind of advocacy for an issue or candidate." Streams with "intermittent mentions of politics, politicians, or sensitive social issues" are also exempt from the labelling requirements.

Right off the top, the whole thing looks impossibly confusing and far more likely to make things worse than better. Does neutral, "educational content" include topics such as, for instance, the rise of fascism in the US or the attempted overthrow of the rightfully elected government on January 6, 2021, or does that fall under "commentary on election-related disputes?" Does a recitation of proposed anti-trans laws in Utah qualify as a "neutral, fact-based" presentation, or is that a discussion of a sensitive social issue? Who decides, and on what basis?

I don't think content guidelines are an inherently bad thing, but these guidelines feel like a rushed, scattershot attempt to be seen "doing something" that ultimately adds up to nothing more than a cop-out. What is neutrality in the face of rising white supremacy and LGBTQ+ hatred? What is ideological when talking about a right to exist?

The response to the announcement of the new classification labels is predictably chaotic and widely unhappy. There are numerous calls on social media for popular streamers who focus on political topics to be banned (and accusations that Twitch is simply rolling out this new classification category to avoid doing so), predictions that antisemitism will become more widespread under the protection of "sensitive content," and LGBTQ+ streamers asking if they're going to have to apply warning labels to streams in which they simply talk about their lives, experiences, and identity.

"I had to have a hysterectomy at 25 due to severe debilitating endometriosis so reproductive health, rights, and freedom are something I feel I should be able to speak freely about as well since it is part of who I am," streamer SerpentineCiCi told PC Gamer. "I also have been an advocate for the Center for Reproductive Rights as a charity and have used Twitch to raise money for them in the past."

Some streamers are also worried about the potential revenue impact: Advertisers can, and often do, avoid streams with content warning labels, regardless of the context in which they're applied.

I have a strong feeling that this new content category is going to miss the mark badly, and that modifications, or possibly a complete do-over, will happen sooner rather than later. It's happened before: In December 2023 Twitch relaxed its sexual content guidelines to allow for "artistic depictions of nudity," then rolled back the change just two days later when it figured out that "artistic" means different things to different people.

Scrolling through TikTok I came across one IrateFrenchFry—the capitalisation is important, they don't rate french fries, though to be fair they're not a french fry either. They're a Twitch streamer of the same name with a degree in mechanical engineering. The reason I stopped on his channel was because I watched as he tried desperately to play Rainbow Six: Siege with a visor falling in front of his eyes, seemingly at random, and completely ruining his game.

It's not at random, though. It's controlled by their Twitch chat—his seemingly maniacal Twitch chat. Every time IrateFrenchFry is trying to be a good teammate on the objective or in a tense stand-off with enemy players, down comes a visor that blinds him.

If you're wondering how it works, here's what IrateFrenchFry told me:

"I programmed a microcontroller board that monitors my chat and looks for certain words. If it sees one of those words it activates whatever function I want.

"For example, one of my scripts monitors the chat for '!blind', if it reads that word then it activates a servo on my headset that lowers blinders."

The gaming headset is nothing special: just your run-of-the-mill Logitech G733, with the obvious exception of the servo powered gizmo on the right ear-cup.

"Mechanically the glasses work through a linear actuator that I 3D printed. The blinder (just glasses that I bought and painted) is attached to that linear actuator to allow them to raise and lower."

IrateFrenchFry limits how often the activation words can be said by having it so only his own account can say them in the chat. That means it's not just a dreadful free-for-all. Any more so than intended, anyways. You might be wondering if that means he's just having us on and they're pressing the button for the visor to drop, but no, it's still the Twitch chat, but they have to earn channel points the ol' fashioned way to activate it.

What's better than making your favourite Twitch streamer do a dab (or whatever it is people use channel points for these days), or blinding them temporarily during an intense moment in a competitive game?

An IRL jumpscare.

Using their mechanical know-how, IrateFrenchFry also rigged together a system that flashes the lights, unleashes a scary puppet in front of them, and plays a blood-curdling scream.

Combined with a horror game and the visor, it's a pretty overwhelming amount of stuff going on at any one time, both in real-life and the game—for me, anyways. IrateFrench used to be in helicopter search and rescue in the United States Coast Guard, so he might be used to loud noises and tough working conditions.

You can check out more of their clips on their Twitch channel or TikTok.

Bernie Sanders met his first catboy vtuber on a Twitch stream yesterday to help promote presidential candidate Kamala Harris, and, I gotta say, he handled it pretty well. Most people—let alone U.S. Senators—might've been more hesitant, but Sanders took it in stride.

Twitch streamer and virtual YouTuber Sykkuno greeted Sanders in his anime avatar moments after he joined the stream and explained why he wasn't on camera like the others, which included host AustinShow and popular streamer Pokimane.

"Do you know what a vtuber is?" Sykkuno asked. There wasa brief moment of awkward silence before Sykkuno repeated the question: "Have you heard of a vtuber before?"

"Nope," Bernie admitted.

"No? I'm the first one! Thank you for supporting vtubers!" Sykkuno exclaimed while AustinShow tried to move the show forward.

Sanders smiled and told him he's "looking very good."

The short exchange was a treat in an hour-long Q&A where Sykkuno, Pokimane, Valkyrae, and Mark Hamill asked Sanders about politics and the upcoming election. They covered topics like his support for Harris, the conflict in Gaza, and U.S. healthcare. After Sanders made his departure, the conversation continued for another two hours with more guests, including Hank Green and Mark Cuban.

But Sanders stumbling into vtuber 101 was the most popular thing clipped out of the stream and shared all over social media. It's not every day you get to see an 83-year-old senator talk politics with a messy-haired catboy in a hoodie. And the meetup felt reflective of, if not a bit more genuine than, the Harris campaign's recent tactics to appeal to young voters. Brat Summer may be over, but Catboy Fall is here.

"This might be the funniest moment in American political history to date," X user therealpanzer posted with a screenshot of the guests lined up on the Discord video call.

I'm never going to get over the absurdity of seeing a still shot of human faces joined by a single vtuber. Even after their explosive popularity on Twitch and YouTube during the pandemic, vtubers haven't shaken all the novelty off. But we're getting there: Pink-haired vtuber Ironmouse recently became the most subscribed-to Twitch streamer ever with over 320,000 subscribers earlier this month. I'm certain Sanders won't be the last politician we see talking live on Twitch with an anime character, and I'm here for it.

In the last week Twitch has found itself embroiled in controversy over what streamers are allowed to say and do about the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine. The incident that brought it to prominence was a racist anti-Palestinian rant by popular streamer Asmongold, which saw him receive a 14-day suspension as well as admit he was out of order and apologise.

Now Twitch has banned a group of Middle Eastern streamers for "hateful conduct," and for one month each, even longer than Asmongold. The reason for the bans isn't entirely clear, but it apparently centres around a tier list ranking streamers from "Arab" to "loves Sabra", an American and Israeli-owned hummus brand.

The ranking was part of a TwitchCon panel hosted by Twitch partner Frogan on September 21, who said it was all about "who has a habibi pass" (habibi is Arabic for "my love"). This was subsequently picked up by Ethan Klein of h3h3Productions, a streamer and advocate for Israel, who posted a video titled "Twitch Has a Major Problem" claiming the panel was "kinda Arab good, Jew bad" and that the Sabra reference is anti-Israeli because this particular brand is often part of pro-Palestinian boycotts. Klein further produced an inverted image of the tier list on Instagram Stories (which disappear after 24 hours) with "loves Sabra" now accompanied by "Jews who live in Israel" to make his point.

The real game-changer, however, seems to have been the involvement of the Anti-Defamation League, a major American non-profit that campaigns against antisemitism and promotes Zionism as a movement for "self-determination and statehood for the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland." Yesterday the ADL confirmed in a statement it had put pressure on Twitch to act about the month-old stream, and accused Frogan of spreading "antisemitic vitriol." The full statement reads:

"ADL spoke with the Twitch staff today after becoming aware of several concerning incidents on the social media platform and/or involving Twitch streamers in the past week. We appreciate Twitch making the right decision to finally suspend the streamer Frogan for abusing her platform and the Twitchcon event to spread antisemitic vitriol during this time of intense apprehension for the Jewish community."

It goes on to say Twitch must improve with "meaningful action", and ends by saying it will "continue to hold them accountable when they fail in that responsibility."

Frogan and the other panelists were subsequently banned for 30 days for "hateful conduct."

The streamers involved in the panel are not happy about this. "[The claim is we] and our guests did a tier list where 'good=Arab and Jew=bad' which isn’t what happened," said Frogan after the ban. "Our tier list was 'who has habibi pass' which is a meme tier list we did with a variety of creators [...] we are all Arabs from different religious backgrounds: I am Muslim, Capri is Christian, and Raff is Jewish. Sabra hummus is objectively the worst hummus to exist and is the unfortunate standard of hummus in the US."

Leaving the question of Sabra hummus aside, Twitch appears to have waded into a controversy where, whatever you think of Frogan's sense of humor, one prominent critic mocked-up an image to make it look worse than it is, and a major non-profit has steamed in to demand a ban. Frogan later posted the ban notice from Twitch for "targeted hateful conduct", while noting that she's received 30 days while Asmongold's anti-Palestinian rant (which was much more explicit) landed him a 14 day suspension. The TwitchCon stream has now also been deleted from the platform.

Whether the ban is justified or not, it is notable that it's been applied retrospectively to a TwitchCon stream that the platform was clearly aware of, and seems to have come about thanks to pressure from an outside rights organisation. The latter is not unusual, of course, but it does seem like Twitch being forced to belatedly moderate something that the platform initially judged as fine.

By going after content like this, it feels Twitch has just created a massive problem for itself: Because it's almost impossible to say anything about Israel or Palestine without angering someone, somewhere. If Twitch just thinks the topic shouldn't ever be allowed on the platform, that's at least a clear decision. But if it's going to start getting into the weeds over streamer tier lists and hummus, it's going to need a whole lot more moderators.

Asmongold might genuinely be on a self-improvement kick—even if 'might' is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Despite living in what I'll describe as a hazardously unclean environment, the hyper-popular streamer has experienced a mental wakeup call after Twitch banned him for some overtly racist comments about Palestinians.

Asmongold stated that he'd been "slowly devolving into the most mean-spirited, rude, nasty, callous, psychopathic version of myself", which seems like a spark of self-realisation, but as my fellow PC Gamer writer Andy Chalk pointed out last week, he did promise on his subreddit that he'd "react to a DEI=DIE gaming video first day back to stream".

Listen—I live in doubt that we're going to see a genuine 180. At the very least, it's going to take a while. But I do want to give kudos where kudos are due—Asmongold is absolutely cleaning his house.

Announced via a post on X, and a horrifying before-and-after shot, the streamer proudly displayed a kitchen that probably doesn't smell like a landfill baking in the sun—genuinely a strong first effort. While there's every chance he brought in people to professionally clean it, even that's a step forward, given his internet superstardom has given him enough funding to do that once a week.

When asked if the spider in the 'before' image was a wolf spider, Asmongold replied: "We had a mutual agreement that he could be in the house as long as no wasps. Two f*cking wasps got in so he got evicted." Fair enough, slackers don't get squatter's rights—it's a shame we lack the technology to give spiders the power of speech, because I'd love to interview this one.

On a more serious note, Asmongold has also started actually going after racism on social media, denouncing a pretty rancid "anti-DEI" podcast for making a reprehensible comment using the ethnic slur "spear chucker", as highlighted by Youtuber Mightykeef, who rightly states: "This isn’t a constructive comment or criticism. He’s simply being racist to be racist."

Asmongold replies: "While it's not one of the 'mainstream' racial slurs, advanced racism enjoyers use it quite regularly. Comment was made in poor taste, obviously racist." Which naturally drew a bit of shock, considering he'd been banned for slinging around phrases like "inferior culture", to which he adds: "Wouldn't that make me an expert?"

In a different comment, he notes: "I've been on the Internet over 20 years. I know every single racial slur, dogwhistle, or derogatory term that has ever been invented for a group of people. I'm making the comment because a lot of younger guys online genuinely don't know, it is for educational purposes."

I want to be clear—I remain sceptical. This is someone who is on record as saying he'll lean into the exact kind of anti-woke culture war nonsense that spawned the cartel of people in that podcast the moment his ban is lifted. Asmongold is pretty directly responsible for perpetuating the hand-wringing that gives people who use slurs like that oxygen.

But I also don't wanna turn up my nose at him too hard. Actively calling racism out (and cleaning his sink) is definitely an improvement, and if the result of this entire debacle is that one of the most popular streamers on the platform—internet king to a fleet of young, impressionable men—brings them along on a deradicalisation journey? Well, my feelings don't matter in the face of a net good, do they?

The ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine, which has now spread into Lebanon and threatens to further destabilise the Middle East, has dominated global news coverage since the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel.

Recently, Twitch banned the popular user Asmongold following a racist anti-Palestinian rant, which thanks to his profile put Twitch's policies around the October 7 attack on Israel and the subsequent ongoing bombardment of Palestine under the microscope. The fallout has now turned up something extraordinary: As first reported by 404 Media, Twitch has been silently blocking new users from both Israel and Palestine ever since October 7, 2023. When this became public, Twitch almost instantly issued a mea culpa and a course correction:

"We deeply regret this unacceptable miss, and the confusion it has caused. Following the October 7, 2023 attacks, we temporarily disabled sign ups with email verification in Israel and Palestine," said the Twitch support account. "We did this to prevent uploads of graphic material related to the attack and to protect the safety of users."

Twitch does have good reason for an abundance of caution, because the instantaneous nature of streaming means that such platforms have been used to broadcast awful content. The Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand in 2019, during which 51 people were killed and 89 injured, were partially livestreamed on Facebook. In May 2022, Payton Gendron killed ten people and injured three in a racist attack at a grocery store in New York (11 of the 13 victims were Black), livestreaming the attack on Twitch.

There are many other examples that justify a platform like Twitch taking a proactive stance in the immediate context of real-world atrocities: Especially with October 7, 2023, where Hamas attackers used the accounts of victims to livestream footage on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

So the initial decision here makes sense. It just seems that, once the immediate context had passed, nobody at Twitch thought to re-enable email sign-ups (users could apparently still set up new accounts using phone verification).

"Signups were not disabled, and we continued to see sign ups from both regions. Users could choose to sign up with phone verification. We've learned that, inadvertently, we did not re-enable email verification sign ups for either region," said Twitch. "We've fixed the issue, meaning all affected users can sign up with email verification."

Twitch's explanation feels plausible but, inevitably, some are unwilling to accept it at face value. Various recent moderation decisions have come under new scrutiny, such as Twitch unbanning the streamer Sneako who'd made anti-Semitic remarks. These theories are rather undermined by the fact Twitch wasn't taking signups from Palestinians either, but persist nevertheless.

There does seem to be one element of the explanation that doesn't make sense, however. This was surely a ban on IP addresses rather than email addresses, yet Twitch is claiming the latter.

"When you try to create a new account from Israel, you get a 'There is a problem' response," says Ran-Bar Zik, senior software architect at CyberArk. "When you look at the server's response, you clearly see that the country's IP has been blocked [...] they have now released an 'explanation' that they did it in order to 'protect'. A bit of bullshit in my opinion."

I'm not sure I'd go that far, though Twitch has clearly backpedalled at speed and most of the replies to its explanation… they're not very reasonable. Perhaps this is the exposure of some conspiracy, but I don't think so. It just reminds me of a classic phrase: Never attribute to malice what can be put down to incompetence.

Twitch streamer Asmongold has announced that he is stepping back from his positions at OTK Media and boutique PC builder Starforge Systems so he can focus on becoming "a better version of myself for everyone."

Asmongold, known in the real world as Zack Hoyt, sparked outrage earlier this week with a racist tirade about the ongoing genocide of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli military in Gaza, which the UN says has resulted in the deaths of more than 42,000 people so far, most of them women and children. After describing Palestinians as "terrible people" who have a call to genocide "baked into their laws," he said, "They're not the same as us. They come from an inferior culture that is horrible. It kills people for their identity, and it is directly antithetical to everything Western values stand for, and it is an inferior culture in all ways."

The outcry was swift and fierce: His "zackrawrr" account on Twitch was suspended, and a half-hearted "my bad" apology only seemed to make things worse, being widely seen as overly flippant and dismissive. Now he's taking it a step further: In a new video posted to YouTube, Asmongold said he's stepping back from his role at OTK, the company he co-founded in 2020, and its Starforge Systems subsidiary.

"I've slowly been devolving into the most mean-spirited, rude, nasty, callous, psychopathic version of myself," Asmongold said near the start of the video.

"The last two years, I think that I haven't really been able to fulfill my responsibilities as a leader in a lot of cases to them, and I think that I've let a lot of people down. One thing this thing has taught me, it's made me realize that I need to get myself in check. I need to get my mind under control. I need to just get my life—I need to fix my fucking life.

"Everything about my life is basically fucked. I'm gonna take a step back from all of that. I'm going to step away from my leadership position at OTK and Starforge and everything. I want to—and they're fine with that, they respect that. I want to do this not only for them but mainly for myself, so I can be a better version of myself for everyone."

While OTK has not publicly commented on Asmongold's situation, Starforge shared a message on X saying they had "mutually agreed to part ways."

Self-improvement is the central theme of Asmongold's video, which begins with what at least has the veneer of actual introspection. He said his comments on Gaza were "a horrible, disgusting, mean-spirited thing to say," and while he remains deeply critical of religious extremism, "it's extremely unfair to categorize everybody in part of that group as religious extremists." The media he's chosen to create and consume have helped shape "certain biases," he continued, "that don't have any sort of relation to what my own real life experience has been."

"Streaming is my entire life. Doing this is my entire existence. And I think that the process of that has been extremely unhealthy for me, and I think what it's done is that it's allowed me to become such a one-dimensional person that I'm not even a person anymore. It's like I'm Dark Souls, I'm going hollow or something."

Look, I take all of this with more than a few grains of salt. I've seen too many come-to-Jesus moments that were quickly forgotten once the public outcry had passed, and Asmongold's reputation does not encourage unrestrained optimism. Subsequent comments the streamer made in the Asmongold subreddit on Wednesday also suggest that the prospect of meaningful change might be a distant hope.

"The vibes and feel of the stream recently has been a lot more tense and a lot of that is my fault," he wrote in an explanation for the apology. "If you think that means my first stream back is going to be playing Dustborn and promoting Sweet Baby, I think you'll be very disappointed. I'm not changing anything other than trying to be more positive and less mean-spirited."

In a reply to one comment, he also reassured followers, "Don't worry, I'll react to a DEI=DIE gaming video first day back to stream," and in another he asserted that "a lot of the laws over there are insane and I completely disagree with them and I think they're disgusting," a not-especially-meaningful shift in verbiage from "culture" to "law."

Despite obvious apprehensions, Asmongold said he'd like to visit countries like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Dubai to see what they're like for himself, which is maybe a bit aspirational at this point. In the short term, he has more practical, life-oriented goals: Regular bedtimes, cleaning up his house, and presumably once his Twitch suspension is lifted, a more consistent streaming schedule.

"I want to live a normal life," he said. "I want to spend maybe a little bit less time streaming and I want to spend more time creating my own videos and doing my own things and spending time on things that I really enjoy and basically just expanding my existence as a person."

Twitch streamer Zack Hoyt, better known as Asmongold, had one of his accounts banned following a racist tirade against Palestinians during a recent livestream. During the stream, Asmongold said he doesn't care about the ongoing loss of life in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli military, which the United Nations says currently stands at more 42,000 killed, most of whom were women and children, because "they're terrible people" who come from "an inferior culture."

"If you want to consider it genocide as a systematic killing of a group of people, they have genocide built into Sharia law right now," Asmongold said during the stream, which was clipped and shared widely on social media. "So no, I'm not going to cry a f—ing river when people who have genocide that's baked into their laws are getting genocided. I don't give a f—. They're terrible people. It's not even a question. It's crazy that people don't see it that way. They'd be doing the same thing.

"These people are not your allies. They're not the same as us. They come from an inferior culture that is horrible. It kills people for their identity, and it is directly antithetical to everything Western values stand for, and it is an inferior culture in all ways. It is that simple. No, I don't feel bad for them, I don't feel sorry for them, I don't care."

Hoyt's speech clearly violates several of Twitch's community guidelines:

• Twitch "does not permit behavior that is motivated by hatred, prejudice or intolerance, including behavior that promotes or encourages discrimination…"
• Users cannot "Create content that expresses inferiority based on a protected characteristic, for example, statements related to physical, mental, and moral deficiencies.
• Users cannot "Encourage or support the political or economic dominance of any race, ethnicity, or religious group, including support for white supremacist/nationalist ideologies. This does not include support for self-determination movements."
• Users cannot make "Statements that a protected group should not exist"; "Statements that a protected characteristic is repulsive"
• Users cannot "Call for subjugation, segregation or exclusion, including political, economic, and social exclusion/segregation, based on a protected characteristic, including age."

Following an influx of criticism over his racist commentary and calls for Twitch to ban his account, Asmongold posted an apology on X.

"Looking back on it, I was way too much of an asshole about the Palestine thing," he wrote. "My bad. Of course no one deserves to have their life destroyed even if they do things or have views I find regressive. You guys deserve more than me saying stupid shit like that, I'll do better."

That did little to calm the upset: It turns out that quite a few people don't consider "my bad" a sufficient expression of contrition and reconsideration for espousing grossly racist attitudes about an "inferior" and "terrible" culture.

The ban was applied to Asmongold's "zackrawrr" channel, which was at one point a secondary channel he used for "chill" gaming streams; his nominal main Asmongold channel remains in place. He hasn't streamed on that channel for the better part of a year, though, and he won't be able to return to it now that his de facto primary channel is banned: Twitch's rules state that "any attempt to circumvent an account suspension or chat ban by using other accounts or identities will also result in an additional enforcement against your accounts, up to an indefinite suspension."

In what I can only assume is part of his ongoing but undeclared rebrand as an actual human being, Meta and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says he will absolutely annihilate you at Civilization. Actually, he says he'll annihilate anybody at Civilization, declaring himself "close to grandmaster status" in the game in an act of hubris rivalled only by the protagonists of Greek myth.

"I'd be surprised if anyone in the world could beat me at that," Zuck told Pubity (via Dexerto), wearing his "Aut Zuck aut nihil" (All Zuck or all nothing) T-shirt that seems to be the only thing he's allowed to wear in 2024.

But which Civ? Zuck doesn't say which precise iteration of Sid Meier's opus is his favourite, but there's evidence a cunning detective like myself can use to piece together an answer. And by "evidence," I mean a literal photo of Zuckerberg playing a game which is clearly Civ 5 on a laptop.

He could have moved onto 6 since that was taken, of course, but I'm pretty certain it's a universal human experience to pick one particular entry in the series (mine is 4) and stick with it stubbornly forever.

Anyway, brace yourself for the multi-billionaire to start soliciting Twitch subs. "I think at some point I should do a Twitch stream of me playing with someone," he says. That is, if anyone dares face up to him. With a little bit of braggadocio, Zuckerberg told his interviewer that his wife—Priscilla Chan—once took a look at his Steam account and was flabbergasted to learn he had over a thousand hours in a game (which he doesn't specify, but which I'm gonna assume is Civ).

Which… we're all friends here, right? This is a judgement-free space? Those are kind of rookie numbers, aren't they? There are PCG staff members with playtimes that make 1,000 hours look downright brisk. I reckon if Zuckerberg ever did throw down the gauntlet to a true Civ sicko, he might learn he's a lot further from grandmaster status than he thinks.

Since it was launched in August, the Kamala Harris Twitch channel has broadcast rallies and speeches from Flint, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and other locations across the USA. It's about to go slightly further afield, with a Tim Walz rally being broadcast from Azeroth, as Wired reports.

A live audio feed of Walz speaking in Arizona will be accompanied by Twitch streamer Preheat playing World of Warcraft and adding commentary. A guides writer for Wowhead, Preheat has more than 50,000 subscribers on Twitch. No, Walz won't be playing WoW with Preheat, so we won't find out if he's a druid main.

So, uh, why is this happening? It's part of the Harris campaign's plan to increase its visibility to young men, which has also included advertisements played during sporting events and on IGN. As the Washington Post put it, they're making a push for "the gamer vote" which included a "Geeks & Nerds for Harris" fundraiser.

Donald Trump has his own Twitch channel too of course, one that was once banned for violating Twitch's guidelines on hateful content. Don't expect to see that channel broadcasting gameplay from Guild Wars 2 in response, however, given that Trump has previously blamed videogames for fueling violent culture.

Twitch has a new subs champion: During a September subathon, Vtuber Ironmouse hit over 320,000 active subscribers on the platform, surpassing the previous record holder, Kai Cenat, who peaked at 306,621 subscribers last year.

Unlike 'following' a Twitch channel (which is like favoriting it), subscribing to a Twitch channel makes you a paying viewer. Amazon Prime members get one free monthly subscription to use on the channel of their choice, and otherwise it costs $4.99 per month to subscribe at the lowest tier in the US. Twitch splits subscription revenue 50/50 with streamers after taxes and fees.

Due to regional pricing differences, I can't say for sure how much Ironmouse is pulling in from subscriptions this month, but it's in the hundreds of thousands. The streamer has pledged to donate 50% of her subathon income to charity, and has done the same during previous rallies—she temporarily accrued over 200,000 subscribers during last year's event. (Most people don't become long-term subscribers after a drive, so Twitch subscriber numbers tend to rise dramatically and then fall back down to normal levels.)

Ironmouse began streaming in 2017 in response to feeling isolated—she has an immune system disorder called common variable immunodeficiency—and opted to try out Vtubing in its relatively early days, appearing as a horned anime character. 

"I originally started streaming because I was lonely and wanted something to do," Ironmouse told The Washington Post in a 2022 profile. "But I was very nervous and worried about being on camera because of my personal life."

The streamer is now known for her impressive singing ability, years of game streams and character development as a pink-haired demon, and her efforts to support chronic illness awareness and treatment. Ironmouse has supported the Immune Deficiency Foundation with financial donations, and also encourages her viewers to donate plasma, something she personally relies on as someone who needs regular immunoglobulin replacement therapy.

"I have so many supporters that have told me that they now regularly donate plasma," Ironmouse told the Immune Deficiency Foundation in 2022. "It touches my heart to know that many people are taking time out of their day to save lives and help people."

After surpassing Kai Cenat's subscriber record this week, Ironmouse posted on X: "Words cannot express how I am feeling nor can they express my gratitude. Thank you all so much for the incredible support and thank you for changing my life."

The popular Twitch emote BibleThump is going away at the end of September, and it doesn't make a lot of sense. Twitch said in an announcement (via Kotaku) that the emote is being dropped because of expiring licenses, but rightsholder Edmund McMillen says he'd be happy to renew the license, but it's not up to him.

BibleThump was popular enough to earn a place in our 2020 rundown of Twitch emote meanings, a handy guide for anyone baffled by the flood of weird faces floating across their screens. 

"Roguelike fans will recognize this emote from The Binding of Isaac," we helpfully explained. "That is baby Isaac right there, with tears streaming down his face. Stream viewers bust out BibleThump when a profoundly sad, or profoundly precious incident crosses through the stream."

Popular though it may be, it won't be around for much longer. "The end of the BibleThump Era (2013-2024) is nigh!" Twitch wrote on X. "On 9/30, the rights to our beloved emote expire. While this is sad news, we know that all emotes go to heaven. SPEAKING OF SAD - we’re going to need a new emote to spam these feelings…"

Well, that happens—content disappearing because of expiring licences is nothing new in the world of videogames. But as the attached community note indicates, the situation took a weird twist when Edmund McMillen, the creator of The Binding of Isaac, said he was open to extending the deal.

"For those wondering what happened with the Bible thump emote, I'm 100% fine with coming up with a good solution to keep or modify the emote but I'm not in control of the new Twitch policies so it's really up to them," McMillen posted. He confirmed in separate posts that he still owns the rights to the emote, and reiterated that he "would be 100% fine with them renewing the rights."

So, why isn't that happening? Some on X suggested, presumably ironically, that Twitch can't afford a new deal: Twitch is owned by Amazon, one of the biggest and most valuable companies in the world, but has reportedly struggled to turn a profit. That doesn't strike me as likely. I don't know how much a license for a single emote based on an old indie game would cost, but I can't imagine it would be a very big slice of Twitch's revenues. Others have speculated that Twitch wants to shift to emotes made in-house that it owns outright, which could be what McMillen was alluding to in his reference to "new Twitch policies."

Whatever the reason, there's been no sign that a new deal might be made. It's possible that BibleThump could live on elsewhere, though. In response to Twitch's message about the expiring license, streaming platform Kick, the place that pays guys like xQc and Nickmercs mountains of money to do gambling streams and recently hosted notorious former Twitch streamer (he was banned for life in 2023 for "hateful conduct) Adin Ross in a bizarre, baffling stream with Donald Trump, posted an image of the emote and a message to McMillen: "We cooking?"

The reaction to Kick's tweet was almost universally negative, with multiple respondents asking McMillen not to take the deal. McMillen himself hasn't indicated whether or not he might be interested in a deal, but he did repost Kick's message. Make of that what you will.

It's all gotten out of hand. They've got concepts playing games now. Specifically, the venerable genre of Twitch Plays—those times when a swarming Twitch chat competes for control over games like Pokémon, and Dark Souls—has evolved to the point that Pi is currently playing Pokémon Sapphire. Actually, it's been playing it for three years (via GamesRadar).

That's Pi as in the mathematical constant. The one you probably know as (at least) 3.14 but which goes on, well, forever if you let it. The way it works is this: Every digit between 0 and 9 has been assigned to a button on the Game Boy Advance (some buttons have two digits assigned). The computer then simply proceeds through digits of Pi sequentially and makes the corresponding input. For example: The first three digits—3.14—would correspond to a push of B, then A, then the left D-Pad. 

At time of writing, the game had just passed its 86,452,000th digit of Pi. That's over 25,000 hours of game time since the experiment began on October 16, 2021.

Want to guess where all that effort has gotten it? If you chose 'not even out of the starting town' then my friend, you're half-right. Pi—or Seth, as its character in the game is called—has made it out of Littleroot Town a few times. Alas, the fickle finger of maths seems to have since led Pi crawling all the way back to Littleroot, losing all that progress it had made in the course of several thousand hours. 

Still, it has accomplished some things. It even recently managed to absolutely curbstomp rival trainer May after finally reaching its first battle with her last, uh, May. The reason? All that meandering has power levelled Pi's starting Treecko to a level 88 Sceptile. May's Torchic got turned to thin paste once the right digits got put in for Sceptile to actually make an attack.

In fact, per the channel's chatbot, the farthest Pi has made it is to Petalburg forest, where it annihilated Bug Catcher Lyle's sextet of level 3 Wurmples.

I'm pretty sure it has to beat the game some day, though, although whether or not that's before the last star in the universe goes out is an open question. Theoretically, you can find every possible sequence of numbers in Pi, including several (well, infinite, I think) that would take our hardy hero all the way through the Elite Four. We just have to find them, and maybe get out of Littleroot Town once and for all.

In his return to YouTube on September 6, Guy Beahm, the streamer best known as Dr Disrespect, addressed the circumstances behind his lifetime ban from Twitch to an audience of more than 200,000 viewers, saying he "wasn't sexting anyone" through Twitch's Whispers messaging system, and calling the former employee who leaked the allegations a "fucking rat."

Beahm began his statement by saying that the terms of his settlement with Twitch imposed a gag order on all parties involved, an order that held until a "disgruntled employee" leaked allegations about the cause for the suspension earlier this year. He also addressed YouTube's decision to demonetize his channel, saying that he will be able to reapply for monetization on September 25, and that he intends to do so.

Then he quickly changed tack, shifting to an aggressive defense, decrying the actions of the people behind the initial leak of the reasons for his suspension. "This was settled professionally," Beahm said, "And you, knowing how black and white the internet is, you decided, you fucking rat, to leak the reported reason Twitch banned me in 2020."

Beahm also asked, rhetorically, if the person behind the leak knows the "legal definition" of sexting, a point that seems uncomfortably central to Beahm's defense. "I do," he said. "And yeah, I used Twitch's Whispers, but trust me, I wasn't sexting anyone."

"I engage with my community. I engage with other streamers," Beahm said. "And through Twitch Whispers, I communicate with Twitch users. Conversations that consisted of a variety of playing games, gaming politics, content creation, random stuff. This was the extent of my communication with this Twitch user."

Beahm brought into question whether the person he communicated with was actually a minor at all. "[When] all these so-called journalists fired off your tweets, did any of you consider that this Twitch user may have been over the legal age of consent at the time of the messages? You didn't," he said. "Neither did any of these journalists, and neither did Twitch at the time of the ban."

This argument seems to hinge on the distinction between the United States age of majority (the distinction between a minor and an adult), which is 18 in most states and 19 or 21 in a select few, and the age of consent. The legal age of consent for sexual activity, which Beahm specifically referenced several times, is only 16 in 34 US states, and 17 in six other states. "Twitch makes this decision to terminate my contract and ban me while admitting they never investigated the age of consent in the jurisdiction where the user's messages were sent and received," he said, before shouting "Fucking unbelievable!"

Beahm also denied the allegation that he was attempting to meet up with the user at TwitchCon, saying, "I never intended to meet this user ever. We never made plans to meet at TwitchCon or anywhere else, and in fact we never met in person, ever."

Beahm claimed that Twitch found no legal wrongdoing in the exchange, a point he's made previously while noting that no criminal charges were ever brought against him, but that a conspiracy led by his former partner manager resulted in his channel's suspension anyway. "The reality is, they wanted to cut down the Doc, plain and simple," Beahm said.

Much of what Beahm said stands in contrast to the now-deleted statement he released in June, in which he admitted to exchanging "Twitch Whisper messages with an individual minor back in 2017" that "sometimes leaned too much in the direction of being inappropriate." You can debate the semantic differences between "inappropriate" and "sexting" as you see fit, but he clearly stated the other person involved was a minor at the time. Today he shifted to referencing the legal age of consent.

The pre-prepared speech came off as unhinged (even for Beahm), but it's also a not-unfamiliar tactic: Rather than acknowledging or addressing his own role in the matter, Beahm pointed the finger everywhere else—the leakers, the journalists, Twitch—and leaned heavily into the strict legality of the matter, as though the absence of criminal charges equates to the absence of wrongdoing.

While Beahm implied that there will be "repercussions for spewing lies" about him, it doesn't seem that any are in the offing. He made no mention of potential legal action against the leaker or Twitch, and implied that as far as he's concerned, the matter is behind him. "I'm not saying anything more about this," Beahm said. "Unless I need to, because trust me, I have more I haven't disclosed." He also indicated that he will not be publicly sharing the messages that resulted in his suspension.

"Everyone saying 'Show the messages.' What are we, in second grade?"

I've reached out to Twitch for comment on Dr Disrespect's statement and will update if I receive a reply.

Streaming platform Twitch has announced and launched Drop Ins, a new feature "designed to make it easier for people to just 'drop in' on each other while they are streaming." The collaboration tool allows streamers to "knock" on other live streamers, who will then receive a notification visible only to them, which if accepted will start a joint stream. The tool is designed with multiple collaborators in mind, though Twitch's announcement doesn't detail what the upper limit on participants is.

"Planning a collaboration can be challenging," writes Twitch CEO Dan Clancy, outlining why the platform thinks this feature makes sense. "First you need to reach out to someone to see if they want to collaborate and then you need to find a time that works for both of you. For longer collaborations, this might be worth the effort, but for short collaborations there is sometimes too much overhead to make it feel worthwhile. Also, part of the magic of Twitch is that it is improvisational and you simply don’t know what you are going to get. You don’t want to have to plan out everything that you are going to do."

The announcement, however, does not appear to have gone down well with a sizeable proportion of the target audience. This is almost entirely because Twitch has done the typical big tech thing of surprise launching a new feature that doesn't allow users to simply opt out. Drops Ins do give streamers a considerable degree of control over who can "knock" on their streams (the options are "All Streamers, Affiliates and Partners, Partners only, People you Follow or your Favorites list"), and the feature can be paused on any individual stream, but you can't just say no thanks and have it permanently disabled.

"This update is awful," says streamer Zach Bussey. "They're forcing it on everyone, and its permission structure, by default, allows anyone to call. You can't turn it off; you can only pause for '1 Hour' OR 'This Stream.' Turns back on every stream."

Popular streamer Tyler Oakley said the same thing as many smaller creators: "please allow streamers to opt out of this, this is so unnecessarily forced."

There are some claims about the feature being dangerous, which seem a mite exaggerated given that Twitch has given streamers control over who can "knock" on their streams, but by far the most consistent complaint is about the feature being pushed on streamers without the option to turn it off.

"Knock knock! Who's there?" writes ShyLily. "Unwanted feature!"

The backlash to the launch of Drop Ins is one of those things where I'm just amazed no-one at Twitch saw it coming. The reasoning behind Drop Ins is good: Streamers increasingly band together, and watching your favourites go in for the odd collaboration and play games together can be great. Twitch is making this much easier, and no doubt the majority will happily use the feature to good effect.

But solo streams still feel like the bread-and-butter, and there will always be a contingent of streamers who don't want to collaborate. Making them opt out in every single stream, rather than just turning it off in settings, just feels overbearing and annoying. Drop Ins will no doubt become an important and popular part of the platform: but Twitch really should let individuals drop out.

In both a sign and indictment of the times, former president and current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump became a Kick streamer yesterday. Specifically, Trump appeared on the channel of controversial streamer Adin Ross for a fawning 90-minute interview, live from Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort, that drew over half a million viewers at its peak.

What did they talk about? All sorts. In Trump's trademark rambling style, the pair touched on topics ranging from the ex-president's disastrous appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists convention to a peculiar lightning round in which Ross pulled up images of celebrities and world leaders—including Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, DPRK supreme leader Kim Jong-un, plus Ross and Trump themselves—and asked Trump to give a one-word summation of each, a word limit the former prez immediately failed to keep to.

Trump said he had heard of Ross via his own son, 18-year-old Barron Trump, who is apparently a big fan of the streamer. "'Dad, he's really big,'" said Trump, imitating his son, "'he's also a friend of mine.'"

That the younger Trump is a Ross fan isn't a surprise. At his Twitch peak, Ross had 7.2 million followers and currently has 1.36 million followers on Kick, and he has particular sway over young men like Barron Trump. Donald Trump no doubt hopes his appearance on Ross' stream will give him a boost among the demographic come election time.

To put it delicately, Ross is a controversial figure: He courted multiple Twitch bans during his time on Amazon's service for using slurs, and eventually had to take a permanent ban—for "Hateful conduct"—from the platform after livestreaming his own unmoderated Kick chat on it, which was filled with antisemitic and racist messages. He has also played host to Andrew Tate, the misogynistic influencer currently facing charges for rape and human trafficking in Romania. He might not host him again though: Tate might bear a grudge after Ross reportedly got Tate arrested by revealing he intended to flee Romania during a livestream.

At nearly an hour and a half, the stream is too long and too baffling to summarise in its entirety, but there are a few highlights. For instance, Trump praised the "sizzle" of his political enemy, New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, comparing her to Eva Perón in front of a smiling Ross (who has previously struggled with political history). 

Later, Ross presented Trump with a gift: A Rolex watch, which the billionaire graciously accepted. All of this occurred before Ross asked Trump if there was anything that could be done for Ross' friend, rapper Young Thug, who is currently facing charges for racketeering. "I have a friend who's currently being treated unfair by [district attorney Fani Willis]... I just was wondering if there's a way that we can make sure he gets treated fair, that's all." Trump didn't really give Ross an answer, beyond emphasising that Young Thug should "be treated fairly."

That would be enough to make you question the reality of our current moment by itself, but it doesn't hold a candle to the stream's finale. After wrapping up Trump's rambling assessment of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with a brief detour by Ross into the former president's plan for the crypto industry, the streamer and ex-prez went on a walk through the Mar-a-Lago resort. 

On the way out, they encountered Canadian streamer xQc, who showed off a custom shirt featuring Trump wearing a grill. "I love that," said Trump, bending down for a closer look, "That's fantastic." The former president then told xQc "Congratulations," for some reason, as he and Ross walked away.

Ending up outside, Ross presented Trump with his final gift for the stream: A customised Tesla Cybertruck, adorned with the now-famous AP photo of a blood-streaked Trump raising a fist in the immediate aftermath of his assassination attempt last month. The pair then sat together in the truck's front seats and listened to Can't Help Falling In Love by Elvis Presley, along with California Dreamin' by The Mamas & the Papas, God Only Knows by The Beach Boys, Beat It by Michael Jackson, and Don't, another Elvis banger.

In the stream's final minute, Ross and Trump stood outside Mar-a-Lago and danced to no audible music. Trump then told assembled cameras and phones—apparently recording for TikTok—that "We're gonna save TikTok, [Biden and Harris] wanna destroy TikTok. So all the people on TikTok, vote for Trump."

All of that really happened, and it's more than a little hard to process. Of course, it's not even remotely new for politicians to turn new media to their advantage, and to participate in awkward or cringeworthy events in an attempt to showcase their humanity and reach new audiences. 

Heck, the aforementioned Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez was streaming Among Us four years ago in an attempt to get young people to vote. Much darker, Russia has even enlisted streamers to drive propaganda for its war in Ukraine, as in the case with GrishaPutin, who played a Hearts of Iron 4 mod from the headquarters of the mercenary Wagner Group.

So why does this even register on the surreal-o-meter? There's more than one reason. Trump is a pretty surreal character all by himself, Ross is clearly out of his depth discussing politics, and the multiple expensive gifts to a billionaire presidential candidate seem utterly bizarre (and may have violated campaign finance rules). Combine that with the pair rocking out to a combo of golden oldies in a Cybertruck adorned with a photo taken seconds after someone tried to shoot Trump dead and, well, I think it becomes clear why this all seems so strange.

It's also probably set to happen again. Just after the stream, Ross responded to a tweet from Twitter owner (and Trump supporter) Elon Musk, asking "Can we stream next? I'll fly to you tonight." Strap in, folks. We're in for a long one. 

Twitch employees are concerned that the streaming platform risks becoming a "zombie brand", and that further layoffs may lie ahead after nearly 1,000 jobs were cut from the company within the last 12 months.

A new report by The Wall Street Journal (via Eurogamer) reveals that Amazon paid $1 billion to acquire Twitch Interactive in 2014, but has received "little financial return" from the service in the ensuing decade. In brief, the report says that Twitch has always struggled to be profitable, even after significant growth following the launch of Fortnite in 2018 and again during the Covid-19 pandemic.

While Amazon doesn't provide official revenue figures for Twitch, internal documents viewed by the WSJ state the livestreaming service generated approximately $667 million in ad revenue and $1.3 billion in commerce revenue in 2023, amounting to less than 0.5% of Amazon's total revenue for the year.

The report points to Twitch's "challenging" business model as the primary cause, specifically the high infrastructural cost of supporting a large volume of livestreams, and the difficult nature of integrating advertising into long-form live video. Quoted by the Wall Street Journal, digital entertainment analyst Mike Hickey said "If you can't be profitable when you have a surge in demand, you have something structurally wrong."

More recently, Twitch's audience has been spending less on subscriptions and donations to creators, with internal projections suggesting the platform could "shed" $250 million in revenue by the end of next year. These ongoing struggles have now begun to result in layoffs. In 2023, Amazon laid off 400 workers from the streaming platform. This was followed by another 500 layoffs earlier this year, with Twitch CEO Dan Clancy stating that Twitch was "meaningfully larger than it needs to be."

Now, with Amazon expected to report its second-quarter results on Thursday, and an internal operations review due at Twitch this autumn, employees are worried that a third round of layoffs may be coming. Moreover, Twitch may end up becoming sidelined at Amazon due to its failure to live up to expectations, known as becoming a "zombie brand", with previous examples including Goodreads and Woot.

Employees have also criticised Clancy for embarking upon international work trips to meet Twitch Creators and host livestreams while laying off employees and remarking about unprofitability. Clancy responded by email to these employees, including his itinerary and stating his meetups included "medium sized dinners" with creators, adding "If I was running a manufacturing company I would be meeting with the companies that provided us raw materials as well as the companies that we sold our widgets to."

Twitch has issued new "clarifications" to its sexual harassment policy in a bid to make it easier to understand, released alongside an update to its AutoMod moderation tools designed to let streamers curb inappropriate messages in chat.

In a blog post released yesterday, Twitch wrote that its sexual harassment policy "remains largely unchanged," but that it was adding on a chunk of clarifying language to—it hopes—draw clearer boundaries around the kinds of behaviour that aren't accepted on its platform.

The new language gets a lot more particular about exactly what Twitch doesn't want to see in its chats. "We prohibit unwanted comments–including comments made using emojis/emotes–regarding someone's appearance or body, sexual requests or advances, sexual objectification, and negative statements or attacks related to a person's perceived sexual behaviours or activities, regardless of their gender," read the update guidelines, "We also do not tolerate the recording or sharing of non-consensual intimate images or videos under any circumstances, and may report such content to law enforcement."

In other words, Twitch is now trying to give its audience a robust list of specific behaviours it can use as a reference when deciding what's kosher or not to post in chat, rather than a broader and more vague ban on creepy behaviour. 

The platform goes on to emphasise that it's (as you might expect) really the "non-consensual" element of that stuff it has a problem with, and encourages anyone who thinks they've been targeted for "mutual, consensual comments" to file an appeal. It notes, though, that some comments—like "expressing a desire to commit sexual violence"—are never allowed on Twitch regardless of any other factors.

Twitch is also updating AutoMod, the machine learning gizmo streamers can use to nip inappropriate comments in the bud automatically, to "better combat sexual harassment.

"We’ve developed a new AutoMod category that will allow you to filter out chat messages that could be considered sexual harassment," says Twitch, "This new category will provide an additional layer of protection, and can help to block those messages in the moment, before they show up in chat." 

Streamers will be able to decide how strict AutoMod is about withholding potentially problematic comments. Alongside their mods, they'll be able to review held messages to determine what to do with them. The new tools rolled out yesterday, although they're currently English-only.

Sexual harassment is, of course, absolutely endemic in online spaces, and Twitch is no exception. Numerous streamers—the vast majority of them women—have plenty of horror stories of viewers crossing the line in one way or another, whether it's creepy comments or outright stalking. Tools like these are an unfortunate necessity, though by no means adequate to stomp the problem out entirely. 

More than three years after suspending Donald Trump over concerns that he would use the platform "to incite further violence" in the wake of the January 6, 2001 attack on the US Capitol by his far-right supporters, Twitch has reversed course and restored his account.

"We reinstated former President Trump's Twitch channel," a Twitch spokesperson said in a statement provided to PC Gamer. "We believe there is value in hearing from Presidential nominees directly, when possible. Trump is now the official Republican nominee for US president.

"We continue to enforce our Community Guidelines and take necessary enforcement action when we identify violations of our rules. Twitch doesn't have a 'public figure policy', meaning all channels are equally subject to our guidelines, regardless of whether the channel belongs to a public figure."

It's quite a turnaround from January 2021, when Twitch said "the President's incendiary rhetoric" made the suspension necessary "to protect our community and prevent Twitch from being used to incite further violence."

That was actually the second suspension of Trump's Twitch account: It had also been given a two-week ban in 2020 for violating Twitch's rules against hateful conduct and harassment. The 2001 suspension was later extended "indefinitely," as Twitch said Trump's statements "continue to be interpreted as calls to action."

Facebook and Instagram also suspended Trump's accounts in the immediate wake of the January 6 attack. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the time that the former president had used the platforms "to incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government," and that "the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great." 

That suspension was lifted in 2023, although "heightened suspension penalties" were imposed to help deter repeat offenses; those penalties were taken off the table earlier this month, shortly ahead of the Republican National Convention.

Twitch did not clarify whether the Trump campaign or some affiliated entity requested the channel's reinstatement, or if it just went ahead and did it proactively. As it stands, the reinstatement appears to have caught everyone by surprise: The channel is empty of all content, and the background image still contains the old Trump/Pence 2020 banner. Mike Pence did not return as Trump's running mate for 2024, possibly at least in part because the House Select Committee investigation of the capitol attack found that Trump had expressed support for Pence's murder amidst the January 6 violence.

What is clear is that Trump has not toned down his rhetoric since his election loss in 2020. In an April speech reported by Reuters, for instance, he referred to immigrants in the US as "animals" and "not human." Trump may not actually return to Twitch—his Twitter account was reinstated by Elon Musk in 2022 but remains untouched, as Trump has thus far opted to stick with his own Truth Social platform—but if he does, and if Twitch is serious about enforcing its community policies, I think there's a good likelihood it'll be suspended again in short order.

Good lighting for your stream setup can be the difference between being able to present a clear friendly face to your audience, or to looking like you're telling ghost stories during nuclear winter. Thanks to the rise of content creation, you can get all sorts of lighting solutions at many different price points for making all sorts of videos. With streaming, gamer brands are truly in the mix and we are starting to see some purpose built options for our niche. 

The Logitech Litra Beam LX is one light designed to not only light your face, but also provide RGB backlighting and bonus control options. It's a smooth and quality experience but there's nothing revolutionary here to justify the price.

Setting up the Logitech Litra Beam LX is nice and easy. The light strip screws into the stand with a standard 1/4-20 UNC mount connection. There's a screw on the long and short ends of the light so you've the choice between having it sit horizontally or vertically when mounted to the stand. There's also a little bit of cable management aid regardless of the direction, and the stand is nice with solid pull into place action, though has a somewhat bulky foot.

You'll need a free power outlet for the light and then connect to your PC through Logitech's G Hub app via either USB-C or Bluetooth. This was also nice and simple as the light was immediately recognised by the app, and from there I could use the software to change the lights settings from my PC as opposed to using the pretty hard to find (especially with a key light shining into your face) physical buttons the Litra Beam XL.

Those physical buttons are excellent in a pinch, however. There's the choice between cool or warm light and a slider for brightness. You can tune it to your preferences and it's handy to be able to do it subtly in app while streaming. 

Once set up, it really is an attractive key light. The light is soft and even and there's no flicker regardless of brightness. I found that having the brightness set to about 70% was enough to illuminate myself quite well, giving room either way for different scenarios. The light is also smooth enough for taking shots of makeup, which is what ring lighting was originally designed for so the evenness is impressive from a bar light.

The packaging boasts Logitech's Truesoft lighting technology to give this effect, alongside passing safety checks for long term use. Some of that is hard to quantify, but the video results aren't that noticeably different from much cheaper solutions such as baking paper defused lightbulbs and budget ring lights I have used in the past. 

The other tab in the G Hub software is for the back RGB light panel which you can set to pulse and vibe away to a whole lot of colourful presets or make your own. There's an audio responsive mode for visualisers and also a screen mirroring mode if you want to create that immersive splash back effect. The lights are bright, quite customisable, and look pretty cool. But also feel super unnecessary. They don't affect your stream at all, which is good in the sense that your bright RGB party doesn't affect your soft camera lighting you've just set up, but kinda makes you wonder what the point is.

That is what I keep coming back to when using this light. I have no qualms in using it, it's an enjoyable tidy solution with a few handy extras. As much as I love RGB lighting I can't see myself bothering to really use the Litra Beam XL back side. I have better solutions for that, and I've noticed that when streaming using the front key light I won't even notice the backlighting effects thanks to everything else going on. 

When considerably cheaper key light options provide indistinguishable results, while only losing a handful of nice-to-have features, Logitech's Litra Beam XL becomes a harder sell at $150/£150/$250 AUD. Especially when the non RGB Litra Beam is a full $50 cheaper.

Logitech's Litra Beam XL is a breeze to use. It's easy to set-up and does a great job of providing ample illumination while looking good on your desk. It has a powerful soft front light for your face, different configuration options, easy app use, and you get that RGB back light if you really want it. It's also carbon neutral, which is very cool to see. If you're after a key light with those features and the price doesn't seem high to you then you'll have a great time. 

However, if you're strapped for cash and just want to look good on stream you can likely save yourself some considerable dollars elsewhere.