How a Twitch Channel Helped Keep Me, Sane, During the Pandemic
Ever since I first sat down with a Super Nintendo and played Donkey Kong Country, I have loved video games. There have been two versions of gamer Damian. The first was born from some sort of bizarre self-inflicted peer pressure not to be a nerd and the current version of myself where I have three different games consoles and a Steam account on the laptop that I am writing this article on. This led me to Twitch around 2016. A platform that was initially a spinoff of Justin.tv allows users to stream what they are playing and chat with viewers at the same time. — I watched a couple of streams, shrugged my shoulders, and, to be honest, never thought about it again. Then as you all know, the pandemic hit around December 2019. By March 2021, we here in Melbourne, Australia, were in lockdown, and my reintroduction to Twitch was only a couple of weeks away.
Meanwhile, across town, stand-up comedian, party DJ, and for the sake of transparency, a very close friend in Andrew McClelland was setting up a Twitch stream. He planned to play DJ sets of Britpop. Sixties classics, pop bangers. The usual smorgasbord of aural delight that Andrew has been serving up to eager angular-haired punters at indie nights like his own Mr. McClleand’s Finishing School held every second Friday night at a colonial-era dance hall at the top of several flights of well-worn beer-soaked stairs in Melbourne’s CBD fringe. Andrew started off, and for the first couple of weeks, I either did not know it was happening due to a lack of Facebooking on my account, or ……I am not sure why actually, being a shit friend? Anyway, one Wednesday, after a particularly brutal moring of combat with the Australian general public in a customer service position for a freight company (in a lockdown during a pandemic, just think about those calls!). I managed to take a breath and look at my Facebook. I saw a post from my dear friend that he was going to go live at 1 pm. A few re-scheduled meetings later, I logged back into Twitch, and there he was, my friend in his lounge room. A giant smile on his face, his three-piece suit somehow befitting of the occasion. He switched on his microphone with a small but mighty thud that escaped from my speakers, thanked everyone for being there, hit play, and bang! Feel Right by Mark Ronson, with some support from his good mate Mystikal burst into my makeshift bed-office, and Andy was off twirling and stepping across his lounge floorboards, looking like a cross between a kind, mischievous elf and a war-era professor pepped up on a robust pot of tea. Alright, man, you’ve got me interested here, I thought.
I noticed a sidebar of users chatting away to each other, saying hi, asking Andrew for requests, using emotes to show their appreciation for the current song. I wanted to be a part of it; looking back, I think I was very lonely and wanted some human interaction, however in the moment, without thinking, I created an account and jumped into the chat. I announced myself to Andrew, hoping for a shout-out on tv, and I got one. I was even more addicted.
The crew that had assembled around what Andrew was calling Lunchtunes seemed to have become fast friends within only a few weeks. Chatting away about their jobs, how the lockdown affected their working and living arrangements, and how much everyone needed a drink, a hug, and a dance. After Andrews’s shout out I was an immediate celebrity in the chat sidebar. I was greeted with numerous hello’s and was welcomed warmly. I decided to pass this show of positivity and warmth on to anyone who came after me in this digital frontiers town. The other thing I noticed about the group of about forty of us who had logged in (and not to be too binary about it) was the number of women there were compared to men. It does always seem to make for a much more convivial atmosphere, doesn't it?
I got to know many of these people just through chatting about music at first and if we knew Andrew in real life or not. Then with each passing day, something started to happen that I did not even notice until I found I was doing it myself. We were confiding to total strangers. They were charming strangers, but still, I was fearful of being vulnerable to myself, let alone another human being. I mean, I have problems admitting that I like Taskmaster with people. Let alone bowling into an online community bold as brass and displaying feelings and emotions. I mean, what was next, a relationship? Happiness?
We were all doing it, in any case. The more we trusted each other with how we were feeling about the not overly novel coronavirus, or the fact just today someone was down, and they were so happy LunchTunes existed and grateful for a virtual ear. The community had become essential to my mental health, but also just important to me full stop. How having something to look forward to each day was so important. Having a place, even if it was online you knew, that you could chat away to people or try and make someone laugh was a beautiful distraction from the bleating monotonous warblings concerning the hellscape that was happening around us.
Maddie, one of the main regulars, is the mother hen of the group. In a good way. She is constantly checking in on people; nothing is too much hassle. She is always optimistic, and her breezy sense of humor has helped me snap out of a self-entitled funk on more than one occasion. I asked her why Lunchtunes was important to her, and she spoke too of it improving her mental health.
“I really feel it has improved my mental health immensely through multiple lockdowns. The community is very important because it unities music and comedy lovers and also that sense of friendship we have created.”
I asked another founding member of the community Cazza LaRouge — a straight talker who constantly asks about the community’s well-being. Her dry sense of humor always generates a smile — about her experience with Twitch and Lunchtunes during lockdowns in the UK.
“As Andy found his feet on Twitch, I really enjoyed being a founding community member as I felt it gave me a bit of purpose- I took it upon myself to create a master setlist of the songs he played. He played such a varied mix, and it was nice to discover new songs and go back to old favorites. My concentration span over lockdown had been terrible as my illness (M.E/CFS) is affected by stress; music, therefore, had become extremely important to me as the one form of entertainment I could enjoy. I never expected to make friends off the back of the stream, but.”
When the internet is spoken about in traditional media, it is always pointed to as the bastion of individualism. Social media is the crux of society’s ills: promoting greed, isolationism, and extremism. My counterpoint to this would be to spend fifteen minutes in a twitch stream with a community such as the one that has formed around Lunchtunes. A community based on comedy, music, acceptance, friendship, and love.
Community is essential no matter where you find it, and as long as it is a peaceful, pleasant, enjoyable one. It can help someone confront social anxiety, become more open and less selfish, and even meet someone. Like Lunchtnes did for me. So thanks, Andrew, thanks, Lunchies, and thanks to you for reading. The world isn’t that bad a place if you know where to look.
You can find Cazza LeRouge’s Spotify playlist mentioned in the article here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3dQRzTWBjcSXpQcRNiDWqq?si=8b7e6f8022b344d4
