So it’s that time of year again. The second week of January, where some of us spend the week watching people play video games. Awesome Games Done quick is week long charity event on Twitch, where people try to speedrun old games. It can be very entertaining.

So there we were, maybe 10 years ago, at Mrs Rad’s family home, just watching some random stuff on Youtube. Honestly, I can’t really remember what we were watching, but suddenly we were watching youtube videos of speedruns. This seemed ridiculous to me at the time. Who watches someone else play videogames, instead of playing them themselves. However, I particularly remember them speedrunning one of the Zelda titles, I think it was Twilight Princess. I did clock the logo in the corner though Awesome Games Done Quick, and I wondered what it was. Mrs Rad’s brother explained that people donated money as they were speedrunning the games. This seemed even more wild to me. Why would people donate money to someone playing a video game?

However, when I went home, I decided to look this Twitch thing up. I wondered whether there were people who could speedrun my favourite game – Legend of Zelda – Ocarina of time. Sure enough there were a few.

At this point we had very young children, one was 3 the other was 1. And they really struggled to sleep. They liked to have us in the room, to keep them safe. So every evening I would sit there for an hour or two in the dark, trying to help them sleep.

So one night I got my phone out and found Twitch again. I would sit there watching people doing run after run, just as a bit of eye candy whilst I sat there. I didn’t really understand the chat thing, that seemed super scary to me, how could I write something in that? So I didn’t. In fact, for 3 years I didn’t have an account.

But gradually I got to understand the thing. I got to know some of the speed runners and I had some favourites that I liked and I would often come back to watch them every night. I saw that it was more about the community than just being like a TV programme to watch. And I saw why people paid money, even though I didn’t myself.

I never really thought much about streaming myself, until I started to branch out to watch some different speedruns. And once the kids were old enough to not need their hands held every night – I decided to give it a try myself.