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I am obsessed with forming healthy communities,
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and that's why I started Twitch --
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to help people watch other people play video games on the internet.
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(Laughter)
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Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
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(Laughter)
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So in seriousness,
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video games and communities truly are quite related.
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From our early human history,
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we made our entertainment together in small tribes.
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We shared stories around the campfire,
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we sang together, we danced together.
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Our earliest entertainment was both shared and interactive.
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It wasn't until pretty recently on the grand scale of human history
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that interactivity took a back seat
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and broadcast entertainment took over.
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Radio and records brought music into our vehicles, into our homes.
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TV and VHS brought sports and drama into our living rooms.
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This access to broadcast entertainment was unprecedented.
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It gave people amazing content around the globe.
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It created a shared culture for millions of people.
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And now, if you want to go watch or listen to Mozart,
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you don't have to buy an incredibly expensive ticket and find an orchestra.
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And if you like to sing --
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(Sings) I can show you the world --
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then you have something in common with people around the world.
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But with this amazing access,
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we allowed for a separation between creator and consumer,
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and the relationship between the two became much more one-way.
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We wound up in a world where we had a smaller class of professional creators
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and most of us became spectators,
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and as a result it became far easier for us to enjoy that content alone.
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There's a trend counteracting this:
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scarcity.
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So, Vienna in the 1900s, was famous for its café culture.
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And one of the big drivers of that café culture
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was expensive newspapers that were hard to get,
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and as a result,
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people would go to the café and read the shared copy there.
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And once they're in the cafe,
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they meet the other people also reading the same newspaper,
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they converse, they exchange ideas
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and they form a community.
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In a similar way,
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TV and cable used to be more expensive,
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and so you might not watch the game at home.
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Instead you'd go to the local bar
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and cheer along with your fellow sports fans there.
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But as the price of media continues to fall over time thanks to technology,
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this shared necessity that used to bring our communities together falls away.
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We have so many amazing options for our entertainment,
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and yet it's easier than ever for us to wind up consuming those options alone.
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Our communities are bearing the consequences.
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For example,
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the number of people who report having at least two close friends
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is at an all-time low.
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I believe that one of the major contributing causes to this
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is that our entertainment today allows us to be separate.
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There is one trend reversing this atomization of our society:
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modern multiplayer video games.
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Games are like a shared campfire.
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They're both interactive and connecting.
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Now these campfires may have beautiful animations,
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heroic quests,
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occasionally too many loot boxes,
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but games today are very different
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than the solitary activity of 20 years ago.
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They're deeply complex,
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they're more intellectually stimulating,
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and most of all, they're intrinsically social.
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One of the recent breakout genres exemplifying this change
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is the battle royale.
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100 people parachute onto an island in a last-man-standing competition.
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Think of it as being kind of like "American Idol,"
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but with a lot more fighting and a lot less Simon Cowell.
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You may have heard of "Fortnite,"
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which is a breakout example of the battle royale genre,
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which has been played by more than 250 million people around the world.
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It's everyone from kids in your neighborhood
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to Drake and Ellen DeGeneres.
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2.3 billion people in the world play video games.
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Early games like "Tetris" and "Mario" may have been simple puzzles or quests,
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but with the rise of arcades and then internet play,
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and now massively multiplayer games of huge, thriving online communities,
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games have emerged as the one form of entertainment
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where consumption truly requires human connection.
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So this brings us to streaming.
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Why do people stream themselves playing video games?
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And why do hundreds of millions of people around the world
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congregate to watch them?
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I want you all the imagine for second --
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imagine you land on an alien planet,
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and on this planet, there's a giant green rectangle.
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And in this green rectangle,
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aliens in matching outfits
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are trying to push a checkered sphere between two posts
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using only their feet.
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It's pretty evenly matched,
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so the ball is just going back and forth,
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but there's hundreds of millions of people watching from home anyway,
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and cheering and getting excited and engaged right along with them.
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Now I grew up watching sports with my dad,
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so I get why soccer is entertaining and engaging.
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But if you don't watch sports,
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maybe you like watching "Dancing with the Stars"
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or you enjoy "Top Chef."
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Regardless, the principle is the same.
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If there is an activity that you really enjoy,
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you're probably going to like watching other people do it
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with skill and panache.
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It might be perplexing to an alien,
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but bonding over shared passion is a human universal.
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So gamers grew up expecting this live, interactive entertainment,
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and passive consumption just doesn't feel as fulfilling.
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That's why livestreaming has taken off with video games.
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Because livestreaming offers that same kind of interactive feeling.
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So when you imagine what's happening on Twitch,
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I don't want you to think of a million livestreams of video games.
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Instead, what I want you to picture is millions of campfires.
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Some of them are bonfires --
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huge, roaring bonfires with hundreds of thousands of people around them.
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Some of them are smaller, more intimate community gatherings
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where everyone knows your name.
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Let's try taking a seat by one of those campfires right now.
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Hey Cohh, how's it going?
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Cohh: Hey, how's it going, Emmett?
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ES: So I'm here at TED with about 1,000 of my closest friends,
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and we thought we'd come and join you guys for a little stream.
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Cohh: Awesome! It's great to hear from you guys.
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ES: So Cohh, can you share with the TED audience here --
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what have you learned about your community on Twitch?
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Cohh: Ah, man, where to begin?
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I've been doing this for over five years now,
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and if there's one thing that doesn't cease to impress me on the daily,
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it's just kind of how incredible this whole thing is for communication.
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I've been playing games for 20 years of my life,
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I've led online MMO guilds for over 10,
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and it's the kind of thing where there's very few places in life
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where you can go to meet so many people with similar interests.
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I was listening in a bit earlier;
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I love the campfire analogy, I actually use a similar one.
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I see it all as a bunch of people on a big couch
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but only one person has the controller.
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So it's kind of like a "Pass the snack!" situation, you know?
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700 people that way --
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but it's great and really it's just --
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ES: So Cohh, what is going on in chat right now?
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Can you explain that a little bit to us?
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Because my eyesight isn't that good but I see a lot of emotes.
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Cohh: So this is my community; this is the Cohhilition.
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I stream every single day.
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I actually just wrapped up a 2,000-day challenge,
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and as such, we have developed a pretty incredible community
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here in the channel.
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Right now we have about 6200 people with us.
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What you're seeing is a spam of "Hello, TED" good-vibe emotes,
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love emotes,
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"this is awesome,"
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"Hi, guys," "Hi, everyone."
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Basically just a huge collection of people --
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huge collection of gamers
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that are all just experiencing a positive event together.
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ES: So is there anything that -- can we poll chat?
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I want ask chat a question.
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Is there anything that chat would like the world,
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and particularly these people here with me at TED right now,
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to know about what they get out of playing video games
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and being part of this community?
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Cohh: Oh, wow.
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I am already starting to see a lot of answers here.
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"I like the good vibes."
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"Best communities are on Twitch."
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(Laughter)
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"They get us through the rough patches in life."
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Oh, that's a message I definitely see a lot on Twitch,
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which is very good.
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"A very positive community,"
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"a lot of positivity,"
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which is pretty great.
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ES: So Cohh, before I get back to my TED talk,
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which I actually should probably get back to doing at some point --
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(Laughter)
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Do you have anything else that you want to share with me
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or any question you wanted to ask,
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you've always wanted to get out there before an audience?
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Cohh: Honestly, not too much.
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I mean, I absolutely love what you're doing right now.
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I think that the interactive streaming
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is the big unexplored frontier of the future in entertainment,
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and thank you for doing everything you're doing up there.
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The more people that hear about what you do, the better --
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for everyone on here.
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ES: Awesome, Cohh. Thanks so much.
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I'm going to get back to giving this talk now,
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but we should catch up later.
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Cohh: Sounds great!
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(Applause)
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ES: So that was a new way to interact.
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We could influence what happened on the stream,
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we could cocreate the experience along with him,
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and we really had a multiplayer experience with chat and with Cohh.
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At Twitch, we've started calling this,
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as a result, "multiplayer entertainment."
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Because going from watching a video alone to watching a live interactive stream
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is similar to the difference between going from playing a single-player game
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to playing a multiplayer game.
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Gamers are often as the forefront of exploration in new technology.
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Microcomputers, for example, were used early on for video games,
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and the very first handheld, digital mass-market devices weren't cell phones,
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they were Gameboys ...
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for video games.
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And as a result,
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one way that you can get a hint of what the future might hold
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is to look to this fun, interactive sandbox of video games
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and ask yourself,
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"what are these gamers doing today?"
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And that might give you a hint as to what the future is going to hold
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for all of us.
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One of the things we're already seeing on Twitch
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is multiplayer entertainment coming to sports.
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So, Twitch and the NFL teamed up to offer livestreaming football,
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but instead of network announcers in suits streaming the game,
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we got Twitch users to come in
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and stream it themselves on their own channel
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and interact with their community
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and make it a real multiplayer experience.
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So I actually think that if you look out into the future --
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only hundreds of people today get to be sports announcers.
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It's a tiny, tiny number of people who have that opportunity.
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But sports are about to go multiplayer,
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and that means that anyone who wants to around the world
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is going to get the opportunity to become a sports announcer,
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to give it a shot.
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And I think that's going to unlock incredible amounts of new talent
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for all of us.
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And we're not going to be asking, "Did you catch the game?"
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Instead, we're going to be asking,
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"Whose channel did you catch the game on?"
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We already see this happening with cooking, with singing --
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we even see people streaming welding.
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And all of this stuff is going to happen around the metaphorical campfire.
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There's going to be millions of these campfires lit
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over the next few years.
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And on every topic,