While the gaming industry had been enjoying massive success already, there’s little doubt that the pandemic of 2020-2021 brought people confined to their homes together in a particularly enjoyable way: by gaming with one another via the internet. More people than ever before experienced the fun and social dimension of gaming for the first time, perhaps especially acutely given the enforced social isolation that the pandemic required.
Whether engaged in an epic fantasy adventure, a battle royale, or a visit to a virtual poker table (after a quick search for, say, “online casino NJ”), gaming provided an anxious population with a welcome respite from the grim reality that was enveloping the world outside their front doors. If there’s nothing one can do about a novel respiratory virus sweeping the globe, a seat at a virtual roulette wheel or digitalized slot machine can suddenly seem like an oasis of normalcy and safety, something to engage your mind and take you away from insistent anxiety and uncertainty. And online resources like Resorts Casino offered that in abundance, with cutting-edge casino games, top-tier customer service, and decades of experience in the casino industry to draw from.
During the pandemic, vast numbers of people turned to or discovered, for the first time, the spectacular entertainment on offer on the video game live-streaming platform Twitch (famously acquired by Amazon in 2014 for a cool $970m). A measure of its popularity? Over a million people are tuned in to Twitch at any given moment.
It seems that Twitch has an unforgeable virtue on its side. The popularity of the games it streams is organic. The gamers who lend it that popularity have become profoundly cynical of any brands or corporations that produce offerings with various fashionable bells and whistles but with little genuine substance in the play. Many of these devotees will spend eight hours at a time on a live stream, which means their sensitivity to (and intolerance of) inauthenticity has been honed by extensive experience.
A vital feature of an authentically durable game that players are willing to revisit time and time again is its replayability: that’s what draws people back day after day, week after week, month after month, and so on.
When a Twitch game’s replayability factor is high, players don’t experience highly formulaic and canalized storylines with identical outcomes each time they play. Built into the game instead are multiple outcomes in each scene, depending on how your character acts, what choices they make, etc. You can play the same title many times over, but maybe never the same game.
Closely related to a game’s longevity on Twitch (and elsewhere) is the related characteristic of explorability: players don’t enter a static universe in their game but a much more dynamic environment where a wrong move culminating in failure in one turn can be redeemed in the next turn by a different choice of action.
And word of mouth on social media platforms amongst gamers “spreads the love” even further. The essence of replayability and explorability is that they can’t be faked; great graphics and heart-pounding action help, but the game’s authenticity rests more squarely on these two foundations.
