By day a blood bank employee in California, Marilolli’s nightly broadcasts on Twitch mostly focus on in-game sculpture and slaying monsters. She’s a relaxed, engaging personality on the live videogame streaming platform but a recent stream saw her utilise a surprising playstyle best described as ‘two kids under five ‘.
Marilee Habenicht more often uses Twitch as a kind of open studio where she creates sculptures of animals (via simulator of wonky castles, Landmark) including Sea otters, penguins and A Mermaid That Looks A Bit Like Bernard Bresslaw that are like brilliant virtual versions of the porcelain figurines on your gran’s mantlepiece. But in between her practice, she also plays Day Z, Planetside 2 and – most recently – Diablo 3, and the other night this early evening wind-down on Blizzard’s Blakean looter was brutally put to the sword by a cast of her children and in-laws.
Diablo 3’s focus is on exquisitely addictive hoarding, upgrading and management of in-game goodies; its narrative currency so devalued that raining a storm of lightning on a hundred foot high demon who dramatically collapses into digitized cinder is treated with as much surprise as a slightly late bus. Bringing low glamour parenting into its high fantasy grind makes for an experience akin to said double decker spending a weekend LARPing in Suffolk. While Marilolli’s stream regularly features chat about her children – such as their habit of bringing home rocks that look like poo – a recent show was special because these off-screen characters – possibly escaping through the gap between bath and bed time – made their on screen presence felt.
It’s surprising how quickly new media platforms ‘set’ into rigid forms. I’m already used to the little streamer webcam window in the corner of Twitch featuring a close up of a dude with a beard for instance – it’s like a picture in the hallway you walk past everyday. Marilee’s stream turned this upside down – overrunning it with children draping themselves over her keyboard and standing behind her blowing raspberries while asking epistemological questions (“Hey Mummy! Do you know me?”), bloodcurdling screams from her four year old when a cellphone is taken away (“No more phone calls to Mexico!”) and a huge cheer that saw her team chat erupt with people thinking she’d taken out mid level boss ‘Bellybloat the Scarred’ before it turned out she was celebrating her mother-in-law agreeing to do some babysitting.
There’s been plenty of examples of people using Twitch – currently the leading videogame streaming platform with 45 million viewers every month – to show things other than videogames. There was a spate of Playstation 4 owners using an app called Playroom that came with their console’s camera to stream everything from chat shows to the inside of a busy barbershop in Brooklyn. But there was little or no videogaming in these examples. The games console was just a shortcut to broadcasting reality television. Marilee’s mashup stream brought games and the play of family together to create something that felt new – although in ten years time her children will presumably experience the same warm nostalgia from these broadcasts set in Diablo 3’s scorched earth as a home movie filmed on the seaside or in a theme park.
On Twitch’s chat, I asked Marilee whether Twitch reminded her of anything other than itself. “I haven’t been streaming for long so Twitch reminds me of Twitch,” Came the reply. “It also reminds me of cupcakes and beans and apples,” The strangest thing about Marilolli’s Twitch stream – where the dramas of real life can outshout those of the deep-space battlefield or post-apocalyptic wilderness – is how it feels as normal as cupcakes. Or taking the kids to school. Or trying to stop her four year old using breakfast cereal as clothing. Next to the familiar concatenation of epic battles that the likes of Diablo 3 offer, small things can seem remarkable. At one point I mention how Twitch can feel like a cross between a videogame and a soap opera but I don’t really hear her reply cos she’s taking out a Deathcaller demon while her kids brush their teeth in the background.
Words: Rob Barker.
Images courtesy of Youtube.
