Twitch, the premier video game streaming service, is no stranger to peculiar social experiments, but their latest stunt just shows how the Internet has warped the way we enjoy media.
October 29 was the birthday of late legendary painter Bob Ross. To celebrate the pop culture icon this year and to launch their new “creative” streaming channel, Twitch partnered with Janson Media and BobRoss Inc. to stream a 9-day marathon of The Joy of Painting starring Bob Ross. Now tens of thousands of gamers have tuned in for a communal viewing of the charismatic painter drowning canvases with liquid white paint and plotting out the living quarters of “happy little trees.”
The marathon is in promotion of Twitch’s new “Creative” channel for their service. Previously, Twitch restricted its users to only streaming video game-related content. As the service has grown in popularity, the variety of content allowed for streaming has expanded to other live events such as music concerts and talk shows. With the new Creative channel, Twitch users can now live stream their more creative side, be it playing themselves playing the piano, editing videos, and, of course, painting!
“All along, the Twitch community has included a determined community of artists, crafters and builders, who have been using Twitch to broadcast their creative processes. These creative broadcasters share many of the same characteristics as all Twitch broadcasters: passion, engagement, and a community-centric worldview,” wrote Bill Moorier, head of Twitch creative, in a blog post.
The launch of the new channel has boosted the amount of viewers for these creative outlets, but outnumbering them all is a channel dedicated to streaming old episodes of The Joy of Painting. Frequently, you’ll see viewership of the Bob Ross marathon at more than 50,000 simultaneous viewers, beating out popular games that normally top Twitch’s view charts, like League of Legends and DOTA2. Even the newly released Halo 5 can’t hold a candle to the afroed artist.
If you’re someone who simply wants to enjoy the relaxing voice of Bob Ross as he narrates his creative process, just focus on the video pane and everything will be alright. The second your eyes veer to the right towards the chat room, however, your sanity might be put at stake. The Bob Ross Twitch chat is an incredibly bizarre application of video game culture to The Joy of Painting. Accompanying the video of Ross’s painting is a live text chat in which viewers can participate by typing messages for others to see. But if you expect to be able to do any actual “chatting” with other Bob Ross fans, you’ll be sorely disappointed. When 50,000 people are all slamming on their keyboards at the same time, you’ll hard pressed to find any actual discourse about Ross’s famous “wet-on-wet” oil painting technique. Instead, you’ll find chatters constantly repeating one-word phrases in all caps that will just go over the head of anyone who hasn’t been paying attention to Twitch and video game eSports culture. It’s so strange, and some ways, offensive, and yet oh-so fascinating.
The second that a new episode of The Joy of Painting starts up, the chat will welcome Bob back in sarcastic amazement that he was able to return so quickly from the previous episode, referencing the normally “live” host of a standard Twitch stream. Once Ross places his brush on the canvas, the chat will spam “RUINED” as if the painting has ending before it even got started. As Ross works his magic, mixing that splotch of “Titanium White” with “Prussian Blue” to create majestic clouds, the chat will claim the painting as “SAVED.” Though with some dissenters will cry out with accusations of Ross “cheating” at painting. You’ll often see the words “VAC” fill up the chat box, in reference to the Valve Anti-Cheat system prominent in competitive shooting games like Counter-Strike. Once Ross moves on to another section of the canvas, any new dab of “Van Dyke Brown” will be met with a flood of “RUINED,” starting the wacky cycle anew.
It’s a cacophony of madness in juxtaposition with the beautiful landscapes that Ross creates, accompanied by his soothing narrative. “Almighty clouds” receive almighty praise, that is until he moves onto the trunk of a “happy little tree,” which is met with mixed reaction of “TREE HYPE” and another litany of “RUINED.” Every once in a while, Ross might make a dark comment about a hunter who died while sleeping in this “happy little cabin” to the bewilderment of chat. “Let’s get crazy,” Ross says, and the chat is definitely already there with him. Then whenever Ross talks about selling a painting, the chat is quick to call him a “SELLOUT.” And, of course, the chat is filled with as much glee as Ross himself at the flapping sound of cleaning his brush, “beating the devil out of it.”
Once Ross has completed a piece and signs his name, the chat has made a ritual of typing “gg,” video game shorthand for “good game,” a sign of good sportsmanship in competitive online games like Starcraft. Then the next episode in the series starts, and it all happens again. Oh, and if Ross’s son Steve happens to take over an episode, the chat will try their best to really let him have it with a hashtag of “#FREEBOB.”
All this lunacy just serves as a reflection of how we enjoy media these days. Not only is our entertainment experience dominated by “memes,” but we also crave reactions from others and from ourselves. And then through the connectivity of the Internet, it’s so easy to share our joy and criticism instantly with thousands of others without having time to even think about what we’re actually saying. If we had social media back in the 80s, who knows what kind of weird things viewers would be sending to Bob Ross’s Twitter account. The Internet has made media really, really weird, but more captivating nonetheless.
The Joy of Painting marathon will continue until all 403 episodes of the series have been streamed, lasting for 8-and-a-half days in total. Some people have even taken it upon themselves to set up a canvas of their own in, be it a physical one or a window in MS Paint, and attempt follow along with Bob as best as they can. If any good has come from this, it’s that an entire new generation of kids have been exposed to the magic of Bob Ross and the joy of painting.
By Alfredo Dizon, eParisExtra