Twitch streamer Ludwig Ahgren has been live since March 14 and today marked the fourth continuous day of his broadcast. The reason? Each time someone subscribes to your channel, it adds 10 seconds to the time they plan to stay live. In other words: Ahgren is running an unlimited subathon because he will stay awake as long as viewers continue to subscribe.
Since he is one of the most popular streamers on Twitch – with 1.8 million followers at the time of writing – it means that Ahgren will be live for at least a few more days. (At the time this book was written, he had 57 more hours to go.) Yesterday, when he went to sleep at night in his red racing car bed, he even managed to become Twitch’s best streamer.
In fact, this is not against Twitch’s TOS. A Twitch spokesman sent an email The Verge a statement, clarifying that they have also been watching the flow very carefully and claiming that Ahgren is not violating any of its rules. “Our Community Guidelines do not prohibit sleeping during the broadcast, however, we expect people to take appropriate precautions to ensure that their broadcast and chat are monitored and attended to,” wrote a spokesman.
While he is awake, Ahgren is broadcasting games with friends; while he sleeps, his mods display videos chosen by the community. As Nathan Grayson wrote in Kotaku: “It’s basically a big pajama party with bleary eyes, where everyone is just vibrating.” (Although sub-zones are one thing in the Twitch community, they rarely last longer than, say, 30-something hours.)
Twitch is a wonderfully immediate online place. You can see and interact with people on the screen in real time, which seems like a kind of intimacy. Ahgren’s stream is on its way to becoming an event in Twitch history, similar to Twitch Plays Pokémon and any of his other memes from the entire site. It’s amazing to me that, however big it is, Twitch still has its own distinct culture and its own set of stars that seem to do stunts like this just because they look cool.
But historicization can wait. Ahgren is now live and wonderful.