Finding THE Game
One challenge I face is deciding which game to stream. There are plenty I want to play, but not enough hours in the day to play them all, let alone finish them. Beyond the time problem sits a harder question: is this game even worth streaming? Truthfully, I am bad at identifying that. All games can be worth streaming for the right streamer, but not all streamers are right for a game.
Aether & Iron taught me that recently. Seven hours in, the game had done nothing wrong. The mechanics were solid. The world was fine. The narrative was fine. Everything was just… fine. And fine is its own kind of problem. Without a genuine connection to what’s happening on screen, streaming becomes a chore to pursue.
Not that I have much of an audience to feel anything. Two years of streaming and I remain firmly planted in the 0-5 viewer range, a number so consistent it’s almost impressive. Streaming to an empty room while not even enjoying the game is a special commitment to the bit, and somewhere around hour six of Aether & Iron, even I had to admit the bit wasn’t landing.
Despite my constant declarations of wanting to finish Aether & Iron on stream by the end of April, I had to accept that would not happen. Pushing through to the end felt impossible once I started falling into a familiar trap: oh, I just won’t stream tonight. Something I tell myself not to do, and do anyway, with the reliability of someone who has learned absolutely nothing from their own patterns.
No Man’s Sky has been the opposite, and the contrast surprised me more than I expected. I’ve tried playing No Man’s Sky in the past, but it never clicked with me… Until it did these last few weeks.
Where Aether & Iron felt like an obligation, I kept negotiating with, No Man’s Sky feels like somewhere I actually want to be. Something about the quiet enormity of it, the freedom to exist in a universe that doesn’t demand much from you, clicked in a way I wasn’t expecting. There’s no pressure to push the narrative forward, no sense that I’m falling behind. The game simply exists, vast and unhurried, and allows me to craft my own story and journey. Somehow that’s exactly what I needed.
And I know it’s working because of what happens when I’m not playing it.
The telltale sign of a game that works for me is simple: I think about it when I’m not playing it. I plan what I’ll do next. Which planet to explore. Which base to expand. Whether I want to push further into the story or wander off in a completely different direction because something on the horizon looked interesting. That kind of pull doesn’t come from a game being good. It comes from a game finding you at the right moment.
Heck, in my brief break from streaming to focus on the end of the semester, my last semester of teaching, I’ve wanted to play even without an audience. No stream. No chat. Just me and an infinite universe, which, considering the state of my viewer count, isn’t entirely different from my usual setup.
Finding the game that resonates is everything. Not the game you think you should play, or the one with the most potential, or the one you’ve been publicly declaring you’ll finish for three months. The one you actually want to play, with or without an audience, with or without a schedule, with or with no good reason beyond the fact that it pulls you back.
Without that connection, streaming becomes a chore dressed up as a hobby. Aether & Iron wasn’t a bad game. It just wasn’t my game, and no amount of stubbornly scheduling stream nights was going to change that. The warning signs were there: the skipped streams, the six hours of fine. I ignored them until I couldn’t anymore. That has been the hardest part of being a streamer, recognizing when something isn’t working and giving yourself permission to move on. I convinced myself that I needed to finish the game. In reality, I didn’t.
No Man’s Sky reminded me what it feels like when the fit is right. When you’re thinking about a game between sessions, making quiet plans for the next time you load it up. That’s the version of streaming worth chasing. Not the numbers, not the algorithm, not the perfectly curated content schedule. Just the genuine desire to play, and the willingness to share that with whoever wanders in.
Even if that’s nobody.
Jesús M. Rivera 