Ch. 10

No That’s Not How You Do It

I raised my hands in the air and started googling and gathering information about broadcasting. It didn’t take long for me to learn about something called a “streamer”.

Streamer

Streamers are people who broadcast online, usually on platforms like NewTube, Twitch, Kakao TV, etc. In other words, they are commonly called internet broadcasters in Korean.

In short, it was a term to describe people who broadcast on the internet.

I searched for streamers and broadcasting and found the links to the internet broadcasting platform sites in the related categories.

Tweety

It was the most famous and largest internet broadcasting site in Korea.

I went to the site and browsed around for a while. I found that most of the broadcasts were of various games, but there were also a few Just Chatting streams, where the focus was on chatting with viewers about real-life topics and daily life.

As an experiment, I started with the streams that had fewer viewers and found that there were a lot of chats going on in real time that were too childish or full of words I didn’t understand.

It seemed like they were probably buzzwords or something related to the streamer, but I didn’t understand them because I didn’t know much about the world yet.

It wasn’t that I was completely ignorant of internet broadcasting, because even in my now faded memories of the past, there was such a thing as live streaming.

It was more fun to play games myself than to watch someone else play games, so I didn’t have much interest in the idea of an inha.

It’s just that the few times I’ve looked for it since then, it’s not really my cup of tea.

“…”

As I stared at the person broadcasting and the chat window for a moment, I felt a little hesitant.

I felt a little afraid to try something I didn’t know enough about.

It felt like something so different, so separate from the sense of omnipotence and danger and adventure in the Dark Ark world.

And then I looked at the window that I had left open.

[Did that hacker asshole say she is going to stream?]

[She said, haha]

[That’s what all the assholes do. They just live with their mouths]

[Do you have the conditions to broadcast Another World? I heard that you can’t even broadcast if your computer is shitty, it’s just bragging, right?]

Bang!

Anger flared up at the sight, and I slammed the desk once more.

“Ugh…”

I groaned pathetically, clenching my fist in pain, but I still wanted to prove myself to those fuckers.

I opened another window and searched for something like “how to broadcast on Tweety,” and there were quite a few articles, as if I wasn’t the only one trying to do it.

I opened them one by one and checked them out. Turning on the broadcast wasn’t as difficult as I expected.

It was just a matter of setting up my broadcast settings as instructed and hitting the broadcast on button. It was so simple, almost as if they were encouraging me to become a streamer, that it made me wonder, “Is this really all there is to it?” and start looking at other sites.

In addition, I was interested in gaming, and even the PC specs I checked on the first day were all up to date, so it was not a problem to turn on the broadcast at all.

The only thing left to do was to connect to Another World and start broadcasting.

As I scrolled through the streams on Tweety, I looked at the top of the list with the most viewers and realized that the majority of streamers were playing Another World.

From the articles and sites I looked at, it seemed that streamers were streaming a lot of Another World because it’s a game that’s clearly gaining global popularity.

I thought broadcasting a game with a lot of users would give me a natural advantage. I also remembered that ‘Fall’ was the mainstream game on live broadcast at that time.

But I wondered how virtual reality was broadcasted, so I did some research.

“…20,000 people watching?”

One of the most popular streamers, “Han-ah,” had 20,000 viewers.

I couldn’t believe that 20,000 people were watching the same thing at the same time to see just one person. I had never saw that before.

In the world of Dark Ark, I had faced thousands of people before, but the number 20,000 didn’t seem real to me.

Curious, I clicked on the stream of a streamer named Han Ah.

What I saw was more interesting than I expected.

I wondered how to broadcast a virtual reality game, but it was a third-person view of a character from Another World, and the streamer, who seemed to be Han Ah, was moving around the screen.

The funny thing was that the character’s face was shown separately on one side of the screen, like a cam.

The character’s face showed various emotions, such as surprise, laughter, and so on.

Maybe because you couldn’t turn on a separate cam in virtual reality, the character’s face was small enough to look like a cam.

“Ahhh. How do I sound, can you hear me?”

[You are clear]

[I can hear you fine]

[We all can hear you]

The atmosphere was very different from the broadcast without an audience.

Even if there were no chats in the chat window, there seemed to be a dozen or so every second.

It looked like the streamer was testing the waters, as if she was just starting out, and I watched her closely.

Being a hack user was also a stigma, and I was determined to mess with the people who were commenting with all kinds of colorful accusations and insults.

Parring was easy.

You guys can’t do it, I’m just a regular user.

I wanted to rebut every single one of those nasty comments.

But before I did that, I needed to check out some famous people beforehand so that I wouldn’t feel awkward about my behavior after I went on stream.

I wanted to make sure that when they saw me, they wouldn’t find any flaws, and I could refute them perfectly.

“Then I’ll go straight to the arena. Ah! First, I’ll invite Bling-nim.”

I was intrigued by the word arena, as it seemed to imply PVP.

A streamer with such a large audience must have a higher skill level than the user I was playing against.

After sending the invitations through several UI windows, the screen began to fade to black.

When the screen brightened again, it showed a huge colosseum-like place as the background. There, Han-ah’s character, and another male character started to take their places.

The streamer’s female character, named Han Ah, was a sharp-looking blue elf-like character who wielded a twin sword, while the user on the other side of the screen, called Bling, was a muscular, macho-looking character with a greatsword.

From what I could see on the screen, their equipment didn’t look anything special.

“I’m not going to let you off the hook this time, so be ready!”

And with that, the battle began with the streamer’s character making the first move.

—-

I soon lost interest in watching the stream. The streamer’s and the chat’s reactions were new to me, but I still kept the stream on.

A fight between a streamer and an invited user.

“Is this it?”

I looked at them with disdain.

They were like children playing with swords, making a show of their colorful and flashy attacks.

I scoffed.

To me, it was nothing but a cheap trick, adding some light effects to their blades.

They were using preset techniques, not exploiting any weaknesses in their opponents.

Even when their swords clashed, it felt unnatural.

I felt stupid for expecting something more from such a rare match-up of dual-wielder and greatsword user, and for hoping to see some clever moves from a streamer/viewer battle.

The weapons looked impressive, with their bright bands of light, and each one had a cool design.

But the reality was that the wielders of the weapons were not measuring anything: not their reach, weight, skill, technique, or their enemies’ flaws and openings. They were just mindlessly bashing each other, crushing my expectations.

“No, not like that.”

I couldn’t help myself as I stared at the screen.

“Ha. You don’t swing a greatsword like that.”

He wasn’t even swinging a greatsword or anything, but the male character who swung it recklessly as if he was carried away by the weight of the greatsword, and the one who only used the predetermined skills, the more I saw him, the more unpleasant he looked.

Are those muscles just for show?

He’s not a real person, but a character in a game, so why does he look like he’s being controlled by my weapon?

That unnatural movement that looks like he’s just pressing the skills registered in the skill window, what is that?

“No…he could have just stabbed her in the side and it would have been over.”

I bit my lip and clenched my fists in frustration as I looked at the screen.

Why is he using a sword like a toy?

I claimed to have used a weapon that few others in the Dark Ark world used, the crescent flail, but it was not my only weapon.

As I grew in skill and accumulated more energy, I became more proficient with the crescent flail, and later used it exclusively.

In my first few years in the world, I tried every other weapon I could find.

I wanted to see if there was anything else that suited my hand.

Of course, I wouldn’t say that I was very skilled with all of them.

But at least.

I could say that I was way above the level of those kids on the screen.

[Wow, what a catch by Han Ah]

[She’s getting better, but a bit slow]

[Bling, how good is that guy with the greatsword? I can’t even swing it properly because it’s so heavy]

[I heard he’s good with it if he uses it a lot and gets used to the weapon]

[I thought Bling was just a rich jerk with a lot of money, but he’s actually good.]

[Wasn’t that a reverse divergence technique? How did Han Ah dodge that perfectly…]

[They’re tiered, so their level is different].

And what was worse than the battle between the streamer and the viewer was the chat window that kept filling up the side of the screen.

I couldn’t understand why they were admiring and praising those kids for their childish moves.

Suddenly, I noticed the number of viewers at the bottom.

21563 people.

“Twenty thousand people are watching this crap?”