My brother is a big gamer dude. He’s always liked video games, and these days he’s pretty serious about it. He streams online and has a community of other gamers that he streams with for up to 50 hours/week. He does this in addition to having a full-time job, but he hopes one day he can stream and provide more gaming content on a full-time basis.

Now mind you, the last time I played video games on a regular basis was probably over a decade ago when I was in middle or high school. And even then, it wasn’t really my thing. So when I see that some people are so gun-ho about gaming, my natural response is one that minimizes the meaning of the whole thing and tends to judge it as wasted time.

I guess I could say I’ve been super cynical. And I feel bad about that. But tonight I popped in on his page and saw that he was streaming live, so I poked around and listened for a bit. 

What got to me was this one kid who wrote a message in the chat as my brother was streaming. He said he was 13, has no friends, and gets bullied for liking certain games like the one he was watching my brother play (don’t ask me which one, but I think it was some kind of Nintendo/Smash something?).

My bro saw this in the chat and started talking to the kid, calling him brother, and letting him know that he was welcome there (“there” being the Misfit community he created). He shared his own experience with how people would make fun of him growing up for not liking the popular games with fancy graphics and instead gravitating towards the indie ones with creative ideas that just happened to have much fewer resources behind them. My bro encouraged him to come back and check out the stream, since those indie games are pretty much all he streams. 

What’s more than just his reaction is how everyone else in this chatroom rallied around this kid, encouraging him not to let the other kids get to him, and that he’s cool for liking the games that he likes. We all can go back to a place buried deep in our minds where we remember how 7th grade wasn’t exactly a highlight of our lives. Back then, though, we doubted it would ever get better.

I’m not going to pretend to know the slightest thing about gaming, streaming, or anything related to those worlds, because I don’t. But I do get the idea that my brother sitting there playing a game for 10 hours straight is less about the game he’s playing, and more about how he uses it to connect with, support, and reach out to people in his community. And when you look at it that way, that’s pretty cool work.