About 2 days ago I 'went' to a twitch stream hosted by Markiplier. I... honestly I've never really watched Let's Plays but I started watching his recently on youtube while working on my VIS thesis. It's just kind of good to zone out to, but, of course, for this meeting I couldn't really zone out because I made the decision to see him live. It's weird, I don't know how much of a gathering this counts as because it felt so distant, like watching a tv-show character or video game character on the screen. Honestly it felt more like a glitchy-video game because you could interact with the main figure – Markiplier – but he would only respond to you sometimes if at all. Honestly I didn't actually type in the chat, it feels kind of weird to do that for me, but it felt like a zoo or a circus a little bit. Like I was gathering with a group of people to watch this guy perform. It felt disconnected for me, but it might not have had I participated more.

That reminds me a lot of what we were talking about last week – how much responsibility does the guest share on making the gathering good? In this case, at least, I would say that the it was pretty evenly split. Of course, Markiplier had to be entertaining, but I also had to participate in actually commenting in order to enjoy it fully. The one thing that was nice about how disconnected it was though was that everyone could have very individual experiences, the people who didn't comment did not affect the people who were commenting.

I guess this makes me think about my own gathering because it makes me wonder how much I expect my guests to participate. I kind of don't need my guests to be incredibly active. I don't know, my entire project last time was about objects so I'm not sure how I want other people to participate when its so object focused. I was thinking maybe a gathering of objects? But not sure.