Twitch streamer Ludwig Ahgren has been live since March 14 and today hosted the fourth consecutive day of his broadcast. The reason? Each time someone subscribes to his channel, it adds ten seconds to the amount of time he plans to stay live. In other words: Ahgren is holding a subathon without restriction because he will stay awake as long as viewers keep subscribing.
Being one of the most popular streamers on Twitch – with 1.8 million followers of this writing – it means Ahgren will be present for at least a few more days. (At the time of writing, he still has 57 hours to go.) When he went to sleep in his red race car bed for the night yesterday, he even managed to become the top streamer on Twitch.
This is actually not against Twitch’s TOS. A Twitch spokesman emailed The edge a statement explaining that they, too, watched the stream closely and claiming that Ahgren was not violating any of their rules. “Our community guidelines do not prohibit sleep on stream, but we expect streamers to take the necessary precautions to ensure their stream and chat are monitored,” a spokesman wrote.
While awake, Ahgren streams games with friends; while he slept, his mods ran videos selected by the community. As Nathan Grayson wrote in Kotaku: ‘It’s basically a big dorm party with pale eyes where everyone just vibrates.’ (Although subathons are something in the Twitch community, they rarely last longer than, say, 30 hours.)
Twitch is a great instant online site. You can see the people on your screen in real time and interact, which feels like a kind of intimacy. Ahgren’s stream is well on its way to becoming an event in Twitch’s history, similar to Twitch Plays Pokémon and any of its other memes. It’s amazing to me that Twitch, as big as it is, still has its own culture and its own set of stars who seem to be doing tricks just because it looks cool.
But historicization can wait. Right now, Ahgren is alive, and that’s great.