Popular Mechanics (South Africa)
3:15 on Periscope
Would-be stars of everyday life
high-five: if they miss, Dan repeats it until they get a good one. He doesn’t rush. He lets each kid talk to him, and he responds thoughtfully, and he smiles. He smiles at the ticketbuying parents, too, who can’t resist popping over to shake Dan’s hand and thank him for entertaining their kids. DANTDM looks the parents in the eye and thanks them back.
Youtube, Minecraft TOON TOWN! Mod Showcase, 10,220,786 views: Hey everyone! Dan here, from The Diamond Minecart. Welcome to another Minecraft Mod showcase, where today we’re going to be looking at the Toon Town Mod, which adds characters and items from your favourite cartoons into your Minecraft world – from Spongebob to Snoopy and even the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. This mod is said to be a lot of fun, so let’s get straight to it. Now our toons for today have taken over Bikini Bottom… So let’s spawn Spongebob here – here he is, you see he looks a-maz-ing. Look at this – aww, he’s so happy… If you’re a parent, it might seem preposterous. It might seem mind-numbingly stupid. Not just that your child wants to sit inside on a sunny Saturday morning playing a video game. No. Your child wants to sit inside on a sunny Saturday morning and watch a video of someone else playing a video game. The first time you witness your child doing this, you feel despair. Like the apes really are going to rise up and take over. Why, you ask your child, do you spend your time doing this, turning your brain to mush?
He looks up from the screen for less than a second and says, “He’s funny.”
Funny is good. So you sit on the arm of the couch for a minute to watch – to make sure it’s okay. No bad language, no inciting of illicit behaviour. And there’s not. You sit there for a minute, and then four minutes, and before you know it you’ve slid down onto the couch and watched the whole 12-minute thing, you and your boy, on a Saturday morning, post-pancakes. This guy – this guy is quite amazing, actually. He first appeared on YouTube as DANTDM in 2012, when he posted a recording of himself playing Minecraft, over which he spoke a fairly humdrum narration. Today, his videos show him playing other games as well, but mostly Minecraft, his 25-year-old boyish face almost always appearing in the corner of the screen, his running commentary now lively and funny. He added a second channel, MORETDM, a regular vlog of his life. He has a rubbery smile, punky hair usually flopped over to one side, and hole-in-the-lobe earrings.
Minecraft is all about constructing things, buildings and landscapes, which makes it better than your average video game. But to DANTDM, all that is a backdrop for his imagination, and he uses it to design entire worlds in which his imagination can live. He invents characters and talks to them. There’s a plot. People – parents, kids, people who post videos of themselves on Youtube – wonder how one guy making Minecraft videos gets rich and famous and goes on tour while the thousands of other people who make Minecraft videos don’t. It’s not luck, really, or marketing or anything like that. DANTDM tells stories.
“That’s when I initially got my popularity boost, I guess,” Dan says over the phone from his home in the UK, a few weeks after the Connecticut show. “I added that story element.” And DANTDM is good at telling stories. He’s Mister Rogers and Barney and the Wild Kratts and the kid from Diary of a Wimpy Kid. He’s a playwright and a cinematographer, a director and an actor. And he is good at all of these things. More than good. He gets 19 million subscribers to sign on to his Youtube channels and to watch him do it every day. Twice a day, when he’s not on tour. Dan records
and edits every video himself, a process that can take between four and six hours per video, including the rendering. He has sponsors such as Telltale Games and Disney, and he has a new series on Red, Youtube’s paid streaming service. Based on Youtube views, his net worth has been estimated as high as R230 million, though that is unconfirmed.
At the end of the 12-minute video, your kid pushes stop and looks up at you like he’s got away with something and he smiles and says, “Told you.”
Youtube, I GET ROBBED IN VR!! Job Simulator, 15 012 009 views: HEY EVERYOOONE! Dan here. Welcome BACK into another video! And today, as you can see, we will be playing some more virtual-reality gaming on the HTC Vive and you guys seemed to absolutely love the previous Job Simulator video so TODAY we’re going to be playing a different job inside that game. So without a further ado… LET’S DO THIS!... Right then, so last time we did… Gourmet Chef so I GUESS we don’t need that one anymore. Ha HA! Get out of here! Aaaand we’ve got Office Worker an – oh geez, it’s back. No! Stay away. Stay away. Uh, Store Clerk or Auto Mechanic. Ooooo, I don’t know which one to choose! I think Store Clerk could be pretty fun… yep. Slushies, check! Hot dogs, check! That sounds good to me. Crank it! Crank it, if I can grab the lever. Here we go. Oh my goodness. OH. MY. Goodness. There’s fireworks… There is about an hour between the meet-and-greet and show time. The families who have been here since 11:15 – it’s 2 pm now – wander the lobby. There’s a merchandise booth selling T-shirts and posters and stuffed pugs that resemble Dan’s. There’s a full bar. Dads drink IPA. Kids eat chicken tenders. There’s a new Toyota Prius on display, and a man from Toyota to tell you about it. Inside the theatre, a mom says to another mom, “What’s he gonna do?” The other mom answers, “This is so… I don’t know.” Lights in the shape of diamonds are projected on the ceiling. Seats are filling up.
“Without Youtube, would it have happened in the same way? No, I guess,” Dan says. “Because the cool thing about media and the online world nowadays is that anyone can do it. Whereas I think through traditional media, if you have something that you want to create, you have to know the right people and get a little bit lucky as well. Not that you don’t have to get lucky on Youtube, too, but everyone has the same starting point.”
It also means, of course, that because anyone can do it, many people do it. But whereas other Minecraft YouTubers review products or game features, or do tutorials, Dan tells stories. His videos don’t aspire to be useful. They aspire to entertain. “I just like to make fun videos, I guess,” he says.
On stage, he doesn’t play Minecraft. He doesn’t play any video games. He and two other players perform a 150-page scripted story about Dan and his evil twin, Evil Dan, who has trapped Dan in a virtual world and imprisoned his pugs, so Dan must escape back into the real world, also enlisting his friend Eve and a dozen or so kids from the audience at various moments in the show. The joys of living in the real world instead of a digital world is the leitmotif – it pleases the parents. (And it’s smart: “We’re all trapped in the digital world,” Dan says at one point. “It’s filled with cat videos, and you have to dodge comments about how much you stink.”) The kids? They just love Dan. They scream and cheer as he wrestles with Evil Dan and eventually wins.
“We sold this idea of the live show on pretty much nothing, really,” Dan says. “They know that I’m going to be there, but they don’t know what I’m going to do. But then hopefully we do blow them away with this really cool show that does have gaming within it. It captures kind of the magic of my videos, too, but involves everyone in a much more personal experience. Which was my main goal: I wanted to take that one limitation about my videos, which is there’s always a screen between me and my audience. I wanted to take that out. And I think we achieved that.”
On the way out, people wait in long queues to buy merchandise. The rain is gone for good and sun brightens the lobby through the glass doors. Kids hold their parents’ hands in the crowd. Near the restrooms, a boy and his dad stand against the wall, probably waiting for the mom. The boy holds an autographed picture of Dan. The dad says, “So what’d you think?”
The boy smiles and nods his head and says, “Yeah. Cool.”
A minute passes. Then the boy looks up at his father and says, “This is the best day of my life.” PM
When Periscope debuted in 2015, the livestreaming app marked the next step forward for video – now it wasn’t just easy to shoot, but easy to share. Instantly. Two years later, it’s mostly a spotlight for the would-be stars of everyday life.
Periscope may be best known for disruptive guerrilla broadcasts of major events – the 2015 bout between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao, the 2016 US Congress sit-in by House Democrats – but most of the time, it’s trained on the utterly mundane. On us, in other words. You launch the app. You browse the list of live streams. You choose one, it loads, and you are presented, more than likely, with the face of a stranger going about their daily life. They might be playing the drums, driving to work, or having a smoke. Utterly mundane and yet people still tap approval, sending hearts bubbling up the side of the screen.
When you get your first glimpse into this stranger’s life, there is, without fail, a familiar exchange. On their end, the app alerts them to your presence. Their eyes break from what they’re doing and flit briefly over the screen of their phone. They know nothing about you except that you are watching; and for a fraction of a second, both looking at your screens, you’re no further apart than patients sharing a glance in a waiting room, or fellow travellers stopped side by side at a red light. Technology changes, but you’ve tapped into something as old as humankind: we all want to be seen.
On Periscope, this is happening all the time, all over the world. At 3:15 pm Eastern Standard Time on Thursday, 15 June – a random time on a rather ordinary day – these are some of the lives you could see.