Twitch has had, let’s call it a complicated relationship with adult content over the past few months. In case you’re completely uninitiated, the rough timeline is as follows: back in 2021, the “Hot Tub Meta” was born—wherein streamers would rake in viewers by streaming in, you guessed it, a hot tub. Twitch played ball after a brief controversy wherein a hot tub streamer was demonetised without warning, despite playing the game to the letter of the platform’s law at the time.
Then, late last year, Twitch decided to get a little more relaxed about the whole thing by permitting “artistic nudity” on the platform. This lasted 48 hours before Twitch decided actually, no, no wait, nevermind, that was a bad move, and shut the whole thing down.
The arms race between sexy entrepreneurs and Twitch is back with a vengeance in 2024—first up, Twitch had to step in and add implied nudity to its list of sexy no-nos, after streamers were bending the rules with black bars that gave the impression of nakedness.
“While most streamers have labelled this content appropriately with the sexual themes label and are wearing clothing behind the object or outside the camera frame, for many users, the thumbnails of this content can be disruptive to their experience on Twitch.” Which… okay, sure. But I’d argue that if you have the sexual themes label active, you’re probably okay with having your experience on Twitch disrupted by sexual themes. Isn’t that the entire point of turning it on?
Following that, in what I can only describe as a divine act of creative inspiration, streamer Morgpie (thanks, Kotaku) has levelled up her game. Her butt is a green screen. Humankind and machine drift ever-closer, like Icarus donning wax wings to soar close to the sun.
Also, here’s a clip of her reacting to popular YouTuber MoistCr1TiKaL on stream.
This has encouraged an avalanche of (mostly VTubers) to ape the new big bun—sorry, big-brained—strat, with one quote tweet of an anime fox girl playing through a literal boob window captioned: “This will save Overwatch.” Finally, I was beginning to worry about that game.
Funnily enough, Morgpie was one of the leading soldiers in the censor bar trenches back in January. Personally, I think this whole thing is sickening—not because of the sexual themes. I think grown adults can make a living however they’d like within the bounds of the law, and there’s clearly an audience for it. I’m not a puritan. I am, however, a PC gamer. And I have several notes.
Firstly, the aspect ratio here is terrible. Not only can Morgpie’s viewers not see half of her screen, but several vital UI elements are blocked off by the framing used. The optimum FOV for third-person shooters is rendered completely useless, completely destroying any sense of situational awareness vital to the core gameplay loop of any good battle royale. Secondly, the giant anime girl doing a sexy dance that shows up completely obliterates, I’d estimate, about 30% of the already-suffering screen real estate.
Granted, Morgpie isn’t suffering from this herself. You can clearly see in the footage that she is using a standard monitor, but I still think she’s setting a poor example for the next generation: We cannot let the gaming public be led to believe that the most efficient way to play a game is by green-screening your own ass, it’s simply lunacy.
Clearly, the best body part to play video games on would be the stomach—or perhaps a leg—using an unflattering, sexless face-on camera. Ideally with green spandex to prevent visible wrinkles. You’d still be able to see all the UI elements you need, and you could even go ultrawide with the right setup. We can do better, people.