Aside of getting involved in some drama, like it happened all those years ago with Depression Quest, that’s not how I want my IFs to reach YT/Twitch.
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Not sure what Depression Quest is. Do you mean how to make playing IF on YouTube interesting?
Or are you asking how to get other YouTubers interested in playing IF on their channels?
I fear that neither one is possible. I don’t think IF will ever attract a huge audience (although I think it could be bigger, for sure). Too much reading, not enough boobs or fights or life hacking for YT.
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I have found inspiration for my Spring Thing entry.
In other news, Depression Quest was the beginning of Gamergate.
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I believe it was tried in the last Spring Thing, but sadly I didn’t see any streamers taking it up.
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Can confirm boobs in Spring Thing.
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Ah yes, but was there ASCII art?
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In seriousness, the best answer I can offer is: have flashy, eye-catching art. People watch streams when they see interesting thumbnails. A screen of text isn’t that.
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I think one thing that streamers would really like about some text adventures is the amount of variation/replayability that certain styles of game excel at (see: 80 days).
There’s obviously a visual element too: I don’t think any streamer wants to put up the Inform 7 interface on their stream, but visually appealing text presentation is possible without getting many artists involved.
YT & Streamers also LOVE to do silly voices and speculate wildly on the systems at play, so there is an opportunity for wacky/cleverly written games to draw in a crowd.
Most important, imo, is that the game that is being streamed has to be fun for the streamer to comment on (express their personality with) and for the viewer to engage with (either directly through chat/comments, or vicariously e.g. “if I had been in that position…”). IF that are highly systemic and offer a lot of choice would be top of the list for a streamer - such as Sunless Seas.
I’m also showing my personal taste here, but as someone who is trying to do exactly this (trick non-IF players into playing) I’ve thought about this topic a great deal.
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Further evidence for this being possible: jacksepticeye was playing Sorcery! just this week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvcwVVOFfsM
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I think it’s definitely possible to make streaming parser based IF fun, you gotta just be an engaging streamer and engage the audience. I’ve actually been considering doing this!
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Yeah, I could imagine a video showing someone reading the text from a funny scene out loud and commenting on it, or maybe dressing up as different characters in the scene.
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I’d listen to a YouTuber just playing the game, narrating the game’s output, declaring their actions in appropriately dramatic fashion and commenting on the game as if putting words in the player character’s mouth. Kind of like turning a game transcript into an audio drama.
Granted, I’m blind, so don’t care about the visual part of a YouTube video and when I download videos to listen to on my portable mediaplayer, I extract the audio track to save disc space.
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I’m not into watching streams myself, but from hanging out among VN fans I get the impression that this is a pretty common thing to do for those, often with a multi-person “cast”, even.
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Plus, you can include the audience in the process of deciding what to do next, functionally making it a multiplayer experience!
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I loved when the Brothers Chaps did a video of Strong Bad playing an old text adventure game, and they added Powered by the Cheat styled graphics on the top half of the screen. Made it a lot easier to follow what was going on 
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We’ve recently completed our very first text adventure streaming experiment. My friend Chris (aka DeadFleshRetro) and I plus our partners, and some others got together every Monday evening to play Fish for an hour. We streamed it on YouTube and also created a nicely edited/cleaned up audio only podcast.
We all enjoyed it so much, we’re kicking off a brand new adventure this coming Monday.
All of our previous shows are of course available now. We’d especially appreciate your feedback regarding the podcast as we’ve tried hard to make it accessible through audio only.
I can’t seem to post links so search for DeadFleshRetro. Let me know if you can’t find it.
Thanks, Lee.
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Video:
Podcast:
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Just in case it’s not obvious in the previous post, the first video is for working eyeballs. The second is the audio only video.
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Yeah, a solo Let’s Play of IF is like a reaction video for an audio book.
I think the closest to the most viable format was Ryan and Jenni’s Clash of the Type-ins where they “played” the game and had the author narrate and so there were opportunities for discussion and color commentary - especially since Jenni is so funny. They also chose very short games, or excerpts from games so these weren’t long series.
Another good one is Jesse Cox’s Let’s Plays of Monster Prom (he was actually a producer of the game) which is kind of a choice-narrative/boardgame/dating sim with really great dialogue, and he and his players were all experienced voice actors (some of whom were in the game which is only partially voiced) reading the text in character voices.
It does work video since their are visuals.
NSFW language and humor:
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I can’t get into videos of groups playing games. The chaotic clash of people talking over top of one another gets on my nerves. I much prefer a single narrator with a good sense of humor. Edited is generally preferrable to live to improve pacing and comedic timing. Adding animation instead of having people read text onscreen would probably interest more people.
He never gets very far in the game, but I really like the following animated videos by Nibbink playing Zork. I wish there were more like this.
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