Remember Chatroulette? The early-2000s era video streaming site connected you with another random person’s webcam and chat, and whatever happened from there was up to the two of you. Sometimes the interactions are pure and good, but quickly, and to this day—the site is still operational, somehow—it’s devolved into people showing their dicks to strangers.
Now you can have a similar experience, but with more gamers and fewer dicks, on Twitch Roulette. The site randomly shuffles live Twitch streams and connects you to ones with empty rooms and no other viewers. This breaks out of the algorithmically-selected and most popular streamers you’ve probably already watched, and allows for something new. I’m not going to say it’s something good, but it’s new, and a window into otherwise lonely worlds of people who are streaming to no one.
Videos by VICE
I gave the Twitch Roulette wheel a couple spins. I watched a few seconds of someone playing eFootball PES 2020, then someone playing Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag at almost the same point I recently dropped the game—I’m inspired to pick it back up now. I watched a kid narrate Among Us puzzles in Portuguese. But most of all, I saw a lot of Fortnite. More than every other stream was Fortnite.
You probably won’t see as many dicks as you would on Chatroulette, due to Twitch’s community guidelines forbidding nudity. But considering there’s no one in these rooms to report anything scandalous, maybe you’ll get lucky and find something more interesting than someone playing Fortnite badly.
