At any given time, there are tens of thousands watching and playing games on Twitch. Some people are obsessed with one game, other people watch lots of games. The service recently enlisted its "science" team to visualize what communities of Twitch look like, and it's beautiful.
Wait, they have a science team? Yep. It's a group within Twitch dedicated to studying Twitch.
Okay, back to the surreal images.
There are tons of circles on each one, and every circle represents a channel on the service.
"The lines between channels represent the amount of overlap between the audiences of those channels; each time a specific viewer watched two different channels during the time period this data draws from, it makes the connection between those channels a little stronger. Because we're only drawing on a short time period in December, not all channels are represented here, and sizing only approximates activity in that time period."
The company follows this up by breaking down the specific patterns within various communities, including League of Legends, DOTA 2, Hearthstone, Minecraft, and others.
Games like League of Legends are their own beasts, which is why they're dominant, and other games are lumped into a catch-all "variety." How the small stuff breaks down is interesting:
It'd be cool if this could be generated in real-time. I'd love to have this massive, macro sense of what people were playing and watching all day long. We'd all be Professor Xavier in Cerebro!
There's plenty more on Twitch's site. If it weren't for the giant text, they'd make rad wallpapers!
You can reach the author of this post at patrick.klepek@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @patrickklepek.