A Grand Theft Auto community paints the future of reality television

NoPixel RP on Twitch

(All views are my own)

Video game viewership is often associated with competitive gaming (aka eSports). This is understandable: on Twitch, blockbuster eSports titles like League of Legends, CS:GO, and FIFA draw in hundreds of thousands of viewers. In the past few years, competitive gaming has gone from niche to mainstream. ESPN invested heavily in its eSports coverage. Colleges began offering eSports scholarships. Robert Kraft of Kraft and the New England Patriots bought an eSports team. 

But competitive gaming is far from the only reason why people watch video games. Outside of mainstream investor attention, another form of video game viewership is quickly gaining momentum. It has nothing to do with competitive gaming. In fact, it more closely resembles unscripted, reality television. This article will explore this new form of entertainment.

Part 1: GTA NoPixel Roleplay

Our exploration begins with Grand Theft Auto (GTA) V, the familiar open-world, action game in which players conduct heists, race, or simply blow things up. While GTA continues to be a popular game, it never seriously competed with heavyweights like Fortnite and League of Legends in drawing in live viewership. In 2018, GTA pulled in roughly one-tenth of Fortnite’s stream viewership count. 

This all changed in March 2019, when GTA unexpectedly surged over 10x in viewership. Within days, It became the most live-streamed game in the world, drawing in over 3 million concurrent live viewers on Twitch and many millions more on VOD. At its peak, more people watched GTA than regular season NBA games. 

GTA V Twitch Average Daily Viewers. Source: TwitchTracker.com

This audience surge was entirely driven by an obscure roleplaying server called NoPixel RP. 

Let’s take a few steps back to fully unpack this phenomenon. NoPixel was founded as a small GTA roleplaying community, meant for the few who wanted to virtually act out their dreams as mob bosses, corrupt cops, or renegade mercenaries. 

Roleplayers couldn’t really do their thing on public GTA servers, so NoPixel created a private GTA server that hosted up to 32 players at a time. To join this NoPixel server, roleplayers submitted lengthy applications and adhered to strict community guidelines on roleplaying. Guidelines ranged from the mundane (“no sprinting when you leave the hospital”) to the philosophical (“Conflict and cooperation both help make stories interesting. Make sure to have good amounts of both. Avoid large alliances that never allow for conflict.”). 

Once accepted into NoPixel, roleplayers took on character aliases, replete with backstories, motivations, and personalities that shaped their in-game character behaviors. Roleplayers interacted, befriended, allied, feuded, and fought with each other in-character. 

To facilitate these interactions, NoPixel provided a suite of custom tools. Players had access to unique customizations, emotes, and chat systems. NoPixel was designed to be the perfect walled-garden for its small, dedicated group of GTA roleplaying enthusiasts. 

NoPixel Gameplay

Lightning struck when this tiny community crossed paths with Twitch streamers. In March 2019, a group of popular Twitch streamers entered NoPixel and adopted roleplaying identities. One streamer took on the alias “Jean-Pierre Baptiste”, an aspiring criminal. Another took on the alias “Kiki Chanel”, a transgender bodybuilder. A third became “Mr. Chang”, a deranged criminal mastermind possibly inspired by Ben Chang from Community. All the while they streamed their misadventures live on Twitch. 

The experience was an instant hit. Playing NoPixel might have been a niche experience, but watching NoPixel drama became a universal hobby. NoPixel drew in more than three million concurrent viewers on Twitch at the height of its popularity. Many millions more accessed this content via VODs on Twitch and YouTube. 

NoPixel story arcs were uniquely compelling. Roleplayers formed gangs with complicated social hierarchies. Some committed virtual heists while others snitched on their activities to the virtual police, roleplayed by a third set of NoPixel players. The complicated social web formed within NoPixel created plenty of drama to engage audiences, much in the same way that Survivor or Big Brother fomented drama on set. 

What began as make-believe quickly turned to reality as both content creators and audiences became more invested in these fictional characters. In one instance, audiences were so incensed by “Jean-Pierre Baptiste’s” in-game behaviors that they took to social media en masse to protest. “Jean-Pierre Baptiste” ignomously ended his NoPixel life. 

As some streamers ended their player arcs over time, new streamers joined the NoPixel universe with fresh personalities and characters. The result was a constantly living and evolving content ecosystem. The NoPixel storyline that started in early 2019 is still ongoing over a year later, even as many of the original characters have cycled out. Days of Our Lives indeed. 

Fans created community wiki articles on their favorite in-game personas, complete with backstories and in-game timelines. Others created schedulers and VOD repositories to keep track of the fast-evolving NoPixel content. Others more lit up Reddit and other online forums with plotline discussions. 

Fan-created tier ranking of NoPixel roleplaying characters

Part 2: Canary in the Coal Mine 

To shrewd observers in the entertainment industry, NoPixel was a canary in the coal mine. It signalled a future in which unscripted reality TV can be produced in virtual metaverses. As unfamiliar as this may sound now, producing reality TV in digital spaces actually has many advantages:

1) Viewers have the agency to choose their viewing experience from different perspectives: NoPixel streams are essentially individual narratives in a shared plotline. Fans choose the narratives they wish to follow rather than be forced along a director’s-cut journey. Want to see what Kiki Chanel is up to right now? Open up her channel. Want to know what her enemies are plotting at the same time? Open up a second channel and you can watch that too. Or don’t. It’s your choice as an audience. This level of agency is simply not possible in traditional reality television. 

2) More degrees of “reality”: unscripted television shows are constrained by budgets, legal considerations, and general laws of physics. None of these constraints apply to virtual worlds, which opens up creative possibilities of what “reality” really encompasses. What if half of Virtual Survivor island sunk into the ocean one day? Latent entertainment value by expanding “reality” can be significant. 

3) Lower production costs: Gaming reality shows cost significantly less to produce than physical ones. Many costs (set, filming, etc.) are not necessary. 

4) Live audience engagement: Audience engagement comes in two orders. First order engagement is about audience-creator interaction. It already exists today on Twitch and other live stream platforms. Audiences can chat, subscribe and donate to streamers. They can also influence streamers actions through chat. 

Second order engagement is about altering the game reality itself. In the book and movie The Hunger Games, the audience donated critical supplies to help Katniss Everdeen survive. The same idea can theoretically be implemented inside game worlds by integrating streaming platforms with game servers. Twitch demonstrated an early version of this idea through its Twitch Plays Pokemon event, in which audiences controlled gameplay through chat. While second order audience engagement is nascent today, it will likely play a very significant role in shaping this new form of entertainment. 

Fan-made NoPixel schedule guide. Source: https://nopixel.hasroot.com/

Part 3: The Future

Video games play (pun intended) increasingly larger roles in our lives. We conduct graduation ceremonies in Minecraft, host fashion shows in Animal Crossing, and post TikTok memes about Star Wars Battlefront II. 

Our gaming viewing habits are evolving to reflect this new reality. Just as eSports became gaming’s answer to traditional sports, NoPixel became gaming’s early answer to reality television. The NoPixel phenomenon was entirely community led—it received no major studio help or venture financing. Imagine what can be done when we allocate proper resources, funding, and tech infrastructure to future endeavors.

Or imagine this: Fifty streamers are simultaneously dropped into a dystopian world with not-enough resources: they form tribes to survive the elements and each other. Rules in this virtual world are constantly evolving and subject to audience manipulation. Perhaps resources are delivered once a day and only a few players are given access to the location. Perhaps monsters come out at night and players need to stick together to survive. Perhaps a few players are given special abilities that provide unique advantages—and it’s up to the collective to decide what to do with these “special” players. 

We can simulate the infinite what if scenarios within virtual spaces in ways we cannot in physical ones (moral complications + physical constraints). Would a bunch of kids marooned on an island turn into Swiss Family Robinson or Lord of the Flies? Would a zombie outbreak turn into The Walking Dead or Last Train to Busan? These physically impossible scenarios best illuminate our human spirits and struggles: right versus wrong, self versus group, order versus chaos, survival versus sacrifice. In the end, isn’t this why we love reality TV? 

New business models will need to be invented. This new form of entertainment requires close collaboration (or integration) between streaming platforms, game studios, and production companies. In today’s world, game studios do not receive direct revenue from streams. They are therefore unmotivated to create “spectator games” that stream well but don’t translate into game purchases. Existing streaming platforms are also unlikely to split their revenue with gaming companies. Innovation in this space is more likely to come from outside the existing paradigm than from within. 

Beyond the technical and business hurdles are green pastures. NoPixel gave us an early glimpse towards this new form of entertainment. Much more still needs to be done.