DJ Pfeif

The games in our Twitch streams are for the viewers, not the streamer!

A lot of Twitch streamers stream themselves or others playing games, which makes sense because that’s the platform’s target audience. However, the Hack The Planet team decided to put the games in the hands of the viewers instead of the streamers to make our streams a little bit more fun for everyone!

As of March 2025, according to twitchtracker.com, an average of about 100k channels are active concurrently at any given time. Most of those are streamers playing games. The category of “Just Chatting” has an average of 4.6k active concurrent channels. And the DJ category boasts an unimpressive average of just over 200 average concurrent channels. So, live DJs make up only 0.2% of the total streamers on Twitch. That’s not a lot, but you wouldn’t know it given our enthusiasm for each new track we pop on the decks.

I haven’t seen DJs play games while they are streaming music, but it’s only a matter of time. I considered it, then reconsidered when I realized I can’t walk and talk at the same time, so gaming and DJing concurrently would be horrific to perform and to watch. Someone will eventually do it, and it will be glorious. I hope they have a cool DJ name that’s a portmanteau of gaming and DJ cultures… DJ Poobear Levan? Oats-n-Cox? Mario1200?

Again, the Twitch platform is designed for gamers. They extended an olive branch to the DJ community by offering their DJ Program in Summer 2024 that helps support the artists and labels of the music we play, which in my spheres of dnb, is a group of people who need more recognition and audience support than they get. I recognize that I’m freely giving my song-play data, audience metrics, etc. to Twitch and its partners, but I justify it by hoping that the person grinding an axe on a snare drum to make it blend with an 808 bass is getting something from my spins of their tunes.

It makes sense that DJs are such a small percentage of the streaming community: the DJ category is relatively new; most people go to clubs or festivals to see DJs spin live instead of sitting in front of a computer screen or listening through their phone perched on the drying rack while they cook noodles; and few people want to watch a DJ press buttons and turn knobs on some sort of device that looks like backpack-sized WOPR with flashing LEDs and weird turntable platters (what the heck to DJs even do?!) while they unintelligibly give shoutouts to their other DJ friends over music that is too loud and obnoxious to understand. It’s not a winning combination. However, we DJs continue to stream regularly, and rally around each other in our own echo chambers and filter bubbles, which makes us feel like we’re important, and that, “Everyone on Twitch is a DJ.” In the end, we are enjoying ourselves, which is why we continue to stream, and our viewers continue to show up and share animated emotes of dancing and explosions and lazers.

Clearly, I really like streaming Hack The Planet on Twitch! Firstly, sharing the music is great, and secondly, it’s given our team the chance to get creative with our show, like developing games from scratch for our audience to play while we spin the music.

We took inspiration from hacking history, classic games, and some of the preexisting games provided by commercial bots and services in the Twitch ecosystem. Usually, those games are controlled via JavaScript overlays or chat commands, and who knows what the heck they are doing behind the scenes with our data. We wanted complete control over our games and bots, so like the naive fools we are, we decided to develop our own code, hacker-style (meaning incomplete, buggy, and quickly compiled in the dark of our parent’s basement). We tried to develop games that we hadn’t seen in the wild, so it feels like we’ve done something unique, but Twitch is large and I mostly stick to my own corner. Luckily, our games throw lots of “Pferrors” and have loopholes that make hacking them a delight. In fact, the first winner of our Scavenger Hunt won by hacking the game instead of playing by the rules, which seemed fitting (congrats MelonFarmerMike)!

Currently, we have developed four games for our chatting audience:

• Hackingrules
• Phone Game
• Hack The Institution – A Text Adventure
• Scavenger Hunt

The first two games, Hackingrules and the Phone Game, were developed when we streamed our show on dnbradio.com. Their chat was historically on IRC, but has since migrated successfully to Discord. However, they still have a tunnel from IRC to Discord for those diehards! Luckily for us, Twitch’s chat is based on the classic IRC protocol, so a lot of our code we used for our bots in dnbradio was applicable to Twitch when we started there years ago.

Hackingrules prompts users to explore our wonderful list of hacking rules–the sarcastic and exaggerated, but not unwholly true, rules by which hackers must abide. Players move from one clue to the next by deciphering numeric codes hidden in the hackingrules descriptions. The hackingrules are pretty fun by themselves, but the endgame has some interesting and weird threads.

The Phone Game asks players to play a Jeopardy-style question-answer game about early phone phreaking and obscure phone trivia. Answering ten questions correctly leads to weird rabbit holes outside of the stream. I realize it’s not smart to direct viewers away from direct Twitch engagement, but it’s worth it for the hacking fun.

Hack The Institution is a text adventure game modeled after classic text adventure games like Adventure or Zork. It’s confusing and full of easter eggs. To date, no one has solved the game, probably because everyone can see, and contribute to, your progress in the chat. Also, it takes more mental energy than the average Twitch viewer in the DJ category wants to put into it. It was sort of doomed from the start…

The Scavenger Hunt is our newest game. It comes with the biggest payoff too–we offer a free Hack The Planet T-shirt for the winner each week! Viewers have to find 13 words hidden within the stream. Our goal in developing it was to incorporate as much of the Twitch experience as possible. That meant that we had to get creative with how and where we hid the words. While the words change each week, the locations of the words stays the same. A few of the words are given as clues in the chat, while others are a little harder to find.

You can find all the games on our weekly Twitch stream at https://twitch.tv/djpfeifdnb. We start at 8:00pm Eastern Time and usually run for two hours, which helps light a fire to those trying to navigate the text adventure in the last half hour. I hope to see you there!