Keep playing, John.

I’m not a very social person. I don’t really have any friends. My coworkers at the fast-food place I work at are all annoying. So, when I get home, I mostly spend the rest of the day alone, playing videogames or watching YouTube videos. I also like to watch livestreams online. I don’t really care for the big streamers; most of them are annoying and fake. Grown dudes screeching into the camera like little children or females sitting in swimming pools, trying to scam money out of lonely guys. No, I like to watch smaller streamers with only a handful of viewers. Real people, you know, who are not just after money. You can find a lot of interesting people this way. They seem a lot more genuine. Just people who like to stream themselves playing videogames or something in their free time. Many of them are still kind of boring, but it gets really interesting if you watch people for longer, if you tune in to their streams every week and really get to know them and their little quirks. Ordinary people can be interesting that way.

I once watched this Russian guy who made techno music in his living room. It really looked like some run-down Soviet flat with yellowed wallpaper and hand-knitted teacloths on their TV. He had four cats that jumped around the background all the time. The music probably drove them crazy. Sometimes his mother came into the room. I guess she asked him to turn down the volume a bit. I don’t know, though, I don’t speak Russian. He would always turn it down for a few minutes and slowly turn the volume back up again. She would come in again and they would argue back and forth a few times until he just started screaming at her. She ran out of the room crying. I haven’t seen her on his streams since, but then I also stopped watching him regularly sometime after this.

The weirdest thing I ever watched happened to a guy from Brazil. I don’t want to share his username here, so I’ll just call him John. He was called João, but I don’t speak Brazilian, so I’ll keep it simpler for my sake. The reason I became interested was because of how he acted – or didn’t act. He played Five Nights at Freddy’s or FNAF. It’s a series of horror games. They’re not really my type of game; I don’t find them particularly scary and think they’re a bit childish, to be honest. But with this type of game, it’s more about how people react to them than about the games themselves. In FNAF you play as a night guard at some run-down fast-food restaurant and there are these big talking robots walking around the place. If you don’t close the doors to your security room fast enough, they come in and jumpscare you and you’re dead and have to try again. It’s not very hard if you know what to do, but John didn’t. He looked through the cameras at the restaurant and checked the hallways, but he did it slowly, almost sluggishly. He didn’t even really react when one of the animatronics started running towards his office. He just kept looking at it through the camera. Even when they jumpscared him, he barely flinched, and just started that night again. He was on night two. The game had five nights, as you might have guessed. He even had the game’s sound turned off. The only things you could hear were his mouse clicks and the occasional shuffle or stifled cough from John.

I thought at first that he was just drunk or high and almost clicked away, but I wanted to watch and see if he did anything stupid. I once saw a streamer who always played with a switchblade knife while reacting to videos, spinning it around and doing tricks with it. One stream he was so drunk that he cut himself deep into his right hand and bled all over his desk and onto the floor. Maybe John would also do some dumb stunt like that.

He didn’t. While waiting for something to happen, I looked at his chat. There were only six people watching. I suspect the website never tells you the exact number, so it might have been just three or four people or maybe even ten or so. There were a couple of people writing in chat, mostly normal stuff. Brazilian, of course. Out of curiosity, I pulled up a translator and put in their messages.

There was one other guy writing in chat, though. I’ll call him creepyguy. He was writing much more than the rest of the people and much of the chat was just large blocks of his texts. He was mostly trying to tell John how to play the game, although he seemed a bit more aggressive than that other guy.

As John kept dying to the robots, this guy was getting more and more frustrated, as you can imagine.

This sounded a bit weird, but I didn’t think much of it. John was getting mauled by these robots left and right. I don’t know why, but I found it oddly fascinating that this dude seemed so little invested in actually playing the game. So, I just followed his channel and went to bed for the night, intending to check up on his progress at some point.

I had to take over a couple of my colleagues’ shifts the days after. I mostly did it for the money, not so much for them. But that meant I didn’t really have time to watch John or anyone else for that matter. Standing in front of a burger grill the whole day sort of takes the joy out of you in a way that not even internet videos can help. A week or so later, I checked back in on some livestreamers. That Russian techno guy was still going strong, my favorite speedrunners were a few microseconds faster and John was still playing FNAF. He seemed to be getting a bit better at it, too, although he was still on the third of the game’s titular five nights. I don’t know how often he played the game in the meantime, but to make so little progress felt a bit weird to me. But to each their own, I guess. Some people don’t play to win. Although John didn’t seem the type to just game to relax and calm down. He was still sitting there almost expressionless. From time to time, he shifted around in his chair or looked around the room, as if he was searching for something. I didn’t think he looked stressed at that point, but he was hardly relaxed either. I checked the chat and, sure enough, creepyguy was still talking to him. There were almost no other people in chat. He was still telling John how to play the game and every time he died, he would just write “John.” in chat, period included. The chat was full of it.

That was broken by only one other chatter, who just wrote “what??”. Same. I wanted to know why John behaved so weirdly. I opened my translator, typed in “How are you doing?” and posted it in John’s chat. I don’t know if he even had his chat open; either way, he didn’t acknowledge it in any way. Normally that’s bad etiquette, but he didn’t seem rude, just sort of out of it.

I should have mentioned this sooner, but his streams always had a little webcam view in the upper left corner, where you could see John. I don’t know how to describe him, but he just looked like a normal dude. Maybe mid-twenties, messy black hair and unshaven. He always wore the same type of white T-shirt, maybe even the same exact shirt. His camera was looking at him from slightly above, so his forehead looked really big. His room was pretty barebones. It was just white-gray walls and a big mattress lying on the ground in the back of the room. There was a window to the right, though it was always just dark outside when I watched him. It was always closed, which I didn’t understand. It gets really stuffy here at night, so I can only imagine how hot it gets in Brazil. He must’ve been boiling. His desk looked like one of those cheap IKEA ones. He had a couple of cans of energy drinks lying around and the wrappers of candy bars, which he occasionally ate. Everything was brightly lit by fluorescent lights. It kind of looked like a prison cell, if I’m honest.

Most of the time he looked really determined at his screen, like he didn’t want to take his eyes off the game for even just a second, even though, again, he wasn’t very good at it. Sometimes he did look around. He looked around the room and out of the window, like he was waiting for something. creepyguy was still the only one talking to him.

At the time I thought the online translator phrased this weirdly. I didn’t think much of it. I had been scrolling through Reddit while watching John play on my other monitor for maybe an hour when I heard that he was mumbling something or talking to himself. I don’t know what he was saying, but his lips were moving, almost as if he was quietly praying or pleading. He looked sort of stressed, even though he was just playing the same game he had been playing for weeks at this point. He pressed his hands to his head and leaned back in his plastic chair for a minute. I felt kind of sorry for him, so I wrote in his chat.

He didn’t react, but he was still agitated, wiping sweat from his forehead. There were only two people watching him now. creepyguy wrote.

After he wrote that, John became visibly nervous. He started losing focus and was getting killed by the animatronics again and again. Rookie mistakes, really. He wiped the sweat from his face with his stained T-shirt. He jumped up from his chair and paced around the room. Then he looked out the window. He stood there for a few whole minutes. He sat back down at his desk again and continued playing.

The last thing I saw that night was John’s signature look, staring straight at the computer screen, not relaxed or apathetic, but close to tears. He stopped the stream in the middle of the game’s one-hundredth or so third night. To me it looked like creepyguy was really putting some stress on the guy. He looked like he might have broken down near the end of the stream. I didn’t know how to help the guy, seeing as he was thousands of miles from my home and I didn’t even know his real name. So I just thought to myself, I’ll report that creep’s chat messages next time I see him threaten John and went and watched someone else.

Work took over again for a bit after that. The good thing about working in the kitchen of a fast-food place is you don’t get any of the weirdos that the guys on the registers or the drive-through need to deal with. It’s still stressful as all hell, but it’s one thing less to deal with. And I don’t mean all the Karens and other entitled boomers that want a refund because their burger is too soggy; I’m talking drunk guys that want to start shit or tough guys that start harassing the female cashiers. They don’t give the midnight shifts to female workers anymore.

At the weekend I had a day off, so I did what I always do and played video games and watched livestreams. In the evening, John’s stream went live again. He started out playing FNAF again. Every time he died – so, roughly every three minutes – he grabbed a bowl of what looked like soggy chocolate cereal and hastily ate a few bites. He ate so fast that a spoonful even fell onto his short, leaving a huge chocolate stain across his stomach area. Meanwhile, his chat remained empty. After a few more tries, he made it to 5 AM, shortly before the end of the game’s night, before dying again. This seemed to break even John’s stoic mood and he leaned back frustrated and said something, which, judging by his tone, probably meant “fuck this shit”. That would have been my reaction too, at least. In that moment, I saw out of the corner of my eye, that something was posted in his chat. Our mutual friend hat returned.

I don’t know if or how he read these messages, but they seemed to reach him nonetheless. He seemed deflated and slouched in front of his computer again, starting another try of making it through the night. At this point, I’ve had enough of this creepy commenter, so I decided to make good on my promise and report him for harassment. After hitting ‘send’, the only thing I got was a little pop-up message, which said “Thank you for helping us improve this site! Our moderators will take a look at this user’s behaviour.” For now though, it didn’t seem to do anything; he was still writing in chat, directly harassing John now.

John was fidgeting with his hands. He jumped up and walked around the room and out of view of the camera. Then he went over to the back of the room, where he picked up his mattress and leaned it against the wall to cover the window. It almost fell over a bunch of times, so he had to reposition it. He sat down again but he didn’t really play the game and just clicked around for a bit. He was still talking to himself. I was getting somewhat freaked out but didn’t know what to do. That’s when creepyguy wrote again.

John didn’t start playing again. He let his head hang, turned away from the camera. It looked like he was crying. I was really getting freaked out by this, but I couldn’t help but keep watching. After a few minutes of this he slowly got up and turned off the lights in his room. I could only see part of his desk, which was getting some light from the monitor; that was it. There was some shuffling, probably him walking around the room. I thought I heard him talk some. It was just the tiny mostly black rectangle of his room and the big menu screen of the video game. Meanwhile, creepyguy was getting mad.

I translated these as fast as I could. I asked back.

The room was dark and quiet. creepyguy answered.

That was the last message. I was panicking. I wanted to turn off the stream, do something else, but I was too curious. I wanted to know what was happening, if he would write anything else, if John would come back. I decided to pull an all-nighter and keep watching the stream for any changes. I just kept looking at the little dark rectangle of his room, not even watching anything else on my other monitor. Nothing changed. There were no more messages from creepyguy. At about 4 AM, the room began to become lighter; I guess he was in another time zone from me. I only had a few more hours until I needed to get ready for work. My manager was a real bitch and I couldn’t just skip a shift at work, if I wanted to keep my job.

I wish I had a happy ending for the story, but I don’t. I just kept staring at my computer screen, peering into the dark room, trying to find some answer in the warbling image compression. There was light coming into the room now from a small crack by the window. The mattress was obviously still leaning against it. There was only a small strip of light showing the floor tiles. I kept watching as the light slowly moved along the floor. I had to really struggle to keep awake at this point. Do you know that half-delirious state, when you’ve been playing video games for so long, that your eyes start to hurt and you don’t even know if what you’re seeing is real anymore? That’s what it was like, but instead of gaming, I kept looking at the little rectangle of John’s camera. At first, I thought I was imagining things, but then it became clear to me: Something was happening in John’s room. At first, it was a shuffle. I thought he was moving around the room again. It sounded like he was trying to not make any sound, just the slight sound of fabric moving across the floor. Then I heard what sounded like the low extended groan of a door opening. Or maybe it was a person groaning. It seemed to me that John got up from the floor, because he entered the little lit space filmed by his computer’s camera and turned off the stream at around 6 AM.

Finally, I was relieved. I dragged myself away from the computer and slowly got ready for work. I had to down a few energy drinks, just to be able to stay awake long enough to get there. However, as I was standing in front of the burger grill, reheating frozen patties, the relief started to slip away from me and horror set in. Because the man who turned off the stream in that dark room didn’t have John’s face and I don’t think those were just chocolate stains on his shirt.