micro-fiction monday: jan 20

cw: supernatural malevolent entities, on-camera death, empathy for a twitch streamer


Was the Death of Twitch Streamer Daniel Kuchar a Tragedy, or a Calculated Publicity Stunt?: A Response.

by: Travis Austin  


A lot of people saw Daniel as a username; not a person, but a caricature.  I get that. Maybe they even saw him as a destination, a place to go when you (a “real person”) want to escape “real life”.
Despite his influencer status, he always kept himself at an arm’s distance from the camera.  People would see Dan, but they wouldn’t know him. They didn’t know what was going on behind the scenes.

I met Daniel in high school. We were both nerds, obsessed with spending as much time in the computer lab as we possibly could.  We grew up together.  Not that we had a huge relationship back then but as a teenage boy, someone I could count on to game with was about as good a friend as any. We lost touch when I left New Hampshire to go to college halfway across the country, but when my Dad got sick and I had to come home, he was there, and we picked up exactly as we left off. 

We were friends again for a few years before GeoGuessr even existed.  Who knows if we’d still be friends if it weren’t for Geoguessr.
Obviously he was a natural; he told me moving to all corners of America as a kid helped.  We joined a discord, started conversations about game meta. We helped Geoguessr become what it is today.

Maybe you’d know that already if you browsed a Wikipedia page on it.

GeoGuessr is a browser-based geography game in which players must deduce locations from Google Street View imagery. One of its top players, Daniel Kuchar, and long-time friend, Travis Austin, helped pioneer the technique of analyzing the metadata to ascertain their location, examining camera quality, height, car blur-radius, etc.

It didn’t tell you who Daniel really was, how good a friend he was.

After what happened, there was media outcry.  There were vigils for him, Twitter threads and 3-hour YouTube essays on what happened. But they weren’t at the wake.  They didn’t hug his mom in the receiving line.  They didn’t have to choose a wreath.

The stream started as any of his streams did. What the articles fail to mention is that his stream had already been going for nearly an hour and a half when it all happened.  He wasn’t planning on signing off anytime soon, but he did message me saying he was planning on taking a break after the next 20K round. He was flipping through fan-created custom maps, when “Hot or Cold” caught his eye.  4 seconds per round.

He clicked for the first location.  Pretty generic Eastern Russia. It was a good guess, conservatively near Krastoyarsk, but still North enough to account for the topograhpy. Still, East Russia is a pretty big place. Score of 3,918.

“Okay, so… Hot or Cold… Hot or Cold… So that’s gotta be cold right? So the next location should be hot, right?  Unless someone’s trying to trip me up…”

Round two was a pretty easy Japan.  I was thinking it was somewhere closer to Hiroshima than it was to Osaka, but obviously, Dan had to guess Obama. Score of 4,611.

That was when things started to go wrong.

Obviously the stream crashed, everybody saw that. Dan called me while I scrambled to get take over and get things up and running again.

I could hear the fans of his PC running like their life depended on it in the background.
He’d gotten a computer warning out of nowhere, and suddenly his fans went into high gear and the stream shut itself down. I cracked a joke to open the window, the 22 degree weather would probably help with the overheating issue.  I could hear his eyes rolling.

Ten minutes later, with a computer reset, he was back to round three.

It was a tough Bolivia.  If I were him, I would’ve guessed Argentina too.  Still not the worst guess I’d seen, especially with the 4-second round timer.  There was a nuanced, vibes-based approach required. Score of 3,602.

A bird running smack into his window?  Made me jump, but not anything too out of the ordinary, sad as it was. But six birds?  As soon as one body hit the ground below the next was running headlong into the glass pane.
Six birds before the window shattered. After the first bird failed to make a dent, they all hit it beak-first, causing a hole drilled straight into the pane, causing shards and splinters to cascade and then finally, shatter inwards.
Dan sat in stunned silence. We all did for a moment. I think we were all waiting for the seventh bird that never game.  I could see the curtains billow and then Dan sprung into action, grabbing a blanket to wrap around himself as he rushed to the window.  He looked at it, then at the glass on the floor and shook his head.  
Honestly I didn’t really know what he should do about it either.
He grabbed a green screen to block the window until he was finished streaming, to stop the wind from coming in so aggressively, and messaged me privately that he was cutting stream after this seed.

Round four was the most sinister.  Not for the location, but for the outcome.  It was in the prairies in Canada. He guessed Saskatchewan when it was really Eastern Manitoba. Not a bad guess, but I waited with bated breath while his score calculated.  Score of 4,030.  I think he waited to, waited for something to happen.  It felt like the world was holding its breath, even the curtains stopped billowing and the wind quieted.  He loosened his death grip on the blanket swaddling while he paused between the rounds.

Nothing.  All was quiet on the Western front.

The last guess was more than easy.  It would have felt like a trick if there were any Burj Khalifa-copycats elsewhere around the globe.  

That’s when I got on the headset.  A second earlier and I could have saved him.

Score of 5,000. It was a gimme.

It didn’t happen how you’d think. Combustion. It started with his face going gray and ashen.  I could tell he wanted to speak but his throat seized up and he began to heave.  He looked like he was trying to cough but no sound was coming out.  As his hand reached to pull the camera down, to stop the show, the tips of his fingers looked like they were mummifying in front of us in real time.  His face went bone white as he fell to the floor, dragging half his set-up down with him, and he began to curl into the fetal position, his mouth open, silently screaming as thousands of people watched in horror. The skin of his face was drying out and clinging desperately to his skull.  His eyes shut but the convulsions continued, the rug at least providing him with a soft place to rest.  I don’t think any of us accounted for the static.  His skin, paper-thin and, veins dry, pieces of him began to rub off on the carpet, dead-skin or ash, I wasn’t sure.  Then suddenly, a spark.  Then the convulsions stopped, just as he began to catch fire.  A death and cremation all in one.  

The worst part of it was that I didn’t cut stream earlier. This is not how Daniel would have wanted to be remembered.  This is not how Daniel Kuchar wanted to go down in history.  As a friend, I failed him, and I have to live with that every day. So I ask, for my sake, enough with the clickbait articles capitalizing on the loss of a real human.  A good friend.  A brother, and a son.  He was worth more than that.  The memory of Daniel Kuchar is worth more than that.