Jerma985 and the Frontiers of Online Entertainment – ​​The Bowdoin Orient

Perrin Milliken

Imagine a carnival without attendees; a wrestling match without spectators; a baseball game without spectators. It might not be hard to imagine given our post-coronavirus experience, but someone remotely hosted an event of this magnitude before the Centers for Disease Control even mandated it.

Jeremy Elbertson, alias Jerma985 (often referred to simply as Jerma), is a streamer on the popular streaming platform Twitch who has gained attention for her massive, one-of-a-kind, boundary-redefining projects on what it means to be an artist on the internet.

Jerma started producing standard gaming content on YouTube that sometimes bordered on skits, but it wasn’t until 2016 that he moved to Twitch (a streaming platform primarily for gamers) that he was able to create his greatest work yet . Twitch is a platform built around streaming video games for viewers, something Jerma does a lot. But every once in a while, Jerma broadcasts something truly special to over 100,000 simultaneous viewers. These activities require months of planning and coordination. In 2019, he live-streamed a virtual carnival where he built multiple bots on Twitch for viewers to control, allowing them to play various carnival games like ring toss or slam dunk (in which he was the dunker). 2021 , in his biggest production to date, a three-day livestream titled “Dollhouse Live,” in which he imitates the popular virtual reality game “The Sims” in real life, asking viewers to vote on what he should wear What (from a set of options), to how to decorate his house and what he should do throughout the day. Most recently, Jerma rented an entire baseball field for baseball games between the fictional teams “Maryland Magicians” and “California Circus.” Throughout the game of baseball, there were impromptu gags and skits that rocked the flow of the game and provided entertainment for those who weren’t too invested in the game itself. These works are best described as unhinged improvisations, using a loose format to guide clever, instant segments that happen at the performer’s discretion.

This just scratches the surface of the various events Jerma is streaming on the platform (along with “Archaeology Live,” “Jerma Wrestling League,” etc.), and suffices to say that no other content creator or streamer does exactly what Jerma does. made. The reasons for this seem obvious and practical: the titles are expensive (“Dollhouse Streams” cost upwards of $40,000 to make), they’re not guaranteed to be profitable, and they’re not really the standard content Twitch is known for. So, if Germa is going to face all these difficulties, why is he doing it?

In Jerma’s own words Interviewed by NPR, “Why not? It sounds fun and seems to make a lot of people happy. So I’m going to do it.” Jerma is a show-value-oriented anchor. He takes a joke to the extreme, moves on when it runs out, choosing to keep inventing instead of sticking with what proves popular. Germa’s various entertainment escapades are sincere and earnest in his position as an entertainer, fully embodying the “electronic clown” title given to him by many of his fans. Another thing that sets Jerma apart from most of his contemporaries is his humility. In the same NPR interview, Jerma said, “I don’t like punches. I don’t punch that much either, though, I just throw wild punches in the air.” His greatest and most popular joke among community members Often at his own expense, such as in “Baseball Stream” where he gets multiple hits in the face with a cream pie, in “Carnival Stream” where his audience conspires in a carnival game, or when the audience lets him in “Dolls”. When fighting a bear (the man in a bear costume) in “House Stream”, shoots a plastic frog at his head instead of a water lily.

Many people refer to these events as performance art, and I have to agree. Jerma’s dedication to comedy and entertainment itself makes him one of the most curious and authentic online artists of our time. What makes him even more unique is his ability to turn a platform previously thought to be just for video games into a place to watch comedy wrestling matches or even amateur mineral digging in the middle of the Nevada desert. If this is the future of online entertainment, I welcome a new era of Jerma-style performers.

Jerma985 is available almost every week on Twitch.TV and on Youtube under the same name.