Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) About three years ago, struggled with computer cables and webcams as hundreds of thousands of people stared and waited to see her play a relatively simple video game. She felt weird, but she knew it was part of her live-stream entertainment realm. “You have to take risks and be afraid online to achieve what you want to achieve,” she said in an interview with The Washington Post.
In less than three hours that October night, the left-wing political star, commonly known as AOC, nearly broke a live-streaming record on Twitch. In less than a minute, her audience reached 163,000. At one point, nearly half a million people watched lawmakers play Among Us, a multiplayer cat-and-mouse game about spacecraft sabotage.
Ocasio-Cortez, 33, has a follow-up Twitch stream scheduled for Saturday night that will combine gaming with a discussion of the resurgent labor movement behind America’s “summer strike.” (Twitch is owned by Amazon, whose founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post, and board member Patty Stonesifer is The Post’s interim CEO.)
It’s her first time playing her Pico Park, her multiplayer game where players work together to solve puzzles. But Ocasio-Cortez told the Post that streaming is not a ploy. She was a gambler long before she became a politician. Their first home video game console was Nintendo’s original Game Boy. When her cousin got an original Sony PlayStation, she fell in love with PaRappa the Rapper, a rhythm-based game featuring a lap dog.
“Oh my god, I was really surprised,” she says. “When I was a kid, I had no idea what it was. Pressing the symbol at the right time was like magic.” Her fiancé Riley Roberts introduced her to League of Legends, the most popular sport in the world when they started dating her during her college days. “He taught me how to play,” she says. “From there, the jump to streaming is very small because you start watching esports and live-streamed events, then Twitch as a platform really started to grow.”
That’s not to say the congresswoman, who famously worked behind a cocktail bar in Manhattan before she defeated 20-year-incumbent Joseph Crowley in the 2018 Democratic primary, can separate her political stardom from her streaming success.
When she decided to adapt her popular Instagram livestreams to Twitch during New York’s pandemic lockdown in 2020, she reached out to Hasan Piker — a former journalist for the progressive outlet the Young Turks and now Twitch’s most popular political commentator. Piker and his team gave the congresswoman technical advice and connected her with other influencers. Ocasio-Cortez had friends drop off high-quality webcams and other computer equipment at her Manhattan apartment.
She spent the first 20 minutes of her inaugural stream struggling to set up equipment, fiddling with recording software and cables while tens of thousands of viewers waited for the game to start. Technical camera issues may be a nightmare for traditional broadcasters, but Twitch viewers are trained to keep it calm, and in time lawmakers piloted cartoon avatars in spaceships, cracked jokes into microphones, and answered questions from blurry audience comments that played non-stop alongside the video feed.
“I think the unpredictability of the flow is what makes it so appealing,” says Ocasio-Cortez. “Being used to the chaos that comes with inviting so many people to chat…that’s something you have to deal with. I think so many political arenas are about control, that is, hypersensitivity to optics.
While her political interventions were centered on the 2020 stream,