Jerma985: Empowering the chat

Jeremy Elbertson, better known by his online alias Jerma985, is a content creator known for his unique and innovative steam and video ideas. Jerma switched from creating gaming-based youtube videos in 2016 and began livestreaming on Twitch. What distinguishes him from his colleagues is the diversity in the content he streams and his willingness to fully commit to bits that come up during his streams. He often goes the extra mile to physically act out scenarios and edit his camera setup, interrupting whatever he is doing in order to creatively explore the comedic potential of an in-game moment or chat comment. Streamer-chat conversation is a big part of Twitch streaming, but Jerma takes it the extra mile by making conversations with chat the priority and treating the game he’s playing as secondary. In the 2020s, Jerma started putting on and streaming big events with high production value, most notably his 2021 livestream, The Jerma985 Dollhouse.



The Jerma985 Dollhouse was a three day long event during which Jerma lived in a prop house and the chat was able to vote for him to take action. This upends the typical Twitch model of the streamer having control over the stream and the chat just being able to watch and donate. Instead, the chat makes the choices and controls the direction of the stream, as if he was a character in a video game which the chat was playing. The visuals and mechanics of this control were based on the life-simulation game series The Sims. This viewer-artist reversal of control is reminiscent of performance art like Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0 (1974), in which the audience was able to use a variety of pleasant and harmful objects on the artist in any way they chose. During the dollhouse chat’s decisions started out helpful, keeping all of his stats up, but quickly trended towards putting him in comically and fantastically unsafe situations, like being thrown through a window, fighting a fire, or being mauled by a man in a bear outfit. Due to chat being in control, there was no clear way of knowing which direction the stream would take. Jerma’s creative process involves a dependence on improvisation, only making a general outline for the event instead of a script to account for this unpredictability. This paid off and the stream was a big success, winning the award for Best Streamed Event at the Steamer Awards.





Jerma also believes in people fostering their own creativity. He noticed it was difficult to find royalty-free greenscreen videos of people doing things, so he created his own pack of greenscreen videos of himself and released them for free. They are comedic, but the idea is that they would be a resource for people to make their own projects and pursue their passion for video editing without being blocked by paywalls or a lack of content. Some of them have even made their way into corporate videos. In The Code Breaker, which focuses on Jennifer Doudna’s development of CRISPR gene editing technology, the author mentions biohacker Jo Zayner. In 2018, Jo injected herself with CRISPR designed to knock out the myostatin inhibitor, theoretically increasing muscle growth. While she has been criticized for unsafe practices and unsubstantial claims, Jo also sells at-home CRISPR kits for people interested in learning the fundamentals of gene editing. In this way, both she and Jerma place importance on improved accessibility for the general public in their respective fields.