It was a normal Saturday night in Northside with plenty of foot traffic as people walked along Chase Avenue for a slice of pizza from the Kitchen Factory.
Across the street, however, something unusual was going on at Happen, Inc.’s headquarters at the corner of Chase and Hamilton avenues: People were stopping on the sidewalk to watch local teens play Xbox. A game of NBA 2K16 was being projected through the window onto a semi-opaque shower curtain that allowed both the gamers inside and spectators outside to see.
“It’s a homemade Twitch; they love to show off,” says Tommy Rueff, founder of Happen, Inc., Northside’s nonprofit youth outreach organization. Located at 4201 Hamilton Ave., Happen, Inc.’s headquarters is a safe place for kids in the area to socialize with peers, contribute to the community and prepare for the professional world that awaits them.
Twitch is a live-streaming video platform that allows players to share their video gaming experiences with audiences around the world as their spoken comments made about the footage are captured in real time. In recent years, it’s amassed around 45 million participants and has been a contributing factor in the new ways that games are promoted and reviewed online — think Mystery Science Theater 3000, without the robot puppets but with people making fun in response to or at the expense of pop culture.
The teens, all Northside locals, are part of an organization run by Happen, Inc. called Teen Hall, a sort of student council that has legitimate representation on Northside’s actual community council. The teens meet every other Saturday to discuss their agenda. The idea to make video games a part of the routine after Teen Hall business was concluded came naturally enough.
“I just asked them what they want to do,” Rueff says. “Our age group (at Happen, Inc.) used to be from 6 to 12, but now we have this huge teen program, and video games are part of their lives. We adapt; that’s how this program started.”
Prior to the most recent Saturday night event, there was a meeting focused on how to repair broken video game consoles rather than giving up on such expensive pieces of machinery when they malfunction. Lewis Riley, an information technology specialist, came by to explain why Xbox consoles tend to overheat.
“These kids don’t have the money to buy new systems when they go down,” Rueff says. “You can see on their faces how intent and focused they were, learning how to fix their games. It’s close to them. It was cool that he came in and shared his knowledge with them.”
Rueff says that he used to receive stacks of older video games from a brother in San Francisco, but would just give them away. Now, with repair instruction being offered, there is use for them.
The recent Saturday night gaming session included a half-dozen teens who wanted to show their prowess on the digital basketball court. The initial problem, though, was that it was too bright to project the game onto the window. The sun had barely begun to set.
“I see this being more successful in fall, when the sun goes down earlier,” Rueff says. “We can’t keep them after curfew, 10 p.m.”
After an hour, the sun had gone down enough to make viewing the game from Chase possible.
“We can’t do anything on Hamilton Avenue for safety issues — people backing up to watch, or driving by and looking,” Rueff says.
Once the basketball video game was projected outward, passersby began to take notice. Rueff and some of the kids took lawn chairs out onto the doublewide sidewalk and watched the game, though it was a mirrored image where everything read backward.
“The kids aren’t just playing video games,” Rueff says. “We hope there will be people on the sidewalk checking it out, talking about it, seeing what the kids are up to. We look at all of our programs with a theme in mind. We’re putting chairs out on the sidewalk in case anybody wants to sit and watch. We have a theme here (that) community is not just where you live, but it’s how you live with other people.”
For more information on HAPPEN, INC., visit happeninc.com.
This article appears in Aug 24-31, 2016.