Wheaton’s Livestream Readings
2 min read
Last year, The Next Generation‘s Wil Wheaton began livestreaming readings of books on his twitch.tv/itswilwheaton channel.
During these readings, which come from random Choose Your Own Adventure books, Wheaton has his viewers decide what the main character in the story will do as Wheaton reads the book.
“I just wanted to do something that would give people a break from all the horrible in the world at the moment and give something for me to look forward to as performer every week,” said Wheaton of his newest project.
Recently, Wheaton took the reading live when he made an appearance at the Buena Vista Branch Library in Burbank, California and doing the reading in person as opposed to online was a bit nerve-wracking for the actor. “I go around the country and I speak to colleges, conferences and thousands of people at a time, and I’m like, ‘Great. Fine. Whatever,’ he said. “Coming to speak to about sixty kids, I am scared to death. So please be kind.”
Wheaton chose The Third Planet from Altair and The Cave of Time and the children jumped in enthusiastically. In the Altair book, they had to decide if the main character would “choose to enter a hibernation chamber in the alien spaceship he’s on in an effort to survive the trip to a distant planet or continue to try to make contact with his old ship.”
Choosing the contact option resulted in the main character “becoming deeply depressed and losing all will to survive.”
“Wow. I mean, that is an incredibly dark ending for kids,” said Wheaton. “I’m an adult and that was hardcore.”
So Wheaton and the kids went back a few pages and opted for the hibernation chamber option instead, which “resulted in the main character landing on a planet similar to Earth.”
Wheaton does the livestream readings weekly on his Twitch channel on Mondays at 6 PM Pacific time.
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