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       About three years ago, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) wrestled with computer wires and webcams while hundreds of thousands of people watched, waiting for her to play a relatively simple video game. It felt awkward, but she knew that comes with the territory of live-stream entertainment.

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       “You need to be willing to take risks and be cringe online in order to get to what you’re trying to get to,” she told The Washington Post on Friday.

       In three hours that October evening, the left-wing political star known popularly as AOC nearly broke live-streaming records on Twitch. In less than a minute, she amassed an audience of 163,000. At one point, nearly half a million people were watching the congresswoman play “Among Us,” a multiplayer cat-and-mouse game about sabotage on a spaceship.

       AOC playing ‘Among Us’ shouldn’t surprise you. Streams are a beloved pastime.

       Ocasio-Cortez, 33, returned to Twitch on Saturday evening, as she mixed gaming with a discussion of the newly powerful labor movement behind America’s “summer of strikes.” (Twitch is owned by Amazon, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, owns The Post and whose board member Patty Stonesifer is The Post’s interim CEO.)

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       For about 3？ hours, she played “Pico Park,” a multiplayer game that requires players to cooperate to solve puzzles, and later her crew switched to a party game, “Gartic Phone.” The thread between “Pico Park” and the labor movement didn’t escape many viewers Saturday night, as she and seven other popular streamers brainstormed how to solve puzzles.

       “This is literally a demonstration of why labor unions are better at accomplishing tasks,” someone said in her chat. “Right now in the U.S., the default system is to have one overpaid manager (who never played the game) dictate the decisions for that group. Everyone needs to be part of the conversation.”

       Ocasio-Cortez told The Post that her streaming is no gimmick. She was a gamer long before she was a politician.

       Her first home video game console was a hand-me-down gift — 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 starring a rapping dog.

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       “Oh, my God, it blew my mind,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “As a kid, I had no concept of what this thing was, pressing symbols in time. It was like magic.”

       Her fiancé, Riley Roberts, introduced her to “League of Legends,” the world’s most popular esport, when they started dating in college. “He taught me how to play,” she said. “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 that 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 Ocasio-Cortez decided to adapt her popular Instagram live streams to Twitch during New York’s pandemic shutdowns 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 Bronx apartment.

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       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.

       Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) streamed to Twitch for the first time to play with streamers like Pokimane and HasanAbi and encourage people to vote. (Video: Jhaan Elker/The Washington Post)

       On-camera technical difficulties might be a traditional broadcaster’s nightmare, but Twitch audiences are trained to brush it off, and before long, Ocasio-Cortez was navigating a cartoon avatar around a spaceship, joking on the mic and fielding questions from the blur of viewer comments that scrolled nonstop beside her video feed.

       “I think the lack of predictability on a stream is what makes it compelling,” she said. “Being able to be comfortable in the chaos of inviting so many people in the conversation, … you need to be okay with that. I think so many political venues are about control, a hypersensitivity to optics. Sometimes the conversation you want to have is not the natural thing to discuss at that moment.”

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       While her political interjections in her 2020 stream focused mostly on voter registration, Ocasio-Cortez spent some airtime Saturday introducing viewers to the basics of the labor movement — an apt topic as Hollywood writers and actors strike together for the first time since 1960, and as UPS drivers threaten the country’s largest work stoppage in about half a century by the end of July.

       “Support for unions is at historic highs, but the concentration of unionized labor as part of the American workforce has been systematically brought down,” she said. “So you have this massive gap between the number of Americans that support unions and those that never had the opportunity to be in a union.”

       “I think the first potential misconception is that only certain places are for union work,” she added, recalling her days as a nonunionized restaurant worker. “Virtually any workplace in America can be organized and unionized.”

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       That includes the video games industry, which is larger and more profitable than the movie and music business combined. Earlier this month, Sega of America workers in such fields as bug testing, product development and marketing won the vote to unionize and became the largest video game union.

       “I think the best organizing is not just meeting people where they are, but also meeting ourselves where we’re already at, and ask how can we take things that we already enjoy and imbue them with more community and purpose,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

       She still plays “League” but has taken more to cozier, slow-paced games when she isn’t streaming or lawmaking. The congresswoman did some political outreach on Nintendo’s life-simulation game “Animal Crossing” in early 2020 but has since lost her save file and found a new passion in the life sim indie hit “Stardew Valley.” She said she completed it during the 18-hour flight to Japan for a congressional delegation visit in February.

       Ocasio-Cortez has come to see games as an important political medium because of their ability to gather people across generations.

       “It’s kind of like the way some of my colleagues talk about golf,” she said.

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