The internet has changed all of our lives, including how we interact with each other. With social networking, the real time feeds and whatnot, our world has become hyperfast and intertwined to the point where we not only have our physical identity but a virtual identity. As services like Youtube have created a whole new generation of stars and with the popularity of e-sports, a new brand of internet icons are starting to emerge: the livestreaming gamer.
Stereotypically, the gamer of old has been depicted either as the conventional geek/nerd type such as the 80’s movie Revenge of the Nerds to the out-of-shape, fat, hippy-ish, balding guy living in a dark room and sometimes the buck tooth kid living in his mom’s basement.
Yet, if you spend a significant amount of time on Twitch.tv, possibly the premier livestreaming gaming site on the net run on top of the Justin.tv network, you’ll find that these images of the gamer are not only a fallacy, but sexist and possibly racist as well. Why is that? Because gamers are everyone and you can see a huge variety of people participating in games around the world.
Take Rabbitbong, whose World of Warcraft nickname is Yoni, for instance. She’s one of the top female streamers for World of Warcraft on Twitch. Boasting over 17k followers with an average of 500-1000 viewers each time she streams, Yoni has earned quite a bit of respect as a top notch PVP champion with her paladin bearing the title of Gladiator. When you watch Yoni play, you wouldn’t suspect that this lovely transplant from New York city would be on that level at first glance as people have been conditioned to believe in gamers. In fact, her chat constantly has a barrage of trolls often making lewd innuendos, in which Yoni deflects along with her band of mods who help patrol her chat in toning down some of the nastier comments. Still there’s quite a bit of respect for her as a hard core player and she does a lot to attempt to dispel the standard notion of high end gamers with her edgy play style, even pushing herself for marathon style sessions.
Then you have other gamers who have managed to accumulate huge followings based on their history as video producers such as Towellie and Swifty, both well known and respected on Youtube for their various series. Both of these high end gamers have a subscription based service, which is offered as a partnership to highly popular streamers. This format is quite strict but allows these streamers to earn a reasonable income as they guarantee a certain number of viewers at all times.
What’s interesting about both Towellie and Swifty is that besides gaming, they have some interesting side activities. Towellie mixes his gaming schedule with gym routines, using Twitter to broadcast his cardio runs, discussing calories burnt and also professing some juicing solutions that have influenced other gamers. Swifty is known for combining high end PVP style gaming with his sports activities such as snowboarding or surfing. In Swifty’s case, he has been well known to embody an extremely positive attitude and energy through his videos that once again defy the dark room, isolated gamer type.
Of course, you still have the usual nerd thrown into the mix in all of this. But one of the more fascinating aspects that I’ve found is the growing number of young girls involved in this. Not just people like Yoni, but a pretty wide variety of them that are high school up until college level. Quite a few of them have reasonable popularity and I find it fascinating in terms of the types of people who end up participating in streaming. Some, such as my friend Eiya, whom I got involved in streaming, do it for similar reasons as Yoni, in that they have a passion for gaming and enjoy the benefits of being part of streaming in reaching a new audience that helps their game play.
Others, I’ve also discovered do it with some level of interesting ambition. I know one streamer who would talk about getting partnership and constantly discussed on the stream giveaways and other things to improve her viewership to get that partnership. Now, partnership with a company like twitch at a young age is a huge thing as it allows one to essentially stay at home and play games all day while getting paid. Who wouldn’t want that? And some girls also have created certain drama on streams, where females would go to other female’s chats and openly denigrate them with certain words (e.g. “slut”) The thing is that the competition is very high, so securing that top spot can be cut throat at times.
Furthermore, I think some females ended up realizing that they could take advantage of their looks or at times just being female and playing a certain game. Some female streamers are pretty blunt in setting up their titles and it can be obvious when they’re seeking attention. I recall seeing one girl advertise herself as a “female” on Path of Exile, making it seem as though she was attempting to be a rarity in a normally all male channel. Yet it’s not just young teenage girls doing this but even male kids in elementary school from Britain. Some of it is just about getting attention and sharing passion for something they love.
When you add the donation aspect outside of the partnership part, things can be quite interesting. Some streamers have received in excess of several thousand dollars from a few key benefactors. Top streamers often are endorsed by gaming peripheral companies themselves or at times the game producers themselves. Take Kripparian and Archon the Wizard for instance. Kripparian was known for his Youtube World of Warcraft series then hit world’s first in killing Diablo on hardcore mode. Later, he was approached by Grinding Gear Games to be an alpha tester for Path of Exile, which is considered a nice possible successor to the Diablo 2 game. On the other hand, Archon the Wizard, who also is known as a huge Diablo 3 streamer, had been approached both by Blizzard and Dave Brevik (who is working on an ARPG called Marvel Heroes) as Archon the Wizard has been a pretty big supporter of Diablo 3, boasting a healthy community and a good spokesperson on behalf of the game.
For game companies and other sponsors, it’s critical in reaching these high end streamers as they hold quite a bit of sway over their audience. Path of Exile, for instance, when Kripparian is not streaming, might only have a few hundred viewers on average. But when he streams, you can see numbers in the thousands. These opportunities offer lesser known companies a chance to be shown to a much broader audience than normal and get early feedback to improve their system. In short, it’s almost like free advertisement at times (although some gamers might get paid).
The game streaming though has its share of very dark moments too. I wrote about several scandals that a supposed disabled person going by the name of ZillionOP had done in his exploitation through botting of Diablo 3 and later the revelation that he was not disabled. Things like that have made monitoring the activities of streamers very strict as the people from Twitch want to continue to maintain good standing with the community, sponsors, etc. I heard earlier that one streamer ended up getting banned for several violations, including using copyrighted material on stream and even stalking another female streamer. Many streamers have to be extremely careful in what they are able to show and say during a stream as it can affect their partnership or potential partnership with Twitch. Although some of this might seem like common sense, somethings might not necessarily be as easy as one may think because everything is happening spontaneously.
But the whole idea of livestreaming bears some very interesting implications both for the streamers and as the audience and perhaps the future of television. The thing about livestreaming is that each person essentially bears their own community. Some share their community with other fellow streamers who may be real life friends and whatnot. But their personality and content can reflect the the community as well. And it’s a very fascinating subject because essentially livestreaming partly offers a voyeuristic approach to the lives of these people.
In the case of Swifty, he has a whole house dedicated for gaming where there’s numerous web cameras set up in several key rooms, offering the audience full 24/7 viewing. While Swifty himself may not be on all the time, the cameras are constantly rolling and there’s always a group of people sitting in his chat. If you swing on by to other streamers, you’ll see them often times sitting inside their room, giving you a pretty private view of their lives. Many streamers will share showing off their meals, computer setup and pets even. For some, this situation might seem like a violation of privacy, but for streamers, it’s not about privacy but opening up their world to everyone.
Beyond that, viewers have the ability to interact from a basic chat to sometimes far more reaching means with their favorite gamers. Chat is a real time IRC-like web based system where people can ask questions, post comments and whatnot to the streamers. Some streamers do the best they can to interact with their chat. Some of the more sophisticated and visionary streamers really up the ante when it comes to interacting with their viewers. For instance, Archon the Wizard had innovated a system called “Arcoins” where followers gain a channel specific for the amount of time they remain in the channel. In turn, they are able to spend their currency on doing certain levels of interaction with him, such as some of his own metagames he invented where people can get in game Diablo 3 prizes.
Sponsored gamers like Swifty do constant raffle drawings or offer giveaways to followers to be able to come to his house and participate. Such methods have been pretty successful in allowing followers to do more than just have a back and forth chat, but actually interact both in game and sometimes with the person directly.
But when you look overall at the direction of the tech world, social media and the notion of online celebrities, you’re really seeing the slow erosion of traditional artificial barriers that had been erected in the past and the increased ties with fans. Twitter has done this as a huge number of celebrities have used the mechanism to not just increase their popularity but reach out to some of their hardcore audience and bridge that gap of stardom. In the case of online game streaming, we’re seeing a whole new level where virtually anyone with a web camera, a decent computer, a good internet connection, some skills with a certain game and of course, a killer personality can also gain a reasonable following of their own.
The thing is though that we’ve only started seeing the basics of this market develop. This barely is the infancy and it’s going to get better as people slowly realize the potential for this area of entertainment.