Author: vitamiinpee

The very first time I heard about Twitter, I remember thinking it sounded like an unnecessary Facebook rip-off. At the time, Facebook was most popular platform being used for all of our social media status updates as well as photos. Twitter was only very short text sentences, so I didn’t see its relevance until about a year ago when I started streaming video games on Twitch. Additionally, Twitter has expanded over the years to include multi-media much better, such as photos, gifs, article links, and video clips. Early on in my streaming career, a few viewers advised me to get more active on Twitter in order to increase exposure of my stream. At first, I didn’t really take their advice seriously. However, after using Twitter daily for a little over a year now, I see just how right they were.

Twitter has not only increased exposure of my stream, but it has allowed me to network much deeper into the World of Warcraft community and get followed by the most prominent, famous people in this exact field and more. It has allowed me to network with professional gamers from other games such as Call of Duty, Fortnite, and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, among others. When prominent players followed me, other players saw this in their news feeds and followed me as well. 

One of the things that I originally disliked about Twitter has actually turned out to be one of the things I like the most and one of the reasons why Twitter will likely endure as a major social media platform in the long-term. The annoyingly short maximum length of a Tweet may be frustrating at first, but it forces us to be concise and keeps our feeds clean with quick, easy-to-read information. What’s great about this is that it makes information and news readily accessible and can spread to more people due to the speed at which our posts can be posted and read. Additionally, if we really have to give more information than the character count of a Tweet provides, we can use Tweets as a way of prefacing a larger post and giving a link to an article or a website called TwitLonger, which allows us to link our audience to a longer post if necessary. I have seen many streamers use this to give an occasional long update for their fans about changing life paths or other very big news.

Another thing I love about Twitter is that it has allowed me to connect on social media with the more prominent gamers and content creators in my field because I’ve noticed that men in the industry are more likely to have only a Twitter and not both a Twitter and Instagram account. Most of the top players in my field are comfortable posting on Twitter, but not comfortable posting photos to Instagram, so their presence is heavily noted on Twitter whereas it’s absent on Instagram. Instagram is definitely more commonly used for female streamers and is almost expected/demanded that we update it with attractive selfies in order to remain relevant, but this can backfire if we don’t also use Twitter, since we’d be missing out on a larger demographic.  

Twitter can definitely be used as a news broadcasting network, since it presents information in such a quick fashion. Politicians are now making frequent use of Twitter, and Donald Trump was one of the first to make the most impactful use of the platform. Twitter is going to be an enduring form of news because it is so easily accessible to anyone regardless of demographic, yet it can also reach sub-audiences through its algorithms and hashtags. I love Twitter because it has connected me with so many people and also allowed me to see breaking news that is relevant to the game that I play that is posted so much faster than waiting for articles on Wowhead or other official WoW-related websites. I look forward to seeing how I can continue to use Twitter for my personal brand, networking, and where the platform goes in the future.

It is officially 11 days until Blizzcon and some really big things are happening this year for professional World of Warcraft players.

With the addition of the Mythic Dungeon Invitational (MDI) tournament that Blizzard implemented into World of Warcraft, an even larger percentage of top WoW players are flocking to this year’s Blizzcon event to witness the top 4 M+ teams in the world battle head-to-head on the big stage for the first time in WoW’s PvE history.

In WoW, the Esports scene has always consisted of PvP arena tournaments. This is the first time that PvE has made it to the main stage, which is a huge deal considering how PvE has always been seen in the competitive Esports scene. Esports have typically been limited to games with a direct player-versus-player aspect, which is why M+ is a such a unique combination of the best aspects of both PvE and PvP. Everyone in the M+ WoW community is ready to see the top 4 world teams compete live and network with their favorite players.

Becoming an Esports athlete has always seemed unattainable to someone like me, since I started gaming late in life and felt more connected to PvE than PvP in WoW. However, M+ allows someone like me to really excel. This week, I made it to top 4 Brewmaster monk tanks in the North American region and top 9 Brewmaster monk tanks in the world. This is a pretty big accomplishment, since I will be meeting a lot of the prominent people in my industry in 11 days and success as a streamer in this field comes largely from success in the game. Additionally, my stream gained a lot of traction this week and I broke over ten thousand followers to my Twitch channel. I look forward to seeing the M+ invitational competition at Blizzcon more than anything else, since I hope to one day be on that stage. What are you most excited for at Blizzcon this year? See you all there!

What a week it has been!

To start it off, I put a lot of work into my stream and homework this week to prepare for my upcoming trip to Blizzcon. Three monitors working over-time!

In order to keep my head to the grindstone, I made a crock pot of fresh chicken curry. I even chopped up fresh ginger and turmeric root to make it extra special! Here’s a picture I took of it before I poured in the coconut milk to cook for 6 hours. It was so colorful and delicious!

One of the more momentous things that happened this week is that I hit over 10 thousand followers on my Twitch channel! Here is the face of a happy girl through my Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) after my stream on Thursday:

By the end of the week once I had eaten all my crock pot curry and gotten a bunch of work done for my job and school, I started to eat out more. Here are some of the gorgeous meals I shared with my family:

It’s been quite a week. I celebrated the end of a busy week by curling up with my parents, sister, sister’s cat, and sister’s girlfriend to watch one of our favorite movies, Forrest Gump. I hope everyone had a great week! Halloween is right around the corner and I can’t wait to see everyone’s costumes. Cheers!

This week in World of Warcraft, 5 of us girls decided to team up to plan an upcoming night where we will all do M+ keys together and broadcast it live on Twitch. In the World of Warcraft community streaming on Twitch, there are numerous women that are pushing high keys on their streams and receiving a lot of the same sexist trolls, but also a lot of the same people encouraging our success. A few nights ago on my stream, I received one of the more common fan messages requesting that I do keys with Mischief, who is one one of the top discipline priest players in M+. It was at that moment that I decided this could be a really great opportunity.

Historically, women have had a hard time entering the competitive gaming world. In an article by Nick Yee, a statistic that year showed that it was 50/50 in the gaming scene between men and women in 2017, but the breakdown of this statistic by genre shows a much smaller percentage of women still in MMORPG’s such as WoW. In the most recent Mythic Dungeon Invitational, only one women in the entire world made it to the regional finals which were broadcast live on Twitch, showcasing the top-qualified North American teams competing to send the best two teams to the Global Finals this past summer. Despite their best efforts, her team did not make it to the World finals, so throughout the entire competition, there were no women that made it to that big stage.

It is hard to come up with reasons why there are clearly women playing the game at a high level, but why there are none who have made it to the finals. Are we not taken seriously enough? Are we just not good enough? What is going on here?

In my experience competing in M+, I have found that there are many politics surrounding women that often rise to  the surface. One of the main ingredients to success in M+ is consistency, which means forming a real team of 5 players who consistently play together to develop synergy, strategies, and good rapport. However, this can be very tricky when combining men and women in a competitive atmosphere. If a woman is a streamer, there is a stigma that can follow her that she is just doing everything for show and isn’t actually “good” at the game. There is also a stigma about girls getting carried by better players and that their score is only a reflection of this free pass to success.

More than that, there is something called the “only girl syndrome” where women feel the  need to compete with one another due to gender because they are often replaced in teams of all men if another younger, prettier, or exciting new girl enters the picture. This can cause anxiety and unnecessary competition that spans much outside of a girl’s talent in a game and much more into the politics of the men controlling who gets to come and go in a group.

Additionally, many women that I know have noted issues on teams with guys when one or more of the members develops feelings for the girl player and refuses to group with her if he gets rejected. On the flip side, if two of the players on the team end up dating, this can also cause drama due to arguments over favoritism as well. It is not uncommon for workplaces to forbid relationships among their employees for these reasons, so it should be no surprise that there are teams and guilds that don’t allow for co-ed group compositions out of pure business-sensibility. Regardless, it still makes it difficult for women to make it in the high-end competitive scene of any game, but it is particularly noticeable to me in WoW, since that’s the game I currently stream on Twitch.

The last time I did a M+ Dungeon on my stream with all women, I didn’t even advertise that it was all-female and people still figured it out immediately because they didn’t hear any male voices coming through the audio. We received tons of trolls in my chat making statements flaming our gameplay for our gender or making sexist jokes such as “Wait, five girls in a M+ dungeon? How did they even find their way into the instance?” Sadly, this discouraged a few of the girls from doing it again if we were on stream and I haven’t done it in almost a year now.

However, I recently decided that it would be a really fun opportunity to play with 5 capable, talented female players on stream to both satisfy the requests of our viewers and to gain some empowerment by playing together without men. This way, we can’t be accused of getting carried if we are chesting keys within the timer all on our own. I reached out to 5 of the best women players/streamers I know and we set a date for our first stream playing together. We all think that this could be a really fun night and are  aware that we may get turned into some of the biggest memes of our lives, but we are not going to let it discourage us. The pros vastly outweigh the cons because we may be able to really make a difference if we succeed and show that, even if we make mistakes, we’re still all capable players and we’re having a great time regardless of your opinions of our “girl brains”. Bring it on!

This week in class, I learned about how Snapchat is being used by companies as the greatest new tool for storytelling. Despite being an avid Snapchat user over the past 2 years, I realized that I had never learned how to subscribe to an actual organization, company, or public figure to see their daily updates using this platform. Tonight, I decided to check out some companies to see how they used Snapchat for their business. I found some of the more mainstream ones like Amazon, Sour Patch Kids, and Masahble, but the Snapchat organization called “Crafty” caught my eye and captivated me for a solid several minutes. Crafty is described as the “Ultimate in DIY, Arts & Crafts, and Home Decor” and it definitely feels that way. I couldn’t stop watching as Crafty showed me all these incredible ways to make cool, colorful soaps that looked like letters, watermelon slices, and other fruits. When the stories were over, it left me wondering what I would see tomorrow. I see videos like this on Facebook and other social media platforms, but what I loved about seeing it on Snapchat was how each story rolled seamlessly into the next and I couldn’t stop watching.

What I love about Crafty is that they use so much color in their videos and they seem to have so many cool, creative things to show from one day to the next. However, something was definitely missing from their stories. I decided to pause my writing process and go check my social media accounts. When I did, a light bulb went off in my head when I was scrolling my Instagram newsfeed and saw a new post from the organization called Snoopslimes that I recently followed. I realized that Crafty is missing a personality. In the DIY soap stories of theirs that I just watched, all I see are hands, so it’s hard to connect with Crafty’s snaps as a “story” and not just an instructional video that’s cute and interesting but a little hollow.  

In fact, I think Crafty could learn something pretty important from the Instagram user called Snoopslimes. Snoopslimes does both a daily Instagram story and a daily posts to their static page. They have 1.8 million followers and are very active on Instagram in similar ways to Snapchat users. While Snoopslimes also lacks a face to their organization like Crafty since it only shows a woman’s hands, Snoopslimes still always does a really great job of creating stories and viewer-interaction by including questions in the posts to get a dialogue going. Additionally, they seem to be very real with their audience, like how they state in the post descriptions when a video was particularly fun to film or apologize for a repost due to a technical issues, (which is something many Instagram users can relate to). So despite their lacking an actual face for their organization, Snoopslimes makes up for it by showing personality and authenticity in their lively descriptions. Crafty’s Snapchat stories were beautiful and inspiring, but they lacked that magical extra factor that Snoopslimes shows by making us feel like there is a real person behind the video and that our feedback matters to what they do. Simply put, Crafty is impersonal and Snoopslimes is our friend.  

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Snapchat has really grown over the last 4 years and is breaking the stigma that it is just a silly app for high schools to use to send lewd photos. In fact, Snapchat is a great tool now for distributing editorial content, such as political articles/news, fashion, and any topic of interest you can imagine. It’s also great because it can give a company access into a younger demographic that they may not have been previously able to reach. While Instagram and Facebook have implemented the Stories feature now too, Snapchat was the pioneer of this storytelling format and it continues to be the platform I go to daily to post photos and videos of little snapshots from my life and watch my friends’ stories as they travel the world, go on hilarious rants, or update me on their various whereabouts. Now that I know more about this feature for organizations on Snapchat, I will be sure to keep an eye out to see how Snapchat develops its powerful niche in the social media world. I hope to see organizations like Snoopslimes get a Snapchat account in addition to their Instagram since I’d be interested to see how they can use it in different ways to interact with their fans. There are merits to many of these new and popular platforms of storytelling, but the most fun part of it all is seeing how each platform develops its own unique purpose as users flock to different platforms for specialized kinds of information and story sharing.