I have been streaming my gaming activities since 2010. It's weird to think about it now because that's 12+ years of my life. My only regret from all of this is just that I have only started archiving all of my streams to YouTube. It would be a lie to say that I only did it for fun because I was actually reaching out to find other like-minded people to hang out with. As much as I like playing games, I also enjoy watching games being played by others. I never imagined myself being popular, but I was hopeful that at least I would be able to find a crowd of people who would appreciate my company while I am gaming. Apparently, whatever that defined me as an anti-social person offline also manifested itself in my personality as a streamer. At one point, it did bother me somewhat. I have had difficulties understanding the reasoning behind my inability to have a close gaming friend. It was the one thing I sought after until I found myself. These days, I hardly ever think about it anymore. A close gaming friend is like 50 million dollars. They are quite nice to have, but I can live without them.
Those 12+ years were quite the journey in understanding more of myself, as a gamer, and as a regular guy. Even though it's been a while, I am also still not tired of doing livestreams. These days, a majority of the people whom I like to watch have practically stopped or hardly ever go live for whatever reason. I find that strange though, like I find it odd for someone to stop gaming for the sake of others. I remember when I was dating back in the medieval age: I made sure that it was known that I was a gamer. Oh, you want to get me a gift for my birthday? There's this game called Parasite Eve that I would love to play! I've always been a game whore, through and through. Yet, it's understandable. Video games are like religions - they shouldn't define who you are, if you are not into them. People move on from video games, from livestreams, from many other things in this temporary life. We all deserve to find whatever makes us happy before we die. I guess I am just happy to still practice video gaming and livestreaming. I still practice blogging apparently. Perhaps all of these things are well past their prime to a lot of people, but they are still meaningful to me.
A reaper's literal jump-scare (2018)
Back when I first started, my livestream activities can be defined as my way to find gaming friends. It didn't take long however for the gaming livestream culture to shift from discovery to the discovered. The more I stream, the more I noticed that it was becoming harder and harder to see new people landing on my channel. It was a struggle emotionally at first, but this took me back to the time when I was buying games just to play with some old acquaintances on X-Box Live and the way that they moved on very quickly after barely playing those games with me. Gaming for other people is just not the way and the core of my livestreaming existence has been there all along: a) I like playing games, b) it doesn't take anything to stream my gameplay, c) I like capturing memorable moments from my sessions. Yes, it is very me-centric, I know, and I love it.
Janna dearest (2015)
What was seemingly a guaranteed connection with other gamers, thanks to live interaction, was truly an enticing allure during my early days of streaming. I underestimated the growth speed of the online social infrastructure, especially being a career professional by day who was aloof to digital friendships. I found out early that I was still an outcast online, amongst other gamers, which was worse than being an outcast in a group of non-gamers. It makes sense though as people now have options with whom they interact. You see, the problem had always been me. I didn't have any close friends offline, both gamer and non-gamer, and the same goes with my online presence. It was the opposite for a lot of other gamers, and this was probably true by the time livestreaming started.
The chill and the thrill (2016)
When twitch.tv introduced tags, that was quite exciting too. For the first time, it became easy to find other gay gamers. Livestreaming games was a totally hetero world at its inception. Though I was never shy about my object of obsessions while playing romance games, finding others with the same interest was next to impossible. Soon after the introduction of the tags however, I felt even more of an outcast. A triple-layered outcast. Apparently, I was not good enough for people in general, gamers in general, and now gaymers in general? I never felt I like I belonged in the gay community since I am not a twink, a bear, a trans, a drag queen, a bottom, a top, or whatever stereotypical label that exist in the community out there. I found a number of gay streamers whom I visited regularly where I was an active chatroom participant. These never produced any substantial connections but alarmingly, I did notice the dismissing attitudes thrown back at me. I will admit that it did hurt a bit when I came to the realization that I just couldn't fit in even here because I thought that being gay was perhaps a hidden barrier between me and potential connections as a livestreamer. As I mentioned in the previous paragraph though, I was able to move past all of this and still continue to enjoy streaming my gameplay sessions.
Team Smooth x Team Hairy (2015)
Livestreaming games eventually evolved into something that serves me primarily. And throughout that long 12+ years, I have experimented with my scene composition in search of the perfect mis-en-scene of what I am truly trying to capture. I did it quite often because I would get quickly bored of my current setup and there was always that nagging feeling that something was just not right. To me, streaming has always been about something else besides the actual gaming. This is not to say that the gaming part isn't as important. As a matter of fact, the gaming portion is half of the story. Of course, at the start of this journey, I too was a faceless streamer. It took me some time to finally purchased my first webcam, which was a Logitech C510. There were definitely people who were expecting me to look a certain way because ever since the facecam was turned on, they stopped visiting me. The first time I propped the webcam, I didn't know that there was a zoom control and since the webcam was sitting on top of my large screen display, the feed was showing my entire game room in a small box on top of the gameplay. I think this exposure gave me the first taste of wanting to accomplish more with my screen composition.
Getting warmer (2022)
I remember watching the small webcam feed on a lot of different channels and I always feel underwhelmed by them. I also remember watching streamers taking 50% of the screen real estate with their green screens and thought that it was stupid. As a matter of fact, using a green screen, which I attempted for a brief period of time using a picnic table cover from the Dollar Tree store, seemed to take too much away from a gaming stream so I never did it again. One thing was certain, I have always been intrigued by the location where a stream takes place because that information in itself tells a story, whether directly or not. I know that a lot of people streams from their bedrooms, and you know a lot of personal details can be gathered from seeing the way that space is put together. No, I don't want to see a sleeping stream, but I want to get the feel of the space where these gamers are engaging themselves in this activity.
The gamer and his game (2023)
Thus, we have come to this point. After all the experimentations, which includes many successes, missteps, and utter failures, I have finally arrived! I feel so happy with my current scene composition, though it has baffled many visitors to my channel. Usually, when I come up with a new setup, I am always looking for the next iteration as soon as I started to use it. You know, like how Mark Cerny likes to design his consoles. That is no longer the case. This is certainly going to be a permanent setup, or at least it will be the one that I will be using for a long time to come. How do I come to this current manifestation? Well, as I mentioned previously, I believe that in a gaming livestream, both the game and the gamer must be visually presented as equals. This means, half of the screen belongs to the gamer, and the other, the game that is being played. The gamer doesn't just mean the person who is playing the game of course, but the actual space in which the person occupies. This is important because it truly tells the story of the gamer as a whole. I like experiencing the dichotomy between the two scenes - the mostly rigid status-quo on the gamer side, and all the out of this world, somewhat fantastical happenings on the game side.
Not inside the VR but what it looks like in true reality (2023)
Gaming is a complex hobby and where you play the game is a part of that story. If I have to game from my bedroom - you never know what the future may hold - I will still capture the essence of my space in my half of the screen. I may place a shoji panel between myself and say, the bed in the background, and that in itself is a narrative thread on its own. An important thing to note here is that the games being played should never occupy the majority of the screen. If I want to see mostly the gameplay, I may as well find a gameplay only video on YouTube. If one wants to showcase oneself alongside the game that is being played, the game itself should not overwhelm the scene. Let's be honest here, most of the times when I am watching a livestream, my focus has never been primarily on the games themselves, so should they dominate the screen? Sure, this current setup is good from the streamer's perspective, but how do things look to the audience? Well, I have watched full sessions of my past streams presented this way and they actually look really cool, despite the black bars on the top and bottom of the screen. I know many will probably disagree with my current scene setup, but this is where the me-centric comes into play. I found my happy place in my game streaming after 12+ years and that is all that matters.
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