I’m not a big gamer, mostly dabbling in the NHL, FIFA, MLB, and Madden realms of the gaming world and even to that extent I am not very good or into it at all. I had no idea that people actually live streamed their screens while gaming and could make up to $300,000 a year. If I ever reach that type of income I’ll probably be living on a private yacht somewhere in the Caribbean.

Twitch on the other hand might be a good career path if this whole accounting thing doesn’t work out. The game streaming business is a crazy concept to me that people will pay to watch someone else play a video-game. The article by Tanya Depass in Paste Magazine brought numbers up that seemed out of this world: $300,000 annual salary, 16 billion minutes watched per month and 11 million videos broadcast per month. The gaming community is obviously much bigger than I had ever known. However, with this many players broadcasting, and this many viewers, why is there such a lack of diversity in the gaming community? That blew my mind a little bit because let’s face it, who doesn’t love video-games?

I agree with some of the article in that perhaps many players of color do not identify themselves as so in their Twitch or Twitter handle, but there has to be more to it than that. How can it be that in a virtual community there is still such disparity and assumptions made about people that can’t even be seen through the game. Tanya Depass states, “there is a false assumption that white male stars attract the best audiences…non-white people are still not considered beautiful or appealing by societal standard.” This is horrible. Even in a world that is seen on screen, with no view of the gamer themselves, there is a “societal standard” that exists in attempt to attract a broader audience.

We have covered a lot of topics this year from new media to gender and race roles, but I don’t know if any have been as shocking as this topic for me. We covered it in our group project about podcasting and the differences amongst podcasts and I am curious if there is a Twitch handle that is owned by the TWiB team. I felt as though they covered the most relevant topics, and had a way of bringing people of all gender roles and races together. Tanya mentions that more people of color need to share and promote other streamers of color to try and level the playing field and that “diversity can’t be put as an afterthought but should be part of the core mission and values of the organization.”

I agree with her in this aspect, and I also hope that someone, similar to Elon James White and his development of the TWiB platform, can create a system that will strengthen the Twitch community by eliminating this societal standards and bring gamers together with the one thing they love most: gaming.