I honestly had no clue what Twitch was before this class and just my luck we ended up being the group that got to present on it. So now I feel as if I took a complete 180 and went from not knowing anything about Twitch to becoming very knowledgeable about it. I think that Twitch is a great platform for people to use and to watch. I started watching some streams to try to understand it better. Although I do not see myself continuing to watch Twitch streams after this semester I do get it now and can understand why this became so popular. I really never understood why people would want to watch others play video games and quickly realized how hypocritical that was because I always used to watch my friend play video games and it was a pretty good time. So I get why people would watch streams online. It also seems like the same thing with watching sports. Why would you want to watch someone play a sport when you could actually just go out and play it yourself? This holds true to video games as well. You are not really watching Twitch just for the games. You are watching it for several other reasons. You may be watching someone play an extremely difficult game like League of Legends who is very good at the game. Or one may just be watching someone who has a good personality. They may just like a certain streamers commentary regardless of how good they actually are at the game.
But even though I now understand Twitch and the popularity in has received there are some real problems with some aspects of it and the gaming industry in general. The gaming industry does not represent people of color or people other genders then male. This holds true to Twitch too. Most of the top streamers are white males. For women to get noticed in Twitch it almost seems like the have to treat it as a webcam website. Some women use their looks to get more viewers on their channel, which causes some debate on whether or not this is a good thing. Should women have to use their looks to gain views? It is a really difficult question to consider and there seems to be no real answer to it. It really depends on who you ask. Like everything Twitch will develop over time and hopefully some time soon we will see more people of color and other genders represented on Twitch and have their channels reach the higher popularity levels