#TwitchCon

#TwitchCon

This is my first TwitchCon and surely won’t be my last. My journey to twitchcon started at E3, I meet a fellow Black Girl Gamer who invited me to speak on a panel about diversity in streaming. I invited The Cookout admin, Denny Von Doom to be a part of this experience. He assembled an amazing panel comprised of me, Will “Black Oni”Wiggins, Undrea “Simply Undrea” and himself to sit on Inclusivity: The Afterthought. It is a wonderful panel and I encourage you to watch the recap here. The best thing happened during the panel where we found ourselves being attacked and called trolls by Steakloins a partnered streamer. She feels this panel is unnecessary nevertheless, she was handled.

Being at TwitchCon was a huge honor, a blast and tiring all at the same time. Meeting some these streamers that we watch on a daily basis and learning that they are as humble and as personable as they seem on stream. Especially being a part of Black Girl Gamers and The Cookout and having that comradery live and in person is moving. It’s very easy to feel alone when you get online to play a game or stream but going to conventions like TwitchCon and being a part of groups like BGG and The Cookout give you a sense of belonging and community. It’s important to create a level of tangibility between whether it be affiliates and partners or streamers and audience because we should be encouraging everyone to stream. As well as show real support for fellow streamers by watching their stream and engaging or running interference for them when being harassed.

TwitchCon2017 is in Long Beach; which is different from TwitchCon2016 that was held in San Diego with over 36,000 attendees. For it’s third year it is held in Long Beach.   TwitchCon is a convention for broadcasters and their communities to come together in real life (IRL).

There are many big names to be found at Twitch such as streamer DeeJayKnight, Afro Jim and Ghost Gaming. You could find pro players from Team Echofox like Justin Wong  & Sonic Fox . I even got to chat it up Rick Fox in the VIP section of the H1Z1 tournament. H1Z1 is a multiplayer arena shooter where 150 competitors are dropped in a map and take each other out one by one in a quest to be the last one standing. The H1Z1 tournament is staged in it’s own arena. It is truly an exhilarating site with the lights, the smoke, the audience and the sounds of players brawling their way to the finals. There were so many things going on at once. Being by the Twitch Charity stage is really good spot to see the things that are happening in with different charities like Extra Life and GameChangers. Next to the Charity stage there is a while section dedicated to gaming charities. It is really awesome to see what they’re doing for the gaming community. AbleGamers which sponsors Killer Instinct player Dayton “Wheels” Jones and hearing how they started the charity is very heartfelt.

Artist Alley is always nice to explore. I met up with The Cookout member Ali The Prodigy. You can watch him on Twitch.

Making my way over through all the companies show of their products like Lenovo with The Legion, next to the Star Wars VR system which is amazing! Then seeing the HTC Vive and Playing Shooty Fruity, VR is one of my highlights.

I saw a few new streaming software, one that really caught my eye is Player.Me. It helps clean up your desktop when streaming. Player.Me helps streamers become content producers. It gives you free overlays, real time news feed about gaming updates. Your community can add videos and stream screenshots to your page. The best part about this platform is, it’s for free. It’s definitely worth looking into.

Twitch is a great place to learn how to organize your stream, dos and don’ts of streaming and to network.

I would like to thank Nadja, Gary, Anne, Erin and everyone who gave me an opportunity to be a part of TwitchCon.