And How I Plan to Utilise Them
Stream Aesthetics
I discovered early on that I didn’t feel motivated to stream without having a complete setup. I didn’t want to turn people off my streams because they didn’t feel polished and spend a few weeks working on my aesthetics before I felt comfortable with them. Once I completed my set-up, I could be ready to stream in less than 15 mins which made me more likely to stream, I went from streaming once a week to 4 times in one week.
To look further into this concept, I’ve been doing some research into how aesthetics can improve viewer engagement and while I haven’t had the chance to read the entire paper, I’ve found an interesting paper on the ethnography of twitch streamers. This is going to influence my final project as I want to consider how my experience as a streamer – especially as someone who is completely new to streaming. I also want to utilise some techniques I’ve learned to grow my persona. I want to look at how my relationship with the game has changed and use reflexivity to analyse if streaming has influenced how and when I play.
Exploring my Niche
I had a lot of trouble engaging fully with my niche because it isn’t too active online, I tend to primarily talk about the game in-person (when that was possible) or online with friends who play it. A friend and I will often share screenshots, screen recordings and talk about getting rare cards or achievements – or our frequent rage quitting. As mentioned in my previous post, the game has a major update on September 9th and I saw an unprecedented amount of activity in the online community.
I’m doing some research into the relationship between game communities and the game (as well as how some can lead to positive and negative experiences). I’ve also found a great article on how game communities can have a large influence on players. I want to work to find more scholarly research I can use to influence my project. In the future, I want to explore the Reddit community more and see if I can grow comfortable with the platform. I also want to check out the communities on discord and see if any of them are still active. To expand my Twitter presence, I want to work on getting past my usual lurking tendencies and try to post more generic k-pop content– mainly relating to the three in-game groups; BTS, TXT and Enhypen.
Monetisation
The final discovery I came to was the importance of monetisation in the game, and how the game works to motivate players to spend money in-game. Players are encouraged to keep monetising, and once they first purchase a subscription the game can feel quite different without it. The game also utilises ads very well. I’m someone who hates playing competitive games and challenges where whenever you fail you have to watch an unskippable ad, there’s nothing that makes me want to quit more. However, I will also willingly watch ad’s before playing a mission stage I’m struggling with because I know it can make my gameplay much easier.
Rhythm Hive – TXT Summer Festa lvl 49
Summer Festa Lvl 49 after watching ad
Since I’m considering monetisation for my bcm215 framework, I have already done some research on the topic which is available in this post.
runaway towards the clouds with me 