What is autoethnography? It’s a writing about yourself.

In this case, it’s about yourself being in a

community, describe it’s culture.

Gaming culture:

- From oppressed to oppresser

- From nice, naïve to toxic
- From about having fun to about having money(lootboxes)

- I have to speak from a weird point of view?

- 2 things: video game as a business and video game as a toxic place.

- Business as a gamer?
o Not useless:
 Competitive scene
 Huge price money, streamer. (info on that)
o Huge audience
 Comparable to football?
 Kind of like a celeb
- Toxic?
o Not really toxic
 The toxic is small in the community
 But they have the loudest mouth. (experience)
o Women toxic?
 Yes. Why?
 Women is not encouraged to be a gamer? How/
o Majority of women streamer makes profit by being a thot.
o Media does not cover them
o They are fighting for it now tho

Gaming culture is an interesting subject. Media has mention it, you probably know
someone who is a gamer, it’s all around us and is basically a part of our daily lives, usually
some form of entertainment. Despite its harmless nature, games and gamers are often in a
bad light, usually associate with laziness, a waste of time, gamers are even related to being
incompetent and being influence, be addicted and such. But not all they say on TV are true.
There is one main point that I want to write about, and that is: being a gamer is a low value
job.

With everything our fathers and mothers had said and done, mainly to controlling us
to not play games, the question arises: Is there any future for a gamer? To answer that, let’s
look at how a gamer makes money. There are four main ways: streaming, selling
merchandises, advertising and earning competitive scene’s price. A gamer main point is not
to play game, but rather to be famous for playing games, either through skills, characters, or
their uniqueness. Gamers usually stream on streaming websites, mainly Twitch, Youtube and
many more. For simplicity’s sake, let limit our scope to Twitch only. Streamer on Twitch can
earn money by a lot of ways: Sponsorship, advertisement, twitch subscription system,
donations and more. Disguised Toast, a famous streamer/gamer, earns around $2,500 from
donations as well as $14,000 from subscriptions in a month with 4,000 subscribers. From
sponsorship and advertisements, he estimates that he can at least earn some $10,000. In
short, he can make at least $20,000 excluding ads.
How about competitive prizes? From 2011 to 2019, Dota 2, a multiplayer online
battle arena, grows from $1.9 million dollar to $34.4 million dollar. That means the team
who is the final winner brings home $15 million dollar in 2020. Another example is Fortnite,
a survival, battle royale type of game where the last standing person of 100 players win. In
2020, its prize poll is $7.88 million dollar. The richest gamer right now, Tyler Blevins, also
known as Ninja has an estimate net worth of $15 million dollar. Competitive gaming,
although quite new, has gather an estimated 2.7 billion gamers all around the world. That is
quite a large and possibly golden opportunity to invest.
As a gamer myself, an Asian one at that, I was often scolded by my parents that
gaming is a waste of time and money, and I should study more. I often have to sneak out to
play with friends and the punishment for gaming is a good beating from my father. That
gaming is why I have all my friends that I have. That gaming is the main reason why I choose
my career path as a Computer Science guy. Gaming has always been a part of my life,
contribute to my growth and characteristic. It makes me who I am. That’s why I think,
despite how media portrayed games and gamer, that games are not something bad, it can
teach people a lot of important life lesson like patience, strategy, teamwork, logic,
leadership, creativity, and many more. But as everything else goes, it needs moderation. Low
discipline people, often children, are immerse into the game, sometimes too much, to the
point of losing interest of the outside world and lost track of time and life. So yes, gaming
can be great, but it needs moderation.