In the 50s it was the gyrating Elvis Presley that gave parents conniptions, in the 60s and 70s it was drugs. These days it's the addictive lure of online games sucking young digital natives into hours of screen time. But, as the Millennials and Generation Z argue, there are careers
Screen time and playing video games turns into money makers for gamers
By Jane Phare
Herald on Sunday·
14 mins to read
Twitch live streamer Lorien Gugich, known as loriipops online, has 93,000 followers. Photo / Supplied
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Sometimes she just stops, to cuddle the cat, take a sip out of a giant blue mug, chew on a lolly, eat lunch, or simply tip her head back and close her eyes to rest.
During one live stream her 22-month-old son Leon appears in the background vacuuming while sucking on his dummy and performing antics on screen. His mum tries to carry on talking about Game of Thrones to her followers without laughing.
All the while, subscribers of the video streaming platform Twitch pay to watch her. For the past four years that's how Gugich has earned her living - as a single-player gamer, an entertainer and as a "lifestyle streamer". The odds are that the majority of her followers are men but she doesn't really care about demographics.
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Gugich likes what she does, she's good at it and it pays the bills. Existing in a male-dominated online community, she knows that female gamers and live streamers are open to sexist or derogatory remarks, or simply being objects of fun.
"Sometimes they objectify us, especially if you have a low-cut top on camera. I'm quite a modest person so I don't usually wear that sort of thing so I don't experience a lot of the sexist comments that other women might."
Lately she's been live streaming herself cooking or doing artwork. If you've got the X factor people will watch anything.
It's a tad creepy watching Scott Dugdale-Wright at work. He's staring at the screen, absorbed in an online character of Fallout 4, a post-nuclear apocalyptic video game.
There's ominous music, gloom, a despairing figure hunched, dripping wet. He's named the man Ashford Cole. Where is his baby son, Sean? Who took him? Oh, the desperation, the emotion.
"Don't fire until I do," says Ash in a deep, gravely voice with an American accent. The voice is startling. Moments before, Dugdale-Wright has been cheerfully chatting in a neutral New Zealand accent, one of those nice radio voices. Now he's this other person.
"Stay ... calm ..." he growls as the character Ash, body tense, fingers busy on the keyboard and mouse. "There. There, there, MOVE!"
There are grimaces, grunts, then "On my count ... GO!" And later, "We're not alone ... there's more ..."
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Cripes. It's a hair-standing-up performance and it's what Dugdale-Wright does for a living. He turns video games into something more like a TV series by creating a story and bringing the characters to life by using a mixture of voices, accents, grunts, shouts and heavy breathing.
He controls the speed of the game and, using a virtual camera, what his subscribers can see on screen. It's mesmerising stuff; it's as though he's possessed. In reality, he's just concentrating.
Dugdale-Wright, 31, doesn't know what the character is going to do next, what the game is going to throw at him. He has to think on his feet as the action happens and inject emotion, lots of it.
He'll then spend hours editing and adding moody background music before uploading the video onto YouTube for his nearly 80,000 subscribers to watch on his channel Rycon Roleplays. He does this every day, all from the lounge of his Ellerslie flat.
To date, he's uploaded 1800 videos and he has no plans to stop. His income's not "luxurious" but it's certainly enough to live on. Like many gamers he has two streams of income: one that comes from a percentage of advertising from YouTube, and the other from his Patreon fan base who make a voluntary monthly donation to help fund what he does.
"What's great about that is it also allows creators to be really niche. You don't have to follow trends all the time."
Gaming for a living was never in the life plan. Dugdale-Wright studied post-production at South Seas Film School and worked as a freelance cameraman for 10 years. A gaming enthusiast, he started recording game roleplays and uploading them to YouTube. To his surprise he found his followers were increasing each day.
While his family aren't exactly sure what he does for a living, Dugdale-Wright's wife Charlotte is supportive, knowing that her husband is combining everything he loves – acting, storytelling, improvising, camera work and post-production. "She was the one who pushed me to try and turn it into a living. I love it."
Chasing dreams
North Shore gamer Jack Stevenson admits he was a bit of a "professional dream chaser" after leaving Takapuna Grammar. He did a barber's course, worked as a basketball coach but couldn't really settle. What the 21-year-old really loved was playing the video premiere basketball game NBA 2K.
Three years ago he started playing seriously when he realised that e-sports were taking off.
Spotted by NBA 2K gaming scouts as a top player, he was invited to Hong Kong in February for a tournament. From there he landed a gig in Detroit in April, earning $50,500 in three months playing for the Detroit Pistons GT (gaming team). His accommodation and health care were covered and whenever the Pistons played away, the NBA 2K team went too.
Now Stevenson is back in Auckland, practicing for next year's season. He won't have to go through the scouting process again but he still has to prove his worth. "Just like real basketball teams they have scouts, and managers and coaches. You have to put in the work for them."
Next month the new NBA 2K 20 game will be released and he'll be hard out practicing. To earn income during the off-season he'll live stream on Twitch and social media, and produce YouTube videos.
But while basketball is an Olympic sport, e-sports gamers can't expect to be invited there anytime soon. The online community had hoped that the organisers of 2024 Olympics in Paris might consider allowing e-sports as a demonstration sport.
But the obstacles are many. The level of violence in some video games, TV, publishing and licensing rights, and the uncontrollable online community who don't come under any single umbrella make the suggestion an e-nightmare.
Auckland Grammar School student Reagan Kelly is skipping a few days of school this week. Instead he's gaming in Vegas. The 18-year-old is competing in the massive fighting game tournament EVO in Las Vegas, playing Street Fighter V.
Winning EVO can be life changing, he says. "I think I have the potential to do very well overseas."
For Kelly, gaming is a means to an end. Raised by a solo dad, he plans to use his gaming money to pay his way through university and help out with household expenses.
"It's a good way to experience the world, especially when money is tight. It's a key to the outside."
From law to online poker
Among those earning a living online are Kiwis who are well educated with university degrees they intended to use for conventional careers.
Ben, who does not want to be identified, is a 26-year-old expat living in Europe. He plays online poker for a living, earning enough to live comfortably in a big city, travel, holiday frequently and save.
Private-school educated, he studied law and commerce in Auckland and lasted less than a year at a corporate law firm before leaving to take up poker.
Playing professionally was never the plan.
"It's very hard to consider something like that while working towards a degree for five years and having all your friends going down the same corporate path," he says.
Leaving the corporate world was an easy decision
Ben was analytical about his decision to swap life as a young lawyer to one as a poker player.
On the one hand, he reasoned, as a corporate intern he'd earn around $43,000 a year for 50-plus hours a week - about $18 an hour, a rate that would be slow to increase. He found the work boring with limited opportunities to increase skills and disliked a "backward boys' club culture".
By comparison, poker would allow him the potential to make a good living working a comparatively low number of hours in a more progressive culture, and flexibility with regard to hours and where he played. And why not live in Europe while he was at it?
He takes his profession seriously, subscribing to training websites run by some of the best players in the world. Earnings, he warns, can vary markedly depending on skill level and the amount of money wagered.
Most poker players will go broke
And there's the risk, he says. Most poker players will go broke at some stage. When that happens, the trick is to control your emotions.
"It's pretty hard losing money and still keeping calm but otherwise you start playing badly and losing money."
He's got no immediate plans to stop. He's aware that colleagues still working in the law firm have a steady income stream and a more direct path to a very high income. "But given it takes 10 years or more without much else in life to get there it didn't seem worth it for me. "
Charles Horrocks spent five years living in the south of Mexico in the small beach town of Playa Del Carmen, earning his living by online gambling. After completing a business degree in Auckland at 22 he was not ready to go into the workforce.
He was already covering expenses playing online poker when he and his brother heard about a community of players from all over the world living in Mexico.
"I thought 'I'm going to give this a shot and try and make the dream come true'. I thought 'if they can do it, why can't I?'"
He hired an American poker coach at US$150 (NZ$229) an hour and bought a plane ticket to Mexico. The plan was to go for six months but a lifestyle living in a penthouse two blocks from the beach, a swim in turquoise water every morning, plenty of travel and a three-day working week meant the Horrocks brothers stayed for five years.
For them online poker funded a lifestyle rather than a serious career. In the beginning, Horrocks says, he was a "fish", a losing player. But with tuition he became a "shark" once he started winning, with the help of $25,000 worth of coaching over the five and a half years he played poker.
The fulltime, serious players can make a lot of money, he says. "I have a lot of friends who are millionaires."
Now he's back in Auckland, wearing smart business clothes and seeing clients as business manager for Refresh MiniMarts, which provides fresh food in vending machines in the workplace.
Twitch streamer Lorien Gugich has also opted for a more regular job this year. As a solo mum her Twitch income dipped because she couldn't spend as much time live streaming. She tweeted that she was looking for a "community manager" position and almost immediately Wellington games studio A44 offered her a job.
Gugich will help market A44 games like Ashen, released last year, through social media and forums, engage players, monitor feedback and organise events at video-game conventions like E3 (The Electronic Entertainment Expo), held in Los Angeles every year.
She plans to move to Wellington, working out of A44's Petone studio and keep live streaming as loriipops at night.
Time to get a real job
So what do parents of gamers and gamblers think of their sons and daughters earning a living online? Reactions are mixed and many say their families aren't quite sure what they do for a living.
Ben says his family are tolerant of what he does.
"I came from a wealthy background and people with money tend to have less bias towards gambling but my poker friends from poorer backgrounds had more trouble with their parents as they wanted their children to have a steady income."
Reagan Kelly's father Mike couldn't be more proud of his son. "As a solo dad I used PlayStation as an incentive (for Kelly) to excel at school and in his everyday life. I've never missed any of his matches and I do my utmost to get him to as many competitions as possible."
But not all parents are so understanding.
Essex mum Lisa Ashman proudly posed for a photo with her 15-year-old son Jaden "Wolfiez" Ashman after he won $1.66 million at the Fortnite World Cup last month.
But she admitted in an interview that she had clashed angrily with Jaden over his Fortnite habit, throwing out his Xbox and snapping his headset because she wanted him to concentrate on schoolwork rather than spend eight hours at a time playing the game.
New Zealand team mates Chris Hunt, 18, and Sam Pearson, 23, were good enough to qualify as one of the top 50 Duo teams to compete in the Fortnite cup, earning an all-expenses-paid trip to New York as part of the Warriors e-sport team.
The Kiwi duo came last but they still came home with $76,000 each while teenage American gamer Kyle "Bugha" Giersdorf, won $4.5m.
Gugich says even though her parents don't fully understand what she does – although her dad still plays video games – they're very supportive.
"Even my grandparents are supportive. I'm very lucky because there are other streamers out there that do have difficulties with their families understanding and accepting what they do for a living," she says.
"It's a very technological world we live in now. It's a very millennial job, a new career that's for sure."
Pam Manning, a teacher at a low-decile West Auckland primary school, agrees. For that reason she wants to make sure that none of her students, some of whom don't have internet or screens at home, miss out.
Ask a kid these days what they want to be when they grow up and the answer's no longer an astronaut, Manning says.
"They're all obsessed with being YouTubers," Manning says. "Some of the children in my class have made their own YouTube channels."
Manning, who is in charge of the school's digital curriculum, integrates technology into mainstream subjects as much as possible. The children learn about live streaming, and making movies, documentaries and music videos for YouTube.
Writing a set of basic instructions turns into "coding," including instructing the school's Bee-bot floor robots to move.
Using a camera on the computer, the children "live stream" themselves playing maths games, introducing the game they are playing and explaining how it works.
"They pretend that they were a famous YouTuber. They love it."
