Streaming, Esports & League of Legends
I made my League of Legends account in 2013, when I was a middle schooler. In high school, League was nearly the only game I played, and I hoped to work for Riot Games. I stayed up to date on news and watched a fair amount of LoL content. In 2018, I got to watch the League Championship Series live in LA, which was a thrilling dream come true (I even met Rick Fox!). And while I’d already begun to aspire to be a streamer, later that year, my favorite streamer unexpectedly snuck me into TwitchCon 2018 in San Jose, where I was visiting for Stanford’s family weekend. I knew I had to make it happen.
I was a silver-ranked League player, so I knew I had a really low chance of making it as a streamer, but I was beyond determined. And I did pretty well for myself! I had the outgoing personality and graphic design skill to make a brand (Turret God), and I put in the work to stream every day for a year, welcomed and chatted with viewers, and fostered a wholesome community. I even held several viewer 1v1 tournaments. I accumulated 917 followers (600 concurrent), with a peak of 250 members in our community Discord server. And while I only averaged a handful of viewers, it added up to 385,000 minutes of watchtime over the 1200 hours I streamed.
The whole time I was a streamer, I was also a successful high school student: I maintained high grades, led my school’s first after-school/lunchtime gaming club, volunteered for 400 service hours while holding roles in a volunteering organization structured like an organization board, learned coding extracurricularly, coded personal game projects, managed my community server and hung out with my friends. Still, the reason I stopped streaming was to focus on college, after it proved too difficult to maintain both (and my roommate didn’t like noise).
That didn’t mean my love for the content creation world had faded. In just my first semester I took a streaming elective featuring established speakers from across the industry (taught by Gordon Bellamy), joined my school’s content creation club SC Live, shoutcasted intercollegiate LoL esports, appeared on a streamed Thanksgaming diversity panel, and rebranded to Blade Princess. Over the next three years I took Gordon’s streaming industry class again and attended every SC Live function I could. Among others, I met Team Liquid staff and Basiilleafs and even got to tour the 100 Thieves compound and converse with a panel. It is incredibly clear to me that I will thrive in the LA content creation and esports scene.
Personally, I have always deeply desired to be a streamer again, for the community, role, collaboration and overall experience rather than for a source of income. For what it's worth, these days in League I'm Platinum, over level 800, and am always up to date on developments. LoLesports.com reports 202 games watched over 180 hours. And I've also spent a couple hundred hours playing Valorant.
Professionally, I’d love to work in the esports and/or content creation scene. One good way this could look like is finding ways to meet needs of multiple parties, in projects such as planned features for Twitch and its viewers, brand-sponsored shoots for Offline TV or partner programs between games and creators. I'd just as much like to help LCS orgs host promotional tournaments or produce other guerrilla marketing. I have a broad range of skills and would be interested in a variety of roles.