After watching Fraize play and stream Minecraft on his Twitch channel, I decided to give it a go myself. So on May 17, I quietly hit start on my first stream.

On Twitch, I’m broadcasting under the user girlnovember. The link there takes you to my Twitch profile page. The first stream on Sunday was definitely rough. I’d been relying on my laptop microphone to pick up audio, and it was quickly evident that it wasn’t up to the task. One of my viewers in Norway hung with me while I swapped out various microphones — the mic on my external Logitech camera, and my singing mic that I dug out of a box upstairs with my TASCAM (neither of which fixed the issues), and I resorted to borrowing Fraize’s mic, which made all of the difference.

Once the audio issue was solved, it was onto a short stint at game play. While I’m not new to Minecraft, I’m definitely new to people watching me derp around a new instance of the game. I’m currently running Resonant Rise on the ATLauncher, and it was weird having people watch me stumble about in-game while I got acclimated with speaking and playing and keeping up with a chat window. It’s a little more involved than one thinks it is. Coming up with commentary is also a little tougher than I expected. I worried that I’d be freaked out talking on camera, but once I started I found it wasn’t all that different from being on video conferences at work, and I’ve done that too many times to count. The biggest challenge was how to react to someone coming by to ask me about body parts and if I’d show them. The ooog factor spikes exponentially when that occurs. There’s also the odd request to Skype – why would I just hop on Skype with a random stranger? I’m still working on how to tactfully respond in these instances.

The above is an image from just before launching my 2nd stream on Mon, May 18. It wasn’t a bad stream, but I realized early enough in that I hadn’t really thought ahead to what I was going to do in-game while streaming. So I’ve added a task of creating a list of activities prior to streaming, so I’m not standing around in-game trying to figure out what to do next.

Through streaming, and also visiting and chatting other Twitch channels, I’ve met a few folks that have made this streaming experiment fun. I’ve chatted with a guy in Norway (the same on that helped with the audio issues), and a couple of folks from Indiana and Florida here in the US, and they’ve been kind enough to up the viewership when I’m live, including one of them hosting my channel for a bit. Networking goes a long way with making acquaintances and bringing in new viewers, even though I’ve only got 8 people currently following me. I don’t know if I’ll do the streaming thing regularly. I find after approximately two hours, I’m dragging a bit and having a difficult time keeping up with chat while playing the game. I’m trying to stream at times different from Fraize’s schedule, so that we aren’t competing. If Fraize and I set up a server, I wouldn’t mind playing so that our shared viewers can run both our channels and see us playing in the same online world. We’re also talking about finding a way for online folks to come play on the server with us, which I think could be fun for us and let us better interact with some of our viewers.

During one of the streams this week, an overnight event delivered a comet kitties invasion, in which tiny cats with space helmets impact the ocean and swim about until they find land. This little guy ended up on Girlnovember Island.

I’m hoping to do some screen grabs of my game environment in the next couple of days, so I can keep a small record of how the world evolves over time. All of this is a big experiment for me. I’m enjoying it so far. It’s different and exciting enough to keep me interested, and I’m hopeful the few viewers I have are enjoying it as well.