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Online video games and livestreaming are inreasingly popular in France particularly amongst youngsters. RFI met Manon Vincent, aka Minstery, a 22-year-old French student in video games production who (also) live streams on the platform Twitch as a hobby.
(This interview is a transcription of the original interview kept as it was recorded for authenticity)
Twitch is a video live streaming platform created in 2011 in San Francisco, acquired by Amazon in 2014, focusing on video games but also on music broadcasts and creative contents.
As of May 2018, Twitch had 2.2 million broadcasters monthly and 15 million daily active users.
Q: What do you do on Twitch?
Manon Vincent: On Twitch I mostly play music so I have a list of songs and people just choose one. In this list they ask me a song and I play it for them. Yesterday I tried a song I had never played. It was a mess but it was cool.
On the palatfrom, people can watch you and can interact in the chat. You can answer to them.
Q: How many followers do you have and do you know how many people watch your live streaming?
I have more than eight thousand followers. I think I have like almost 40 subscribers. So people pay every month just to have special contents such as emotes, special emotes in the chat and little emotes next to their names.
And for the average sessions it’s between 20 and 70. My stream lasts between one hour and two hours and a half.
But most of my friends who would do streaming as a job they can stream like seven hours straight.
I also once a week play video games, mostly Ghost Recon Breakpoint.
My life is a mash up between video games and music. That’s all the foundation of everything I do right now.
When I stream my parents watch the stream, they are also at two hours from me, my sister is at 700 kilometres and she watches my stream.
For me Twitch it’s a way to connect people. I’ve met my best friends through video games and thanks to Twitch.
Q: Do you receive good or bad comments?
Both happen especially when you’re a girl.
But I mostly have good comments and I think it’s because I’m doing creative and I’m not doing video games.
When you’re playing video games, people will come to you and say: “I would have not done that not this… you’re bad.”
But when you play music, people are more like: “Now I’m relax thank you, you made me discover songs.”
One day, there was a girl and she wanted to play a song … it was a really important song to her because it was a song that her mother played for her before she died.
It’s a way to learn a lot of things. It helped me having more self-confidence. I’m not the same person as I was when I started streaming, totally not.
Q: Can you explain why?
So, I had a lot of lack of confidence and I still have some.
It was difficult to go on camera and speak when no one is watching because when you start streaming there is actually no one.
And after that when you stream, people are just judging what you’re doing and you think maybe I won’t do that because I don’t want to have bad comments about me.
I put on my camera and it’s like I’m the real me.
After that I have to speak I have to entertain people and as I play music, people tell me that they like my music and so it gives me more confidence.
And now I can write songs and I can do concerts more easily than before.
