Today we’re joined by Skacle, our first guest of a multi-part series to look at how Covid-19 and quarantine are impacting different professions. Skacle is a one-two punch for us, both a professional game streamer and a real-life elementary school teacher. He takes a significant amount of care to ensure these two professions don’t collide, so we’re keeping his identity a secret and sticking to his screen name and avatar.
Our conversation begins centered around teaching, specifically how having the schools closed has directly impacted his day to day life. While Skacle says his routine didn’t change much, he did notice one thing.
“I find myself being “active” online to respond to emails throughout the whole day.”
I had a university professor that described this as the “tragedy of the urgent.” The short version of which is the feeling you need to answer someone who calls, texts, or e-mails, even if it disrupts what you are currently focused on. The hard to follow advice is simple: Don’t answer. That said, Skacle doesn’t appear to mind, from our experience he genuinely loves both of his jobs. For anyone who may not have his sunny disposition, just remember you can always return a call, e-mail, or text later.
On the student’s front, Skacle is even more positive, clearly indicating that the experience they are gaining now will benefit them far into the future. “They’re learning to work more independently without the safety net of an educator being able to answer the question immediately,” and he continued to list a wide variety of skills that his students are being forced to learn. In the end concluding that he doesn’t believe things will return exactly to where they were before. While he isn’t willing to go on record and make any predictions, he made it clear that he expects there to be lasting change.
As a full-time streamer as well as an educator, Skacle also has a lot of insight with what is going on with Twitch, which is seeing record setting traffic numbers lately. He says,
“I think the streamers benefiting the most in the current Twitch climate are the streamers on the top of the directory. There is very little trickle down viewership happening right now.”
However, his channel is also seeing record highs, so we want to reconcile these two facts and start drilling him on his secrets.
Source: Sullygnome.com
The first, and obvious, part of the formula for success is that because he is at home more, he’s been able to stream more. More streams equals more traffic, who knew! But the secret part of the formula is that he’s spending more time working with other streamers and businesses to help drive viewership. So while the big players are picking up the natural inflow of traffic, the quarantine is giving him the hours needed to stream more often and find more partners to help drive traffic from outside the system. Pretty brilliant really.
Finally we move on to life outside of school and games. He immediately starts talking about seeing more people out walking as a family and speaks at length about the importance this has in bringing families together that would normally not be able to due to work/life conflict. He summarized it,
“This can be seen as a reset button and the way we view society could have fundamental changes in the future.”
We here at Antlion hope this potential fundamental change is for the better, but in the meantime believe wholeheartedly in taking the time to have a walk with your family, friends, dogs, or whatever you have. Slow down and enjoy, quarantine won’t last forever, so make the most of it!
Thanks again to teacher, streamer, and professional potato Skacle! Check him out at https://www.twitch.tv/skacle
See part 2 of our series here: https://antlionaudio.com/blogs/news/a-complexity-quarantine-cowboy