Have you ever wanted to expand your gaming influence? Have you ever wondered how to apply your gaming interests and abilities in other ways? I want to highlight a person doing just that.
Enter the Beauty of Technology
On YouTube, you can find a user by the name “markiplierGAME,” or Mark Fischbach offline. Most of his videos consist of “Let’s Play” content where he plays through typically indie horror games as well as the occasional AAA title. What makes him worth watching is his consistency in creating new videos and the weird amusement you may get from his screams of terror—when they’re good, they are good. Also, if you may not be able to play certain games for want of a particular console or they happen to be out of your price range, you can experience the games vicariously through him.
To give you a little background on him, he’s an Ohio University student majoring in biomedical engineering. He began his YouTube channel in May of 2012 and has since earned almost 340,000 subscribers with his deep resonant voice and his desire to do good through his hobby.
With his passion for gaming, Mark has been using live streams to raise money and awareness for various foundations dedicated to Alzheimer’s and cancer research. People donate money as he plays through requested games in his 24-hour monthly live streams. So far he and his community have raised about $50,000!
You may have also heard of PewDiePie, the Let’s Player from Sweden who was the first big YouTube gamer to start the charity trend–who has a huge subscriber base (almost 7,400,000!). Granted, he’s been around longer and he’s earned quite a bit more for charity in that time, which is great. However, I stumbled upon Markiplier before PewDiePie and find his style more to my liking, but I think both have a lot to offer the gaming community as well as the other Let’s Players starting up on YouTube.
My point I want to share is that gamers can be innovative because of all the creativity they soak up daily just through something they interact with and enjoy. We all can’t be superstar professional Starcraft or League of Legends players sadly… Yet whether you want to create your own game, share your game experience in real-time via YouTube, game for charity, make extended movies on your favorite game story, etc., it’s perfectly plausible if you want to take your diversion past just playing for fun. If you don’t have that desire, that’s cool too, but for those who wish gaming could be applicable to other things in life, you just have to sit down with your goals and assess what you can do, then try and make it happen.
Out of all the series Markiplier has played through, I really enjoyed the Amnesia custom story The Great Work the most. Seeing him play these games may inspire you to check them out for yourself or you can potentially use them as a walkthrough if you get stuck along the way. View them as you see fit!
You can check out Markiplier’s YouTube page here and PewDiePie’s here to see what they do.
Published: May 3, 2013 07:56 pm