On The Next Gamer set with dibbsGG

Last Tuesday, I was fortunate enough to be brought on as a guest host for the Twitch and YouTube League of Legends-based reality show, The Next Gamer. The premise of the show is one that isn’t unfamiliar to fans of the reality TV show format, but the one thing that makes this series stand out is that this show is the first of its kind in our region Australia.
Up for grabs is $10,000 and a contract with the current #1 OPL (Oceanic Pro League) team the LG Direwolves. The opportunity to not only gain a lucrative contract with an established eSports organisation but gain exposure to catapult yourself into potential multiple career pathways in the industry.
The call to action was put out by Intel to all the potential candidates. Out of that initial group, only 10 were chosen based on the role that they play in game, and furthermore they were broken down into 2 groups of 5 that squared off against each other nightly in League of Legends and each day they have to compete in various challenges with the winner, accruing points that go towards a total that will determine the overall winner of the series.
Attending the location of where the show is shot and seeing the production behind the scenes was an eye opening experience into the parallels of having a streaming setup at home. I got to meet the talented host Jessie “geekandgamergirl” James as well as the cast and crew that make the show run smoothly and effortlessly.

Our challenge for that night was to throw the contestants into the deep end and have them stream on The Next Gamer’s Twitch channel to the audience that has tuned in nightly for the show, see how well they fared, and pick a winner. Usually, it would take a streamer months (or possibly years) to amass an audience such as one that was watching the show, but it’s great exposure for them to be able to interact directly with Twitch chat and show a side of themselves that may not have been uncovered by merely being a contestant.
After introducing the show, announcing the challenge for the night and setting up the space for the guys, Jessie and I ducked into a side room and observed the contestants’ ability to interact with positive, negative and inquisitive chat comments while playing a game of ARAM in League of Legends. The results were surprising and a lot better than expected, with each contestant being able to keep up with chat and show more personality than what we have previously seen from them on the show up until this point.
During the show, some of the production guys jumped into chat and we attempted to throw the contestants off their game by asking unorthodox questions. We also teed up a Bluetooth speaker to play various noises behind them in an effort to see how well they handled jarring events occurring while they were conducting themselves on screen.

Once all of the contestants had sat in front of the stream and tried their hand at entertaining chat, Jessie and I had the hard job to determine who would be chosen as the winner of this challenge.
Out of the 5 guys, the 3 main standouts were Get Back71, Huey Dewey Louie, and FrA. Out of the top 3 that we identified, FrA showed the ability to both interact and smoothly transition between commentating what was happening on screen and interacting with what was being asked and said in chat.
What we saw from the guys, is that they are capable of holding their own when it came to conducting themselves on stream. Make sure you keep an eye out for them beyond the show: this is just a taste of what is to come.
A massive thank you goes out to the crew at Intel Australia, gotogame.temp927.kinsta.cloud, and all of the staff on The Next Gamer for the opportunity to be apart of an exciting production.
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Check out dibbsGG on Twitter and Twitch.