Dad pulls son out of high school to focus on gaming career

[everysingletime]

I'd be more worried about the kids playing 8+ hours of video games per day but NOT making money.

This.



If kid can earn 85k a month for the rest of his life playing video games he should never stop.

 

[smedroc]

This is the first thing I thought of too.

The world is changing rapidly, though. We're almost at the point where dating doesn't even involve in person interaction.

Waifu

 

[freakydestroyer]

This.



If kid can earn 85k a month for the rest of his life playing video games he should never stop.

I think people's main concern is that this WON'T last forever. But IMO he should ride this gravy train for however long he can. In a few years he will still be young and can go back to school if he chooses to.

 

[everysingletime]

I think people's main concern is that this WON'T last forever. But IMO he should ride this gravy train for however long he can. In a few years he will still be young and can go back to school if he chooses to.

It's not going to last forever. But that doesn't matter. Like you said he can go back to school if need be.

If he's smart with his money by the time he's done he might be able to live on that money alone for the rest of his life

 

[harlemtothebronx]

Waifu

Jesus Christ.

The Japanese be on some weird **** at first, then you realize they're just ahead of the rest of the world when that **** starts popping up everywhere else.

Incel gang.

 

[debso]

I think people's main concern is that this WON'T last forever. But IMO he should ride this gravy train for however long he can. In a few years he will still be young and can go back to school if he chooses to.

i think ppl are conditioned to believe stuff like that.
nothing lasts forever.
nobody's job in corporate america lasts forever.
why work to death and be micromanaged, have to answer to pawns with power that throw their weight around, etc.
when you can work for yourself or do something you actually love to do and make money from it?

we are conditioned to think that pouring obscene amounts of money that we had to borrow from banks to pay for high priced schools and then get mediocre jobs making barely livable wages while we pay said money back is the move and its not. its all a debt trap designed to keep us enslaved to the dollar so that we have to work to death.
na.

let that kid rock. i wish we had that opportunity back then when we poured our own money into creating our own teams and trying to travel, etc. coming up with websites and stuff.

 

[debso]

triforce got a lot of backlash for things that are commonplace now.
always thought he should be at the forefront of all this off of the strength of what he put into it.

 

[getback]

i think ppl are conditioned to believe stuff like that.
nothing lasts forever.
nobody's job in corporate america lasts forever.
why work to death and be micromanaged, have to answer to pawns with power that throw their weight around, etc.
when you can work for yourself or do something you actually love to do and make money from it?

we are conditioned to think that pouring obscene amounts of money that we had to borrow from banks to pay for high priced schools and then get mediocre jobs making barely livable wages while we pay said money back is the move and its not. its all a debt trap designed to keep us enslaved to the dollar so that we have to work to death.
na.

let that kid rock. i wish we had that opportunity back then when we poured our own money into creating our own teams and trying to travel, etc. coming up with websites and stuff.

Great points

If I got paid to do the things I loved doing as a kid I'm positive I'd be a lot happier than I am today.

Reminds me of that quote from the piece Pharrell did a few years back

Growing up, Williams had no interest in how the world was presented to him, as hard rules or lines. As long as he can remember, he’s wanted to blur them. The few times he had a boss, including a stint at McDonald’s when he was a teenager, “I got fired–every time. I had good managers, I was just lazy.” It wasn’t laziness so much as boredom, and his fuel is enthusiasm. Williams describes himself as a visual person, a kind of intelligence that isn’t celebrated in most schools. “The school system isn’t spending a lot of time looking for specific potential. We are bred to be worker bees; to grow up, get married, have a kid, drive a Volvo, do our taxes, invest in something, find a hobby,” says the man who did finally marry Helen Lasichanh–his girlfriend of five years and the mother of his son, Rocket–in October. “I spent a lot of time in school not paying attention.”

https://www.fastcompany.com/3021377/pharrell-get-busy

 

[aNYone]

You go to school to make money.

He’s making money already.

He’s doing it.

 

[everysingletime]

Yea to add to the nothing last forever bit.

Nba players retire around 35 or earlier.

I'm assuming NFL players even younger than that.

Gymnasts are done by their early 20s.

Presidency of the United States lasts 8 years max.

The really cool careers have a short shelf life.

The 9-5 middle class life is 25 to 30 yrs.

The choice is easy. Anytime you can make an obscene amount of money doing something fun you do it.

 

[DCAllAfrican]

I'd be more worried about the kids playing 8+ hours of video games per day but NOT making money. Those are the ones more apt to come unhinged

At least the dudes getting paid like this kid will attract yambs by default and figure out stupid ways to to spend money and kill time.

Man I thought WE were delusional when we thought we were going to make the NBA/NFL man I hear some middle schoolers tell me how they WILL make as Pro Gamers/Streamers. These dudes have less than 50 Youtube followers but they tell me they will drop out and become gamers.

It is funny.

 

[blastercombo]

I think people's main concern is that this WON'T last forever. But IMO he should ride this gravy train for however long he can. In a few years he will still be young and can go back to school if he chooses to.

True and it’s an outdated frame of thinking. What job is forever now? Who has worked a single job until retirement? That’s the 1960’s frame of mind that has zero relevance today. Same timeframe that a summer job bought a car cash and your entire career can be found in the wanted ads of a newspaper

 

[goledensilence]

Love reading articles like this. I'm a gamer myself so I spend a lot of time watching/supporting guys like him on both YouTube & Twitch when I get the chance.
The thing with this situation is that you have to put in a lot of months maybe years to first build up your fanbase. I've been following a few gamers on Twitch for years and they still barely crack 20 viewers during their live streams. Without that fan base none of this stuff happens.

Once you get that fan base, the world is yours. Now you have hundreds/thousands of people that will not only watch you on a consistent basis, but they will also subscribe to you for $5 a month. Mix that in with the money you get from randomly running ads during your stream, the merch they can purchase from you, the random donations they will send in & the sponsorships from all the random companies. Hell guys like him wont even have to enter into these random tournaments unless they just want the extra cash & exposure.

 

[hand2handking]

Meet Ace Watkins, The First ‘Gamer Candidate’

Twitter.com/GamerPres2020

https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/meet-ace-watkins-the-first-gamer-candidate/

He already has thousands of followers on Twitter.

There is yet another candidate entering the 2020 race, but this one is actually trying to be a joke.



Earlier this week, a Twitter account for “Ace Watkins,” a young man claiming he aspires to be “the first gamer president,” surfaced with the handle @GamePres2020. Within hours, Watkins had over 2,000 followers, and after several days, his follower count was over 40,000. This fake candidate actually has more followers than some actual presidential candidates.



Of course, Watkins is a joke, a parodic character played by actor Phil Jamesson and created by the editors of video game humor site Hard Drive (a part of the Hard Times): Jeremy Kaplowitz, M.J. Amory, Kevin Flynn, Andy Holt, andMatt Saincome. The joke of a gamer president feels particularly resonant right now, with so many candidates vying for the Democratic nomination in this incredibly strange political moment.

The Daily Dot spoke with the team behind Ace about the character and the intersection of politics and gaming. They agree that the time feels right for a character like Ace. Holt says they created Ace after an earlier bit about a defense contractor getting into gaming showed them “how much people liked satire that mixes gaming and politics.”

Amory adds that he thinks Ace works because “we managed to find space between doing a political satire joke that has nothing to do with Donald Trump but also could only exist in a timeline where Trump is president.”

The first round of Democratic debates featured a number of white male candidates who made claims about identity that are as ridiculous as Ace’s claim that “our political system has treated gamers as an afterthought. Washington has ignored the unique skills of gamer Americans. That ends now.”

Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) and Mayor Pete Buttigieg have tried to lay claim to a youth vote although neither of them necessarily appeal to young voters. Swalwell spent much of the first Democratic debate arguing that it was time to “pass the torch” before dropping out this week, while candidate Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) has claimed he wants to win the “yoga vote.”



Ace has striking similarities to a number of candidates in the race, but he most resembles Andrew Yang. Yang, a 44-year-old Silicon Valley entrepreneur, has launched a presidential campaign that combines elements of libertarianism and liberalism into a strange platform that feels tailor-made for your stereotypical gamer.



Ace’s claims that he will “legalize video games” and institute UBV (Universal Basic V-bucks) sound similar to Yang’s actual platform. Although he is best known for his support of universal basic income (UBI), some of Yang’s proposals, like “data as a property right,” “empowering MMA fighters,” “quantum computing and encryption standards,” and the “American Mall Act,” feel just as gamer-friendly as Ace’s.

For their part, the Hard Drive team rejects any specific comparison to an existing presidential candidate. Flynn says, “I don’t think of Ace as a parody of any presidential candidate. He rarely mentions his opponents or compares himself to them, and with good reason. He’s out of their league.” Jamesson is careful to make the distinction that Yang is more of a “memer” than a gamer.

Ace’s humor goes beyond any particular candidate, and he takes aim at the perceived politics of gamers as a whole. There is a long-simmering political culture among gamers and Silicon Valley that has taken shape in recent years. A particular style of cynical male libertarianism is associated with gamers. There’s Yang, and further to his right you have Gawker-slayer and Palantir (named, of course, after a Lord of the Rings reference) founder Peter Thiel and right-wing gadfly Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray)—just to name two apostles of this ideology. Gamergate, the incel movement, and “heated gaming moments” are all incarnations of this ideology.

The Hard Drive editors reject this association and argue that this right-wing ideology is more of a fringe element than indicative of gaming writ large. Flynn says, “I feel like these are the dominant mental associations with gaming because there’s so much overlap between these problematic groups and gaming as a hobby, but it’s much bigger than that, and a more holistic perception of the community of people who are fans of video games as a whole outside of those bad elements is still forming.”

Holt believes Ace can be part of changing the conversation. “I think it’s less that video games have impacted politics, and more that games became an effective way for a really troubling political faction to get attention,” he says. “You’re seeing a lot of pushback against that recently, and I like to think Hard Drive and Ace can be a small part of that.”

Amory adds, “I think, like any medium, gaming is an empty vessel that allows for any politics to be attached to it. It just so happened that the alt-right/libertarian partisans got there first but there is no reason why it has to be exclusive to them.”

To their point, Twitch has seen a sharp rise in left-wing politics recently, as socialist and progressives have started to compete for the ideological loyalty of young disaffected gamers. The Young Turks’ Hasan Piker has over 100,000 followers on Twitch. Popular leftist podcasts Chapo Trap House and Struggle Session have launched streams. Even Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has a stream.



The Hard Drive team is careful to say they “believe in being funny first,” but they do describe themselves as “left-leaning.” In their view, the right-wing, libertarian, bigoted image that gamers have gotten in the public imagination is something worth fighting back against. Holt says, “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a wide-open place like Twitch would be the place where a leftist gaming culture would take off—we have the numbers, just needed the right platform.”

They believe that the way to fight this toxic ideology is through comedy. Kaplowitz adds that, “Twitch is a ridiculously large untapped market for comedy … once comedians realize there is such a big, ravenous audience available to them on Twitch and it’s a platform built to make it easy for fans to give you money … everyone’s gonna be on there. So that’s why I think Chapo and Struggle Session andDough Boys and Hard Drive are all running to Twitch.”

A few years ago, @GamerPres2020 might have been considered merely a good bit. But with the increased politicization and polarization of gaming and the dizzying absurdity of modern politics, Ace feels closer to reality than we might be comfortable with. And as the Hard Drive editors point out, it is easy than ever, and perhaps more important than ever, to make jokes about the politics of gamers.

On July 9, Ace joked that “a gamer president is inevitable.”

https://twitter.com/GamerPres2020/s...k/meet-ace-watkins-the-first-gamer-candidate/

He’s probably right.

 

[6pac]

the interesting problem on the horizon...technology and capitalism lapping the purpose for actual education....why go to school when u can do something online and become an influencer before you're 18.

 

[laserbeak]

16-year-old kid just won a cool $3 million.

[tweet ]

 

[shorty doo wop]

Seen this thread get bumped and knew it would be about this props to homie.

Alot if kids gon end up like every young boy that dreams of going to the NBA but really doesn't have a shot.

 

[Master Zik]

Another thing about this, @ the dad pulled the son out of HS. Its high school, kid coulda dropped out once eligible.

 

[Canadian Destroyer]

Smart move on the dad. School aint doing nothing for no one these days. I’m telling kids straight up either game or learn a trade.

 

[DCAllAfrican]

You go to school to make money.

He’s making money already.

He’s doing it.

Funny, Kwame Brown was the first person that I ever heard say this when he was asked why he won't attend University of Florida.

 

[DCAllAfrican]

the interesting problem on the horizon...technology and capitalism lapping the purpose for actual education....why go to school when u can do something online and become an influencer before you're 18.

Why does this have to be considered a problem?

 

[water]

3 million

 

[joe billionaire]

Funny, Kwame Brown was the first person that I ever heard say this when he was asked why he won't attend University of Florida.

Google says he made 58 million being trash

Why go to school

 

[DCAllAfrican]

Google says he made 58 million being trash

Why go to school

I mean this was said before the actual Draft.

 

[6pac]

Why does this have to be considered a problem?

It ain’t really one for “us” but lol if u think “they” just finna let the whole institution of education in America quietly go away because technology/Google (information) and content creation (income) made it obsolete damn near.