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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

This 'Gamer Grandma' Has More Than 900,000 'Grandkids':

Shirley Curry, 84, has cultivated a following on YouTube with her charming videos of journeys through The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

[...] Shirley Curry has clocked thousands of hours of gameplay since the 1990s. She's been a gamer longer than many of today's top competitors have been alive. Still, when people rave about her charming walk-throughs of the blockbuster role-playing game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, she feels their praise is out of place.

[...] She joined YouTube in 2011 to watch some of her favorite gaming channels and uploaded her first Skyrim video in 2015. That clip, in which she does battle with a giant spider, hit 2.1 million views. "Petition for Grandma Shirley to be classified as a national treasure," one of the top comments reads.

Now, Ms. Curry is a fixture in the global gamer-influencer world. Alongside her hundreds of thousands of YouTube subscribers, she has 75,000 followers on Twitter and an additional 7,000 on Instagram. Bethesda, the studio behind the Elder Scrolls franchise, has promised to include her as a character in the forthcoming sequel to Skyrim.

"Everyone at the studio knows who she is. I wanted to do it right. That meant not only capturing her likeness, but also her skin detail and facial expressions," said Rick Vicens, a senior artist at Bethesda. "When we spoke about the process and what it would take, Shirley was completely on board. I'm excited for everyone, and most importantly Shirley, to see the final result."

[...] Ms. Curry said she makes decent money from her YouTube channel, enough at least that she can afford to travel on the gamer convention circuit, where she has met some of her die-hard fans. Those tours have been sidelined during the pandemic, but Ms. Curry said that her daily routines haven't changed much in 2020. ("I get my coffee, I sit down at my computer, turn both my screens on, and go through my emails, comments and Twitter," she said.)

Original Submission