Rebranding
New followers might not notice, but I changed the name of my blog, Twitch, and Twitter recently. Friends, family, and old followers keep asking about it, and because I’m chronicling my journey as a gamer and content creator anyway, this is the best place to respond. I like to call it a rebranding.
The need for online identities keeps growing, and I have accumulated many different usernames in the past twenty years or so. This is the third time I’ve changed my Xbox Live “Gamertag,” and it was always different than my PlayStation ID, which is different than my Steam username, different than my World of Warcraft ID, and so on. When I created an Amazon account years ago, I don’t think that it occurred to me that someday I would use that name as a Twitch channel or online identity. One of the problems with having so many different usernames is that I find it hard to identify with any of them.
Similarly, I thought of my blog as a place to discuss all the different games, movies, and shows I was consuming on “My View Screen,” and not part of my online identity. However, a key component was sometimes missing from those “discussions” on my blog – my personality. My attempts to infuse more personality into my blog coincided with my contemplations of various online identities, so I began merging those efforts.
DavPoint: It’s best to keep it simple – and use the same “brand” across gaming channels, websites, and social media!
With so many different identities to choose from, I deferred to my Twitch channel name…which arguably didn’t really mean anything. Plus, that didn’t solve the problem of my blog not demonstrating my personality or sharing my online identity. I mulled over several alternatives, but I was stuck thinking that a website describes a destination and its name rarely sounds like a person, and a (user)name describes a person and rarely sounds like a destination.
Believe it or not, that “stuck” thinking led to my new name and branding. (That, and the fortune of playing a lot of games like Mass Effect lately!) I thought of games that constantly refer to mission objectives as navigation or “Nav Points” to reach or complete, and I had my inspiration: followers can come to my website, a destination point, and get tips and points from me, their navigator. Since people are coming to the point, and getting points from me, I AM the point. The site and online identity is the same: DavPoint!
I already came up with the catchphrase: Get to the DavPoint!
My View Screen 
” I AM the point.”
Exactly!
🙂