Many streamers are accustomed to going live for lengthy gaming sessions as part of their typical routine. For Gina, better known online as Z2_Conjurer, the challenge recently became considerably bigger: a full 24-hour streaming marathon, raising money for Gaming the Mind.

The fundraiser marked Gina’s first anniversary as a streamer and was intended as a celebration of the community she had built around her channel.

For Gina, gaming, streaming and mental health are closely connected. She began streaming after her mental health prevented her from finding work, and she sought a way to combat loneliness during the day. A year later, streaming has given her a community of hundreds of people, many of whom she now considers close friends.

“I still love it,” Gina says. “The community we’ve built has been such a good rally that you can’t help but want to keep going.”

Gina has been a gamer since childhood, with Kingdom Hearts among her earliest influences. Today, her channel is primarily focused on Final Fantasy XIV, with occasional variety content.

The community Gina has built through streaming has become one of the most important parts of the experience.

“They are some of the most supportive, loving people I’ve ever met,” she says. “Some of them have very quickly become lifetime friends that I never would’ve met if it wasn’t for this.”

Why a 24-hour stream?

The idea of the marathon came partly from wanting everyone in Gina’s international community to be able to participate. Her audience includes viewers from the UK, Germany, New Zealand and the United States.

“24 hours is just good,” she says. “They can come and go, they can go to sleep, wake up, come back — I’m still here.”

There was another reason for choosing 24 hours: it was a challenge.

Before the fundraiser, Gina’s longest stream had been around 16 hours, during a Christmas sub-a-thon event. That experience had left her exhausted, so she wasn’t entirely certain that she could manage another eight hours on top.

“I was like, I don’t know if I’ve got it in me anymore. I’m not a spring chicken anymore!” she jokes. “So it was a bit of an endurance thing as well.”

The fundraiser was also a learning experience. It was Gina’s first charity stream, and she was learning how to organise an event of that scale while doing it. That included choosing Gaming the Mind as the beneficiary. Having personally used the charity’s Reset Room at fan conventions, Gina felt an immediate connection with its work.

“I used those spaces so many times,” she says. “They have been such a saving grace for me when I’ve gone to conventions.”

Large public spaces can be overwhelming for Gina, particularly due to her mental health. She was diagnosed in 2017 and experiences auditory hallucinations, hearing voices that are not her own. Gaming the Mind’s Reset Room gave her somewhere to step away from the noise and intensity of conventions.

“Just having those few minutes to stop, not feel so overwhelmed — because big public spaces like that can be quite triggering for me. Multiple voices, multiple people, you know, it’s a lot.”

For Gina, Gaming the Mind’s work also reflects a broader connection between gaming and mental health. Having studied games design at university, she believes conversations about mental health should be more prominent within education and the games industry.

She points to games that include internal voices or other potentially difficult audio experiences as an example of how video games could be made more accessible for players who may experience difficulty with such content.

“A lot of people don’t quite realise that a lot of people in our position who struggle with their mental health do look at gaming as a sort of saviour, a safe haven,” she says. “So that’s why it’s so important that these things go hand in hand.”

Preparing for 24 hours online

Gina’s approach to the marathon was deliberately flexible, so she could change direction if she or her audience stopped enjoying what they were doing.

“I tried to not make a schedule because it feels really forced,” she explains. “ You do just go with the mood of what’s flowing.” She prepared backup options so she could adapt to the mood: Final Fantasy XIV would be the main event, but a Minecraft server was ready in case she wanted to switch games.

The principle was simple: keep the event enjoyable.

“If I’m having a good time, they’re having a good time and we’re all having a good time,” Gina says. “And that’s all that matters for us.”

She also made preparations for the less glamorous side of marathon streaming.

“We planned in advance in terms of food and comfort,” Gina says. “I made sure I had snacks. I made sure to set timer reminders on my phone to just stand up and stretch my legs so I wasn’t sitting down for too long.”

There was, however, one element she hadn’t planned for: the weather.

“I did not plan for the comfort of that maid dress very well,” she admits. “It had like three layers to itself… So I’m just sat here like, ‘See what you guys have done to me!?’”

With her computer also generating heat, temperatures in the room reached around 30°C. Gina resorted to three fans positioned around her desk.

Her conclusion for marathon streams? “”Winter activity! Do not do it in the summer!”

What happens when the hours add up?

Gina began the marathon at 9am, meaning that the final hours coincided with the time she would normally have been asleep.

Initially, energy levels were high. She expected tiredness to arrive somewhere around the 18- or 19-hour mark, but the steady arrival of familiar viewers helped keep her going.

“The community would pop in at random times, so you’d get like a new wave of ‘Oh hey’, because you’d see someone you’d recognise,” she says. “That definitely helped keep me going.”

The final three hours were considerably harder.

“That’s when I really started to struggle,” Gina recalls. “That was the time I could feel my head going. My eyes were getting heavy.”

Her viewers could even tell she was becoming tired from her speech. Gina jokes that her British slang becomes increasingly prominent when she’s exhausted, with “oh no, bro” and “ah, nah, man” making increasingly frequent appearances.

Eventually, at around 9am, the marathon was over.

“I don’t think I’ve hit the bed so hard in my entire life,” she says.

Unlike the marathon itself, Gina normally keeps her streaming schedule relatively structured. She describes herself as a “day streamer”, usually going live around 11am and finishing around 5pm — roughly the length of a normal working day.

That boundary is important. Her partner works full-time, and Gina deliberately uses her streaming hours to occupy the time when he is at work. When he gets home, the stream ends and she can switch back to spending time with him.

“It’s nice that we have those [boundaries],” she says. “When he comes back, it’s like, I can go spend time with my partner and just talk about our days.”

Looking after your mental health on stream

For Gina, conversations about mental health are a natural part of her streams. Indeed “MentalIllnessAwareness” is one of the tags on her Twitch streams.

“We’re very, very open on our streams when it comes to our mental health,” she says. “If I’m having a bad day, if, for example, my voices are particularly bad, I will just be honest with them and we will just talk about it.”

Sometimes the gaming stops altogether. Gina and her community will simply pause and talk about how everyone is doing. Because she sees many of the same people almost every day, she says they have become a kind of support system for one another.

“We start to notice when we’re all starting to hit a bit of a dip. So it’s nice to kind of just go, ‘Okay, let’s stop for a minute. Let’s not put on a mask, let’s not put on a performance. Let’s have a real talk here. How are we all actually doing right now?’”

Gina is careful to distinguish personal experience from professional advice.

“This is just how I’m personally struggling with it, how I’m personally dealing with it,” she says. “It can be different for everyone.”

For her, however, the ability to exchange experiences can be valuable. Someone else might be struggling with something similar and find an idea worth trying.

Having such an open community was helpful during the marathon. As Gina became increasingly tired towards the end, she says that the voices she hears became harder to tolerate.

“Once I started to lose my energy, obviously those walls do start to calm down.”

But her community understood when she needed to step away from the camera, or simply take a moment.

“Having such a good support system really got me through those last few hours.”

What happens after the stream?

Once the marathon ended Gina went to bed almost immediately and slept for around four hours. She was able to recover, although she describes the sleep afterwards as somewhat rocky. Then she replenished on water.

“With the heat as well, with how much I was sweating, I was so dehydrated.”

After 24 hours of constant activity and interaction, she valued simply having nothing she needed to do.

“It was nice to just go, ‘Okay, no one needs me. I just need to sit here and just exist for a minute.’”

Lessons learned

For Gina, seeing her community rally around the fundraiser was one of the highlights of the entire experience.

“I never expected to reach what we did,” she says. “I was incredibly proud of everyone — and not just of me, but the community.”

Her advice to would-be marathon streamers is to choose something that genuinely matters to you.

“It’s so easy to get overwhelmed and get nervous and think you need so much preparation,” she says. “But you don’t. You really don’t.”

For a charity stream in particular, she believes authenticity matters.

“As long as you find something that you are truly passionate about, the community will see that really quickly.”

And there is an important caveat to her enthusiasm for the challenge: completing the full 24 hours isn’t the point.

If a streamer reaches the middle of a marathon and realises they don’t want to continue, Gina says it is completely acceptable to stop.

“It’s okay to turn around and be like, ‘This isn’t working. It’s not going as planned. I’m not having a good time. Your community’s not having a good time.’ It’s okay to just go, ‘Yeah, we’ve still done good.’ I still would’ve been proud if we didn’t even reach the initial £100 goal, because it’s still more than what we ever would’ve got.”

That perhaps sums up the experience better than the 24-hour figure itself. The marathon was an endurance challenge, but it was also a celebration of a community Gina never expected to build in the first place.

She started streaming because she was looking for a way to connect with people. A year later, those people had stayed awake with her through the night, rallied around her, and helped raise funds for a cause close to her heart.

“Don’t underestimate my community,” she says. “That’s probably the one thing I’d do differently.”