1315: Twitchy

I’m still thoroughly baffled by the phenomena that are Let’s Play videos and livestreaming of video games.

In the latter case, I sort of get why it would be useful for e-sports — it allows audiences to watch matchups between skilled players, just like real-world sports — but in the former case… hmm.

The argument tends to run that Let’s Play videos and livestreaming allow people to get a feel for games they might not have tried. And that’s a fair point, with one fairly major-ish issue: the popular Let’s Play and livestream feeds are all for the same games all the time… and they’re popular games that people already know all about. (“Hey guys, DarkPhantom123 here; welcome to part 527 of my Let’s Play Minecraft video!”)

The current trend is for people to post videos of them taking on Spelunky’s Daily Challenge, a randomly-generated level that is the same for all players worldwide. This can occasionally be amusing, but when there are hundreds of people all posting these same videos, I have to confess I find myself feeling like I’d just rather play the game for myself. Perhaps you can learn something from watching someone else’s run, but in my experience, most of these videos tend to be characterised by blind luck and fluke, with genuine skill only entering the picture relatively occasionally. It might just be the people I’ve watched videos of though.

The thing that strikes me the most about all this, though, is that it feels like such a massive waste of time. I love games; they’re my go-to form of entertainment, and I’m fortunate enough to be able to call playing the games I like my job, too. However much I love games, though, whenever I look at, say, the Twitch front page, I feel no desire whatsoever to watch other people playing games; I would rather just get on and play myself. I have lots of games I want to play; it simply, as I say, feels like a massive waste of time to watch other people doing so, particularly when a lot of these streams appear to be nothing more than vanity projects.

I clicked on a few streams on Twitch the other day out of curiosity and felt no desire to keep watching. The first was a guy playing Blizzard’s new World of Warcraft-themed card game Hearthstone, and featured a picture-in-picture webcam view of him playing — hardly the most interesting thing to watch, since he wasn’t talking or looking at the camera; all you saw was him looking engrossed in the game. The second was someone playing the free-to-play MMO Ragnarok Online 2, which featured some dreadful backing music and footage of someone apparently just running around doing random solo quests. Again, why would I watch that? Particularly when Ragnarok Online 2 is free-to-play, even, meaning that if I was genuinely curious about it I could just, you know, download it and actually try it out for myself?

Perhaps this is a generation gap thing; maybe I’m just too old to understand why people would want to treat games as a spectator sport when they’re not designed to be — e-sports excluded, obviously. If I have some free time to devote to games, I want to spend it playing games, not watching other people doing so. Other people apparently disagree, and that’s cool — I just wish I understood the phenomenon a bit better. Can anyone explain it to me?