We’ve commodified hanging out on a friends couch watching them play.

It's not an age thing - I watch a few game streams a week and I'm older than you. But the most popular streamers are an age thing - they overreact to everything because their target audience is literal children and that's what kids like. Kids bring in the big bucks because they have endless freetime and are willing to watch the same thing forever.

Some people are ridiculously good at games and it's cool to watch. That's your speedrunners, competitive gamers, and Kaizo Mario players. Personally I don't understand watching a speedrunner grind out runs either, so if you like them enough to watch them sometimes, I recommend randomizer races. It's like being into sports. Here's my fave doing ALTTPR.. There's also a channel that has more commentated races than you could possibly watch (pick at random until you like the commentators lol).

I'm not baffled by the streaming industry... But i'm baffled that a lot of kids see it as some sort of career path. I remember a conversation with this centrist early zoomer, i was arguing that the IT innovation industry was not offering as many jobs as the manufacturing industries used to offer and his answer was "There are many jobs for streamers and youtubers." With this smug tone like he was educating the boomer... And what do you even answer to that?

In this guys mind, does he see himself paying rent and bills from streaming donations? Does he see a generation of streamers living in little houses like General motor workers? is there an angle i'm missing?

I do like watching certain players but what ruins it for me is the constant shouting out of subscribers, reading of donation messages, reacting to the chat, etc. It’s extremely parasocial, you basically pay to have the streamer say your name/read your message and give you attention. It’s annoying when you’re just trying to watch them play a game and discuss the game.

Jerma is the best streamer and the only one I’ve seen who uses the medium in a funny way

I'm a little older and I'm baffled by it too. I've spent many hours chilling in a room with friends playing vidya, and the shadow of that experience that is represented by streaming is just so unfulfilling by comparison - I can't even turn on a stream in the background while I do something else, it just gets annoying. I wonder if it's the natural outgrowth of people getting lonelier over time, where kids whose baseline of human interaction is so atomized that they don't have the same hangup as me and can turn on a stream and feel like it's some kind of genuine connection.

I don't want to sound like an old man telling you that your online friends aren't real, but they're definitely in a different category to friends that you can reach out and touch - and people you watch stream are in a category even further removed from that, because you don't even have indirect interaction with them the way you might have with someone in your WoW guild or whatever.

I'm the same age as you and plenty of people our age watch twitch streams.

I dont donate to anyone because thats cringe but I fail to see how watching an entertaining or maybe extremely skilled person play video games is weird or this new thing (youtube let's plays have existed forever... montages... etc...)

Watching people who are good is an easy way to increase your own game knowledge and even skill ceiling because you dont have to learn every lesson yourself, you get to skip all the noob shit and just figure out how the pros do things.

Parasocial relationships can and do exist but that is a problem with all media.

Streamers are annoying and incredibly over dramatic when they play.

There are plenty who are laid back. Some of the ones who do speedruns and stuff barely say anything.

I especially don’t get why you would pay someone money to sit there and watch them.

Why would you pay money to sit there and watch people play sports, when you could go and play sports yourself? Why would you pay money to watch soaps, when you could participate in your own mundane dramas with your family and neighbours? A lot of pastimes really just boil down to watching people do stuff that isn't especially exciting.

And I used to watch my brother play as a kid but that’s different. We knew each other and were in the same room at least.

A lot of people don't have friends with similar interests. Parasocially sharing a game you like with a streamer can be a substitute for sharing it with a friend or sibling.

Personally, if there's a game I really like and have played repeatedly, watching someone else play it can be a fun way of reexperiencing it. I tend to prefer the slightly more polished stuff you get on youtube to livestreams though. Also I find twitch to be buggy and poorly optimised, and am somewhat mystified that it has become such a successful platform.

I mostly watch them for the same reasons I listen to most podcasts: it's people talking in the background while I'm doing chores or whatever. I only watch videos with at least two people because otherwise it's intolerable even if I really like the person. In a lot of cases I'm only looking at the screen maybe a quarter of the time.

I'll also watch videos to decide if I want to buy a game, to learn about a game I won't play but seems important, to experience the story while doing other things, or to learn how to be better at the game.

And I used to watch my brother play as a kid but that’s different

its not really that different if you don't have any other option to interact with people. a lot of people don't have friends, and a stream of someone just hanging about in a server lobby or annoying their mates is sometimes a close enough approximation of having people who'll talk to you lmao. you take what you can get.

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I have fond memories of reading screenshot let's plays instead of working like 15 years ago when I was unpaid interning and poor.

These days if I can't be assed to play a game but I want to see the story I hop onto youtube and watch a NO COMMENTARY run, because most people arent nearly as entertaining as they presume to be.

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i dont like having videos interrupted every second to read chat/have a donation, its very annoying. and i dont think ill ever understand most of the famous twitch people, twitch culture seems so awful. small streamers are fine, joining a smash bros arena and seeing it streamed is nice. or when mario maker was new you'd give people ur level to play. very fun.

oh also.. can we discuss hololive while we're here? anime is ok but this is way too weird for me. isnt it mostly in japanese, to an audience that doesnt speak japanese? and its like the exact same as regular twitch, but its.. anime? and thats a huge draw? yeah

I can't watch any sort of stream. The fucking graphics and pinging everytime someone subscribes drives me nuts. I feel like you can't objectively watch a twitch stream like that. You have to become one with the stream.