This applies mostly to young gamers.
imagine if this was about football fans
The interesting part to me is that you can watch football even when/if you can’t play football, but you could be gaming instead of watching.
Nah, I can’t game while I’m doing the dishes but I can watch a video just fine
You’re taking too long to do the dishes.
There are more chores than dishes:
- folding laundry
- sweeping and mopping the floor
- fixing the car
- going through the mail
- changing the sheets
That’s when I watch/listen to streamers, I almost never do it when I could otherwise be gaming. I’ll occasionally listen/watch while gaming though.
Obligatory
I feel this so much sometimes…
I don’t only do dishes. Also, there are short videos.
Watching sports is a useful activity when you confined to a hospital bed for a month or two as has happened to people I know. In one case they wouldn’t be allowed to game, even sports were in danger of being too exciting for their condition.
Logic does not check out. Like they’re both activities I can do on my couch? Okay sure, I guess. Just like I can watch a video about knitting even if I can’t knit, but I could be knitting instead of watching!? Complete nonsense…
I can only watch so much football as can a rare other people like me. If I am watching football I want the view of one position. I don’t care that the quarterback got sacked on the play, how did the running back avoid the defense in his attempts to become open for a pass - or some such that I want to emulate when I next play. (i think that is a likely thing - I consider football too dangerous to play so I’m guessing - in reality I’d prefer to see other sports that I’m likely to play)
edit: spelling
buarterpacv
That’s a fascinating way to spell… Presumably “quarterback”?
i can’t make heads or tails of this reply :P
“how did the running back avoid the defense”, i’m assuming there should be a “to” in there? who runs back? i can’t parse it…
They went with American football, where “running back” and ”defense” refer to positions.
…huh.
The game most of the world calls “football” is called “soccer” in the US. We have a very popular game we call “football” in the US that is unrelated to “soccer”, instead it is related to rugby (still very different from rugby, but there is a relation)
strange
Welcome to the world. There are strange things all over. Sit back and enjoy laughing at the ride.
It’s time for game publishers to think about in-game video as something beyond marketing alone," said Rhys Elliott, games analyst, MIDiA Research. ‘‘By reclaiming video engagement, publishers have the potential to unlock new revenue streams, like advertising, and drive growth.’’
Lmao, what a takeaway. Guy is struggling to earn that paycheck.
Reminds me of the business plans of the business guys from Ready Player One. “We estimate we can sell up to 80 percent of a user’s visual field before inducing seizures.” 😂
Groooowwwtthhhh! It’s all about that Groooooowwwtthhhhh!
New report claims people with hobby spend more time watching videos about hobby than doing hobby
Watching someone cut a dovetail by hand is a lot more interesting now that I know from experience how hard it is. And maybe I’ll learn a trick to make my next ones better.
Dovetail sounds like a bird. It’s not a bird, right? Right?
A dovetail is a type of joint that doesn’t require fasteners and only uses the material (usually glue for wood).
It was more funny when I didn’t know that :(
But thanks! I kind of expected it’s something like that :D
Does knowing that the name comes from one of the join elements (left side) looking like the tail of a dove, improve that?
I use one of those big metal paper choppers to cut doves tails.
😏
And its cheaper to watch someone do it. Quality timber and tools are expensive.
And less annoying to your neighbor if you’re in a neighborhood. Plus how many tables can you actually fit in a house?
Cutting dovetails implies by hand - power tools exist for it, but those using power tools generally use different joints.
My neighbor does not make dovetails, then.
I’m not surprised. They are very hard to make correctly and not that much better than other options that are easier to do. they are a “holy grail” of wood working skill for a reason. I’ve done a dozen in my life and the best is so awful I want to burn an otherwise nice creation to hide the evidence.
If I want to do my hobby, I need to make time for it, whereas if I want to watch videos about my hobby, I can do it on the toilet. It turns out it’s a lot easier to watch than make time for a hobby, hence why I do more of it.
If I didn’t have to work, I’d spend more time doing my hobby. But I do, and I have kids, so hobby time is quite limited.
Execution is a small part of “the planning”, man. That ain’t even fair.
I stream a 25-year-old MMO, EverQuest, about 8 hours a week and lots of viewers just want to live vicariously through my moment remembering when they were doing it themselves without committing 500-1,000 hours to level a character.
I also watch other people play other class types of endgame content to do the same.
I’m not the most engaging streamer, but I enjoy answering questions to my 2-10 viewers. I also enjoy when another streamer answers my own questions.
I don’t understand watching streamers with 4,000 viewers spamming kewk emojis though.
You play live service EQ or P99 or Quarm?
I’ve played them all. EQ definitely the game nearest and dearest to my heart.
I stream and play Quarm exclusively. Best balance of nostalgia and community. <3
I played Quarm until just before Kunark came out. Haven’t played since Kunark but continue to support Secrets on Patreon. She’s putting so much work into it. How’s Kunark doing?
Lots of VP raids these days and there was a kick-ass event for the one year anniversary where we got to play in Plane of Justice for a month with all kinds of fun loot. Raids are instances now, with open world raids still around as well. So there’s none of that P99 FTE sweat going on. Basically, if you raid, you’ll get gear. No bottle necks for epics anymore.
Most of us are ready for Velius, but having fun.
I’ve been really into Meridian 59 lately, but haven’t been playing in the past couple of weeks. Thanks for the reminder.
This is not at all surprising. Almost all hobbies and sports are like this.
The only difference that makes this interesting is the fact that you could be gaming while watching about gaming, which is untrue for many other hobbies.
You don’t watch football while playing football? What else is the jumbotron even good for?
Kiss Cam, and wacky mascot antics. At least that is what I’m led to believe. Never actually been to a sporting event with a jumbotron.
They’ll also show replays of important plays, often in slow motion so the fans can get frustrated when a call doesn’t go their way.
dude in AR glasses runs across the field
I ain’t gonna tell nobody how to live their life or nothing, but, uh…
Not really interesting. Gaming is often stressful and requires more though / action being put into it. Also there is the matter of skill - it’s way more fun to see someone completely anihilate the other team, than to go out and get killed yourself. You can also go through a story based game without having to actually play, and you get most of the experience. You also need to count in people watching other people’s guides, especially for strategy games. For other hobbies it’s often about actually doing something and feeling the rush, or by occupying the hands and chilling out. You don’t get the rush of driving a car by watching someone else do it. You don’t get your hands occupied by seeing someone knit. Also, gaming provides instant feedback / dopamine. Watching it does that with even less effort.
I don’t find gaming stressful at all, I just honestly don’t have the time for it. Gaming means my butt needs to be in the chair doing nothing other than playing the game. Watching/listening means I can be doing dishes, folding laundry, or even commuting to work. Very rarely am I totally focused on watching/listening to someone playing a game, and I’m never involved in the chat.
If I had the time, I wouldn’t watch nearly as much, but I don’t, so watching is my surrogate.
Makes enough sense, as goofy as it sounds.
- No Money. - Videos let me watch games that aren’t worth buying to me along with letting me parse games that look fun enough to buy.
- No Time. - Videos can be put on during other chores or tasks, left on as background noise during times where I would absolutely not have enough time to actually play a game.
- Skill Issue. - No matter how good I want to be, I’m ultimately just kinda ok at games. Watching higher level players can be a way for me to learn tips and tricks to improve, or they can be a way for me to experience difficulty levels of the game I will never realistically achieve on my own.
You forgot: The videos often have absurd challenges that most gamers would never try, like for example trying to beat Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire with only a physical attacking Abra.
Or counting how many people are employed in Skyrim.
Arguably that falls under both 2 and 3, but yeah entirely unique challenges or play modes is another reason to watch.
Amen to that!
In other stunning news, researchers find people who like sports spend more time watching it than playing it.
Where’s “New report claims sports fans spend more time watching sport / videos about sport than playing sport”.
This isn’t some new, crazy, hard to understand concept.
I’ll be honest I find it hard to understand for sports as well.
Wouldn’t be me. I don’t like streams. When I’ve had twitch drops i wanted to claim I’d just mute the tab in the background to get the time limit needed.
I don’t have the attention span for streamers. It’s like golf. Might be fun to play but watching is another matter.
This, how people can find watching more entertaining than playing is beyond me. I tried watching people play my favourite games on twitch to see what it was like, I got bored out of my brains in minutes.
The closest I can do is watching gameplay videos on youtube, from people who do extremely creative things that inspire me for future playthroughs - but even then.
To y’all watching streams: I’m not judging you, you do you. I just don’t understand you.
Well, for example; I like to watch LeagueOfLegends streams but don’t like to play it anymore.
I’m 4 years clean from league and I still dream about it sometimes
all ex-league players who i’ve spoken with (myself included) refer to league of legends and breaking free from it as if they were raised in a cult or dealing with life-ruining substance abuse that still affects them to this day
I don’t watch streamers, but I’ll watch videos like ‘which is the best weapon for [X]’ or ‘how to optimize production in [X].’ I’ve watched stream highlights like SovietWomble’s bullshittery, or IAmCrusty’s psychopathic VR vids. Once you get stuff like that into your YouTube algorithm, there’s a lot of it. It’s gaming content you can consume when location or time constraints won’t let you actually game, and that’s a larger chunk of my day than when I can sit down and play.
You can’t have stream highlights without a stream. Even if no one watches the stream, the infrastructure and technologies have to be there. And I can see where some audience members of those highlights would be attracted to the raw stream, trying to catch the ‘good stuff’ live, the same way some people watch NASCAR hoping to see crashes as they happen.
I enjoy watching tournaments to see how much of skill difference there is between me, the one day a week gamer, and the pros who play every single day for 8-12 hours. It shows you what is possible and what the limit is.
Once I bought a game because I saw a pro playing it and thought it looked like fun. Boy, was I wrong. The gaming community is not just a shit-hole, it’s a toxic, radioactive bog of brain dead troglodytes caked in layers of fecal matter, impervious to reason or friendliness. Not only that, many multiplayer games have either no tutorial and you’re dropped into a war zone when you keep dying, all the while being screamed at by some dude with a supermarket mic that’s either in his asshole, mouth or 3 meters away on his console, with no possibility of reviewing what you did or a some kind of training chamber / level with bots to get better in peace and quiet.
For me, it’s audio in the background that I can interact with if I want.
Sometimes the people are funny too, but it’s not like my first monitor. Streams are a second monitor thing, with me doing something on the main. Reading, gaming, writing.
Also sometimes I’ll watch the various leagues to see people do games I’d hate to play do really really well at it.
I prefer to play, but I don’t have time to dedicate to it. I can listen/watch a game stream while working, on the toilet, or doing chores around the house. I can only play in the evenings and weekends, and only when my kids are otherwise occupied or in bed.
Yeah, watching is worse than playing, but it’s better than doing neither.
Yeah I’ve only ever found 1 game play chann on YouTube that I enjoy watching, Macie Jay who makes compilations of his stream for YouTube. He’s incredibly creative playing R6, it’s really fun to watch. But in general I don’t get watching someone play a game when I could just play it myself.
I usually open streams on a second monitor while playing, unless the game demands my full undivided attention for extended periods of time. It’s more of a case by case basis for me.
I did the same when I was playing WoW a long time ago, watching stuff while doing mining routes and whatnot. But to be fair, I was doing it because the game itself was a drudgery that I got skinnerboxed into playing and pretending I was enjoying.
So I ask this to you: is the game you are playing not entertaining enough, that you have to watch something with it in order to feel entertained? If so, why not play something else that captures your whole attention? It’s your time, shouldn’t you be spending it with things you actually enjoy?
The answer is I enjoy both games that capture my whole attention and games that allow me to watch something in the background. Sometimes I feel like doing the former and sometimes the latter
There’s retro streamers and smaller/older streamers that aren’t so hype and “ON IT” all the time.
Sometimes I just want to be around the community that surrounds a game I am enjoying. If I am playing a JRPG, I may spend more time in a JRPG discord going back and forth with users, or go find a streamer playing it and pick their brain a bit.
It helps you not feel so alone with the experience. You may be the only person for miles and miles to boot up Breath of Fire IV, but rest assured, someone out there wants to talk about it.
Definitely fall into this category. Commentary/ video essays about games are my go-to for background noise.
Commentator: “Here’s my 100-hour video essay on what King’s Duty 8, an award-winning game, could have handled differently, with another 40 pages of annotations.”
Game Developer at 4:50 PM: “Ok whatever, we didn’t fix the cutscene bug but at least it doesn’t crash. Time to go home and not think about video games all weekend.”Game Production Manager: “Nobody is going home until we get this bug ironed out. You don’t have to come in this weekend if you don’t want, but we won’t renew your contract if you didn’t.”
Makes sense. I usually just put on a 2+ hours long video whenever I’m doing chores. I don’t actually care about Wolfey’s last weird team, it just makes for good background noise.
Same. I watch VODs about a strategy game I really like playing (EU4) because I rarely have the time to actually dig in to a campaign, so watching/listening to someone else (while I do chores) do what I don’t have for allows me to get some of that connection to a game I love. I do play the game quite a bit (have nearly 1k hours), but not nearly as much as I’d like.
There’s a pretty big difference in what I play vs what I watch though. I generally play action games and watch strategy games, because action games are easy to jump into for an hour or so at a time, whereas strategy games usually need an hour just to remember what I was doing last, so I tend to wait until I can block out an entire evening.
Yep, it’s hard to make time for a several hours long hobby when you’re an adult.
strategy games usually need an hour just to remember what I was doing last, so I tend to wait until I can block out an entire evening
lol yeah, it’s like planning date night with your game.
I have played through Factorio, I have also watched every video doshdoshington has made about it while cooking, doing dishes etc.
Exactly what I did the last few days, great channel :D
people want to play with friends, and with gaming getting lonelier, i think people are seeking the parasocial relationships on streaming sites.
or it’s because IRL our gaming interests aren’t something we can talk about. I haven’t had a IRL friend who thinks gaming is cool since I was 15. I’m 40 now. for 25 anytime I bring up my interest in games my ‘friends’ or girlfriends cringe and tell me to STFU about my weird immature stupid interest.
on twitch and youtube i can find people who share my joy of games and appreciate them and openly talk about their fond memories of playing them and how important they were to their childhood. IRL talking saying shit like that gets you socially shamed and ostracized.
If “friends” or even “girlfriends” tell you it’s cringe, it’s them that’s cringe. Worker-bees with sticks up their arses. Get away from such toxic people.
I get it, I’m gaming for 40yrs now, and i know how it feels to be ridiculed for it. Fuck them. Especially when it’s coming from people who spend their time watching TV or mindlessly scrolling fuckbook et al. They really should STFU. Gaming always was an art-form, now more than ever. And adults have a right to, nay, the freedom to enjoy their passions guiltfree.
Drag plays video games with drag’s partner. Right now @HonouraryDragon@lemmy.nz is playing through Deathloop. We only have one copy, so unfortunately drag can’t invade its game and kick it off a cliff as Julianna, but it’s still fun to watch it play through the early stages. On its first loop after unlocking infusion, it got the Strelak Verso AND the Sepulchra Breteira! Only cooler thing would have been getting the Heritage Gun.
Anyway drag can’t imagine having a partner who isn’t into games. Luckily, everyone drag has ever fallen in love with enjoyed a variety of entertainment media. Probably because boring people are too busy watching broadcast TV all day to hang out in the cool places.
If the partner is enjoying games, and especially the same games, it’s awesome. My wife isn’t as fanatic as i am, but has her own share of game-love. Couldn’t imagine a partner that wouldn’t at least get it either.
Try to find new friends, or a community where your interests are shared. Anybody who makes fun of another person for their interests is not a good friend.
the friends i have who game either cant afford it anymore, or are playing things rocket league and fortnite and gacha games for multiplayer now. 😫
This thread got me thinking Lemmy needs a better “find a co-op buddy” community for games in general. If it’s here already, could use better marketing.
Not sum’m I suffer from, but I want to see y’all living your best lives too. A good homie can make or break a game run.
I miss r/summonsign and whatever the one for elden ring was. From Soft co-op is the best part of their games.
Truly. A bit of jolly co-op goes a long way
That’s me for sure these days. Back in high school I used to play at least a couple of hours every day. I have a gaming PC and a Steam Deck but probably play a few hours a month. But I’ll happily watch several hours of Twitch each day while I’m relaxing.
Probably just getting older and busier, haha.
As a (probably) even older guy I find it the weirdest thing ever. “watching games being played”. It’s boring AF.
Sure, I can’t t play counterstrike effectively anymore. Sure I am the one with the most deaths in helldivers2. Doom eternal is just way too twitchy for me. I’ve become too slow. In mechwarrior 5 I have too put the difficulty on story/easy and aim assist on. Which hurt my old ego the most to be honest.
But doing it still beats the shit out of watching it.
/start_old_man_rant
Especially these days when every streamer is an egocentric manchilds screaming their head off in a totally scripted “episode”. Or girls in bikinis only because it sells. Can we just leave that in hooters? And everything is bought and paid for. You’re watching a commercial. Or do you really think that logo on his mike just happens to be in view? Or the brand of the gaming chair?or that cupboard behind him filled with lights and gaming gear? Its ultra consumerism. And the begging for money. Fuck off. Really.
I hate it.
I miss total biscuit. That was entertainment.
/end_old_man_rant
I mean, the thing that people watch twitch for is mainly the person/people on the stream, the game is a backdrop, rarely the actual focus
And not everyone is ego-centric like you’re saying? I mean, there’s literally tens of thousands of streamers. Don’t just look at the biggest ones that probably mainly appeal to kids, i.e. a different audience than you. Chances are the kind of people you would enjoy watching are just smaller and more niche
