I’ve spent boatloads more time watching football than playing football, too.
Also, with Rainbow 6: Siege, there’s so many ways to play the game that I love watching videos to get ideas for new strategies to try.
Lastly, contrary to popular belief, a lot of games actually require thinking about what you’re doing. Time spent playing is not really time spent spacing out so I will happily watch videos about a game I like to play when I don’t have the energy to actually focus on playing them.
I don’t watch streams, but I do watch a lot of Let’s Plays (i.e. Materwelonz, WoolieVersus). Sometimes to watch them play games that I normally wouldn’t, sometimes to listen to their insights at certain hype points in games I previously played, and usually due to loneliness (i.e. parasocial relationships).
Regarding the last point, it also tends to be the reason I gravitate towards games with strong story, or MMOs. Feeling like I belong to a community keeps the loneliness at bay. Outside of games, I like to be in crowded areas, though not necessarily interacting with anyone.
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.
Arguably that falls under both 2 and 3, but yeah entirely unique challenges or play modes is another reason to watch.
Or counting how many people are employed in Skyrim.
Amen to that!
I watch games about the game in gaming, but I also watch games about my game when I’m not gaming. Therefore by definition my gaming will be less than my watching gaming.
What if gaming time is 4 hours, you spend 3/4 of gaming time playing games, and you watch gaming videos for one hour outside gaming time?
You have to watch the video of the game you are playing in order to play the game you are playing. By definition… (if you are video gaming) all bets are off for boardgamers!
Board gamers watch videos about board games too!
The point is if you are video gaming you are literally watching a video of yourself playing the game. That is why it is "video"gaming…
What if gaming time is 4 hours
I remember not having kids…
Now gaming time, if I’m lucky, is like 30 mins a week. Much of that spent patching and remembering wtf I was doing last time I played.
Not counting playing with them, at least. Though they spend more time watching Minecraft videos than playing Minecraft, so there’s that.
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.
My wife likes YouTubers but isn’t a gamer. If I’m doing stuff with them I’m more likely to pick a video about games than a game.
My wife thought she was the same until suddenly it clicked and she realized she is in fact a gamer
We called my wife “fake gamer girl” for a while because we made a group chat back in 2020 with everyone in it to coordinate online games. They were there because she would play Among Us or Jack Box with us. It was very tongue in cheek. To be honest, they may have even said it themselves for the first time lol.
Nice. My partner is more of a movie person and I’m more a games person, so I’ll watch movies with her almost as a favour, and she’ll return it by playing games with me lol.
There’s an art to picking a movie or game for a choosie person, and we’ve both got pretty good at predicting eachothers’ tastes in media.
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.
All of my little cousins and nephews watch streamers. To them it’s more fun to watch someone play than to play most times. They don’t like dealing with challenging games all the time, they really just want to have fun. These kids do play games but they watch more than me so I tried watching some streamers and I get it. When I was growing up we had systems with multiple controller ports and no online. Online gaming was PC only until I went to college and console online took off. But growing up you had to bring your friends or cousins to play some Mario Kart 64. That was way different than playing with randoms online. Streamers kinda brings that connection back.
Streamers kinda brings that connection back
In a parasocial kinda way…?
when my son plays he’s constantly talking through whatever he’s doing in the game. streaming has rubbed off that much
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.
the friends i have who game either cant afford it anymore, or are playing just rocket league and fortnite for multiplayer now. 😫
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 @[email protected] 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.
In other stunning news, researchers find people who like sports spend more time watching it than playing it.
Never watched a stream, never really understood the motivation. But i also don’t consume social media (besides lemmy) or such and am generally anti-social, so that might be that. I would be infuriated if those people wouldn’t do what I would do. Also the chat is… Annoying.
The wisdom of streams is simple.
I do shit with my life other than gaming. If I want to experience a cool game without spending the money and without investing the time to get good at the game, it’s a no-brainer to watch a playthrough done by a professional gamer and a professional live commentator like the best streamers are.
That makes sense. As someone who never saw the appeal in watching sports, this is probably the same league. But somehow it’s like watching porn when one isn’t in the mood for actual sex 😁
Cool 😎
Never really understood watching it when playing is also very little effort. It’s not football.
for me it’s mostly because I am too depressed and unmotivated to get out of bed and go sit in front of the console/PC but not depressed enough to put the dumb addictive black rectangle down
(i am taking medication i hope this changes)
I hope it changes for you too!
thank :]
Interesting that you see a difference between the two. Football also does not require incredible effort to play, still a lot of people only watch it.
Well…
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“Videos about gaming” don’t necessarily have to be gameplay footage. Reviews, promotional materials, discussions etc. count. Maybe even stuff like Viva La Dirt League’s content which is live action skits about video games.
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Tutorials and walkthroughs exist.
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Some vintage systems are difficult to get up and running or even find. For a lot of people it’s easier to just watch an enthusiast do it on youtube.
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Especially on Twitch with streamers it’s as much about the player as it is the game.
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Especially with esports or speedrunning it’s like watching a sporting event. Even if you like playing football too there’s something to watching the professionals play at the top echelons.
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One can watch gaming videos while doing other things. When I was moving into my apartment in Greensboro I assembled my furniture while watching HCBailly play through the Gameboy Zelda games.
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I’m definitely one of those people, but I work in an office where they let us watch shit on our phones as long as the work still gets done. A hell of a lot easier to watch YT videos than to try to sneak an Xbox S into a cubicle farm ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Might wanna contemplate about nvidias geforce now 😁
I didn’t use it, but I’m still salty that publishers had a fit about that. It’s honestly none of their fucking business where you run your games.
I’m not investing in a cloud only platform like Google’s abandoned attempt, so the only hope is a hybrid like Geforce Now.
It’s an okay-ish solution for people who don’t wanna invest in a pricey pc or that just wanna game from their potato thinclient. No mods kills it for me personally.
A guy at work used to use a cloud service called Shadow PC.
They’d basically rent a gaming PC out and he’d just torrent them right on to the cloud machine. Pretty sure mods would have worked there.
It felt a touch laggy with a mouse, but a controller would probably have been just fine. It’s a shame there’s a disconnect between what gamers want (a gaming PC that’s just somewhere else) and what providers want (a walled garden).
True. Those cloud-services allow for mods. But still too laggy, too expensive, too much hassle. And in the end you own nothing again. Like car leasing 😑
But gf now is much cheaper, but therefore has those downsides. But yes. Just a pc somewhere else
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when playing is also very little effort.
Same. Not only is it little effort, but you get to experience what the intended purpose of the game was without having to listen to some rando try out bad jokes or say lame stuff. Any time I look at a video tutorial I look for videos with no narration and once I figure out how to solve the problem I turn the video off and get back to the game. Watching someone else play a game just seems like a waste of time, personally
Sometimes I’ll watch videos for build inspiration, especially for survival crafting games
I hate watching people play video games too, but definitely for strategy or inspiration it can be helpful
I would say this isn’t me, but I started playing Dwarf Fortress lately and have probably been watching an hour of tutorials for every 30 minutes I play at this point. 😅
It’s not that bad! Once you’ve got the basics down you can just watch as everything explodes
Once you learn how to survive, the deep end is best learned by trial and error!
Expensive as the games are these days you gotta do copious amounts of research before plunking down those bennies
What you need to do is find two or so reviewers who align with what you want out of a game.
It is a free and easy way to experience 75% of the experience without even downloading it (data bloat has massively ballooned too, perhaps needlessly in some cases). Also linear stories, or procedural things not being as deep as they seem.
Even when it comes to indie-appearing stuff I often don’t like the direction of the game design/difficulty, so it will likely be a more enjoyable experience in those cases too. The narrator also cuts boring bits or issues, also may do things I would not especially when it comes to skill or knowledge of said game. They may do silly things or tell a story. This may be 300% experience (of a new mix).
EDIT: Also never really been into the idea of multiplayer games, competitive or cooperative for different reasons. So watching is a new avenue for that.
