By Nelson Schneider - 09/20/15 at 03:35 PM CT
Early this month, late night talk show host and former “The Man Show” buffoon, Jimmy Kimmel, ignited the billowing fumes of generalized angst and Internet stupidity surrounding the group of morons and illiterate children that now pass as the “Gaming Community” (the same brilliant community that thinks “J”RPGs and “W”RPGs are a thing, that PvP FPSes and MOBAs are the best genres ever, and that provoking militant feminists is a good way to accomplish anything). Kimmel produced a rather amusing little video poking fun at the particular strain of ‘gamer’ that enjoys watching other people play games on services such as YouTube Gaming and Twitch TV more than they enjoy actually playing games themselves.
I found this video to be right on the nose, taking a questionable concept and reducing it to absurdity via reduplication of the core premise. If watching other people play games is stupid, then watching other people watch other people play games is even moreso! I’ve never gotten much enjoyment out of watching other people play games, putting me at direct odds with Chris, who spent enormous amounts of time in the pre-Internet era flopped on a sofa watching his friends play videogames.
YES, gameplay videos DO have a semblance of a point – But only in specific instances. If I’m on the fence about buying a game, I wouldn’t mind seeing some gameplay footage to see if it looks like fun. If I need some pointers on how to play a particularly tricky game (or section thereof), being able to watch someone who already knows how to play is a valuable tool, as it is with any learnable skill. Likewise on-the-ball gamers who manage to record the random hilarious glitches that plague Bethesda games (or, indeed, ALL modern “AAA” games) can provide plenty of entertainment by sharing one-time, hard-to-duplicate moments of absurdity with the world. But that’s where it ends.
Kimmel took great delight in tabulating the firestorm of poorly written, inarticulate hate spewed at him by the “Gaming Community” in response to his first video. Naturally, some of the less braindead comments included some of the simple arguments for game-watching that I just mentioned in the preceding paragraph. Kimmel readily agreed with these points as well.
Some of the less vitriolic Tweets Kimmel received also brought up the inevitable sports analogy… and backfired in spectacular fashion. If watching other people play videogames is stupid, then surely watching other people play ballgames is just as bad? Right? RIGHT?! Yes, that’s right. Watching sports is just as stupid a waste of time as watching gamestreaming. Kimmel even admitted that, “Watching people play football is dumb. I do it every Sunday. I know it is dumb. The guys I watch it with are dumb. They’re all a bunch of dumb guys.” Yet sport-watching is a massive communal money-sink and revenue stream for the people who create and maintain the infrastructure that enables the watching of ballgames simply because SO MANY PEOPLE DO IT.
I have long theorized that gambling is the sole reason spectator sports have become the de facto religion in the majority of the modern word. I hate gambling in all its forms, but it seems to me that the only reason to be invested in the outcome of a ballgame played by other people is if you have money riding on that outcome. Some of the biggest ‘e-sport’ events, like Valve Software’s “DotA 2” finals have a lot of money on the table, both for the participants, and for odds-makers. Yet the vast majority of gamestreamers aren’t even playing the type of games that one could logically wager on, and their watchers typically just give them money for the privilege of watching them play. It makes no sense.
In an effort to understand the appeal of gamestreaming, Kimmel met with two gamers who are, apparently, known names in gamestreaming circles. I’d never heard of them, since I only tend to care about people who produce meaningful editorials and/or reviews along with their gameplay videos (folks like Yahtzee Crowshaw and Jim Sterling).
The proof is in the pudding, as they say, and watching Kimmel and those two streamers play a bit of “Rocket League” was about as fun as brushing my teeth. It wasn’t painful or torturous, but it also wasn’t pleasant in any way. It just kind of happened. “Rocket League” still looks like an uninteresting game, Kimmel is obviously not good at it, and the commentary provided by the two ‘professional’ streamers was of little to no value.
Perhaps gamestream watching is the next evolutionary step in the sad, pathetic lives of people who think that ‘Internet Friends’ are the same as real friends. What first started with people obsessing over the number of ‘friends’ they had on Facebook or the number of followers they could accumulate on other social media sites has transformed into a fixation on stalking other people via live video feeds. Watching other people play videogames isn’t that much different from watching them do any other recreational activity. Where’s the YouTube channel for watching other people watch movies? Where’s the channel for watching other people read books (a guaranteed thrill a minute, there)? Perhaps ‘socializing’ with streamers is the most inter-personal contact some lonely folks can get... and if that’s the case, doesn’t that make gamestreamers the ultra-softcore version of webcam whores? Gamestreamers mostly do it for the purpose of making money – either via advertising or directly accepting donations from their viewers – so it’s a fitting comparison.
Regardless of the backlash, Kimmel’s video was great little piece of social commentary, and the “Gaming Community’s” anger over it just makes those of us who SHOULD actually represent the Gaming Community look bad by association. Who are these watchers to take it upon themselves to speak for their community, when they are clearly part of the problem? With that, I’ll leave you, dear readers, with the immortal words – which I paraphrased in the title of this article – of the Roman satirist, Juvenal.
Comments
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/27/15 at 03:08 PM CT
Thanks for the correction. I had to drag out my Wheelock's Latin book, and it made me sad. You know what I did? I visually skipped over the Masc./Fem. and Neut. headers above participle declensions on p. 148 and assumed those were the Sing./Plur. columns.
Matt - wrote on 09/26/15 at 07:58 AM CT
Indeed. I was very puzzled at the value of Twitch when it sold for $970 million, and then the amount of money involved with eSports is staggering. Also, I found that Kimmel's admission that watching sports is dumb to be quite honest. The mindless nature of it is at the heart of the Roman realization that the mob only needs bread and circuses to be entertained, and thus controlled. I've often posited that all that is needed in the Nova Roma is NFL and McDonalds to keep the masses pacified, but it looks like I should add YouTube and game streams to those things which distract the populace.
Also, your title should read "quis spectat ipsos spectantes." The participle "spectans" needs to agree in gender, number, and case with the pronoun "ipsos."
