i’m in my 40s and i don’t watch the twitch or whatever, but i do watch “let’s play” type junk on the youtubes sometimes, which are like recorded episodes of some rando playing a game for 30 minutes at a time or whatever. i’ll watch them if two basic criteria are met

• the are very competent at the game
• it’s a game i am curious about, but not enough to actually buy it (i am a serious tightwad, so i never buy shit)

when i was real young i used to go to arcades and i never had more than a few quarters, but i would stay for a while because i liked watching people who were good.

when i was a teenager my friend and i used to rent a console game every weekend and if it was some kind of single player game, we would take turns for a while until he got sick of sucking (lol he sucked, like panicked at shit, got distracted by bullshit, walked right into traps) and would just let me do it because i could think quick on my feet and when i panicked in a game, it usually worked out.

if i got frustrated he would go again, and we would go back and forth. but frankly, some games were a real pain in the ass and having to play the game was kind of irritating and we would both rather just watch someone kick the shit out of it. also, we were broke, so if we dropped the money to rent a game, we were going to play it all weekend and get our money’s worth goddamit.

now that i’m old, i might watch a let’s play of someone playing a game these days, but i really don’t give a shit about their commentary or attempts at humor or whatever. if they suck i get mad and look for another one because watching some bumbling fool just pisses me off, but if they are really good and not annoying with the chatter, i might look through their channel to see other ones i might want to watch… so i kinda get why some of these people have like a following and get requested to play certain games. but i am pretty casual about it.