I do it sometimes as a sort of surrogate for experience-sharing when I either can’t see/play something with friends (lockdown) or none of my friends are into the same thing I am. Like I’ll play through a really cool sequence, think “that was dope as shit,” and then go find a few people online playing through it to enjoy the feeling of it being dope as shit.

I rarely watch something all the way through and I don’t join chats or anything, there are just some video game interests I have that i share with none of my IRL friends so I like seeing people who do.

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.

I don’t have irl friends. Listening to someone screw around in a game lobby with their mates feels like you have mates by extension. It simulates the noise of having company. I’m a zoomer, and i used to be way, way more into this stuff when i was younger, just because no one at school would speak to me - at that point a bunch of 30-year-old strangers on the internet feel like an adequate substitute. Used in moderation it should be fine, no worse than listening to a podcast; the only issue being that streamers don’t tend to release an hour of content a week like a podcast or old-style youtuber would, they can do about 6 hours a day. Thats where it can become a crutch. Listening to that shit for hours is much more comfortable than listening to an empty fucking apartment all day, but its not healthy. Idk what else do for company really.

There’s also a (probably healthier, but also much more annoying) section of people who treat it like a reality tv show or stanning a band, as if streamer drama is the new celebrity gossip. Thats a big attraction for some people, hollywood drama that they can actually interact with and that feels more “real”.

Capitalist alienation means that people don’t have friends.