Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7847338" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm not entirely sure to be honest. From a purely logical perspective, watching people play video games is a fairly boring activity. However, I've on several occasions enjoyed it.I think for me it's akin to watching sports, something I admit I don't do a lot of despite the admiration I have for athletic accomplishment.  I'm just not that into sports, except for the ones I actually played a bit - soccer, ultimate, table tennis, etc.   Occasionally I'll watch some sport I'm unacquainted with for the novelty - I watched a lot of Sumo last year.When you watch sports rather than play them, the appeal is usually watching someone play the sport at a higher level than you can. You are watching the sport in order to admire the art and skill of the person(s) playing the sport. The more you know about the sport, the more you can admire the subtly and skill of what someone who is making it all look easy is actually doing.I think video games are similar.  So for example, I played "They Are Billions" when it first came out and I was pretty good at it. I managed to beat map 4 in Survival Mode at the normal level of difficulty back when 90% of the player population was struggling to beat map 1 at any difficulty. I could beat every map but map 4 at max difficulty, but I was hugely struggling to beat map 4 at any higher difficulty level. I had a couple of top 50 world runs on the challenge maps, which wasn't bad considering that the top 10 scores or so were cheats that had modified the game (the scores they were reporting weren't merely good, but impossible with unmodified data).There was this streamer who was playing map 4 at max difficulty without pause, which is just insane levels of skill, going for a world first win on the map. And it was a lot of fun to watch him play, simply because you had to admire what he was doing. I never did beat map 4 at max difficulty, and I tired of the game before I got that good, but I don't regret the hours of time I spent watching one of the world's best RTS players do the elegant ballet of mouse clicks and strategic planning that he was doing.And, I guess in that I've also answered why I probably don't enjoy watching table top RPGs streamed.</blockquote>

Verification