Oh dear, I fear you have involved me in yet another level of recursion, reading a screen about people watching a screen of people playing on a screen.
It does seem that humans enjoy watching excellence. The interesting part is that it does not seem to matter what activity the excellence is in. In fact, the more pointless the excellence is, the more likely we are to watch it. I ask myself, for instance, why I watch snooker and auto racing. Auto racing has some relation to the classic uses of sport, which is a preparation for war. Snooker does not. But snooker lets you get up close to the excellence in a way that auto-racing does not. You can't really see how a race car driver is using their hands and feet in direct relationship to how the car is holding the road. You can see that the excellence is happening. You can't see it happen.
In all the preparation-for-war sports -- football, auto racing, etc. -- there is also the element of courage. Excellence pursued under the threat of injury and death holds an inherent interest for a species evolved in times of constant warfare.
But courage is not a factor in snooker, nor in video games. What I suspect appeals about them is the element of selectivity. As a novelist, I am conscious that a novel is not a window but a lens. It distorts to focus, bringing the reader's attention to bear on one particular aspect of human experience, in order to observe it and contemplate it more easily and more intensely.
Snooker seems to do much the same thing for excellence in hand-eye coordination and the ability to anticipate the movement of bodies in space. There is no element of danger or courage involved, but Snooker refines and selects those skills and puts them on display in a very accessible way.
And perhaps the appeal of watching video games is something of this sort. (I'm guessing because I have no interest in either watching or playing them.) But maybe there are certain kinds of excellence that are selected for and refined and put on display in a video game that opens them up to the fascination of those who are interested in those forms of excellence.
Getting older is hard. From Monterey Pop in '67 to Win 11 Insider Preview Dev Channel you feel like a grey-haired, still revolutionary teen.
I felt old about videogames (eSports in contemporary words) since I sold, for little and poor-quality heroin, my broken Commodore 64 and its Compact Cassette loader back in 1984.
So, near my sixties, I decided to front this chapter left open years ago.
The occasion to wander among spectacular human creations occurred thanks to a Game Pass Ultimate account, Bing offered me for my robotic loyalty.
It opened my eyes to an unknown world.
I'm sincere, the best part of the titles I patiently downloaded, remains the "intros" and the creativity behind the scenes.
War in Ukraine and mass shootings in the USA increased my inner aversion for war, entertaining violence, and murder.
Then, I threw down the drain 2,000 USD on Zynga "Harry Potter Puzzles and Spells" and they made me "MVP" of my club: "Siriusly Black".
Don't need new addictions. I already got a great, enviable collection.
Before it was too late, I quit.
eSports, action games, vacuum-cleaners of credit card balances are not for me.
Lately I fell in love with "Genesis Noir": more than a game or an eSport, it's a trip.
My son is 12 and started watching the more family-friendly game streamers on YouTube this past year. We won't let him on Twitch, to his dismay, but I finally started to understand the attraction. I used to ask him how he could watch someone playing a game, like some old geezer, I suggested he play it himself, or get some real exercise. Then, on a whim, I streamed a few NES classic playthroughs like Ninja Gaiden, RoboCop and Zelda. I was quickly transported to my youth by streaming a wide range of old arcade game playthroughs on emulators. Yes, he caught me watching, and yes, he gave me a hard time about it. I get it though, and I'm not the least bit surprised now why it's so popular.
Truly grateful to have read this essay. Not because I learned a ton, given that, despite not playing anymore, I'm a recovered gaming addict. But because you, a public intellectual, went out of his usual line of topics and talked about this, normalizing the behavior.
If only people let their preconceptions about activities aside, such as that gaming is X, y, and z, we would learn so much about human behavior.
Jun 14, 2022·edited Jun 14, 2022Liked by Erik Hoel
I'd just like to add that esports does, and probably always will be severely lacking in granularity as compared to regular sports. You asserted that the gulf between a normal footballer and a professional is the same as between a normal video gamer and a professional gamer. I assert that because of the lack of granularity (the complexity of real world conditions and physics involved in say kicking a field goal is infinite compared to landing a headshot in an fps or skillshot in a moba, for example) the skill/talent gap between a pro and regular gamer is much smaller compared to that of a pro and regular sportsman.
That's my only point of contention, look forward to reading more of your stuff.
Edit - I sound way to confident here, could be totally wrong it's just where my mind went when I got into esports myself.
Knowing that AIs will easily outperform any vain human attempts at a video game with enough training cycles and data, "watching excellence" isn't quite the point though, is it? By that measure, esports players should be among the very first victim professions of AI automation.
And while we already may have popular virtual influencers on Instagram and the like, something tells me the spectator equation of the esports market would largely wither and die if dominated by algorithm vs. algorithm combat.
It never seemed that weird to me, though I think that might be because I've never really enjoyed 'normal' sports either. As someone who doesn't watch sport, not watching esports seemed very natural, and I've never seen much of a difference between the two.
"Esports are perplexing, for video games are meant to be played, not watched" is how I've always felt about traditional sports, too, on the whole. I think what I find most surprising is that older sports fans find it so difficult to understand the appeal of esports. Though perhaps you need that basis of having played games to 'get' it - much like most football fans will have played football as a child, even if they don't still regularly play as an adult.
I cast esports semi-professionally. I've also played them, though the only one in which I reached the highest competitive level in was extremely niche (though it may be of particular interest to this crowd, because part of the elevator pitch is that it's a "reverse Turing Test." It's called SpyParty, and I highly recommend it).
When I'm asked why someone would watch another person play video games, the answer is: for the same reasons you would want to watch another person play sports. To enjoy excellence, to see the real-life narratives of skill and pressure and strategy play out. Basically everything you've said.
One thing I'd like to add, which is related to what you mentioned about donations, is the parasocial nature of the profession. Like most streamers (and, for that matter, many podcasters) there's a false sense of intimacy that draws people in, that makes them feel like this person is their friend. It's standard, until you're *really* huge (and sometimes even then) to call out every donation by name on stream.
There's some of this with athletes, to be sure, but not as much. There is a degree to which technology here is simultaneously the cause of and "solution" to our sense of loneliness, and the relationship people have with esports and streamers is just one example of it.
My first exposure to esports was listening to some pro Quake players comment on a replay of their match. It was eye-opening. They mentally kept track of maybe 4 different timers for various damage buffs, armor shards and weapons, and sort of instinctively knew where their opponent was likely to be based on those timers.
My main beef with esports is that all of the particle effects and animations often make it hard for the uninitiated to understand anything at all without having played the game. Whereas I mostly get American football without playing constantly. There aren’t any “special abilities” beyond the usual things humans do, but at an ultra-elite level
Oh dear, I fear you have involved me in yet another level of recursion, reading a screen about people watching a screen of people playing on a screen.
It does seem that humans enjoy watching excellence. The interesting part is that it does not seem to matter what activity the excellence is in. In fact, the more pointless the excellence is, the more likely we are to watch it. I ask myself, for instance, why I watch snooker and auto racing. Auto racing has some relation to the classic uses of sport, which is a preparation for war. Snooker does not. But snooker lets you get up close to the excellence in a way that auto-racing does not. You can't really see how a race car driver is using their hands and feet in direct relationship to how the car is holding the road. You can see that the excellence is happening. You can't see it happen.
In all the preparation-for-war sports -- football, auto racing, etc. -- there is also the element of courage. Excellence pursued under the threat of injury and death holds an inherent interest for a species evolved in times of constant warfare.
But courage is not a factor in snooker, nor in video games. What I suspect appeals about them is the element of selectivity. As a novelist, I am conscious that a novel is not a window but a lens. It distorts to focus, bringing the reader's attention to bear on one particular aspect of human experience, in order to observe it and contemplate it more easily and more intensely.
Snooker seems to do much the same thing for excellence in hand-eye coordination and the ability to anticipate the movement of bodies in space. There is no element of danger or courage involved, but Snooker refines and selects those skills and puts them on display in a very accessible way.
And perhaps the appeal of watching video games is something of this sort. (I'm guessing because I have no interest in either watching or playing them.) But maybe there are certain kinds of excellence that are selected for and refined and put on display in a video game that opens them up to the fascination of those who are interested in those forms of excellence.
Getting older is hard. From Monterey Pop in '67 to Win 11 Insider Preview Dev Channel you feel like a grey-haired, still revolutionary teen.
I felt old about videogames (eSports in contemporary words) since I sold, for little and poor-quality heroin, my broken Commodore 64 and its Compact Cassette loader back in 1984.
So, near my sixties, I decided to front this chapter left open years ago.
The occasion to wander among spectacular human creations occurred thanks to a Game Pass Ultimate account, Bing offered me for my robotic loyalty.
It opened my eyes to an unknown world.
I'm sincere, the best part of the titles I patiently downloaded, remains the "intros" and the creativity behind the scenes.
War in Ukraine and mass shootings in the USA increased my inner aversion for war, entertaining violence, and murder.
Then, I threw down the drain 2,000 USD on Zynga "Harry Potter Puzzles and Spells" and they made me "MVP" of my club: "Siriusly Black".
Don't need new addictions. I already got a great, enviable collection.
Before it was too late, I quit.
eSports, action games, vacuum-cleaners of credit card balances are not for me.
Lately I fell in love with "Genesis Noir": more than a game or an eSport, it's a trip.
More suitable to my chemical weaknesses.
My son is 12 and started watching the more family-friendly game streamers on YouTube this past year. We won't let him on Twitch, to his dismay, but I finally started to understand the attraction. I used to ask him how he could watch someone playing a game, like some old geezer, I suggested he play it himself, or get some real exercise. Then, on a whim, I streamed a few NES classic playthroughs like Ninja Gaiden, RoboCop and Zelda. I was quickly transported to my youth by streaming a wide range of old arcade game playthroughs on emulators. Yes, he caught me watching, and yes, he gave me a hard time about it. I get it though, and I'm not the least bit surprised now why it's so popular.
Truly grateful to have read this essay. Not because I learned a ton, given that, despite not playing anymore, I'm a recovered gaming addict. But because you, a public intellectual, went out of his usual line of topics and talked about this, normalizing the behavior.
If only people let their preconceptions about activities aside, such as that gaming is X, y, and z, we would learn so much about human behavior.
I'd just like to add that esports does, and probably always will be severely lacking in granularity as compared to regular sports. You asserted that the gulf between a normal footballer and a professional is the same as between a normal video gamer and a professional gamer. I assert that because of the lack of granularity (the complexity of real world conditions and physics involved in say kicking a field goal is infinite compared to landing a headshot in an fps or skillshot in a moba, for example) the skill/talent gap between a pro and regular gamer is much smaller compared to that of a pro and regular sportsman.
That's my only point of contention, look forward to reading more of your stuff.
Edit - I sound way to confident here, could be totally wrong it's just where my mind went when I got into esports myself.
Knowing that AIs will easily outperform any vain human attempts at a video game with enough training cycles and data, "watching excellence" isn't quite the point though, is it? By that measure, esports players should be among the very first victim professions of AI automation.
And while we already may have popular virtual influencers on Instagram and the like, something tells me the spectator equation of the esports market would largely wither and die if dominated by algorithm vs. algorithm combat.
It never seemed that weird to me, though I think that might be because I've never really enjoyed 'normal' sports either. As someone who doesn't watch sport, not watching esports seemed very natural, and I've never seen much of a difference between the two.
"Esports are perplexing, for video games are meant to be played, not watched" is how I've always felt about traditional sports, too, on the whole. I think what I find most surprising is that older sports fans find it so difficult to understand the appeal of esports. Though perhaps you need that basis of having played games to 'get' it - much like most football fans will have played football as a child, even if they don't still regularly play as an adult.
I cast esports semi-professionally. I've also played them, though the only one in which I reached the highest competitive level in was extremely niche (though it may be of particular interest to this crowd, because part of the elevator pitch is that it's a "reverse Turing Test." It's called SpyParty, and I highly recommend it).
When I'm asked why someone would watch another person play video games, the answer is: for the same reasons you would want to watch another person play sports. To enjoy excellence, to see the real-life narratives of skill and pressure and strategy play out. Basically everything you've said.
One thing I'd like to add, which is related to what you mentioned about donations, is the parasocial nature of the profession. Like most streamers (and, for that matter, many podcasters) there's a false sense of intimacy that draws people in, that makes them feel like this person is their friend. It's standard, until you're *really* huge (and sometimes even then) to call out every donation by name on stream.
There's some of this with athletes, to be sure, but not as much. There is a degree to which technology here is simultaneously the cause of and "solution" to our sense of loneliness, and the relationship people have with esports and streamers is just one example of it.
Went to find your pieces in my very full inbox (12,027 unread), and that is a first. Grateful for your perspective
My first exposure to esports was listening to some pro Quake players comment on a replay of their match. It was eye-opening. They mentally kept track of maybe 4 different timers for various damage buffs, armor shards and weapons, and sort of instinctively knew where their opponent was likely to be based on those timers.
My main beef with esports is that all of the particle effects and animations often make it hard for the uninitiated to understand anything at all without having played the game. Whereas I mostly get American football without playing constantly. There aren’t any “special abilities” beyond the usual things humans do, but at an ultra-elite level
This explanation was so satisfying. Thank you!