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Penny Arcade - Comic - Consider The Lupo
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Consider The Lupo
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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Dr Lupo is one of them. He wears a lot of wool.
Lupo hilariously really plays a ton of Escape from Tarkov, which is a popular streaming game, but still feels niche to me. Though he got known for playing fortnite which is of course the juggernaut.
He's a pretty decent streamer to watch, but can be a little on the M rated side and if you don't get some of his morning show jokes you might think he's a flat earther (because he rags on a friend of his with the dumb theories). He donates a ton of money to st jude and other charities and is generally a decent person as much as one can be on the internets.
pleasepaypreacher.net
As a mid-range millennial, I've found one or two I enjoy. Sometimes I just like to have something playing on the side to half pay attention to, if I don't feel like actually focusing on a game. And if they're good at the game and you're trying to get better, it can be handy to see somebody who knows what they're doing.
As another elder millenial its kind of the evolution of watching your buddy play games like I did as a kid. I don't have friends that play games the same way, but I can pull up twitch and watch duders play games for me when I need background noise or just too tired to play games myself.
pleasepaypreacher.net
But I also accept that I am simply not with whatever 'it' is these days due to rapidly heading for middle age, and try to maintain apathy over irrational anger.
There's a few different reasons, some of which might resonate with you.
1. Maybe the streamer's really good at a game you like, and you either want to get better, or just see it executed well.
2. Maybe the streamer's doing challenge runs you like the idea of, but don't want to do yourself.
3. Maybe the streamer's racing others, which can be fun to watch.
4. Maybe the streamer's doing a blind playthrough of a game you like, which can be equal parts bring back that "first play" feel, and really frustrating because they don't know the stuff that you figured out halfway through the game.
5. Depending on the streamer, might be fun to have in the background while you do other stuff or wind down.
6. Depends a lot on the streamer and size of the community, but you can have genuine "online friends." This can get weird though due to the fairly one sided nature of the interaction, especially with larger streamers. This is the "parasocial relationships" you may have heard about.
Probably a few more reasons as well. If you compare to "why would anyone watch sports when you can play sports" there will be some overlap.
I mean you can play football, but you still watch pro sports right?
pleasepaypreacher.net
Just about any speedrun. I'm not going to do a 30 minute run of Breath of the Wild, but it's a lot of fun to watch folks try to nail each trick and pull it off.
Megapopular streamers where the chat is like catting a massive log file only filled with emoji... yeah, I still don't think I personally am ever going to get into that. But then I never liked "reality" TV, either (save Strip Search, for reasons similar to the above).
Or Cuphead, god damn do I love me some cuphead, but I don't have the finger dexterity to do that shit at all. Or Ori.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Same, with a notable exception - adventure games, story/cutscene-heavy games, etc where the experience is "a movie where you sometimes push buttons and/or solve puzzles to continue watching."
For those, I often prefer going to YouTube and watching a no-narration playthrough (especially since then I don't have to pay to buy the movie game, just spend the time I'd have to anyway).
Yeah I mostly watch music streamers, though I would hop into the PA stream when Buland was on playing RimWorld. Those smaller streams where you're not just shouting into the void are great. Both the chat and the streamer recognize you, they recognise you when you meet again in other streams, etc.
Maybe the streamer is playing a game you're thinking of buying and you want to see a little of it before to make sure.
Or you're not even thinking about buying it, and you haven't even heard of it, but you saw it on the stream and it seemed cool.
That happened with me several times on PA streams. Also with First 15.
The nice thing about the non-english speaking Vtubers is that I have to wait for subtitled clips, otherwise I'd probably be watching Korone all day long
Yeah, elder millenial here too. Like others have said, this is just the same as the watching on the couch factor. What some people miss often in this kind of discussion, is that streams didn't really change this experience in a substantial way. Your perspective that you don't know why anyone else would watch just tells me that you were the kid who constantly hogged the gaming system and probably whined when forced to give someone else a turn. The people who watch streams are your cool friends who were happy to relax while you did that, but doing it remotely. That's... literally it. You don't get why people WATCH streams, because you're the kind of person whose character would be better suited to HAVING one. Some personality types need to be in the action, others are content to watch it. Both are valid, and we should be happy for the symbiotic relationship. There are definitely games I enjoy seeing played, that I would hate playing myself. Among Us, for instance. I have selective mutism, I could never play that effectively. People would eject me just because I would go silent when people got heated and I started to become uncomfortable, I'm sure. It's still funny as hell to watch and listen to, though. I also used to play Overwatch, but the character bloat got beyond my ability to want or be able to keep up with all the ways it changes team dynamics. So I do really enjoy watching tournament content from time to time, but I can't be arsed to learn and master how every new character bounces off of and plays complimentary to... *checks*... 30+ other characters.
that said I prefer to interact with streamers in more curated form on youtube than to watch live
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
I sucked at Nuclear Throne, went to Twitch to see if anyone else was playing it. Ran into one Scottish dude who was ripping through the game. I was his only viewer and he just got very excited and started to show off his skills while we chatted for a bit.
Besides that, there's not enough hours in a day for me to watch livestreamers (or sports, for that matter).
I think you may have overshot a bit there. As I stated above, I totally get the couch factor if the streamer interacts with you or the chat interacts with each other. But on these big streamers, it's a flying wall of text with everyone screaming into the void. Your presence is entirely moot. Something like that is much more like watching sports on TV while alone in the room. That's not really the same thing as watching your friend play, possibly with some other friends with you.
The streamer this comic was about gets around 7k to 13k on average and yet he still interacts with his chat. Its not each person he'll talk to, but just because someone is big doesn't mean they can't still give you that somewhat personal connection.
pleasepaypreacher.net
As it was in response to the post that lumped them all together into "streams", and then drew conclusions about people who were not into them, I wasn't specifically talking about DrLupo. Though I did just pop on and they have 15k viewers and the chat is scrolling and they're not really reading any of it. I mean, how could they? They're trying to concentrate on an FPS. These kind of things depend on the type of game being played and the percentage of people watching that are actually chatting. I just jumped on (PA's) Josh's stream, and he has 56 viewers. That's a whole other level of interaction than you'll ever get with someone like DrLupo.
But if people have popped onto these bigger name streamers, who play things like Fortnite, and who have chatty chats, I can totally see how that really did change the experience (of couch watching) in a very substantial way. That doesn't mean they are flawed people (let's be honest, saying that if someone doesn't like streaming, they must have been a whiney kid who couldn't share video games is a pretty negative judgement). Perhaps they just haven't found the right stream with the right people on it. That was me before I started jumping on the PA streams. They most likely have no found one where it's like sitting and watching your buddy and chatting with them while they play, because you're going to have to go to something like Josh's stream for that. It's just fundamentally different.
I'm just basically saying let's not categorize people quite so fast.
Personally I prefer to be active with things, but there are a few people, like The Normies that watch TV series and if it is one I enjoyed enough then watching them react to it is worth the time. They get invested in it enough that the reactions are genuine.