Vicarious Gaming

“Experiencing” as a new dimension of modern gaming

For decades, “as fun as watching someone else play a video game” was a putdown. Now watching other people play games is one of the dominant forms of entertainment on the planet. The explosion of game-based livestreaming bears further examination because it defies traditional understandings of creation, performance, and even the purpose of viewing.

Previous writing on the ascendance of game-based streaming tends to focus on psychological explanations for the secondhand thrill involved in seeing someone else perform these challenges or stories. There’s also the parasocial aspect of watching streamers on Twitch and other platforms, with viewers forming affective bonds with players. (This is also the basis for the success of much contemporary personality-based entertainment beyond games, such as YouTubers, TikTokers, Instagram influencers, and more.) The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated these trends, for years restricting in-person socializing and entertainment options for billions. But those broader explanations miss the specific appeal behind each of these forms of what could be called “vicarious gaming.” Furthermore, each form nods to a different facet of how drastically streaming has shifted paradigms not just of entertainment, but also basic human interaction.

Returning to esports is the simplest place to begin, because of its parallels to the analog world — “normal” sports, for lack of a better descriptor. The kind of prowess on display is different from what we see in games like basketball or football, but the basic joy of rooting for one player or team against others in a contest of skill is fundamentally the same.

But how do you properly engage a mass audience with an esport? While games are cinematic, playing one is not — at least not as we traditionally think of what’s exciting to witness as an audience. There’s a reason that many startup television networks that attempted to showcase esports through the traditional broadcasting model, like XLEAGUE.TV or OGN, didn’t last. Streaming video was the key to truly drawing mass audiences to esports. I would argue that this is because prior to streaming, the medium and its message weren’t properly in sync. Streaming made it much easier to directly translate what players were seeing on their own screens to the viewers (and also to get reactions from the players and audiences in a less intrusive way). And now millions tune in for League of Legends, DOTA 2, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive tournaments.

If venues like Twitch are the gaming equivalent of ESPN, then YouTube is its own forum for esports “highlight reels.” I personally have spent more time watching “best of” compilations on the site than I have watching actual livestreams. Fighting games like the Super Smash Bros. series in particular lend themselves well to this format. Free of any context, one can easily understand a quick, exciting fight, or even just one impressive snippet of a fight. The options are remarkably customizable. You can hunt down the highlights of a specific event, the most impressive plays that all involve the same character, or a compilation of memorably “disrespectful” moves that players have pulled. Here the appeal is similar not just to those of clips from sports games, but also the wider YouTube genre of “tidbit” spectatorship — things that draw eyeballs simply because they’re so interesting or unique. It’s fundamentally not so different from “Horse kicks tree, farts on dogs then runs away.” Each vid is a fun diversion for a few minutes, and also eminently sharable.

The wider YouTube ecosystem supports many other kinds of gaming videos. Rather than let a viewer watch someone else play, the ways that YouTube and other sharing platforms display game footage makes viewers feel as if they themselves are playing the game. Isolate a game’s audio-visual components from the act of playing, and it could arguably become its own film. Indeed, critic Keith Uhlich included a comprehensive YouTube playthrough of 2019’s Death Stranding in his consideration for his favorite films of the 2010s.

This kind of content was the origin point for sharing games via streaming video, in the form of Let’s Plays. Livestreaming would go on to supplant LPs as the preeminent personality-based form of streamed game experience. As for focusing on the games themselves, “clean” uploads, free of any input from the uploaders beyond how they played the game, have risen to prominence. Such “no commentary” longform videos and compilations exist for nearly any game you can think of. Here’s the notoriously challenging platformer Celeste. Here’s the magic realist point-and-click masterpiece Kentucky Route Zero. Here are 28 hours of Red Dead Redemption 2. If you don’t want to spend money on a game, find a title too challenging to play yourself, or simply don’t feel like playing it but are curious about the story, then this is an emotionally involving alternative. Watching a game is qualitatively a different experience than playing it, and one could quibble over whether the experience is enough like that intended by writers and developers, but that’s a separate issue.

And then, of course, there are individual livestreamers and vloggers, those inheritors of the Let’s Play mantle. Some, like Zfg1 or Beuchiism, are speedrunners, showing off how quickly they can make it through a game. Some, like Hasan Piker, are political pundits who almost play games as wallpaper for their musings on current events. There are the creators like Pewdiepie and Jacksepticeye, whose “deal” is harder to pin down, using games to create more nebulous skits and sketches. That indefinable magnetism draws millions of viewers who follow along as they just play games. Sometimes the level of intimacy broached goes into uncomfortable, oversharing territory. There’s a subgenre of creators playing games notorious for being sad, such as Jacksepticeye recalling his grandmother succumbing to cancer while he plays That Dragon, Cancer or Pokimane weeping while playing Before Your Eyes. This kind of emotional rawness (or maybe performative sadness) is the extreme end of the parasocial quality of streaming.

Across these different “genres” of vicarious gaming, we continuously see the simulation of the gaming experience playing out for the viewer — without any need for input. For many, a panel cam at an esports tournament or a livestreamer’s face window provides the illusion of company. This is a form characterized by a passive kind of spectatorship, custom-built for watching while doing other things. (And common features like autoplay and 2x playback often encourage such a relationship.) It’s ideal for the overwhelming, busy contemporary world of too much work and endless stimulation options. It will be fascinating to see how these entertainment forms will continue to evolve as technology marches onward.

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