Watching People Play Video Games

When I think about the swathes of time that I’ve had over the last year of quarantine, I wonder where I spent my leisure time. Sure, I watched a good deal of anime, TV shows, TikToks, and movies, but where did the rest of the time go? Or in general, where have I spent most of my time on the internet in my life. I don’t have any statistics to back it up, but I’d guess that I’ve spent a good deal of time watching people play video games.

Before Twitch (and even now), I’d watch Let’s Plays on YouTube. Before YouTube, I’d watch my older brother play through games IRL. Like many younger siblings across the world, I learned to love the experience of simply watching a game get played. Zelda didn’t have a co-op mode, and my undeveloped motor skills weren’t honed enough to have a chance at stopping Ganon; it only made sense that I could learn to enjoy watching, backseat solving puzzles along the way.

For me, video games have always been an inherently social activity — I couldn’t imagine trying to play a single player game by myself. Most games I’ve played in my life have been multiplayer: I can’t even begin to count the sheer hours that I’ve put into the Halo series, the 2K series, or the Call of Duty series. Even when I do play some games solo, it’s only with another let’s play in the background, to make it feel like I’m working together with this internet stranger to achieve victory.

And so, despite having an ongoing interest in video games, even studying them in some courses in college, I find it difficult to play them. Instead, I look to my favorite streamers and YouTubers to share their own experiences playing the games, getting a sense of not only the game but their unique perspectives and play styles on the game.

I recently read a piece by Jenny Offill (one of my favorite writers) in the New Yorker, in which she wrote about re-reading the novel Mrs. Dalloway, regularly. She mentions a quote from the author, Virginia Woolf:

At each fresh reading one notices some change in them, as if the sap of life ran in their leaves, and with skies and plants they had the power to alter their shape and colour from season to season. To write down one’s impressions of Hamlet as one reads it year after year, would be virtually to record one’s own autobiography, for as we know more of life, so Shakespeare comments upon what we know.

In a parallel vein, the same games are changed by those who play them. Different folks will take different directions, and each one reveals a different aspect of that same game. One of my favorite games of all time is 2017’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a breathtaking open-world approach to the classic series. I played the game intermittently, solving shrines and watching my brother tame the Divine Beasts (I’m still bad at fighting mechanics). Despite the fact that I’ve seen the ending of the game half a dozen times, I still find so much joy in watching different people play the game for the first time. It’s such a gorgeous and joyful experience and each person approaches the open world in their own ways.

Video games are one of the most unique art forms because of how experiential and involved they are. They shift to the user’s actions, through dialog or game mechanics or interpretations of the gameart. Part of me wonders if I am truly experiencing the game since I’m unable to make any of the choices in the game. Yet, another part of me wonders if by watching multiple playthroughs of a game, I’m engaging in some sort of meta-play, where I replace the individual choices in a game into a selection of a particular player’s set of choices. I trade a thousand small choices into one: who am I watching today?