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Comment by SaltyBackendGuy | Hacker News Reader

As a Twitch consumer (married 'professional' in early 30's). I am a huge video game nerd at heart, so I watch streamers that run games that I am interested in however don't have time to play/master. Often it doesn't involve me sitting down for hours at night (although I am sure there's a huge demographic that does that as well). I usually watch when I am laying in bed before I go to sleep. Same time my wife is usually watching some separate but equally mind numbing content to decompress from a long day.

Just another form of entertainment, like tv, but there's nothing I enjoy watching on tv. To each their own.

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This. I also enjoy video games and often read up on trends and news... unfortunately I have little to no time to really meaningfully play them. I enjoy watching people who have gotten really masterful play the games I have read about. Not unlike sports.

I also watch things like the Games Done Quick marathons. Those are mostly people who have dedicated themselves to a few games and are mostly interested in completing them in insanely short periods of time. People often spend years dedicating time to shaving off minutes... I would never do that... but I am glad someone does.

Yea I love games and used to play a lot, but they have become a huge time commitment. It’s usually one or more of:

1. Games that simply require grinding to unlock game progression (XP, time-based gates, etc.)

2. Games with numerous hour-long quests that need to be done serially in order to progress

3. Games that disproportionately reward outlier-level skill, requiring a huge practice time commitment (multiplayer shooters)

4. Games that reward deep knowledge of rules and formulas, requiring extensive study and sometimes Excel modeling (Eve Online comes to mind, but also the Civilization series and some sandbox games)

These days if you want something fun you can play for 15-30 minutes and still get good at on that schedule, you’re limited to the bland “Casual Gaming” genre.

These days? Hasn't that always been the case? It's just that when we were kids etc. we had more free time.

The Nintendo Switch has an excellent selection of more 'casual' games. Super Mario Odyssey reminded me a lot of the games I played as a kid.

I would say not really. For one thing, the early days of gaming held onto many elements from arcades where games were meant to be consumed in somewhat bite-sized chunks (Atari, NES, etc).

A big factor for multiplayer games is the somewhat modern obsession with matchmaking and character intro/pick screens. When I was a kid, I could hop into a game immediately for a 15-20 minute deathmatch session of Quake 1/2/3 in any semi-populated server then leave whenever it was time to do homework, etc.

Last I tried Quake Champions, the newest installment in the series, you spend roughly 1-5 minutes in a matchmaking queue then another 2-3 minutes (or more, it was pretty bad sometimes) in some intro/loading screens, then another minute or two in a pre-match warm-up. So even in the same genre's case you're already potentially 8+ minutes sunk into your 15-20 minute 'quick game' period.

To make matters worse (again because of matchmaking) you are penalized if you have to leave before the completion of a match or if you go idle. Usually this penalty is applied as a low-priority queue the next time you try to matchmake which just compounds the problem from above.

> Quake Chanpions

Don’t forget the 2-3 minutes it seems to take to even load the game. QC would be so much better if you could just load it (quickly) hop onto an already-playing game, and skip all the intros and statistics. How did a franchise like Quake backslide so badly?

I think the developer/publisher are just responding to market pressures.

Quake Live (at least for its first few years) was relatively pure and old-school, including in the ways mentioned in this thread, but it was only moderately popular and didn't seem to do well financially. The most (financially) successful modern games tend to focus a lot on extrinsic motivations to play -- including character progression, unlockables, gambling crates etc., but also things that give extra context to individual matches, like statistics and ranking points -- rather than just the core gameplay. People also have less tolerance for being the newbie who loses 100-0, and expect to be matched against players around their level.

Not all of these things are relevant to your question, but some of them help to explain the trend toward lobbies, matchmaking queues, and other obstacles to just clicking on a server list and jumping into a game.

Same boat. I find a chill streamer that doesn't talk much and plays a game I like. I set the TV to 30 minute timer and watch for ~10 minutes before falling asleep. This is similar to people that fall asleep to shows they like -- see https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurama_Sleepers/

Whoa. I am a The Office sleeper and had no idea that was a thing. There's something comforting about knowing I'm not the only one.

The entire ASMR sleep community is built around this premise as well, fwiw.

Nature and history documentaries for me. Pretty sure I've slept through some part of every documentary David Attenborough has made.

The Office or Forensic Files and I'm out.

Once upon a time, a huge segment of Western civilization used to fall alseep to the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. :)

Something I'm curious about is where that comes from. Why do people like falling asleep to the TV? Why is it preferred over white noise?

White noise is better than nothing, but my brain won't stop generating content (thoughts) with white noise. When the TV is generating the content, my brain focuses on that, and it's mindless enough to fall asleep to. I think it has something to do with being a mentally active person forced into a passive role, like shifting the brain into low gear.

Check out the Sleep With Me Podcast[1]. Same concept: Dull, meandering talking to lull you to sleep.

[1]https://www.sleepwithmepodcast.com/

Check out the book, "Turning the Mind into an Ally" by Sakyong Mipham. I used the techniques in that book to silence those random, erratic thoughts. I fall asleep within a minute of hitting the pillow now.

Thanks, I will look it up.

Honestly, I do it because I'm afraid of the dark.

When my SO is out of town, my brain generates all sorts of horrible possibilities of things that could happen to my while laying in bed, from simple home invasions to black holes suddenly appearing and consuming my right arm. Watching Futurama (I had no idea there was a whole community around it) distracts me from those invasive thoughts.

I get pareidolia from white noise. Not a lot, but enough that the 'sounds' are more distracting than mundane background sounds like TV or music that I can tune out easily.

Hah yeah, I hear melodies in white noise fairly often. Are you a musician by chance?

No but I've spent a good amount of time doing vaguely sound-engineering work where I listen carefully to audio samples. I may have overtrained some pattern-recognition wetware along the way.

Even 'naturally' generated white noise (e.g. Marpac Sound Machine)? I have similar problems listening to electronically generated white noise but no problems with the Marpac.

Possibly not lab-grade white noise, just broadband audio noise in general: fans, moving water, RF static, voice codec comfort noise turned up too loud, that sort of thing.

If you grew up in a big family and got used to there always being voices and activity in the house, it can be kind of comforting just to have quiet, familiar voices as background noise.

I'm not on Twitch much, but "quiet" and "comforting" aren't really how I'd characterize the voices of most streamers I've been exposed to.

I've been trying to go to sleep earlier for a little over a week now (I used to sleep at about 3AM-5AMish and now I'm sleeping at about 9:30PM-10:3PM0ish now). My sleep plan is turn off all the lights, open up my laptop about 30 minutes before I try and sleep and watch an episode or two of futurama on 1.23x speed. I've been getting to sleep every night since on my target time despite being on an Adderall prescription. Futurama really helps for some reason. I'm trying to build it up to the point where I don't need to watch any show to get to sleep early, but I'm not quite at that point yet.

For me it's dubbed anime, it probably takes me 1-2 weeks to make it through an entire episode.

While I work I need some noise, something, nearly anything. The complete lack of silence bothers me. I usually listen to OCRemix at work (via rainwave.cc) or 90's/00's music from when I was younger (nostalgia).

At home I will put on something like Friends (Netflix), Giant Bomb videos (giantbomb.com), or classic game play throughs (NES, SNES, Genesis) on YouTube (or Giant Bomb). For example, LaserTime did Aladdin SNES vs Aladdin Genesis side by side video and they played through NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Simpson's games on NES/SNES. Giant Bomb has a series called Vinnyvania where Vinny (one of the Giant Bomb employees) plays through all the Castlevania games and another where they play through all the fighting games and rank them. I'm not into the new games.

Just a sidenote for anyone else who might be streaming rainwave from a limited connection: it uses about 60 megabytes an hour and sounds pretty heavily compressed (only a problem on some tracks)

I like new age music while I work. Tangerine Dream, Andreas Vollenweider, Vangelis, etc.

Another thing about the TV analogy; when TV was only broadcast, many people (well, at least I...) would end up not watching an entire series. You turn on the TV and find out it's episode 3 airing tonight. What do you do? Just watch it and figure out what's going on via context, or try to hunt down someone who has a VCR and already taped episodes 1 and 2?

Twitch in some ways is more like those old days. I follow several streamers fairly closely. And by "fairly closely" I mean "they stream several hours a day and I probably watch 20 minutes of it, amortized over time".

Good point with broadcast TV. For shows I enjoy on Netflix, I'll usually miss the latest season on live broadcast if I forget to set the DVR to catch the series. If I wait until episode 3, I've already missed 1 & 2. So I can hope for enough re-runs to catch them all or wait longer for the series to migrate to Netflix where I can watch on my own schedule.

I also find entertainment in watching game streamers, but I catch them on Youtube at my own schedule as well. I've never attempted to subscribe to Twitch and watch live.

We had VCRs with timed record from the early 80s onward and had a _large_ collection of recorded VHS.

We got into the habit of recording a few minutes before and after the show was supposed to air, as things frequently did not run on schedule. Especially recording things on the major TV networks and recording Doctor Who off NJN who would keep the fundraiser drives going as long as they could before starting an episode.

The only problem with this was sometimes my brother had a habit of taping public access porn over whatever was in the VCR...but that wasn't exactly a problem either. :)

Yeah same. I've found there are a handful of games that are fun to watch rather than play. League of Legends and MOBA games for instance are super freaking boring for me to play because I suck at killing creeps (too tedious for me) but watching pros play is pretty satisfying because the higher level games are faster paced.

Also agree with the TV thing -- lots of things I don't enjoy watching or maybe if its an episode, I don't have an entire hour to watch so rather not start one if I'm not gonna finish it.

Consumer of the content as well. I play some of the games I watched stream. For me it includes insight into how things work and how to play better. Some streamers have good connections to developers and also provide a platform by which they and their audience can discuss a game, mechanics, and such, live, which is much more enjoyable than just posting to a forum.

Finally the more successful streamers are very enjoyable to watch. They engage with their audiences and treat them with respect. Compared to some of the smaller or no audience streamers who don't communicate or are just rude to their audience when they have one.

It is entertainment, it also is background noise for me when I am working.

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