I relate to your sentiment, and then I think about how hard it was to explain to my parents why I enjoy watching others play video games.
That's the part I don't get.
Also, at least some celebrities are indeed professional entertainers.
But the videos I talk about, I would have thought the people in there were not funnier than my real friends, even at 12 years old. They have nothing special about it.
Maybe that's the key? That they are as average as the viewer?
However, I don't get watching pewdiepie playing something. I just can't groke it. You don't know the person, the person is not in the room, the person is not even currently playing since it's a recording. It's a flat image of someone else having fun. And not somebody particularly good, interesting or special.
I tried to tell myself it's like watching porn: you watch somebody else having sex, why not play video game? But something doesn't click for me.
I miss the point entirely.
It is essentially a hack for the brain's social processing systems. Generally, we'd have only seen others in real life and interacted with them. This confers evolutionary advantage so we feel good interacting further with people, and perhaps even seeing people do things we find enjoyable in the first place.
Now with video, we feel good as we "spend time" with the other person, even though they don't know of our existence. Our caveman brain doesn't know about this sort of one sided relationship at all, it wasn't present in the olden days.
We will see the same with AI and chatbots as the decades pass, only at least now we're actually able to interact in a two sided way. There are already people doing this with ChatGPT or even Replika.
You want to watch it live on tv, even though the fact that you're watching has zero impact on the result. You're just watching other people play a game. You could do anything else and just check the scores afterwards, but still you want to watch it.
Some people will watch a recording of the game and still enjoy it even though the scores were determined hours ago.
The younger generation does the same thing, but instead of sports they watch someone play a game.
I don't understand either, but I can live with it =)
But I can live as well with it. I don't blame the kids that watch those. I just don't understand it.
For me, it's just low effort entertainment. Like I don't enjoy talking with people, but it's kinda nice to have someone talk in the background to remind me that I'm not the only human alive.
I'm in my thirties though, these parasocial teenagers might be less jaded then I am.
But to get there, you have to spend time doing so before it happens.
Which means you have to watch many videos where somebody is explaining their school day or reacting to a movie trailer before you get to that point.
Indeed, which is exactly what these creators do. I've watched a few of their videos before and I can't get over how...mundane their content is. There really is nothing of actual substance there. But I assume watching more of that content over time cultivates the same feeling as bullshitting with your friends, hence the parasocial relationship forms.
It's okay if you don't get it, if you don't enjoy watching others game. Doesn't mean others can't
But at least for sports, you will see a level of play that is itself can be interesting because you can't just see it in day to day life.
Watching a video of a guy opening a kinder egg or playing badly at cod for the first time.
I get people watching streamers that are good at what they do. Rankers. Speed runners. Analysts. Jokers.
This is not what I'm talking about.