Roderick

Watching other people play games

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Besides having always loved playing games, I’ve also always loved watching other people play games. Instinctually, since games are meant to be played, one is lead to think that watching games is at best a poor substitute for playing them yourself, something for when you’re waiting for your turn. I recently came to the realization that this isn’t so. Spectating, if I may call it so, is its own thing altogether.

The realization came when I started to notice that what I see on the screen when I play games is not what I see when I watch other people play. There is a sort of hyper-focus during playing, a subconscious filtering of information. All the fluff is registered and ignored, so that the player is better able to deal with the important stuff. The user interface (numbers, bars, mini-maps) are important, so are enemies and their movement. Background visuals, details in the worlds, are chucked.

Take the recent Bioshock 2. Here’s a game that is visually overwhelmingly rich and saturated. The player is forced to make distinctions between what is necessary information and not, to be able to function in that world. Since Bioshock 2 is so heavy on details, the game actually makes it rather difficult in the beginning. Pretty soon she’s used to it however, and by that point, what is seen in the game differs from what the person watching next to her sees. Especially during times of action, her focus is purely on objectives, on enemy positioning and combat strategy. She switches weapons, fires plasmids and avoids hazardous terrain. It’s difficult to register what actually happens in the brain, how things are visualized, but it’s undeniable that the visuals on the screen are only a slice of what she’s really focusing on. How much ammo does she have? Where can she replenish her health? Where’s that enemy hiding? What’s a good strategy to lure them out? A mini-map is probably the worst detractor: the player will almost exclusively think about the level in terms of the mini-map layout, instead of the actual surroundings.

How different is this from how the game is perceived by a spectator? Think more in terms of watching a movie. What happens on screen is all there is. Sure, the spectator may empathize with the player’s struggle and strategize about things, but still this happens on a different plane, more along the lines of watching sport on TV and shouting suggestions or predicting what will happen. Devoid of the entire meta-game that rolls in the head of the player, the spectator sees and knows only what is happening on screen. The change in perception is often staggering. I have noticed details I didn’t see before. Levels suddenly became beautifully designed worlds instead of gameplay challenges to negotiate. It’s a fundamentally different experience. The state of passive onlooker versus active player changes the perception of the game in a big way. In many ways, I see more when I’m just watching.

And this is not even considering the sports-element, the emotions you feel when you watch someone pulling off something incredible. That’s a whole other layer altogether, one emphasized by actual sports gaming. Watch a few amazing Korean Starcraft league matches and you’ll know. But that’s another story and not what I’m writing about here: a more intimate form of watching when your friends play games, on the same couch.

Watching games is a totally different thing from playing games, with its own unique pleasures. The gamer and the spectator are, in fact, not experiencing the same thing. Spectators tap into a different layer, process the information differently, more like a narrative, like a movie, whereas the player perceives the events from a strategic, gaming viewpoint. As such, watching games is neither lesser than playing them, nor a waste of time. I instinctively felt this long before, intensely enjoying the act of spectating. Now I can conclude that there’s actually a reason for it.

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The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past must be the game I have finished more often than any other game (with a plot and structure). Yet, I have ever actually played it, controller in hand, for 2 hours max. I didn't suck at it and I wasn't afraid of it, I just preferred someone else play it. So I watched either my sister or my friend complete the game for, what, four or five times. I enjoyed it a lot too and never actually thought I would gain anything if I was the one pushing the button swinging the sword. It felt perfectly natural to me and even my friend didn't find it strange that I barely even touched a game that (my sister and) I owned. It was just like playing any other single player SNES game we owned except that we didn't swap controllers at any point.

While there was seemingly no reason for me not to play Zelda back then, there is a reason why I don't play a lot of games but would still like to see them played: I hate scary crap that jumps at you and tries to rape your skull or bite your head off or whatever. That is why I have never actually played a Resident Evil or Silent Hill game or even Bioshock. I would still very much like to see someone else play them, though. I don't know anyone to do that with, however, and I don't think I would be able to enjoy just watching someones playthrough on video.

God damned I miss playing video games with someone actually sitting next to me and swapping the controller every now and then. Or not swapping the controller every now and then, I guess.

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I remember me and my friend playing arena mode of TF2 switching every match and the one not playing would always taunt other one. Ah, good times...

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I've always liked watching other people play. I'm terrible at FPS's and get a bit seasick when I try to play myself, but I really wanted to experience a lot of these games I'd heard so much about, especially the first BioShock and the Half Life series. Given my equilibrium disadvantages I wouldn't have been able to otherwise. Watching my housemate play was especially interesting with BioShock. I was able to really take in the environment, which is what interested me about the game in the first place. The times I've tried to play it myself, I find myself either stopping progressing to stand around and look at the details of the room, or tuning them out because I get attacked. It's definitely an entirely different story when you watch someone else, and I appreciate that almost more with certain games.

I used to watch my older brother play games all the time when I was little, so I'm completely conditioned to enjoy it. Perhaps manipulated is a better word than conditioned, since by convincing me it was fun to watch, he never had to share the controller. :grin:

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I've never been into watching others play. Games are meant to be played, not watched. Otherwise they'd be movies.

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:tup::tup::tup: Rodi

Absolutely. The first time I really noticed the hyper-focus you mention was watching a housemate play Resistance, in that I was noticing all kinds of subtle stuff about the art style I hadn't seen at all when playing it.

The sports thing too; my brother and I used to take turns spectating/playing MoH games (death = switch seats). We shared plenty of incredible moments that we probably wouldn't have remembered if there was noone there to comment. I once popped through a door and pulled off two exceptionally lucky rapid silenced headshots on a pair of seated guards, causing my brother to ask "David. If there's ever a war... can I be on your side?" :D

Another thing I've realised being in a 50% gamer household where people spectate is that games have a definite visual language that I take for granted. Most of us can grok a game very quickly by watching it, but to one housemate and most of my family when they visit, they're just visual nonsense.

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Great read!

I've definitely experienced what you're talking about, but usually from the other end...

I've lived with several different people now who declined to play, and would rather just watch me do it. One of the big reasons I'd get if I tried to press a controller or a keyboard into another person's hands was that they really wanted to see the "whole picture" and the stellar visuals without having to worry about gameplay. One person even bought a couple of games specifically for me to play when they're around, turning it into kind of a movie experience for them that apparently they weren't interested in trying attain the skills to reproduce personally.

As a player, this experience is sort of amazing- You start thinking about crazy things like overall combat pacing and camera movements/angles. You deliberately attempt to use the ENTIRE range of options, rather than "cheesing" one specific move or strategy to get through a tough encounter. I've gone to great pains to attempt to transform and script my play to make watching it more enjoyable in situations like that. For example, unnecessarily flipping a third person camera to point back toward an explosion I caused and putting the character into a crouch to make it look like a badass "Bruckheimer" moment. Hah, my Uncle learned to effortlessly navigate a certain neighborhood in GTA 3 without ever exiting the insane cinematic camera mode that randomly looks at you from helicopter shots, head on, from the perspective of the car chasing you, etc. just to make his "Subway Jump" runs more entertaining to watch.

Look at the proliferation of playthrough video on YouTube for god's sake! If the game is even slightly popular, there's at least one complete playthrough of it available out there. Even if it's cut up into 10 minutes chunks of gameplay over the course of eight hours, there's a demand for it. I know a girl who's too scared by horror games to play them, so she just watches someone else play them online to get that additional layer of removal while experiencing the plot and horror movie vibes from a "safe" distance.

From the watcher perspective though, there's another huge reason I agree with you that may not have occurred to some yet- I watch others play to study game design!

There are things like difficulty and intuitiveness that are impossible to judge from the perspective of someone who routinely plays and makes games. Designers have so many visual and logical shorthands for things that we take for granted! They're almost all based on the cumulative experiences of a lifetime of playing video games... That most people don't possess. This is one of the huge reasons gaming continues to struggle with being widely accepted as an art form and a lifestyle choice, right up there with degrading depictions of stereotypes and violence that lacks consequences and pathos. We're getting better, but the vast majority of games aren't designed in such a way that a complete outsider is invited to "get it". When die hard gamers and game makers say that they were taken by surprise by the rise of the Wii or Facebook games, what they're really saying is they're unfamiliar with what serious focus testing reveals, and that paints a sad picture of entire genres and communities designing themselves slowly into a corner where the only people they appeal to are those that are already in the know.

Observing how someone who isn't me navigates an unfamiliar series of interlocking systems is FASCINATING, and reveals just how poorly designed some of my favorite games really are. I really wish I could get more time in such a position, but a lot of people are creeped out by how little input I offer when they get stuck on something. Putting them more at ease by backseat driving contaminates what I'm really looking for, though. I'm looking for reveals like "at what point EXACTLY does someone just give up trying to figure a thing out?" I'm pretty tenacious and forgiving when it comes to a challenge, but I get the impression that most people never actually finish the single player modes of games they play. This assumption has been backed up several times, and if I want to do my "research", I may eventually need to be more forthcoming with helpful gameplay advice... It's a difficult situation to engineer in the first place, socially. People generally don't like to be studied while they're trying to overcome challenges.

Watching other people play isn't just entertaining, it's the only way we're going to figure out how to be more widely accepted as an industry. It's the only way we're going move past "Hardcore" and "Casual".

Watching other people play is the future.

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Nice read!

I personally don't think I undergo the Hyper-focus in an FPS, though I do in games such as Ninja Gaiden, a racing game or a bullet hell game. Though for me this is closer to a trance, losing focus from the screen and just letting my mind process what is happening, I have no idea how it works, but it does.

On the subject of spectating, I can see the enjoyment of it. My ex of several years ago seemed to love watching us playing Halo lan games, despite her not being a gamer. I have never been into it really, other than fighting games. Though I guess with Scoops mentioning of Gears of War in the latest 'cast, I remember very fond memories of watching others play over the net, after I had died, though this was for tactical reasons as we used the party chat, and we were damn good at the game.

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That's fascinating, Xeneth, I totally get it! Making your playthrough worthwhile for spectators by spicing it up. That's brilliant. I have subtly done this as well, I believe. Lingering on explosions or trying to squeeze every ounce of oomph from a particular crash in GTA4.

As for playthroughs on the internet, a few months back I watched someone play through the entirety of Lands of Lore 3, which is a horrible, horrible game. But coupled with a modestly entertaining commentary track, it suddenly became very enjoyable, for all of its 15+ hours.

Thanks for the comments everyone =) I wasn't sure what I would gain or if it would be interesting to write this up, but apparently it was.

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We did this with all the Call of Duty games and also with F.E.A.R. 2.

Me and two other friends gathered together to one place and played on one computer as a "co-op" thorugh the game, changing the seat everytime a mission/level was completed.

It was really cool to do that, to follow what the other guys are doing in the game and seeing their reactions to various situations. Basically all of us had a very different take on the game always. It's funny to see how one handles the mouse for example. One of these friends of mine is really hardcore with FPS gaming, playing a lot of Quake Live and Q3Arena in the beginning so his mouse handling style is completely different to mine as mine is more like "the way to break your hand completely while gaming".

Also you totally see the game in a different view as you don't need to focus all the time, you can watch all the little stuff happening in the background. We sometimes said that we noticed some small details somewhere and the one of us who was playing at the moment did not necessarily always notice that same thing as especially when playing FPS games, things fly by so fast that you just can't focus on everything.

Edited by Kolzig

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This is an awesome Idle Thumbs grade thread.

If it's a game I've played before, I personally can't stand to watch others play it, as I always get frustrated at how other people aren't as thorough as I tend to be. The comparison to film/television is interesting, though. If you're sitting next to a guy playing a game, and you're giving orders/advice, isn't this close to what people envisioned interactive films/TV would be like? You're not controlling directly, but you're playing in a more abstracted way, while leaving the implementation to the player. I can see how this would be an ideal way of playing games for people who aren't as interested in learning complex controls, or introducing people to gaming.

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Watching other people play is the future.

Wired ran an article on Bungie doing this for Halo 3; getting an outsider to use something is a great way of understanding it (similarly to attempting to write accurately about something being a good way to learn about it).

Making games work for TV/video spectating is also a really tricky problem, which noone seems to have solved yet. FPS leagues keep getting on TV, but die on their arse because the cameras don't convey drama in the same way, FPS arenas can't be focused on in the same way as an open pitch can call your attention to one spot or let it spread out to see the entire game.

Something like Dawn of War's replay system seems to work better, where you get control of the camera and it replays the game exactly using the engine.

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Since I never had enough disposable income to blow at the arcades I spent a large amount of time there just watching other people play. It was occasionally useful to learn new strategies in my favorite fighting games, but I often ended up circling the Mortal Kombat machines as (Although I had no interest in playing them) the spectacle of a Fatality or Friendship always made the people around laugh and roar. And since back then there was no Gamefaqs to list the commands to perform all the finishers or Youtube to view them all in a row there was always the possibility of seeing something new and unexpected.

That's the one thing I miss the most about arcades, to be honest. It's a different social atmosphere to watch two people compete in a game right in front of you while standing shoulder to shoulder with a bunch of strangers. Joining a server as a spectator doesn't have the same feel, unfortunately.

And then there are games like Rock Band which are pretty much designed for two different people. The note highway is made for the player and the backgrounds are made for the people watching while they wait their turn.

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If it's a game I've played before, I personally can't stand to watch others play it, as I always get frustrated at how other people aren't as thorough as I tend to be.

I get this, it's totally not fun to watch some dude to fuck your ex-girlfriend, but it's always fun to watch some dude fuck a girl you have not touched!

er...

Since I never had enough disposable income to blow at the arcades I spent a large amount of time there just watching other people play. It was occasionally useful to learn new strategies in my favorite fighting games, but I often ended up circling the Mortal Kombat machines as (Although I had no interest in playing them) the spectacle of a Fatality or Friendship always made the people around laugh and roar. And since back then there was no Gamefaqs to list the commands to perform all the finishers or Youtube to view them all in a row there was always the possibility of seeing something new and unexpected.

This to me describes exactly how much of a spectator sport videos games can be. I am also guilty of being one of those kids who just leeched around the skilled game players whose parents gave them a ton of quarters to finish the game. Great memories watching people trying to finish games I would have been terrible at.

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I've never been into watching others play. Games are meant to be played, not watched. Otherwise they'd be movies.

I'm not sure your logic is as black and white as it might seem. Sports are meant to be played, and watched. As such, I have a blast watching a buddy of mine who used to be a professional FPS gamer. Seeing the skill and mastery is just as exciting for me as watching Ronaldo have a beautiful assist.

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There are some games I don't particularly enjoy playing, but I do enjoy watching. Metroid Prime was like this for me, for awhile. I think who the player is and what they're doing can affect it a lot, though. If the player is bad, or boring, or doing things in a way that's different from how you would do them, it can get frustrating. But if they're good, and if the game can be watched as a continuous experience, it can be really fun.

Actually, one of the reasons the Metroid games work well for me as a spectator is because there's so little extraneous stuff to distract the player - they can't stop and spend 20 minutes reorganizing their inventory, or agonize over where to put stat points, or skip through long cutscenes, for example. The entire thing is "the game," so you never feel like you're waiting for things to start back up again. The old resident evil games were good at this, too.

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I have the best time watching people play games. Most recently, i was teaching my brother TF2. Unfortunatly, my mother rang me in the middle of it and i had to explain why i was randomly shouting out warning and laughing hysterically at his elaborate deaths.

I'm happy to watch any game really, untill it comes to level up choices/material/magic and then I'll get very very snippy.

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It's like riding in the passenger seat of a car, sure, you can lock in on what the player/driver is doing, but you're also free to look out of the player/driver's tunnel of focus and enjoy the sweet parallax scrolling on the distant hills, or the attention to detail in that dude's hedge row. This is really just an oversimplification of what the OP has stated though, +rep for you.

I've actually never really minded spectating games. I think its mainly because I was the mild mannered, "have-not" kid growing up, always sitting in the back of the room watching my cousins play all the latest games, quietly waiting for someone to generously offer me a controller.

Nowadays, if I'm playing a game with a large enough group of people around, I'm actually pretty eager to give others a turn, especially if I feel that I have way more experience at a certain game.

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I think watching a game of starcraft 2 pros with some good commentary is awesome. I will never be as good as those guys but it's a blast to watch and try to apply those strategies to my game.

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This is one of my favorite pasttimes, and I especially love seeing people play adventure games. It's like a casual version of playtesting, and you see what works and what doesn't.

is a favorite: the guy, playing The Secret of Monkey Island: SE, starts out weirded-out and confused, but is laughing and loving it by the end. Lovely transition, and shows how the game, apart from some obscure, niggling puzzles, has aged gracefully.

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I think watching a game of starcraft 2 pros with some good commentary is awesome. I will never be as good as those guys but it's a blast to watch and try to apply those strategies to my game.

This!

I totally buy complex RTSs as an "e-sport" for a variety of reasons I won't go into here. I'm terrible at micromanagement-heavy games like Starcraft, but seeing two people that know what they're doing going at it always puts me on the edge of my seat. I could watch an endless series of those Starcraft 2 "battle reports" they were releasing for a while; something about the commentary in those works for me as well as any "real" sport. It's hilarious and awesome when we get all worked up over a a damn SCV scouting the map and avoiding death!

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This to me describes exactly how much of a spectator sport videos games can be. I am also guilty of being one of those kids who just leeched around the skilled game players whose parents gave them a ton of quarters to finish the game. Great memories watching people trying to finish games I would have been terrible at.

Oh, man. Seconded. What a sad, dorky, child I was.

I think I'm a kindly game watcher in general, but if it's a JRPG with a super-rote, typical battle system, it drives me bananas watching someone who's not used to the routine stumble through the battle menus. I know it's ridiculous, but I find myself practically gnawing on the furniture to keep from lecturing them on how "inefficient" their battle choices are and how long they spend meandering through the skills and whatnot. Agh! This also makes me a little bit sad to be me.

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Oh yeah! Now that you mention the "tons of quarters" thing, memories come rushing back of my youth as a poor, shitty-at-video-games lad where I would blow my weekly 2 bucks at the arcade in 15 minutes and then watch teenagers with their rows and rows of quarters kick ass for hours on defender, robotron, joust, etc.

Why did I never make the mental connection that paper route = tons more video games? Anyhow, very true that watching can be at least as enthralling as playing.

Tanks 4 da memories, nyuk nyuk...

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I actually have been watching people play games more and more often lately, thanks to the wonderful Giant Bomb dudes and their hilarious quick look videos. This is obviously different that watching people play a game in the same room, but Giant Bomb quick looks are becoming more and more one of my go to forms of entertainment.

An example of this for people who don't know http://www.giantbomb.com, is this, a quick look of Noby Noby Boy (one of my personal favorites)

http://www.giantbomb.com/quick-look-noby-noby-boy/17-256/.

I don't really know how this would fit in with the way you guys are discussing watching people play video games, because one of the main draws to watching these quick looks is listening to certain people that you expect hear say funny things.

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Just had to blow off some steam about this...

So, I had a conversation with a friend that involved some of the themes in this thread- Specifically how game designers can paint themselves into theoretical corners where things like intuitiveness and challenge are structured around a very unrealistic but understandable gamer perspectives. We make games that appeal to us, and when we don't the efforts tend to be rather hollow, like most games trying too hard to appeal to a specific demographic, like young girls.

Anyway, they seemed to find this interesting enough that I went on to explain that if designers could watch more people play games, things like this could be improved, and at the time they seemed to understand. I even went so far as to ask if I could watch them play a game that I've been enjoying lately, (Red Dead Redemption) as they had recently been given a copy as a gift.

Well, just now they finally got around to booting it up and suddenly everything has changed...

I've been told that "This is something they have to do alone" and denied any game watching rights. I understand that it's a single player game, but I thought I had explained that after playing 300+ games in your lifetime, you can't just magically pretend you've never seen a control schema before or you're not sure what it wants you to do next.

In the end, if my watching makes the experience of playing unfun for them, obviously that trumps any kind of insightful research I'd like to perform, I'm just frustrated because this isn't the first time/person this has happened with. I don't add my own input besides base reactions like "Oh, wow. That's a lot of enemies." or "Well done!", because that's basically contaminating the data. So people don't want help, and I have no intention of giving any, but it's clearly too creepy to have someone observing your actions silently, no matter how many times I insist I'm not "judging them".

I give up. I officially want a bunch of games to start capturing the raw positional and input data the way an RTS or Halo game does and silently send that data to developers for in-engine playback and analysis (Unless they opt out via the options menu). Is that a bad idea? Am I crazy?

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