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So I don't remember whether this made it into an episode or not in the past, but at one point
the topic of watching other people play games came up. The idea of like streamers and people
streaming their games or streaming other actions. And I think you replied or stated something like
I do not understand why people do that. Not really. I still don't really get it.
Got it. Okay. And that's totally fine. So that's I think where we're starting for today.
I guess I'd like to ask because I'm a little curious. Is there anything that you enjoy
watching and enjoy doing? And I'm keeping that vague for a reason.
Watching more than doing. Equal is fine. Like kind of you would enjoy them both. The idea of
like I don't mind watching it and I enjoy that process, but also I enjoy doing it. Is there
anything that fits that category for you? I'll explain why after. I would say I guess dancing
is one, right? Like I don't mind watching other people perform. And I guess I also don't mind
dancing myself. Okay. And do they feel like a different experience? This seems weird,
but I should ask anyway. Like separate enjoyable experiences? Very separately enjoyable experience.
Fair enough. So maybe we can connect these. Let's hold on to that idea.
The reason I asked it kind of vaguely is because the thing that I thought of first as a
what would other people maybe consider an analogy here or a parallel? I probably could have guessed
like dancing for you, but people would probably be thinking about sports. And mind you, I hate
watching sports. I cannot stand it. It is the most boring thing to me. I cannot.
Even the sports that you do like playing? Even worse, especially when I was younger,
because I was like, why would I watch this when I can go and play it? Like, I don't understand.
I mean, that's generally my thinking also. And if I were to pick, I do enjoy dancing
more than watching dancing. Okay. And this, I think is maybe
a common ground between this, where the idea with what I experienced and what you're kind of saying,
right, is the doing is, of course, very enjoyable, right? It's probably the thing that you want to
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be doing is the game, the sport, the art, the whatever it might be. However, and this I'm
going to speak from my thoughts and perspectives first, and then maybe I'll pull some thoughts from
from like, things people have written. However, I think that they come with different, maybe
barriers to starting, right to like having just the availability or the ability to do it at a
certain time. Also, the act of doing it can come not only with the joys, but also with a bunch of
stressors, and perhaps a lot of time spent in a way that you might not feel is conducive or useful
to whatever you're doing at the time, right? If I were to choose, I'll use the game example,
if I were to choose to say play a game over watching somebody else or something like that,
right? But I also had all this other stuff. The only example I can think of is work. So say I had
a bunch of work related stuff that I was trying to get done at the same time, I would then be only
doing the game because I'm of course investing my experience and my growth and my learning about
this game on that one thing. Whereas the watching of something I think frees up and lowers that
barrier to doing it, right? So you have this, yeah, it's, I think this falls into like the by proxy
category, and maybe a little into the living vicariously through another, right? Like I'm
enjoying this person's joy, and that's what I'm getting back here. In the same way that maybe,
you know, if you're watching something that maybe you appreciate, right? The dancers who are involved
in the performance that's in front of you. I mean, to a certain extent, that's how we
consume all content, right? Vicariously living through other people's lives, other people's
joyful moments, other people's embarrassing moments, whatever, yeah. So I think that's all
sitting in this space, right? The idea of watching a thing, you can get those sort of
feelings and experiences from it. And there's this additional side that at least for me,
and I think for others, fits in the category of like podcast listening, audiobook listening,
you can just sit there and just like, listen to it, which sometimes I will do. But a lot of the
time I'm ending up doing stuff that I don't want to do otherwise, like the dishes, or my laundry,
or, you know. So there's a way of sort of gathering a joy or something more in like creative spaces,
06:01
or in any of these, right? While doing something you don't want to do. And that's like pairing
tasks together so that they're more sort of tolerable. But yeah, so that's, I think,
the starting point of it. I think we kind of agree with what that might look like, but.
I see. Yeah. I guess, yeah, game streaming is not that different from podcasting.
Yeah. But, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like in order to fully follow them,
you need to be watching the screen, right? Or do you not really?
Yeah, this is a great question. And I did have to think about this, because I think you mentioned
something similar back then. Let me share, I guess, the ways that I will watch it.
So there are some people who, there's a lot of different ways to stream a game,
A. And as a result of that, you get B, which means there are a lot of different ways to sort of
consume the stream. And so in one case, there's somebody that I like to, quote, unquote, watch
once in a while. But I find myself appreciating their narration and their experience of the game
as they play more than the visual of the game itself. So what happens is, I like know what the
game generally looks like. Like I get a feeling for like, this is the game and whatever it is,
and there's pieces. And something about like just the way that they're speaking, just the sort of
humor they might have, right? And you can hear the game sound and like narration. So you can
piece together kind of what's happening, and it becomes much more podcast-like, right?
This also fits, I think, well with the fact that I enjoy podcasts that are story-based.
So podcasts that do like tabletop role-playing or audiobooks. Audiobooks I have listened to
before and enjoy, but I don't do them very often for some reason. I don't know why I never picked
them up in that way. I think something about, and this would be my maybe difference, right? I get
more joy out of sitting down and reading the book myself most of the time. Like if the book is really
dry, I would prefer somebody to read it who has a wonderful voice and can intone some sort of life
to the book. But that doesn't usually happen, or at least I'm not looking for those things.
Yeah, the books are an interesting question. So yeah, you get this, then there are some that I
want to watch because I appreciate them, their reactions, the ways that they sort of communicate,
09:00
but the gameplay is either interesting or there's some sort of interplay, right?
The visual and audio medium are obviously connected in that way. And in that case,
I want to watch it at the same time, right? So there's a difference between what I can do there.
But I had that open the other day. I had one running in the top right-hand corner while I was
doing different types of grading and assessment. And I could watch it and listen. Obviously,
humans cannot multitask. We don't understand what that means. It doesn't actually work.
You do it, but everything just gets done at fractions of your ability. Sometimes that's
the only way to get it done, though. So you do it, right? Fine. So it obviously took me a little
longer to get stuff done, but I could watch and sort of laugh along. It was semi-enjoyable that
way. It was semi-enjoyable. I had a little bit of vicariousness. There is, I think, what is
described in the few studies slash sort of journal, not journal, news articles that have
popped up. It took a while for me to look for things that were like, why do people watch games?
Because I also expected it to be more connected to why people watch sports and all these other
things. There's weird barriers between these types of discussions. Anyway, more complicated.
They talk about tension release a couple of times in like at least the two articles that I found.
I have not read all of these in detail, but I think the idea is it falls in the same category
as things like games or even sports or doing something else or books. The escapism, the
getting out of whatever you're in and having a little bit of a freedom to let that space exist.
One of the ones that I listened to, for example, plays a game where they are regularly having
sort of spontaneous chaos happen in that space. And it's just like, woohoo, it doesn't matter.
It's fine. We can just let it happen. And even if it is like, oh, that's really intense,
it's still not serious. So there's maybe something to be said about that.
And I think we kind of hit the other ones accidentally. A lot of them are getting something
out from somebody else's experience. You're sort of having these emotional reactions to both them
and the stuff they're doing. And you've got a mix. There is one other category of this, which I
have done before, which is looking for people playing a certain game so that you can learn
how to do something or play something better in the game. You can also do that.
Okay. So kind of like a passive tutorial.
Yeah. So there's that as an option, right, as well. I don't do that myself, but people
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definitely do in other ways. I think that covers all the main points. What are your
thoughts on this? I guess what I'm hearing and this kind of confirms my suspicion
about my own ability to process information is I am not like when there's visual and audio
stimulus, it's already multitasking for me.
Ah, okay. Okay. All right. That's interesting.
I think I can do reading. I can do listening. But YouTube videos or Instagram videos require
me to do both. And of course, if it's stuff like something benign, doesn't really matter.
It doesn't require that much CPU of my brain anyway. But if it's something remotely interesting
to me that I want to actively process, I find it not able to focus on either of them when there is
moving visuals and moving audio. Okay. Okay. I think I get it in the sense that,
well, I guess I should ask, right? Actually, audio specifically like
verbal audio, like it doesn't matter if it's a music, it's okay.
But if there's like words in it.
Got it. So this is now because now I'm thinking about it, we're saying, all right. So by this
being multitasking, are you seeing it as well? Do you see movies as multitasking? I should ask this
because it's the question on my mind. Again, like I have an idea. So just let me know.
I think it's a mild version of multitasking for me. I don't think at any given time
I'm focusing on both. I'm usually like, if you just like chop every split seconds of my movie
watching, I'm either watching the visual or reading the subtitles or listening to the words.
I think I actually find listening to words really difficult in movies in general,
like whether it's English or Japanese, I prefer subtitles.
This is actually a separate topic. I'm putting this in the list.
15:00
I'll explain that afterwards.
So that's why like, I really appreciate this like trend of like captioning their videos,
because I can now follow the words. Sure, I might get like, you know, 30% reduction in the
visual information content, but at least I can understand what these visuals are about better
than if I were just hearing it. Okay. Yes, I do totally understand. And I think I also agree,
right? Because there's a separate thought, I'll get to that. But I agree because the
listening and the watching, and what I realized is that things I usually miss in a film are,
well, I mean, for example, sound design, sometimes, right? It's the invisible stuff
that you don't always catch. And I just finished a great YouTube series on
no CGI is actually just invisible CGI. So there's like a lot of visual effects that still exist,
but we don't see them. We're just told that they don't exist. So it's a fascinating thing. But
and like, you can't capture all of that at once, which I think is why many things that are
at least even decently designed, usually have replay value, right? They have replay or rewatch
or re-listen value, if you have a lot going on in them. And I think with the streaming,
that is the case, right? If I'm watching both, I've kind of dedicated myself to both,
like I'm now invested in both the video and the audio. But over time, I think I realized that
I was there mostly for the sensation I got, right? The sort of emotional, like following
along and just enjoying it. Maybe you're better at sort of like noise cancelling the information
input to a suitable level so that you can perform these other tasks.
And I'm just not very good at doing that. Which is probably more normal.
See, like, if I want to figure out, I don't know how to fix my overflowing toilet.
I think seven out of 10 people nowadays would prefer to find a YouTube video that tells you
with visual cue and verbal cues. For me, that's my last resort. Like I would prefer to see
WikiHow or something and follow a written instruction. And if that doesn't work,
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then I will resort to, you know, stop play, stop play of the YouTube video.
But like that is not my first go to. This makes a lot of sense to me. And it's made me think about
another thing as well, which is you just pointed out how people will jump to like the video version
of that, right? Whereas you might find yourself going to WikiHow, right? Or just something that
lays out by word what it is you're supposed to do. And I've been having this thought recently
because I've been considering building myself another computer, which is watching videos about
it happen gives you visual information on it. But I do feel like I don't hold the kind of technical
information as well coming from the video. So if I were to sit down and like write it.
Yeah, so confusing. Yeah, there they. I think it depends on how much framework you already have
about the topic. And then the video can become either useful or way too much,
or you just can't absorb that information. Right. So that's that's a whole thing about like,
wait, maybe. Yeah. I want to talk more about this. So let's stop this recording.
All right, let's finish here. And just Yeah, okay. Yeah. End of this one.
But we will talk about this video tutorial problem.
In the next episode.
That's it for the show today. Thanks for listening and find us on x at
Eigo de Science. That is E-I-G-O-D-E-S-C-I-E-N-C. See you next time.
