Watching a video game is basically playing it

polygon.com:

I turn off my phone and prepare for another round of Dead by Daylight. The last match was tense — in the game, solo Killers need to capture an entire four-person group of Survivors, and this particular Survivor team didn’t want that to happen. Its members milked every exploit possible, running in strategic circles around the reddish desert map, and their mounting confidence quickly began to outweigh mine. But, somehow, we pulled through in the end and won. Or, I mean, the Twitch streamer I was watching pulled through.

Sometimes, I find it difficult to distinguish my memories of playing a game from seeing someone else play it. I’ve probably spent an equal amount of time doing both, becoming a taquito under my blanket on the couch, staring at my TV the way a cat observes a laser pointer. Both playing and watching result in an intimate understanding of how a game works, imparting crucial knowledge of its combat system, story, and weathered characters. Either might make you wish you could scream through your PC and up into heaven. So I’ve come to think of playing and watching games as basically interchangeable.

There are a lot of games — Dark Souls, Resident Evil 4, League of Legends, and others — that I talk about with expert conviction, though, in reality, they’re more like acquaintances. I made it through only five bosses in Dark Souls with my pigtailed powerlifter protagonist before I decided that the game’s pimple-eyed basilisks were too annoying, and it was time to focus on what was for dinner instead.

But in the years before and after I decided I was quitting Dark Souls, I also watched one boyfriend, one roommate, and several YouTubers play the 40-hour game from start to finish. I had the pleasure of meeting Ceaseless Discharge only once in my abandoned playthrough, but, over my hundreds of hours observing other people’s games, the oozing boss became a familiar flame to me. I got so used to seeing Blighttown’s rickety, rotten wooden pathways that they might as