First off, fun is completely subjective and needs to be seen as such for this to be understood. I hate arts and crafts, my girlfriend loves them. I'll never find them to be fun but she always will. So let's just get the 'I don't find this fun' thing out of the way. [u]You[/u] don't find it fun, great, but let's not claim streamers are 'sucking out the fun' when you really can't determine that for others. You can only determine that for yourself. If that was actually the case... you wouldn't have streamers in the first place because no one would want to watch them. Clearly, the people losing fun are not the majority of people. And where you see some people not liking something you also neglect to see those who might be really upset if they didn't have an avenue to watch their favorite entertainment. Some people are very happy to watch streamers do stupid things in their favorite games or show them completely new games. Secondly, you sound as if something is fun all the time until you do it a different way. ie: Go from playing games to watching people playing games makes games 'less fun' somehow. That's really not true. Some people might even enjoy watching people play games more than actually playing the game themselves. Dark Souls is a good example. This can be more of a sports reason, as some people are just super good, but others might watch lore videos or watch those that go on PC and intentionally get assailed by modded characters or really dumb game mods. All stuff you could do on your own, but more fun to watch someone else do it. Generally, games get boring eventually and sometimes all I want to do is watch someone else play a game just because there's nothing better I feel like doing. Sometimes, I wanna see someone push Lydia off a mountain in Skyrim. Why? I've seen it before, hell I've done it before, but I'm in a skyrim mood but I don't want to actually play skyrim. That sort of mood just happens sometimes. You also have to realize a lot of people do things not in the terms of 'fun' but in terms of 'I'm bored'. Watching TV, sports, eating food, drawing, even cleaning can all be done under the context of 'I'm bored' and not, I wanna have fun. Watching other people play games is often times just a way to burn time, so to speak. Not too different from watching TV honestly... there aren't that many shows that are actually fun to watch IMO. But again... fun is subjective. ^ Getting on the Bungie forums... Lol, another boredom for a lot of people I'm sure. This place is rarely fun. And another thing is that people go watch people play games that they don't currently own. I do that with Overwatch or BF1 or Halo 5 (deleted that one, actually). So there's a lot of reasons why one might watch streamers or that sort of thing. Third, a some people watch streamers/youtube people just because they like listening to the person running the show and aren't there for the express purpose of 'watching someone play'. The hosts are funny, or informative, or like to scream into the headset after playing a bullet hell shooter game. It's entertainment when it all comes down to it. Like point two, this can done for several things like fun, or done out of boredom, or done because they just are in the mood. Some people just like to watch someone that's not as skilled as they are to make themselves feel better. In the end, there are a lot of reasons people watch streamers/youtubers. If they weren't fulfilling the roles of being entertaining or fun or a pass time for boredom for a large amount of people, they wouldn't exist in the way they do now. The fact that people are so successful that they end up making a job out of it should be enough to see how much streaming/youtube has become popular as entertainment. Which, like all entertainment, is subjective as to how much it entertains every individual. That's all it is, entertainment. -- With the whole doll thing... I look at it this way. Most people like reading books, not writing books. We like to be given a story to sink our teeth into, not make one up on our own. Games, toys, art, movies, plays, videos, activities, are fall under this to some extent. It is fun to watch or see something someone else created. It's easy, it's exciting sometimes, and often times we find it to be more enjoyable than making something ourselves. Very often to be honest. It's the same reason we sometimes watch TV so much. It's something someone else is doing, we watch it because... well, someone else is doing it even if it's the stupidest thing ever. Why do you need 500 channels? To get 500 channels of well scripted fun/story? Probably not... it's more likely it's because it's a pastime to flip through channels thinking something 'might' be good eventually, but you know inside that it won't be. Have you ever found yourself enjoy watching someone else mow the yard for a minute? Or like the smell of someone else cooking on a grill or at a bonfire? Or watching cars go by endlessly for a little bit? There's a fascination with watching other people do something that's just ingrained in most people. I think there's less of that fixation as we get older... but it's undeniable that it's there. Children find playing with toys fun, but watching someone play out a story with same said toys to be even more fun. It's easier, it's more fun, and you can spend all day doing it without really getting tired. Even as adults, we don't like to be solely entertained by just our imagination. We need a game, or a slow book, or a a tv series that isn't completed yet to get our imagination moving along with what we're given. Rarely do people just like sitting in a room and think for actual fun. Sure, it might happen, but usually that's because you're waiting in the first place. Imagination is great and all, we should certainly use it, but it's easy to be lulled into just watching something someone else made even as adults. Children are no exception to this, in fact, that's why you gotta isolate them from electronics every once in a while.