Oh shit, yeah. I watch Starcraft livestreams occasionally. I used to more than I do, because there used to be more streams of the kind I liked than there are.
I used to, but these days I tend to watch even those on youtube soon after they air.
I do watch the live stream sometimes when I’m not 100% paying attention. But if it’s a run I care about (like those Final Fantasy Legend ones), I want to give it my full attention and watch it like a movie.
I created a Twitch to back Chad Shank of the Stanhope Podcast and watch the Utena Musical livestreams Ohtori.nu does. I have never actually watched video games on there.
When it comes to watching other people play video games, I’ve boiled my enjoyment of this down to exactly 1 thing.
Mastery
When I watch someone play video games I am watching a artisan apply their skill and enjoying what that looks like, and ideally also learning (only sometimes though, sometimes the thing is so high level I cannot even take anything from it that I can apply to my own play)
Some people, the majority even, who watch people stream video games aren’t watching masters of a craft. They just seem to be watching gameplay of similar quality to their own play, or close to average. This doesn’t make sense to me, and when I’ve asked, I’ve been given answers that they enjoy the comedy of the person playing the video game (fair enough, but if it’s comedy you want, there are professional comedians that do amazing work) or they “just enjoy the personality of the streamer”. This one I truly don’t understand and likely never will.
Watching someone play a game that you could just play yourself doesn’t make sense to me unless they’re showing off things you’ve never seen (mastery in one form) or speedrunning (mastery again) just doesn’t compute to me.
The phenomenon I understand is watching someone play a game you might want to play but want to research, or want to play but don’t have the platform (ie I might watch Spiderman streams because I don’t have a PS4).
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I have a few steams I go to as my review before I buy the game. If they like it and it looks good then I’ll pick it up.
Imagine a programming game Zahctronics style.
The way it works is there is an environment. There are also robots/viruses/organisms whatever that are basically just tiny programs that interact with the environment. They just do their thing. Maybe they even reproduce, and their babies could have small random mutations to their programs that result in evolution.
Anyway, that’s just a thing that happens. What you do as the player is you write the program for some other robot/virus/organism. The thing is, your program can’t interact with any of the environment objects. You can only interact with other programs and modify their code, help them, hurt them, etc.
Your code has to navigate the environment, but can’t manipulate it, directly. It also has to manipulate other programs that then in turn will manipulate the environment. Forced meta-programming.
Basic example:
A grid where every square is blue. The bots are running around making things green. Your goal is to make X% of the map red. You lose if the map is over X% green.
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So a world full of animals, and you’re programming viruses?
You make it, I’ll play it (ᴘʀᴏᴊᴇᴄᴛ 
ST 
ᴀᴘᴘʀᴏᴀᴄʜɪɴɢ).
This is idea thread. Not a thread of doing.
You’re reinventing Core War?
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When I was younger I had a ZX Spectrum and there was a game where you marked green squares which were grass, blue squares that were rabbits and red squares that were foxes and the aim was to create a sustainable environment. We could never do it. The foxes would kill the rabbits and die off and everything would go green or the grass would be eaten and it’d all go black.
Close, but not quite.
An RPG where you start at level bajillion and the first battle is against some kind of literal god, and it’s not so hard at all because you are god-tier. As you play you only get weaker. The final battle is against the common rat in the sewer. Do you have anything left to even punch it? Reverse grinding! You try to rush through the game expending as few resources as possible so you can make it to the end. You definitely DO NOT want to spend time walking around having random encounters. Of course, you still have to survive. No point in holding back on using powerful magic if the alternative is immediate game over.
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In Mythender you start out as epic-tier mortals killing gods. The problem is that you become more godlike as you kill gods, and if you become a god then the other players turn on you.
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That’s cool. Your link is broken, though.
Really? Works for me.
Yeah, it works now.
Enemies shouldn’t get weaker, otherwise you’re just creating the same difficulty curve of a normal RPG but with numbers slowly shrinking. Enemies should remain relatively static so that the player begins to feel themselves degrade and weaken. I could easily see this as a theme of players being powerful magical gods being slowly overtaken by industrialization.
The difficulty increases because there’s no way to get anything back. You are always losing. XP down. Stats down. HP down. Mana down. Equipment, broken. You have a huge pile of resources you have to make last to the end.
The closest game I can think of is Oregon Trail where you are perfect at the start and drag yourself over the finish line. Just remove the hunting, shopping, and any other way to get more stuff, etc.
I’d always thought it was strange how Mega Man got more powerful after each level. He should have started at full strength and sacrificed a specific upgrade after each mission.