Most of the time, I’m not really one to watch people play video games. I don’t really enjoy Let’s Plays, I don’t really enjoy watching most people stream, and I even have a bit of a hard time sitting around while other people play a game nearby. This is because I have a very firm grasp of game mechanics, how to succeed at most games, and am easily frustrated by what looks like, in my eyes, inefficiency. I don’t get really backseat driver-y with video games, but I can feel my blood pressure rise as someone scrolls past an item in their inventory that they’re looking for or that they know is worthless and yet won’t throw away. It is my own personal hell, to watch someone play a game I know how to do well when they are struggling because they either haven’t grasped a core mechanic as solidly as the game requires or because their level of general disorganization is making their life difficult. I feel physical pain whenever I watch someone play a video game that involves a degree of inventory management and they refuse to manage their inventory in any kind of sensible or logical way. My heart cannot take this vibes-based “do I keep this pile of junk I’m going to throw away in ten minutes?” type play because it inevitably leads to the player messing around in menus for ten minutes while they try to figure out what precious junk they’re going to keep this time only to toss it the instant they find a cool new gun or whatever. It’s easier to handle on YouTube, with Let’s Plays, since I can just skip forward past things that will be frustrating to me, but that’s not an option for stuff like streamed video games and most people don’t want “helpful tips” from their viewers. Which I would never provide unless solicited, of course. I’d rather be miserable than make someone play a game the way I want them to rather than the way they want to.

Still, this is why I’ve watched maybe a dozen total hours of video game streams or Let’s Plays (not counting party games/roguelite-multiplayer games such as R.E.P.O., since the chaos and ineffeciency is part of the fun). I know I’m going to hit a point of frustration eventually and that I’d just be better off doing something else with my time, so I typically avoid them entirely. All of which changed recently when A More Civilized Age, the Star Wars podcast, started playing Knights of the Old Republic 2 and I realized I did not have it in me to play along with them. Austin Walker, one of the participants and the person on the podcast who has past experience with the game, has been recording himself playing it and uploading it to their YouTube channel so people who aren’t playing can follow along with the podcast. Which means I’ve now watched some fifty or so hours of LPs between that and the Patreon LP of Outward he’s leading as a bonus for the third Friends at the Table podcast: Side Story (a video game podcast). It has been everything I feared mixed in with a lot more fun that I expected. They’ve been entertaining to watch about ninety precent of the time and the unfun parts have been the Inventory Management Hell that is watching Austin slowly accumulate more and more junk that he’s never going to use but will never actually sell. I get it. Not everyone manages their inventory super closely, not everyone is ready to immediately throw away stuff they don’t think they’re going to use, and I am far from perfect given my penchant for slowly accumulating consumables that I’m always saving for later and almost never actually using. In fact, I’m so bad about that specific thing that the only time I can think of that I wasn’t incredibly (and overly) precious with consumables was in Baldur’s Gate 3 where I was exactly that until all of my characters were so over their carrying capacity that I’d either have to start using them or throw them on the ground so I could pick up the valuable stuff (based on my ten-to-one, sale-value-to-weight-ratio rule: I never pick up anything to sell that isn’t worth at least ten times what it weighs and typically try to avoid anything that isn’t twenty-times its weight in sale value). I am not judging Austin for the way he plays, I’m never going to leave a comment or send a message criticizing his style of play or accumulative tendencies, but it has been a clear reminder of why I tend not to watch this stuff in the first place.

Still, as long as you’re not a sicko like me who gets antsy any time they even HEAR about a messy, disorganized inventory (one of my friends gets a few frustrated sighs every time she brings up her lack of inventory management and tendency to never use any kind of consumable in video games), you’d probably enjoy both of these Let’s Plays. Austin’s a very good entertainer, mixing in a variety of cerebral, philosophical topics with his clear expertise in video games. The only time he doesn’t know something useful or interesting about the game he’s playing is when he’s trying to avoid looking up all the answers to the games he’s playing, like in his Patreon Outward LP (the first episode of which was uploaded for free). His hosting and the fun he’s clearly having with the editing work he does for these videos is what keeps me coming back and skipping through my moments of frustration rather than abandoning the LPs all together. He does a great job highlighting the interesting aspects of the game and there’s enough of an overlap between his tastes and mine, when it comes to video games, that I can’t help but want to play every single game I’ve seen him play or read his writing about (well, the writing about the games he has really liked rather than all the ones he was obligated to write about as a games journalist back in the day which I also have a lot less experience with so take this particular note with a grain of salt). Which is why I’m currently trying to exercise patience and wait for Outward to go on sale so a friend and I can do our own little multiplayer exploration of the game.

I kinda get why so many people like to watch others stream, now. It’s a great window into the gaming experience of other people, so long as the host isn’t entirely abdicating their personal experience as a player in favor of being an entertainer on stream (that’s also a fine thing to watch streamed, but it’s a bit more off-topic than I’m willing to go right now), and I understand why so many games want streamers to show off their game in the weeks and months following it’s release. I think it would also be good if those same developers did more to support people playing it prior to release, usually as part of an advertisement camapign, since I’m confident that would boost their week-one sales numbers. I mean, it would help a lot of people, like myself, who are potentially interested in a game, get a feel for it immediately rather than need to wait however long for their preferred reviewers to publish something or for the first compilation videos or live streams to start running with a deep-enough look into the game to say whether or not they’d be interested in it. I understand the hesitation to do something like that, since some people might just watch the game be played rather than buy and play it themselves, but I’m pretty sure those people weren’t ever going to buy the game no matter what. Just like most movie and video game pirates don’t represent lost sales so much as people who were never going to interact with it in any other way.

I don’t know that this experience is going to get me to start browsing Twitch or whatever other streaming services exist so I can watch people play games I’m curious about, but it has been fun regardless. I know the KotOR 2 LP has a set lifetime, given that they’re coming up on about the two-thirds or three quarters mark, but I think the Outward LP is going to be going for a very long time and it’s probably going to be replaced with something else eventually, when Austin and company are finished playing it, so I should have enough of this kind of entertainment to meet my “what do I watch while I eat my lunch” needs for the foreseeable future (especially because I fell behind everything thanks to a MASSIVE episode of KotOR 2). If you’re looking for something to watch or even just mostly listen to, both LPs would help you fill a lot of hours.