it seems like the game almost doesn’t matter as much as the social aspect does in the same way that guys like Leon or Pete Thorn do livestreams and different pieces of gear can be the focus.
This is exactly it. My spouse is an avid Twitch stream watcher. When she's on her computer and not listening to thrash metal
, she is likely to have a Twitch stream on for some game she likes (often in the Final Fantasy series), that she has played through many times herself. It's much less about watching a streamer speedrun a game, and all about that specific streamer and interacting with the community whether it's silly memes, talking with the streamer, reacting to events in the game.
This is basically the same thing what we do on this forum. We might also watch e.g a live stream with our favorite guitarists, amp designers etc talking about their shit, being able to ask questions from them and so on. Sometimes it's just background noise you can follow without focusing too much while doing something else, more like listening to a podcast. It's all about the personalities.
I also watch game streaming occasionally and it's the same thing - I watch e.g streamers that play Dark Souls games because I like those, I enjoy seeing people who are way better than me beat some incredibly high difficulty tiers or try out some weird mods to these games that e.g randomize enemies, items and bosses, effectively creating new experiences. There's a guy called Hey Zeus Here's Toast who did a Bloodborne speedrun at Awesome Games Done Quick. He was narrating it as if it was a football game, it was hilarious.
Which brings up a point: watching game streamers can be the same thing as watching a real world sports game. Even though playing those games is more fun, we still like watching people at the top level play them. Competitive gaming is not called eSports for nothing and even if the players are not physical athletes, it takes a lot of work to become really good at a specific game.
There's a lot of streamers that I cannot stand but appeal to kids. They generally have extreme reactions to anything and constantly yell at the mic, it's exhausting. They play a character on stream rather than rely on their own personality. They are the Glenn Frickers of game streaming.
I wrestled for a long time over the idea of video games being a waste of time or not, I was quite conflicted about it due to the amount of time I put into GTA V (9 full months of game play….3/4’s of a fucking year) and ultimately I settled on the idea that while I didn’t create anything with the game itself, it was the community of players I was in a crew with that kept me coming back and we created a lot of laughs and friendships in that time, the game was kind of like a soundtrack to the laughs and socializing, just a highly interactive soundtrack.
Of course, that speaks nothing for the stereotypical gamers who just antagonize people and act like morons over the mic, or the people that don’t socialize at all but put mass amounts of time in….I can’t really speak on that, I’m too baked and I’ll write 4 more paragraphs.
Me and a friend of mine have very different approaches to video games. He likes multiplayer games for the reasons you describe, while I can't stand the toxic communities and how much you need to play these games to be good at them. So I mostly play single player games only, even though I can sink a lot of time into those as well.
To bring this all back to music, the way we listen to it has changed. Music used to be a separate activity where you'd just gather together to listen to music. With portable solutions, streaming etc becoming possible it has become a side activity, so I'm not surprised there are less people who are very invested in music itself. Even I do most of my listening while working from home, where music is on the background. Traveling somewhere is really the time when I actually pay more attention because you have less visual stimuli if you are e.g driving between cities or on a train or plane.
