it doesn't do anything for me at all. if i'm going to watch something performance-oriented like sports or videogames, i want to see something out of the ordinary.
the reason why people watch sports is because, at the professional level, you legitimately get to see new things every time you watch. there are millions of ways for a game or a match to be completed, and the nature of each is such that the best players and coaches involved need to constantly reinvent the game, to a degree, in order to get an advantage. every player has a legitimately different way of playing the game within the general framework of the game(and physical reality if you want to get quantum with this shit), and ultimately the version of any given game you see today is rather dramatically different than the version that was played ten years ago, or even five years ago. admittedly, it's usually the more observant fans that really realize this, but it is why the established sports have maintained such a strong following for such a long time.
this is not the case with professional gaming. with videogames, you invariably know what you're going to get, and the entertainment value of the performance is limited to what is physically possible within the framework of that game. i see people competitively play things like street fighter and i really don't get the appeal. it's vaguely neat watching someone who is particularly good at a videogame, but you aren't going to see anything legitimately new from a game that only has a couple dozen moves(sometimes not even that much). sports are similar to an extent, in that there are usually moves or techniques or whatever that the players employ, but no two players do things identically. right now, there's no way for two competitive gamers to be fundamentally dissimilar as long as they're playing the same game. to be honest, that's really fucking boring! i wouldn't have any interest in watching something that predictable. it's usually bad enough actually playing this shit.
i guess it's possible that competitive gaming could become quite popular in the future, but there's a very logical cap on what can be done right now with the technology we currently have in games. competitive gaming relies on the power of game programmers, while sports rely on the power of the forces of the universe. not a lot of competition there, i think. it's going to be an awfully long time before you start seeing videogames that offer that sort of physical versatility to legitimately compete with the dynamic, unpredictable nature of professional sports. that, or it'll pick up without any rhyme or reason simply because the masses are always subconsciously in search for the next fuhrer to blindly follow.
HOWEVERthere is a big exception to this. even though i think competitive gaming is a joke right now, i do really get a kick out of people hacking the shit out of a game and exploiting the core programming of it to allow the player to do stuff totally unintended by the game. game speedruns can be kinda neat in small doses, but they get really interesting when the person is actively using tools to exploit the game and do absolutely bonkers shit.
here's a good example of this:
dada showed me this a while ago. basically some dude hacked chrono trigger and inserted some item glitch in the code that does all kinds of ridiculous things. it's hard to explain, and it's better to watch. the first few minutes are pretty dull but eventually this comes out to be this bizarro 21 minute speedrun of chrono trigger.
basically this is the extent to which i can watch someone else playing a videogame and take legitimate interest in it. it's taking the way i understand a game and totally breaking it entirely. i can't sit there and watch hours of stuff like this, but i usually can get pretty involved in seeing it happen to games that i'm familiar with and have enjoyed playing myself.
