Sunday, December 20, 2009

More Things I Don't Get

My two sons -- currently aged eight and eleven -- spend massive amounts of their free time these days watching YouTube. And that's fine.

But what they mostly watch is videogame walkthroughs, for games they don't own. And that's fine, too -- it's less fun than playing a game yourself, but I can see the appeal in finding out how it works.

Except that, a lot of the time, they seem to be watching walkthroughs by teenagers -- only slightly older, though much whinier, than they are -- who aren't any good at the game. After several jump-cuts, to obscure the fact that "TtlDminor07" just got killed three times, and repeated voiceovers like "Wait, what's that doing there. Ah, man, stop it! I'm down to seven guys! Just stop, OK? I'm going to have to do this part again...", I begin to wonder why my boys are watching this.

Is there any point to watching bad walkthroughs, or are my boys just still so young that they have seemingly infinite free time and nothing constructive to do with it?
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Listening to: The Long Blondes - I'm Going To Hell
via FoxyTunes

3 comments:

James A said...

The only answer I can imagine is that its really hard to find good youtube walkthroughs. Which, I assure you, it is. People who want to do good walkthroughs still mostly write them down.

Anonymous said...

Andy: Maybe they watch the ones they do to see where the pitfalls are.

Andrew Wheeler said...

James: I know that when I've looked for walkthroughs, I always went for written ones, so I could print them and have them next to me in case I forget the "tap the third yellow rock twice, then jump four spaces to the left" sequence. But I thought I was just tediously old-fashioned.

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