This was pre-Twitch, but I used to work at a company where the tech team after hours would play Age of Empires for fun. We kind of got into it, we would read s

This was pre-Twitch, but I used to work at a company where the tech team after hours would play Age of Empires for fun. We kind of got into it, we would read strategy guides, blog comments over whether it was best to be Assyrians or Babylonians or Choson etc. Some people (not us) would really get into it and spend hours measuring things like how long it took for a catapult to get from one side of the map to the other, measuring each second and pixel carefully. I'm sure if Twitch were around and some of the best players broadcast their games with live commentary we would have watched them for pointers. I used to play Quake and remember watching a pre-Twitch video of one of the best Quake players, "Thresh", and observing how one of the best (perhaps the best) Quake players played the game. In terms of time, it's like people taking golf lessons to get a better swing and get their par down, or people reading chess endgame books to learn how to properly do a bishop and knight checkmate, or what have you. I guess you're right about students and single young professionals, as that is when I had the time to spend on improving my skill at various games.