7 ms·

Viewers vs. Doers: The Rise of Spectatoritis

148 points by dcaldwell 15y ago

pkananen 15y ago
I'm always amazed by the number of 20 and 30 year old men who'd rather watch football than play it.
- dmix 15y ago
  I watch Starcraft games in my liesure time after work. I used to play it often. But I find I can get as much enjoyment watching pros, who completely dominates the game, play against each other. The difference is watching doesn't involved the mental effort that playing does. After 8hrs of design/programming, the last thing I want to do is think more. I imagine the required effort is the same for grabbing a beer and watching football on TV vs going outside and playing it.
  - robryan 15y ago
    I can relate to this, with a lot of sports, both online and offline watching can bet better as you could never experience (at least not without dedicating a large chunk of your life to it) the same skill level that the game is played on.
- keeptrying 15y ago
  I dont think: A) you've seen a football player. I wouldnt want to be hit by one of those guys. B) you've understood the beauty of american football. Imagine a sport which combines the ferocity of grappling along with the strategy of chess. Its just an awesome sport to watch and comprehend.
  - nooneelse 15y ago
    Grappling, and strategy of chess, yes. But you forgot the other third of the appeal to the American mind, the litigiousness allowed by the instant replay review and numerous rules with slightly different penalties. Each play is a sequence of strategy, chaos, lawsuit.
    - keeptrying 15y ago
      lol ... Yeah thats one of the negative points IMHO.
- mechanical_fish 15y ago
  Are you talking about American football? The sport where you need a suit of armor just to lower your risk of neck, knee, and brain injury to the point where you can survive a two- or three-year career in the pros before being forced to retire? I'll watch, thanks.
  - clistctrl 15y ago
    There's always tag football.
    - mechanical_fish 15y ago
      Football without blocking or tackling is a completely different game. Might just as well just play soccer or ultimate. Which, in fact, people do. Those who want to poke maximum fun at couch potatoes always seem to pick American football for their examples. That's because civilians don't actually play American football, so there's relatively little danger of an embarrassing counterexample popping up. (Actually, plenty of teenagers play American football, but perhaps teenagers know better than to try to argue with curmudgeonly trolls on the Internet.) It's rarer to hear people try to make fun of Americans for not playing basketball or, god help us, golf... because in any city in America a golf course or a pickup basketball game is probably no more than ten minutes away. I know a bunch of middle-aged adults who play basketball. I know this because they occasionally turn up with basketball injuries. ;) Incidentally, I only just noticed an incredible folly at the heart of this article: If you sample teenagers, you'll find a much larger percentage of them playing sports. But a smaller and smaller percentage of the American population is under 25. Is it really such a terrible thing that so few 55-year-olds play contact sports? Aren't our emergency rooms busy enough as it is?
    - arethuza 15y ago
      Or Rugby - which would seem closer to American Football but without the fancy outfits and all the standing about. ;-)
      - robryan 15y ago
- gaius 15y ago
  Or play Guitar Hero rather than... a guitar.
  - timknauf 15y ago
    But isn't that a much more active way of enjoying music than just sitting listening to it? Rock Band, Guitar Hero and their ilk have imparted an active sense of rhythm, at the very least, to millions of players. And in the case of the Pro Expert mode in Rock Band 3, you actually do play using real guitar chords and drum patterns.
- cpearce 15y ago
  I'm amazed by the number of 20 and 30 year olds who'd rather comment about how crap Firefox is rather than working on a patch to make it better!
- damoncali 15y ago
  Football is IMO not much fun to play. Lots and lots of repetitive boredom for any one player. But to watch is amazing. When it's all put together well it is art.
_delirium 15y ago
I'd like this article a lot more if it weren't sort of gratuitously about gender in a strangely jarring way. The underlying point about spectatoritis is interesting, but I don't see what it has to do with what it means to "become a man" or developing a "manly 'philosophy of leisure'". Surely plenty of people of both genders are suffering from spectatoritis, and not only in spectator sports (and even there, there are plenty of female fans as well). Nash's book is not explicitly gendered in that way, though it was written in 1938 and so does have a more implicit built-in assumption that it's probably addressing men (and it does use "man" and "men", but in the now-old-fashioned sense that's sort of gendered but ambiguously so and might also mean "people in general", depending on context). But it's not really accusing its readers of being insufficiently masculine; it's accusing them of being too passive, which seems more to the point.
- mkr-hn 15y ago
  http://artofmanliness.com/about-2/ http://artofmanliness.com/about-2/ It's a gender-specific blog. A good one, too.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    This article isn't gender-specific, though, except in a very lazy way that just gratuitously throws in the word "man" and "manliness" a few times in an article that has nothing to do with them, unless you count some vague reference to old-fashioned ideas about what constitutes a "real man". It would require changing about four sentences, and not even changing them a lot, to make this a completely gender-nonspecific article. The blog overall, from a brief skim, seems about 50% sexist nonsense, and 50% obsessed-with-old-accoutrements-of-masculinity hipsters (I expect to find some fancy moustaches and pipes). If it matters, I'm a man, and I find this kind of stuff trying to tell me what it means to be a "real man" pretty offensive, backwards crap.
    - mkr-hn 15y ago
      I recommend more than a brief skim. We appear to be looking at two different blogs.
mechanical_fish 15y ago
As a student of history, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to make of this odd philosophy that there's something wrong with watching other people do things that you will never do. Living vicariously is the essence of being human. It's why we have language, and stories, and imagination, and all the wetware required to support these things. Dogs can't tell stories about other dogs in such a way that their canine audience is moved to weep or cheer. Whereas humans line up to hear stories about three-thousand-year-old semi-mythical events. Then they draw practical conclusions from those stories. I don't see why it's so terrible that I'd rather watch, say, a deep-sea fisherman risk his life than try deep-sea fishing myself. We have no shortage of deep-sea fishermen -- in fact, what we have is a shortage of fish. And the same principle definitely applies to soldiers: Every real soldier who can be replaced by a Team Fortress player, or a History Channel viewer, represents a net win for humanity.
- danking00 15y ago
  It is my opinion that the article does not suggest that "it's so terrible that I'd rather watch, say, a deep-sea fisherman risk his life than try deep-sea fishing myself." It actually directly chastises, in the following quote, the people who make such claims. There are men who feel that the entire problem with males today is that they’re too obsessed with college and professional sports. But that’s as wrong-headed as thinking that indulging in a straight diet of passive entertainment carries no ill-effects whatsoever. Rather than suffering from spectatoritis, these men are inflicted by high-horse-itis. The writers further clarify their position in the paragraph following the above one. They insist that "a problem only arises when instead of being a supplement to your life," it becomes "a substitution, a way to feel better about something you personally lack." I'm a fourth year undergraduate at a university in Boston, MA. I have had roommates who watch television many hours a day, do their homework with no passion or interest, and then proceed to drink and party all night. I will not argue that any of these actions are individually "bad," but I will argue that a life consisting primarily of these activities is devoid of creative output and is qualitatively "bad" under my philosophy. A life of raging all night at a party and, assuming an impressive alcohol tolerance, waking the next morning to start creating something is not a a life I'd call "bad." I believe this is a faithful interpetation of the article's position.
AndrewMoffat 15y ago
894 likes, 35 +1s, 160 tweets
- pigbucket 15y ago
  Your comment was looking a little grey under the collar when I read it, which I think raises the irony to which you allude to another level.
swlkr 15y ago
I loved this article. Mostly because I see a bunch of "spectatoritis" around me all of the time. I swear that the inland empire is just a bunch of passionless zombies living their lives waiting to die. I really don't see any get up and go or any enthusiasm for much of anything and this article mirrors my observations perfectly.
rudyfink 15y ago
My dad always described television as watching other people live life. It was an observation I'd forgotten. Thanks for posting this article and reminding me of it.
maeon3 15y ago
If 95% of people were not fraggles, sheep and spectators, then a lot of things in this world would not get done as quickly as they do now. People think that the innovation phase of a project is the hard part, but in some ways, it's just the seed, you need an army of autonomous humans to do the mundane work to make the innovation take root and flourish. If everyone on Earth had (and acted upon) Earth-shaking visions like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Ford, then the world would be full of amazing ideas that never get carried out to their potential. We need the drones, workers and the queen. Too many queens and the hive dies.
- aMoniker 15y ago
  "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." - Robert A. Heinlein
forbes 15y ago
I used to spend a lot of my weekends watching my AFL team, Collingwood, losing. Then I saw the episode of Seinfeld where he did his bit about sports fans: "We're a little too into sports in this country, I think we gotta throttle back. Know what I mean? People come home from these games, 'We won! We won!' No, they won - you watched." "They won, you watched." It really resonated with me. I was spending quite a bit of cash to watch a bunch of fit guys try to kick a ball better than another bunch of fit guys in different coloured jumpers. If 'my guys' won I felt good and if they didn't, I didn't. It seemed ridiculous to me. If they won, why should I feel happy? I don't even know them! And if they lost, why should I feel upset? It wasn't my fault. I haven't really been to an AFL game since then and barely watch it on TV. If Collingwood makes a final, like they did last year, then yes, I want them to win and I will watch the game on TV. But it doesn't go any further than that. Giving up on the spectating didn't make me go out and play football myself, but I do mostly spend my spare time being creative rather than just spectating.
- smokeyj 15y ago
  i came away with a similar sentiment after reading this blog, and it really articulated a similar notion in my head -- for me, wasting precious free time online, living through the success stories of fellow entrepreneurs.
  - forbes 15y ago
    Yeah, it is inevitable that we will do a little spectating. I got my insight into the pointlessness of watching spectator sports from watching Seinfeld, watching TV, another spectator activity. I still enjoy comedies and movies and they don't make me depressed like watching professional sport. I try to limit my time on sites like Hacker News for the same reason I try to limit my TV. Anytime I think of the masses of creative output of greats like Beethoven, Picasso, Edison I think to myself - "The amazing power of not watching TV for four hours a day."
canistr 15y ago
What about video games?

148 points by dcaldwell 15y ago

pkananen 15y ago

I'm always amazed by the number of 20 and 30 year old men who'd rather watch football than play it.

dmix 15y ago
I watch Starcraft games in my liesure time after work. I used to play it often. But I find I can get as much enjoyment watching pros, who completely dominates the game, play against each other. The difference is watching doesn't involved the mental effort that playing does. After 8hrs of design/programming, the last thing I want to do is think more. I imagine the required effort is the same for grabbing a beer and watching football on TV vs going outside and playing it.
- robryan 15y ago
  I can relate to this, with a lot of sports, both online and offline watching can bet better as you could never experience (at least not without dedicating a large chunk of your life to it) the same skill level that the game is played on.
keeptrying 15y ago
I dont think: A) you've seen a football player. I wouldnt want to be hit by one of those guys. B) you've understood the beauty of american football. Imagine a sport which combines the ferocity of grappling along with the strategy of chess. Its just an awesome sport to watch and comprehend.
- nooneelse 15y ago
  Grappling, and strategy of chess, yes. But you forgot the other third of the appeal to the American mind, the litigiousness allowed by the instant replay review and numerous rules with slightly different penalties. Each play is a sequence of strategy, chaos, lawsuit.
  - keeptrying 15y ago
    lol ... Yeah thats one of the negative points IMHO.
mechanical_fish 15y ago
Are you talking about American football? The sport where you need a suit of armor just to lower your risk of neck, knee, and brain injury to the point where you can survive a two- or three-year career in the pros before being forced to retire? I'll watch, thanks.
- clistctrl 15y ago
  There's always tag football.
  - mechanical_fish 15y ago
    Football without blocking or tackling is a completely different game. Might just as well just play soccer or ultimate. Which, in fact, people do. Those who want to poke maximum fun at couch potatoes always seem to pick American football for their examples. That's because civilians don't actually play American football, so there's relatively little danger of an embarrassing counterexample popping up. (Actually, plenty of teenagers play American football, but perhaps teenagers know better than to try to argue with curmudgeonly trolls on the Internet.) It's rarer to hear people try to make fun of Americans for not playing basketball or, god help us, golf... because in any city in America a golf course or a pickup basketball game is probably no more than ten minutes away. I know a bunch of middle-aged adults who play basketball. I know this because they occasionally turn up with basketball injuries. ;) Incidentally, I only just noticed an incredible folly at the heart of this article: If you sample teenagers, you'll find a much larger percentage of them playing sports. But a smaller and smaller percentage of the American population is under 25. Is it really such a terrible thing that so few 55-year-olds play contact sports? Aren't our emergency rooms busy enough as it is?
  - arethuza 15y ago
    Or Rugby - which would seem closer to American Football but without the fancy outfits and all the standing about. ;-)
    - robryan 15y ago
gaius 15y ago
Or play Guitar Hero rather than... a guitar.
- timknauf 15y ago
  But isn't that a much more active way of enjoying music than just sitting listening to it? Rock Band, Guitar Hero and their ilk have imparted an active sense of rhythm, at the very least, to millions of players. And in the case of the Pro Expert mode in Rock Band 3, you actually do play using real guitar chords and drum patterns.
cpearce 15y ago
I'm amazed by the number of 20 and 30 year olds who'd rather comment about how crap Firefox is rather than working on a patch to make it better!
damoncali 15y ago
Football is IMO not much fun to play. Lots and lots of repetitive boredom for any one player. But to watch is amazing. When it's all put together well it is art.

_delirium 15y ago

I'd like this article a lot more if it weren't sort of gratuitously about gender in a strangely jarring way. The underlying point about spectatoritis is interesting, but I don't see what it has to do with what it means to "become a man" or developing a "manly 'philosophy of leisure'". Surely plenty of people of both genders are suffering from spectatoritis, and not only in spectator sports (and even there, there are plenty of female fans as well). Nash's book is not explicitly gendered in that way, though it was written in 1938 and so does have a more implicit built-in assumption that it's probably addressing men (and it does use "man" and "men", but in the now-old-fashioned sense that's sort of gendered but ambiguously so and might also mean "people in general", depending on context). But it's not really accusing its readers of being insufficiently masculine; it's accusing them of being too passive, which seems more to the point.

mkr-hn 15y ago
http://artofmanliness.com/about-2/ http://artofmanliness.com/about-2/ It's a gender-specific blog. A good one, too.
- _delirium 15y ago
  This article isn't gender-specific, though, except in a very lazy way that just gratuitously throws in the word "man" and "manliness" a few times in an article that has nothing to do with them, unless you count some vague reference to old-fashioned ideas about what constitutes a "real man". It would require changing about four sentences, and not even changing them a lot, to make this a completely gender-nonspecific article. The blog overall, from a brief skim, seems about 50% sexist nonsense, and 50% obsessed-with-old-accoutrements-of-masculinity hipsters (I expect to find some fancy moustaches and pipes). If it matters, I'm a man, and I find this kind of stuff trying to tell me what it means to be a "real man" pretty offensive, backwards crap.
  - mkr-hn 15y ago
    I recommend more than a brief skim. We appear to be looking at two different blogs.

mechanical_fish 15y ago

As a student of history, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to make of this odd philosophy that there's something wrong with watching other people do things that you will never do. Living vicariously is the essence of being human. It's why we have language, and stories, and imagination, and all the wetware required to support these things. Dogs can't tell stories about other dogs in such a way that their canine audience is moved to weep or cheer. Whereas humans line up to hear stories about three-thousand-year-old semi-mythical events. Then they draw practical conclusions from those stories. I don't see why it's so terrible that I'd rather watch, say, a deep-sea fisherman risk his life than try deep-sea fishing myself. We have no shortage of deep-sea fishermen -- in fact, what we have is a shortage of fish. And the same principle definitely applies to soldiers: Every real soldier who can be replaced by a Team Fortress player, or a History Channel viewer, represents a net win for humanity.

danking00 15y ago
It is my opinion that the article does not suggest that "it's so terrible that I'd rather watch, say, a deep-sea fisherman risk his life than try deep-sea fishing myself." It actually directly chastises, in the following quote, the people who make such claims. There are men who feel that the entire problem with males today is that they’re too obsessed with college and professional sports. But that’s as wrong-headed as thinking that indulging in a straight diet of passive entertainment carries no ill-effects whatsoever. Rather than suffering from spectatoritis, these men are inflicted by high-horse-itis. The writers further clarify their position in the paragraph following the above one. They insist that "a problem only arises when instead of being a supplement to your life," it becomes "a substitution, a way to feel better about something you personally lack." I'm a fourth year undergraduate at a university in Boston, MA. I have had roommates who watch television many hours a day, do their homework with no passion or interest, and then proceed to drink and party all night. I will not argue that any of these actions are individually "bad," but I will argue that a life consisting primarily of these activities is devoid of creative output and is qualitatively "bad" under my philosophy. A life of raging all night at a party and, assuming an impressive alcohol tolerance, waking the next morning to start creating something is not a a life I'd call "bad." I believe this is a faithful interpetation of the article's position.

AndrewMoffat 15y ago

894 likes, 35 +1s, 160 tweets

pigbucket 15y ago
Your comment was looking a little grey under the collar when I read it, which I think raises the irony to which you allude to another level.

swlkr 15y ago

I loved this article. Mostly because I see a bunch of "spectatoritis" around me all of the time. I swear that the inland empire is just a bunch of passionless zombies living their lives waiting to die. I really don't see any get up and go or any enthusiasm for much of anything and this article mirrors my observations perfectly.

rudyfink 15y ago

My dad always described television as watching other people live life. It was an observation I'd forgotten. Thanks for posting this article and reminding me of it.

maeon3 15y ago

If 95% of people were not fraggles, sheep and spectators, then a lot of things in this world would not get done as quickly as they do now. People think that the innovation phase of a project is the hard part, but in some ways, it's just the seed, you need an army of autonomous humans to do the mundane work to make the innovation take root and flourish. If everyone on Earth had (and acted upon) Earth-shaking visions like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Ford, then the world would be full of amazing ideas that never get carried out to their potential. We need the drones, workers and the queen. Too many queens and the hive dies.

aMoniker 15y ago
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." - Robert A. Heinlein

forbes 15y ago

I used to spend a lot of my weekends watching my AFL team, Collingwood, losing. Then I saw the episode of Seinfeld where he did his bit about sports fans: "We're a little too into sports in this country, I think we gotta throttle back. Know what I mean? People come home from these games, 'We won! We won!' No, they won - you watched." "They won, you watched." It really resonated with me. I was spending quite a bit of cash to watch a bunch of fit guys try to kick a ball better than another bunch of fit guys in different coloured jumpers. If 'my guys' won I felt good and if they didn't, I didn't. It seemed ridiculous to me. If they won, why should I feel happy? I don't even know them! And if they lost, why should I feel upset? It wasn't my fault. I haven't really been to an AFL game since then and barely watch it on TV. If Collingwood makes a final, like they did last year, then yes, I want them to win and I will watch the game on TV. But it doesn't go any further than that. Giving up on the spectating didn't make me go out and play football myself, but I do mostly spend my spare time being creative rather than just spectating.

smokeyj 15y ago
i came away with a similar sentiment after reading this blog, and it really articulated a similar notion in my head -- for me, wasting precious free time online, living through the success stories of fellow entrepreneurs.
- forbes 15y ago
  Yeah, it is inevitable that we will do a little spectating. I got my insight into the pointlessness of watching spectator sports from watching Seinfeld, watching TV, another spectator activity. I still enjoy comedies and movies and they don't make me depressed like watching professional sport. I try to limit my time on sites like Hacker News for the same reason I try to limit my TV. Anytime I think of the masses of creative output of greats like Beethoven, Picasso, Edison I think to myself - "The amazing power of not watching TV for four hours a day."

canistr 15y ago

What about video games?