This reads as very biased and judgmental. It treats streamers as kids who can't take care of themselves and don't understand the long-term impact of their lifestyle and career choice. It honestly makes me wonder if the author is jealous of the subject. It seems like the piece is really reaching to make Tyler's life appear as irresponsible as possible.
Plenty of people in all careers don't know how to run their lives at 26, and plenty decide to completely change their lives at ages far older than that. Tyler seems like an admirable rags-to-riches success story -- he didn't get his foot in the door by being in the right location or knowing the right people, just hard work and a ton of talent. The company that runs the game he plays banned him for life, and he persevered anyway. In many ways, his success is more rare and more difficult than starting a startup. I'm not saying the lifestyle is necessarily worth celebrating, but it's deserving of a lot more respect than it gets here.
> It treats streamers as kids who can't take care of themselves and don't understand the long-term impact of their lifestyle and career choice.
Interesting. I did not read it like that at all. Do you have an example quotation of what makes you think that?
The impression I got is both Tyler and Micayla are well aware of how negatively streaming affects their lives. They both explicitly said they don't want to be doing this forever and want to retire, didn't they?
I also didn't get the impression at all that they're kids; quite the opposite. They have golden handcuffs, just like a lot of people in tech. The difference seems to be (and this is what I felt the article conveyed, at least to me) the grueling effect of having your life and brain on display around the clock.
I think it's possible to both respect how they got there and their agency, but also feel some mixed feelings about their lifestyles. Especially if you see tyler1 and xqc do 8+/10+ hour streams every day respectively, while taking 1-2 vacations per year.
"Pity" might be too judgemental, but I personally don't envy that lifestyle. It's just like respecting boxers' and NFL players' success, while not wanting to be in their shoes and risk getting killed in the ring or CTE.
> Plenty of people in all careers don't know how to run their lives at 26
I mean take a look at the movie artist, musician field and see how many people there have problems running their live.
Having the skills to run your live, is a separate skill set. And the more stress and irregularities you job entails the harder it is. Hence why e.g. successful actors often have people helping them managing their lives.
> but it's deserving of a lot more respect than it gets here.
yes, it's a hard job. For each successful case there are thousands which fail.
> It treats streamers as kids who can't take care of themselves and don't understand the long-term impact of their lifestyle and career choice.
This is more or less what many streamers are saying about it too. And most streamers are eager to get out of this self-destructive lifestyle with age. Streaming is a though gamble, and most are losing it. Educating about the harsh price of this is good and necessary, and the article is pretty fair there IMHO.
If they had instead wrote the article about a drug dealer making $500k a year, explaining the downsides of that line of work, would you also think the journalist was just jealous?
The point of the article is that this seems like a lifestyle destined to cause issues later in life.
Not all "issues" are equal; a job that requires regularly committing felonies has much more severe potential "issues later in life" than working a few too many hours a week.
I don't think this article is that biased. This kind of lifestyle is pretty common for top streamers, and I'd argue it's about far more than just not knowing how to run their lives.
It's actually a lifestyle common for many self employed people, not just streamers.
But also e.g. startup entrepreneurs.
Or people with a small one-person shop.
or even the movie industry, everyone from the industry I have spoken with agreed on the lifestyle many involved peoples is so bad that many end up needing drugs to goo on sooner or later.
But I tend to linger on twitch and there are many streamers which might just earn comparable to a slightly better employee job, but which have a much more healthy life style. Like streaming with a (somewhat) stable schedule, <=5 days a week. Taking holidays and not streaming too long. Through platforms like Twitch, YouTube and especially TickTock make taking holidays REALLY hard. And it's really not easy to get right.
Agree, I thought the way the article was written made me really sympathetic to Tyler. Plus, while the article does talk about streamers in general, I really read it much more as a story about this specific streamer, not about streamers in general.
Streaming aside, tyler1 has an almost inhuman dedication and focus when it comes to League of Legends. On Hacker News it's common to hear that programmers can't work (on classic programming tasks) for more than ~4 hours a day. I also feel exhausted after working for ~4 hours and have always wondered if this was some sort of mental trap I'd fallen into or a genuine limit.
Games like League of Legends require complete focus and attention yet he somehow manages to regularly stream for 10 hours and sometimes reaches peaks of over 30 hours(!!!)[1]. Can you imagine solving leetcode problems (even easy ones) for 30 hours?
In 2020 he paused streaming so he could focus solely on going from Diamond (mid-to-high tier) to Challenger (highest tier). If I recall correctly, he said he would sleep on the couch by his computer, wake up, play and go back to sleep on the couch after ~17 hours.
I don't follow League of Legends (I prefer Dota) but tyler1 has always stood out to me as a person with an incomparable focus and dedication. I haven't seen anything similar in the Dota community and the only programmers that jump to mind would be geohotz or maybe Nick Winter[2].
Do you really imply that playing the same game over and over again (with some variables but still) is the same as solving programming problems?
The game is literally designed to hook you in and make you play one more and one more. You absolutely can autopilot through a game and still win.
Don't get me wrong, the guy has a lot of dedication for sure. But playing League all day is really not like coding all day, I don't want anyone to get that impression.
Have you played League of Legends or Dota 2 before? It will be hard to convey the mental/emotional exhaustion that most people feel from playing MOBAs at even a semi-competitive level. In my experience it's a lot different than playing FPS or other games.
I have a distinct memory of finishing a game of Dota 2 and realizing that it felt as though I'd just finished a 3 hour exam. I didn't feel happy that we'd won, just relieved. I don't think this will convince you, but perhaps consider being open to the possibility that it genuinely is as difficult as solving most programming problems that we face in our day-to-day work. In my mind, it's at least as difficult as "easy" leetcode problems.
This comment shows a remarkable disregard for the level of skill required to compete at the highest level.
You don't encounter a lot of autopiloting at the highest level of competition. The people you compete against are trying as hard as they possibly can to beat you, and it takes a tremendous amount of focus and ingenuity to outplay them and win. You gloss over the details of that monumental task with reductive phrasing - but I think you're overlooking a lot.
I was at a party once, talking to a stranger about why I loved programming so much. They said: "Yeah, but at the end of the day, it's _just_ programming, right?". That's how this comment reads to me - "At the end of the day, it's just playing a game, right?"
There's a reason that some people compete at the highest level and some are in the fat part of the bell curve.
I have 5?k hours in LoL around high plat / in previous season low diamond and I'd say that LoL while being different from competitive programming
is still exhausting if you want to play it with full focus for a few hours.
Of course there's difference between playing ARAMs for fun and tryharding on "relatively competent" ELO where you try to do not commit mistakes as hard as you can and games are not "fiestas" (lack of strategy, just fighting)
>You absolutely can autopilot through a game and still win.
Significant part of day2day programming can be pretty brainless/trivial too - yet another gluing json over http. Don't get me wrong, there are insanely exhausting projects too.
During programming you can take break whenever you want, go to kitchen, watch memes, hn, read news, blabla, meanwhile when you're in game, then you can't*.
I humbly disagree, and if you have not competed at the pro level in an RTS (Starcraft is another absurdly hard game that requires hundreds of actions a minute) then I believe your view is skewed. When I code all day there are tasks I can auto pilot. Rebase from gerrit, an amend, maybe hunting down answers on Stack Overflow. Sure, I get that coding != video games. But the skills Tyler has or someone who plays as a pro Star Craft player are Masters at a craft that takes way more than auto pilot. In many cases it is physically demanding too and I think you’re giving the wrong impression. It’s not a game at that point, it’s a profession, and an absurdly tough one at that. Machines can beat people at chess. Our AI had struggled for years to beat humans at Star Craft. I find that inspiring, and am in awe some people can push themselves so hard to be that good.
Playing a high level game of Starcraft or Dota is more exhausting to me then programming. With programming I have to think of some designs, spend some times with the tooling, setting things up, to all the busy work surrounding the core problem and so on. Sure there are moments when you really have to think very hard about what you do as well, but its not constant.
I can take easy breaks. Run some tests and so on.
When playing a game you have to be totally focused for longer periods and not just focus but also execute and handle the concept of being activity opposed. Its like if you were programming and the compiler was activity being evil.
At gunpoint, I'd rather code 12 hours a day than play LoL or CS:GO 12 hours a day. Because programming is less exhausting and my code doesn't insult my mother on VOIP. And I say that as a gamer and esports enthusiast.
There's a world of difference between playing league casually and competitively. No one at his level of play can autopilot through a game and still win.
I think the impressive thing is doing it day after day. I can do lots of things, including programming, for 12+ hours. The trouble is, after a day or two of that, I desperately don't want to do whatever-it-is for several days or weeks. I want to go do other stuff.
It's the doing it day after day on a regular schedule that makes me feel like I never really recover from programming, and just want to zone out and stare at the wall until bed time, having very little energy left for anything either fun or productive, after 4-5 hours, most days.
I'll even do that with video games. Get the family out of the house and give me a weekend, I'll play vidja games for like 16 hours. Then wake up the second day and not want to touch a game for at least a week, and instead start doing home improvement projects or whatever. Or sit outside and read a book all day. Not because I feel like I should, but because it's the thing I most want to be doing, and I have zero desire to look at a screen for a good long while.
The regularity of work is what makes it so damn draining, for me. I'm sure it'd ruin gaming for me in short order, too, though I'd have fared a lot better at it back when I was in my teens or early 20s than I would now, for sure. I can't do 30 waking hours of anything now. 24 just about ruins me. I could get to about 36-38 before hitting a wall and passing out for like 12 hours, back then. 30 wasn't that big a deal, and I hit that mark pretty often (usually, yeah, playing video games for a good chunk of it).
> Why do you think demonstrating focus on an addictive video game is the same as solving open-ended computer science problems?
Firstly, I probably wouldn't classify the work most of us do as "solving open-ended computer science problems" so I'm not trying to make a comparison to that work.
Secondly, I guess it stands out to me because I watch other people play the same addictive game and are unable to play at a high level for the same lengths of time. If it were just an addictive property of the game, we should expect to see thousands of tyler1's as we see thousands of heroin addicts. Since we do not, it makes me think that there's something special with him.
He takes Adderall my dude. I'm a developer and I use absolutely no cognitive enhancers. If I took Adderall I would be able to code for 20 hours straight. I took a small dose back in college and that stuff is insanely good for long hours at anything.
Also, I'm speculating here, but I think he is on Testosterone Replacement Therapy, which also has insane energy, mood and cognitive enhancements.
Lastly he takes a ton of stimulants.
I don't for a moment think he's working purely off "natural" energy.
My dad worked for startups on-and-off and he definitely was productive for a lot more than 8 hours per day. He does agree that for truly novel work there's a limit, but for every novel problem to solve, there's dozens[1] of reported bugs to investigate, so there's plenty of work to fit between work on new things.
1: That number seems small today, but I got the sense that bug-discovery by customers at least was limited by the low number of customers that a b2b startup had in the 80s.
I could also play MMORPGs and Dota 2 for 10 hours straight without any break, I can barely sit one hour solving LC/learning something.
And before you account this to age, even now I could spend whole day playing some addictive game like a robot.
I think it's totally ridiculous that some are treating this at "not a real job".
It just shows that many people do not understand what is going one at all.
Sure it's a form of "entertainer" job, but actress, synchron speaker or comedian are also real jobs.
And no one would go and say "oh say just need to say some lines on stage so it's not a real job". It's not at all as simple as "just playing games in front of camera".
Sure some people do just that as a hobby, but then people also program as a hobby and programming is still a real job.
And sure many just barely make enough to cover living expanses, but that's true for many jobs which still are "real jobs".
No idea why people feel to denounce people which act as entertainers while also often managing a merch job and a community as "not having a real job"? Is it be of envy that some people have and at their job and where able to turn their hobby into a job?
Either-way it's not just a real job it's like many jobs from the entertainment business not an easy job to get successful with, without a "clear" path to success, requiring often both hard work, talent and luck and with often not-so rosy long term aspects and just a few managing to get rich or wealthy, while many other are sooner or later forced to change their job. You know like in many other jobs in the entertainment industries, e.g. musician/singer.
Ya and it’s amazing that people think it can be easily replicated. To get to that level you must be the one percent of the one percent of gamers typically. Most coders can be “professional” with a boot camp these days.
A real job is one where a boss can arbitrarily fire you so that you learn to respect your elders and anybody who doesn't have a real job is bypassing the critical societal conditioning step and should be shamed.
What's the career progression for streamers and eSports players, anyway? I feel like everyone that does this now is going to be tired of it in 5 years, and then they're just 30 and without a college degree or job experience.
I know a few ex-YouTubers, and they're all doing just fine. Working in PR, marketing, agents for other creators, etc. Sure, they don't all have a degree... but they have a ton of connections and relevant experience.
Any of the giants should hopefully have been saving there money and have quite a bunch tucked away. Any of the smaller ones should have been doing something on the side, or at least have a plan B ready.
Also, not sure why we're assuming no college degree here.
Or that running a successful business for a decade doesn't count as experience that most businesses would be happy to hire on. Being a successful twitch streamer involves extremely good time management and a lot of hands on advertising. They've got a lot more proof of successful marketing than most PR folks you might look at hiring.
Nowadays there are financial planners focusing on content creators/streaming talent who will know the specifics of tax structures and advantages, etc. as well.
But what if you're not one of the top streamers, and you just get 250 viewers a few times a week? I watch a lot of people like that. It seems to pay for room and board, but I worry about their future.
The same career path as a professional athlete. Some go into commentating, some go into sports management, and most retire broke and have to pick up a whole new career in their late 20s/early 30s.
There are quite a few streamers who have been doing it for more than a decade at this point with no sign of slowing down.
On the other hand, there are plenty of ways to sell the skill of building a large following to employers, and plenty of companies looking for people who are experts in social media/streaming platforms.
why does every endeavor require career progression? its [Current Year] can't people just enjoy something, take the money and invest it, then go to college, start a business, make a RE empire?
Ask a few military vets, many legitimately just start at the bottom at the totem some place novel into their mid 30s.
Right? Can't you just enjoy being in a good place and stay there?
Maybe I'm jaundiced because I just had to fill out my annual review self-assessment and skipped the "5-year plan" because I simply couldn't be bothered to lie about it.
We have decades of examples of how this works out for pro athletes. The answer is that there's a range of outcomes: some have to find new careers after their playing days are over; others find ancillary work (coaching, scouting) in the sports industry; the very best make enough money that they don't need to work anymore. In many cases, the athletes have a college degree of at least some value.
Professional video game streaming is relatively new. It's a valid question.
One concern I could see in e-sports vs traditional (and I don't follow e-sports closely, so maybe I'm wrong) is that the games being played change regularly. Do the skills of a top player of one generation of games tend to translate well to coaching top players for the next generation of games, or would any such coach look more like Ted Lasso?
I'm sure professional athletes in non-traditional physical sports have had to face the same questions — e.g. Tony Hawk. And in reality a lot of people put in professional levels of effort into traditional sports without reaping the kind of career-defining rewards one would associate with "professional athletes".
Yes. A lot of professional athletes don’t really make much money. They get normal salaries and play for non major league teams or federations of some sort.
Eventually though they will have to quit their sport due to wear and tear and no longer being at a peak level. And most will probably never really progress to a level where they can make some quick millions from a contract and then retire early.
I'm a proponent of the idea that your athletic scholarship at a Division I-A school should be for "sports degree" and that it should entitle you to come back prepaid for an "academic" 4 year degree when that track runs out.
That would stop a lot of the idiocy we see around "student athletes".
I know an ex-WoW professional player. He didn't make a ton of money. After it was over he went back to school, and is now a very talented software engineer.
Doing anything at a high level tends to cultivate skills that translate to other areas. General skills like focus and discipline come to mind.
Reminds me of Travis Morrison, lead singer of the indie band The Dismemberment Plan who were popular in the 90s/early 2000s. After his retirement from music he became a web developer who at one point worked for the washington post and huffington post.
His girlfriend (now wife) describes the experience of being with someone who was once somewhat famous in this article [0] -- There were moments of extreme cognitive dissonance when I saw him up there. He’s a wild and expert showman on stage. As I’d watch him do things like play the keyboard by smashing it with his forehead, spit water all over the audience or writhe convulsively on the ground, I would think, “I can’t believe this is the same man who likes to go to bed at 10 o’clock and sweetly brings me coffee in bed every morning.”
If someone is an esports player, it would be hard to stay a professional (in most action games at least) at age 30 simply due to natural wear on your hands and reaction times getting slower.
This doesn't really make sense. Athletes in many sports are playing way past their 'prime' these days and they are wearing out much more than just their hands. Consistently good reaction times are a result of consistent training. Plenty of older baseball/tennis players have superhuman reaction times. I would see mental fatigue and boredom as being the major hurdle to playing esports on a professional level at an older age. No matter how fun it started as, 10+ years of looking at the same thing over and over has got to be soul sucking.
I haven't seen any evidence to suggest 30 years is a number of much importance for this. Most Esports scenes also aren't old enough to have older players as well.
The only ones that I know of are Quake and Street Fighter. In Quake currently only 1 or 2 of the best mechanically gifted players in the world are under 30. In Street Fighter, there's a wide range of ages including younger players as well as players as old as 40+. The "god of execution" Sakonoko is 42 years old and is still winning major tournaments every once in a while.
In Formula 1, Lewis Hamilton is likely on his way to yet another world championship at 36, edging it out over his 10 years younger contender.
I think a decent few of them find positions in related fields like talent management or esports. They do probably develop pretty decent relationships in those industries.
You could ask the same of any developer in their 30s or 40s, most of whom earn less per year than the subject of TFA, and who similarly will have trouble finding work in their field in 10-20 years (if the ageism doesn't go away).
What's the big deal starting at age 30? you still got another 30 years to work at least, if not more. You just study some profession and start working in the field.
This article is fascinating for the effects it has on readers.
We likely all understand that one of the toxic forces in our culture today is the compulsive need to turn every story and news article into a clear moral narrative with a pure protagonist and a villainous antagonist. Reality isn't like that at all, and when journalists force reality into that framework, it distorts our perception of the world in unhealthy ways.
But when an article comes out that doesn't do that, that just says "here are some people and what their experience is like", it seems many of us are unprepared to handle it. In the comments here, I see this rorschach-like phenomenon where each reader imagines a morality play, superimposes it on the article, and then gets surprised when others saw something different.
This isn't an acticle about good guys and bad guys, winning and losing, the good or evil of capitalism. It's just a window into one person's life. It's a useful article because this is a kind of person whose life affects many of us—a lot of people here watch popular streamers—but where we have little insight into the whole picture of how that impacts their life.
We should relish journalism like this. There is no need to jump to any moral conclusion. Just witness and understand a bit more about the variety of lives people live today.
Agreed. I'm kinda shook at a lot of the comments here, IMO missing the point (or lack of point) of the article. It's a slice of life view into a poignantly tragic story of a kid "lucking" into a terrible pair of golden handcuffs - a view into the apex of parasocial relationships. Someone who so clearly lacks any semblance of a social life, in the same hand creating a social environment for thousands of people - chiefly centered around making fun of him. There's no moral "good" or "bad" here.
As readers we can draw our own conclusions here, but to call the author biased into making the life/platform/phenomenon of twitch streamers bad? That's just a really narrow view of a fairly compelling article.
Sure his life seems like a nightmare, but to be honest, wouldn't it have been even worse without the streaming. Then he'd probably still be playing computer games all the time, still living in squalor, but he'd be broke. Now he's at least able to save up a lot of money.
Streamer here.
It makes me sad to see that kind of numbers. There is plenty of interesting and attaching personnalities but the crowd focus on top tier streamers.
I not complain for me, I'm in the top tier of my niche but I see many people with unit viewers while being positive for other people. That's why I systematically send my viewers to smaller streamer when I stop the live.
If some of you wonder why viewers give us money, from my experience, the stream is a comfortable place for them.
But how a 26k people chat could be comfortable? You instantly loose the special link with the streamer by being flooded into the chat. On the streamer side, I can't imagine loosing the special link I have with the community.
With 240 messages per minute, it's impossible to meet anyone. I'm lucky to have made friendships and even working relationship through the stream.
For anyone curious about how twitch and HN can meet, go to the Twitch "software and development" category.
I think for most streams there's no real need to watch them from start til end. You can just tune in and out at will without missing much. For many it probably just runs in the background while they do other things, like some people do with soap operas on TV.
Personally, as a programmer I usually have a Twitch stream (often Tyler1's) running on a second monitor as background noise if I'm not listening to music. However, the most active chatters are mainly college students in my experience.
The streamer is 8 hours in, not the audience. Also, if you think how much free time children, teenagers and NEET adults have, yeah, 5+h per day watching games is completely doable during a pandemic.
You have it on in the background. Some streams have a very engaged community, everyone is there flooding the chat all the time. But in most streams the viewers aren't engaging, they have it on the background, it is on their second monitor while they play games or work or whatever. Viewership went way up during the pandemic too.
I don't think it is for everyone but I prefer it to TV/Netflix/whatever. I didn't even play games when I started watching (I do now, but only once or twice a week). Some people prefer amateur porn to Brazzers.
Or just keep it on in a background tab with headphones on? I've always got some kind of podcast running or twitch if I'm not doing deep work (I do frontend, so I'll listen to stuff when writing boilerplate vs problem solving).
Readit News
Plenty of people in all careers don't know how to run their lives at 26, and plenty decide to completely change their lives at ages far older than that. Tyler seems like an admirable rags-to-riches success story -- he didn't get his foot in the door by being in the right location or knowing the right people, just hard work and a ton of talent. The company that runs the game he plays banned him for life, and he persevered anyway. In many ways, his success is more rare and more difficult than starting a startup. I'm not saying the lifestyle is necessarily worth celebrating, but it's deserving of a lot more respect than it gets here.
Interesting. I did not read it like that at all. Do you have an example quotation of what makes you think that?
The impression I got is both Tyler and Micayla are well aware of how negatively streaming affects their lives. They both explicitly said they don't want to be doing this forever and want to retire, didn't they?
"Pity" might be too judgemental, but I personally don't envy that lifestyle. It's just like respecting boxers' and NFL players' success, while not wanting to be in their shoes and risk getting killed in the ring or CTE.
Sounds like the live of very many self-employed people.
Like even if you just have a small shop going with 10h a day 6 days a week without vacation for many years isn't that rare of a story to hear.
I mean take a look at the movie artist, musician field and see how many people there have problems running their live.
Having the skills to run your live, is a separate skill set. And the more stress and irregularities you job entails the harder it is. Hence why e.g. successful actors often have people helping them managing their lives.
> but it's deserving of a lot more respect than it gets here.
yes, it's a hard job. For each successful case there are thousands which fail.
one doesn't live a live, they live a life.
This is more or less what many streamers are saying about it too. And most streamers are eager to get out of this self-destructive lifestyle with age. Streaming is a though gamble, and most are losing it. Educating about the harsh price of this is good and necessary, and the article is pretty fair there IMHO.
If they had instead wrote the article about a drug dealer making $500k a year, explaining the downsides of that line of work, would you also think the journalist was just jealous?
The point of the article is that this seems like a lifestyle destined to cause issues later in life.
Not all "issues" are equal; a job that requires regularly committing felonies has much more severe potential "issues later in life" than working a few too many hours a week.
But also e.g. startup entrepreneurs.
Or people with a small one-person shop.
or even the movie industry, everyone from the industry I have spoken with agreed on the lifestyle many involved peoples is so bad that many end up needing drugs to goo on sooner or later.
But I tend to linger on twitch and there are many streamers which might just earn comparable to a slightly better employee job, but which have a much more healthy life style. Like streaming with a (somewhat) stable schedule, <=5 days a week. Taking holidays and not streaming too long. Through platforms like Twitch, YouTube and especially TickTock make taking holidays REALLY hard. And it's really not easy to get right.
Games like League of Legends require complete focus and attention yet he somehow manages to regularly stream for 10 hours and sometimes reaches peaks of over 30 hours(!!!)[1]. Can you imagine solving leetcode problems (even easy ones) for 30 hours?
In 2020 he paused streaming so he could focus solely on going from Diamond (mid-to-high tier) to Challenger (highest tier). If I recall correctly, he said he would sleep on the couch by his computer, wake up, play and go back to sleep on the couch after ~17 hours.
I don't follow League of Legends (I prefer Dota) but tyler1 has always stood out to me as a person with an incomparable focus and dedication. I haven't seen anything similar in the Dota community and the only programmers that jump to mind would be geohotz or maybe Nick Winter[2].
[1] https://dotesports.com/news/tyler1-marathon-stream-top-lane-...
[2] https://blog.nickwinter.net/posts/the-120-hour-workweek-epic...
The game is literally designed to hook you in and make you play one more and one more. You absolutely can autopilot through a game and still win.
Don't get me wrong, the guy has a lot of dedication for sure. But playing League all day is really not like coding all day, I don't want anyone to get that impression.
I have a distinct memory of finishing a game of Dota 2 and realizing that it felt as though I'd just finished a 3 hour exam. I didn't feel happy that we'd won, just relieved. I don't think this will convince you, but perhaps consider being open to the possibility that it genuinely is as difficult as solving most programming problems that we face in our day-to-day work. In my mind, it's at least as difficult as "easy" leetcode problems.
You don't encounter a lot of autopiloting at the highest level of competition. The people you compete against are trying as hard as they possibly can to beat you, and it takes a tremendous amount of focus and ingenuity to outplay them and win. You gloss over the details of that monumental task with reductive phrasing - but I think you're overlooking a lot.
I was at a party once, talking to a stranger about why I loved programming so much. They said: "Yeah, but at the end of the day, it's _just_ programming, right?". That's how this comment reads to me - "At the end of the day, it's just playing a game, right?"
There's a reason that some people compete at the highest level and some are in the fat part of the bell curve.
is still exhausting if you want to play it with full focus for a few hours.
Of course there's difference between playing ARAMs for fun and tryharding on "relatively competent" ELO where you try to do not commit mistakes as hard as you can and games are not "fiestas" (lack of strategy, just fighting)
>You absolutely can autopilot through a game and still win.
Significant part of day2day programming can be pretty brainless/trivial too - yet another gluing json over http. Don't get me wrong, there are insanely exhausting projects too.
During programming you can take break whenever you want, go to kitchen, watch memes, hn, read news, blabla, meanwhile when you're in game, then you can't*.
I can take easy breaks. Run some tests and so on.
When playing a game you have to be totally focused for longer periods and not just focus but also execute and handle the concept of being activity opposed. Its like if you were programming and the compiler was activity being evil.
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It's the doing it day after day on a regular schedule that makes me feel like I never really recover from programming, and just want to zone out and stare at the wall until bed time, having very little energy left for anything either fun or productive, after 4-5 hours, most days.
I'll even do that with video games. Get the family out of the house and give me a weekend, I'll play vidja games for like 16 hours. Then wake up the second day and not want to touch a game for at least a week, and instead start doing home improvement projects or whatever. Or sit outside and read a book all day. Not because I feel like I should, but because it's the thing I most want to be doing, and I have zero desire to look at a screen for a good long while.
The regularity of work is what makes it so damn draining, for me. I'm sure it'd ruin gaming for me in short order, too, though I'd have fared a lot better at it back when I was in my teens or early 20s than I would now, for sure. I can't do 30 waking hours of anything now. 24 just about ruins me. I could get to about 36-38 before hitting a wall and passing out for like 12 hours, back then. 30 wasn't that big a deal, and I hit that mark pretty often (usually, yeah, playing video games for a good chunk of it).
Why do you think demonstrating focus on an addictive video game is the same as solving open-ended computer science problems?
Firstly, I probably wouldn't classify the work most of us do as "solving open-ended computer science problems" so I'm not trying to make a comparison to that work.
Secondly, I guess it stands out to me because I watch other people play the same addictive game and are unable to play at a high level for the same lengths of time. If it were just an addictive property of the game, we should expect to see thousands of tyler1's as we see thousands of heroin addicts. Since we do not, it makes me think that there's something special with him.
“Focus” aside, his overall contribution to the sport is tainted with his abhorrent behavior.
Also, I'm speculating here, but I think he is on Testosterone Replacement Therapy, which also has insane energy, mood and cognitive enhancements.
Lastly he takes a ton of stimulants.
I don't for a moment think he's working purely off "natural" energy.
1: That number seems small today, but I got the sense that bug-discovery by customers at least was limited by the low number of customers that a b2b startup had in the 80s.
But I have worked (programmed) two 9h days without sleeping in-between before and it worked somehow well???
Through normally I often have problems working 8h a day without taking a fairly long lunch brake.
But then sometimes I just went 10h with close to no brakes (some ad-hock food) without even realizing it.
It's still puzzles me what makes the difference.
I could also play MMORPGs and Dota 2 for 10 hours straight without any break, I can barely sit one hour solving LC/learning something. And before you account this to age, even now I could spend whole day playing some addictive game like a robot.
It just shows that many people do not understand what is going one at all.
Sure it's a form of "entertainer" job, but actress, synchron speaker or comedian are also real jobs.
And no one would go and say "oh say just need to say some lines on stage so it's not a real job". It's not at all as simple as "just playing games in front of camera".
Sure some people do just that as a hobby, but then people also program as a hobby and programming is still a real job.
And sure many just barely make enough to cover living expanses, but that's true for many jobs which still are "real jobs".
No idea why people feel to denounce people which act as entertainers while also often managing a merch job and a community as "not having a real job"? Is it be of envy that some people have and at their job and where able to turn their hobby into a job?
Either-way it's not just a real job it's like many jobs from the entertainment business not an easy job to get successful with, without a "clear" path to success, requiring often both hard work, talent and luck and with often not-so rosy long term aspects and just a few managing to get rich or wealthy, while many other are sooner or later forced to change their job. You know like in many other jobs in the entertainment industries, e.g. musician/singer.
-some old fucks. probably
- Continue
- Retire
- Start coaching
- Start casting
- Management (Organizing/growing content creators/groups)
- Switch careers entirely
Any of the giants should hopefully have been saving there money and have quite a bunch tucked away. Any of the smaller ones should have been doing something on the side, or at least have a plan B ready.
Also, not sure why we're assuming no college degree here.
On the other hand, there are plenty of ways to sell the skill of building a large following to employers, and plenty of companies looking for people who are experts in social media/streaming platforms.
Ask a few military vets, many legitimately just start at the bottom at the totem some place novel into their mid 30s.
Maybe I'm jaundiced because I just had to fill out my annual review self-assessment and skipped the "5-year plan" because I simply couldn't be bothered to lie about it.
Professional video game streaming is relatively new. It's a valid question.
Eventually though they will have to quit their sport due to wear and tear and no longer being at a peak level. And most will probably never really progress to a level where they can make some quick millions from a contract and then retire early.
So what then?
I'm a proponent of the idea that your athletic scholarship at a Division I-A school should be for "sports degree" and that it should entitle you to come back prepaid for an "academic" 4 year degree when that track runs out.
That would stop a lot of the idiocy we see around "student athletes".
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Doing anything at a high level tends to cultivate skills that translate to other areas. General skills like focus and discipline come to mind.
i was pleasantly surprised one day to find I was working side-by-side with someone who was once a minor music celebrity
they had pivoted in their 20-somethings after a decent payout, used it to finance their education, and are now just 'one of us' haha
His girlfriend (now wife) describes the experience of being with someone who was once somewhat famous in this article [0] -- There were moments of extreme cognitive dissonance when I saw him up there. He’s a wild and expert showman on stage. As I’d watch him do things like play the keyboard by smashing it with his forehead, spit water all over the audience or writhe convulsively on the ground, I would think, “I can’t believe this is the same man who likes to go to bed at 10 o’clock and sweetly brings me coffee in bed every morning.”
[0] - https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/07/travis-morrison-and...
The only ones that I know of are Quake and Street Fighter. In Quake currently only 1 or 2 of the best mechanically gifted players in the world are under 30. In Street Fighter, there's a wide range of ages including younger players as well as players as old as 40+. The "god of execution" Sakonoko is 42 years old and is still winning major tournaments every once in a while.
In Formula 1, Lewis Hamilton is likely on his way to yet another world championship at 36, edging it out over his 10 years younger contender.
https://liquipedia.net/counterstrike/Virtus.pro
e.g
>2016-07-30 1st S-Tier Offline ELEAGUE ELEAGUE Season 1 2 : 0 Fnatic $400,000
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We likely all understand that one of the toxic forces in our culture today is the compulsive need to turn every story and news article into a clear moral narrative with a pure protagonist and a villainous antagonist. Reality isn't like that at all, and when journalists force reality into that framework, it distorts our perception of the world in unhealthy ways.
But when an article comes out that doesn't do that, that just says "here are some people and what their experience is like", it seems many of us are unprepared to handle it. In the comments here, I see this rorschach-like phenomenon where each reader imagines a morality play, superimposes it on the article, and then gets surprised when others saw something different.
This isn't an acticle about good guys and bad guys, winning and losing, the good or evil of capitalism. It's just a window into one person's life. It's a useful article because this is a kind of person whose life affects many of us—a lot of people here watch popular streamers—but where we have little insight into the whole picture of how that impacts their life.
We should relish journalism like this. There is no need to jump to any moral conclusion. Just witness and understand a bit more about the variety of lives people live today.
As readers we can draw our own conclusions here, but to call the author biased into making the life/platform/phenomenon of twitch streamers bad? That's just a really narrow view of a fairly compelling article.
If some of you wonder why viewers give us money, from my experience, the stream is a comfortable place for them. But how a 26k people chat could be comfortable? You instantly loose the special link with the streamer by being flooded into the chat. On the streamer side, I can't imagine loosing the special link I have with the community. With 240 messages per minute, it's impossible to meet anyone. I'm lucky to have made friendships and even working relationship through the stream.
For anyone curious about how twitch and HN can meet, go to the Twitch "software and development" category.
I don't think it is for everyone but I prefer it to TV/Netflix/whatever. I didn't even play games when I started watching (I do now, but only once or twice a week). Some people prefer amateur porn to Brazzers.
Kids.
Adults without kids.
What an ignorant thing to say. Apparently having no kids==nothing to do except for consume full day long content.