You need to understand it certainly, in the same way you need to understand the rules of Football to really enjoy watching a game. but I haven't played SC or SC2 in years and I still enjoy watching the streams, in the same way that I've never played a real game of hockey but still like watching the NHL.

Depends on the game. I have watched Dota 2 games and have absolutely no idea what anyone is doing or why. I tried playing HOTS and even the tutorial couldn't explain to me what a MOBA is.

I think a lot of Twitch is not competitive games like Dota or Overwatch and are really casual games that anyone can understand. I never played Portal 2 cooperative but can easily understand what's going on if someone is streaming it. I think people that don't play the game but watch are watching games in that genre.

There are also games in the middle, like Fortnite, that are pretty easy to follow. "What do you do in this game?" "Kill anything that moves and run to the circle." Once you understand that you can probably figure out what the streamer is doing and why.

This is why I've always thought Rocket League would take off in a big way, it's as trivial to understand as most physical sports.

So far I've been proven wrong, but who knows, maybe it'll turn around.

I tried Rocket League... I didn't find it that much fun and the learning curve was a bit too steep. I certainly knew what to do in the game, but I could never get out of my elementary-school soccer habits where I just chased the ball around like an idiot, never in a position to make a play. If I was in a good position, I didn't know what the controls did. As a result, not much fun.

Overwatch I got sucked into immediately. I knew the basic idea; kill the red team... and the rest of the details I picked up as I played. The matchmaking did a very good job of keeping the games winnable but not boring. The variety of heroes has something for everyone; from those that have been playing FPSes since they were 5 (Soldier, McCree, Widowmaker), those that picked up Overwatch as their first competitive FPS at 30 (Winston, Reinhardt, Moira, Mercy...), or those that want something completely different (Doomfist, Sombra, Symmetra). I have made many friends in that game, even met my (ex-) girlfriend via "stay as team" after a good match.

The biggest problem Overwatch has is that they made it appealing to the hard-core gamers as well, so you have to wade through all the people in the community that complain about "no aim, no brain" because they happened to play Aim Hero 13 hours a day and believe that's the only skill in a first-person perspective game that involves killing people. And the balance of the game is such that right now, they're kind of right... people with average aim in other games can absolutely destroy with Hanzo given the large hitbox of his one-shot-kill arrows. You don't need positioning, you don't need teamwork; just get those arrows in the immediate vicinity of the enemy's heads and you win, no matter what your team is doing. They'll probably tone him down a bit in the near future, though.

Rocket League has a pretty serious inflection point on the learning curve where the game suddenly becomes much more fun. Basically once you can control the ball enough where your optimal strategy isn't "punt the ball as far as you can", the game gets much more interesting.

I clocked about 200 hours over 3 years before hitting that point, and since then I've done another 200 over 6 months.

Regardless, I think it's one of the few e-sports that's fun to watch regardless of how skilled you are yourself.

I don't know if "it gets really fun after 200 hours" is really going to work on anyone but the most poop-socking maniacs.

Yeah, I felt completely useless in the beginning. It wasn't fun at all but then it suddenly clicked and I started improving. Now I feel like one with the car and can pull of stuff I would only dream of (air dribbles, ceiling shots etc).

Also, RL has become my favorite esport by far. The problem is that unless you've tried the game you don't realize how crazily good the pro players are. Things that wows me don't impress my non-RL friends at all.

Rocket league was meh for me, but then I tried Oculus’s Echo VR zero-gravity soccer - and it’s unbelievably good. Having real physical competitive sport in your room anytime, instantly - it’s like a dream came true.

Not quite watchable on streams and videos currently because first person view on 2d screen is erratic and horribly flat - but I hope games like this is the future.

Just like regular sports, you need to understand the basic rules, but that doesn't mean you need to know all of them. Most people don't know the full rulebook of sports that they watch.

And commentators can make it even more accessible; their expertise is there to help provide context and guidance.

As someone who watches a lot of Dota (at an esports bar with strangers who may or may not know dota) and plays very little, you’re half right.

In football You don’t need to know, exactly, which way the plays are going to go and why, but you do need to know the rough constraints of the game and what is physically possible to perform.

Some of the things that happen in dota are utterly impossible to follow unless you have, at the very least, a knowledge of the (on average 3) active abilities of the ~110 heroes.

Yeah, I think this is the major difference. Being from Europe I don't really know anything about American football or baseball beyond the basics, but watching a game it's pretty transparent whenever someone does something good. I don't need to know batting averages, the difficulty of plays, or why a play was exceptional to know when a player or team scored points.

Games like MOBAs are opaque by comparison. I can see roughly what's going on but I couldn't tell you if a team is winning or losing to save my life. In football if the guy holding the ball is out in front of the defending team and running to the end zone I can guess he's going to score a TD, but a team can look like they're getting whooped in DotA but really they're tricking the opponents and someone is making a sneaky play in a different corner of the map or someone has an ability or gear that means the situation is the reverse of what it appears, etc.

All of that is really only apparent to someone very familiar with the game.

In addition to what others have said (you need to understand the game, not be an actual player of it), many channels cultivate a community of the same regular viewers. While gaming is technically the thing that brings them all together, the streamers' humor, community in-jokes, and a sense of shared interest are what make different channels unique. As a non-gamer, that's why I watch a few of them regularly.

Watching streams is "about" gaming in the same sense that tailgating is "about" football.

Not necessarily, several of my co-workers are big into Overwatch so when the Overwatch League started up in January I started watching matches with them. After a few weeks of asking questions as we went, I felt like I had a pretty handle on it and could start to contribute to the discussion.

You are absolutely correct though. Those first few weeks I had no idea what was happening aside from the occasional head-shot.

The popular FPS games like Overwatch, CS:GO, or Fortnite are easy to understand for someone who've never played them. Dota/LoL/Starcraft are completely different though -- you needs lots of hours of experience to even have any clue as to what's going on. Try watching it, and you'll see what I mean.

This is true of DotA and LoL, but not really Starcraft. Starcraft is fairly easy to pick up and almost all the relevant information to understand who is ahead, who is behind, and how the game is going is easily visible on the screen.

Games like DotA and LoL have too many mechanics built into them that are just debt from their origins as a Warcraft 3 mod. They're not really intuitive or sensical to the uninitiated.

Moreover, in Starcraft if lots of different things are happening at once, it's as technically challenging for the players to keep track of as it is for the viewers. With MOBAs the action is scattered across 3 to 6 areas of the map at the same time, so it's way more complicated to keep track of as a spectator.

The Blizzard MOBA, Heroes of the Storm, was kind of designed from the ground up to be a lot more watchable. They got rid of the item stuff and moved the complexity from being focused on the character builds to more strategic stuff that's visible on the map. But it doesn't seem to have taken off that much.

For some people who used to play RTS and MOBA games years ago, they can still understand what's happening in a complex team game, even if they don't actively play the game.