Matthew Ball: belief

Transcript context

…Holding real income constant, what’s the number of hours a day, say, for five, six days a week, that you feel maximizes the happiness part of being part of gaming — metaverse, internet, whatever is going on at the moment. Like Nakamura, the chess player — he streams an incredible number of hours, probably more than he wants to, but yes, the income is important, but again, holding his income constant. At what number of streaming hours are these people most happy? Is it three or four? Or they love it at the ninth hour? Most of them will say that, ideally, they would do two to three hours, four to five days a week. I think the big hope — and we’re seeing this with a lot of new technologies — is that it’s still a broadcast model, and it’s still on time delay, which is to say, your audience is responding to what you did 5 to 30 seconds ago, and they have no real interaction beyond sending an emoji and cheering you on, perhaps voting on the next game that you play. There’s some hope that when you start to engage the audience more directly, that that mixes up the variety. Also creates more fun for the individual streamer who is otherwise essentially alone, talking to themselves, reading a scroll. A lot of people do a lot of gaming, as you’ve stressed. Gaming means stories, often wonderful, compelling stories in the most successful games. Politically, how do you feel gaming shapes people’s attitudes? They’re competing a lot more. They’re in environments that are, at least in a micro sense, quite meritocratic. How does it shape their overall worldview?…

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