Gaming/movie-watching environments

General Off-Topic Discussion
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Continuing the discussion from AI in competitions:

This is insane to me because:

  • I cannot do anything else while I’m gaming. I have the soundtrack playing, the noises going, the vibration on (for controller)—anything else is off, whether I’m playing a relaxing sim or an action shooter. It’s weird to me if I can’t hear what I’m playing, even for games where it doesn’t matter/is unhelpful like Super Smash Bros.
  • I don’t understand how people can focus on videos at 2x speed (I watch YouTube at 1.5x speed but movies and TV I watch at 1x) since it’s so fast. I use captions/subtitles in all cases if available though since it’s just easier to understand.
  • I can’t imagine combining all of those things to multitask on gaming and listening at the same time.

Props to @sophia for their tastes, which differ significantly from mine.

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I don’t understand how people can focus on videos at 2x speed (I watch YouTube at 1.5x speed but movies and TV I watch at 1x) since it’s so fast. I use captions/subtitles in all cases if available though since it’s just easier to understand

I’m sort of the same. I’m a native English speaker, but I always use subtitles because I don’t understand speech well. (I’m not very good at speaking, either, and I went through a lot of speech therapy when I was younger.)

However, combined with subtitles, I often increase film speeds to ~1.1x because I don’t really like to watch films that are more than 2 hours long. That can get most 2h+ movies closer to 1:45 after you exclude the credits. Either that, or I end up breaking it up into two sittings if it’s a really long movie.

It’s the opposite with YouTube, where if I start watching at normal speed, I feel like videos don’t last long enough and I could drain an evening into watching someone’s playlist.

(Also, 1920s-ish silent films didn’t have a standard speed, so when I occasionally watch those, I don’t feel like I’m breaking rules by changing the speed, which is nice.)

I also redshift and reduce brightness on videos dramatically because I usually watch things before going to sleep for the night.

I guess none of that has to do with gaming conditions but you see what I mean.

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My eyebrow also lifted at Sophia’s comment :smile:

Re: everything, cinema’s my temple and I’d never watch a film at any speed other than real, or while doing anything else. If I need to change the speed or skip any part of it, the film must be too unengaging to watch, and that almost never happens.

I use 1.5ish speed for instructional Youtube videos so long as I can comprehend them, to save time.

I’m around a lot of people with hearing difficulty so they need subtitles on for films or TV, which distract my brain. If I rate the importance of a particular film experience, I won’t watch something at the same time they watch it, to avoid the subtitles.

Funnily enough, two nights ago I accidentally went to a cinema session (of Borderlands) that had closed captions on the screen, which distracted both me and my friend. Though it distracted him more, as he’s not used to seeing them, whereas I am.

In gaming, I’m all for whatever the its creators sent, unless I don’t like it and I’ve been playing for days and am sick of it. Again, very rare. Except on some long grinding game where I might listen to my own music (e.g. Bee Swarm Simulator)… Okay, the other exception is IF, since I consider IF a reading-processing activity, and when reading, again, I’m not doing anything else. I still try any music the author packed, but yes, I might think it doesn’t work or just think ‘I’m reading.’

I’ve said it before on this forum, but in the 80s, sometimes you’d go to someone’s house just to play a game so you could hear its music again. Or because your computer couldn’t do that. The Commodore 64 had endless great electronic scores. For me it was a holy grail if I ever got an Apple II game that could play music and move sprites at the same time, given its 1 mhz speed, no video coprocessor, no sound coprocessor and 1 bit sound mechanism. Old people out.

-Wade

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I’ve got a friend who keeps recommending me these interminable video essays where the throughline is never really clear and the segments are disjointed. It makes sense that people would like them more if they have them on at x2 speed and are paying attention to something else entirely.

I’ve tried playing a game with something else on in the background but it’s exhausting, I feel oversaturated, distracted, and there’s little chance I’ll actually take in anything.

Sometimes I’d go around someone’s house and they have the tv on all the time. How anyone can think in that environment I don’t know.

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I guess it also depends on the type of games you play? I play mainly games that have a relatively high cognitive load, so I don’t really do something else while playing them. If you play a hack & slash game where you’re kind of OP I can understand why you’d want to listen to something else while playing.

Also, the only environmental sound I turn off everywhere I can is rain. I have enough bad weather where I live, I don’t need to also hear an annoying background noise constantly while playing.

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I’m deaf, but with cochlear implant, so basically I keep low the soundtrack (~50) but kept SFX at ~75 so I can exploit sound cues. of course voice at 100% and subs on :wink:

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Wow, timely! When I release River Rescue Obby within the next 24 hours, it is set in constant rain. But I already had a rain volume slider in place.

-Wade

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My ideal is playing a mindless video game while either listening to a horror podcast or audiobook or watching a show.

I listen to a horror podcast while playing Diablo 2, switching it to Dragon Ball Z when my son’s up since he doesn’t like horror. I used to listen to the Magnus Archives while playing Sunless Sea (which is funny because they ran an ad for Fallen London while I was playing).

I don’t generally double-speed videos; I like reading for speed. Watching Dragon Ball I can only get in maybe 3-4 episodes a day, but I got a Viz subscription and have been reading Bleach and other stuff and I cap out my 100 chapter limit every day. So I do text for being fast and audio/video to fill up empty time.

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A lot of audio players can increase or decrease speed without changing pitch, and I know people who listen to audiobooks at 1.5 or 2x speed to cut down the listening time. My podcast player is set to “smart speed” which doesn’t change the speed but buffers and trims out any significant pauses - which works for a podcast that is usually people conversing and there are natural delays where nobody is saying anything.

I also worked with a visually impaired friend who showed me his computer that to me looked like a tape recorder he wore around his neck and he could chord commands to - the output was synthesized speech, and he was so accustomed to the speech rate being so fast that he could comprehend a segment of high-speed computer babble that I would never understand. It legit sounded like that scene in Portal2 where GlaDOS gives you instructions in fast-forward. For him it was how he’d do a google search and since the results were read back to him in a burst he was utilizing his device as fast as a sighted person would to obtain information.

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Back when I had a working eye, I’d sometimes listen to the television while playing a game on one of my many Handheld gaming systems(at the time I went blind, my gadget bag included a GBA SP, DS Classic, 3DS, PSP, Vita, and Gamepark32 and might have had a GBC and GBA if those hadn’t suffered broken screens), but that was usually when grinding or doing something else in the game that didn’t really require my focus and during random reruns of shows in that “I’m only watching this because nothing better is on” category. Only ever used subtitles for non-English media.

Also, I have slow ears and can’t stand listening to pretty much anything at accelerated speed. Only exception being music, and even then, not every song sounds good sped up, and I usually enjoy the original version just as much… Big fan of nightcore remixes, especially of songs with female vocals. I am kind of jealous of my blind peers who can crank their screen readers up to 500 wpm or more. Sounds like gibberish to my ears, but the default screen reader speed, which is around 180 wpm, same as average human speech rate, is pretty slow compared to average sighted silent reading speed and I was a fairly fast reader before I went blind.

Haven’t encountered many games that are blind playable, I can reliably run on my Linux box, and which have sound, though considering I have a problem with YouTube being whisper quiet when my screen reader is at normal volume and my screen reader shouting when I crank up the volume enough for YouTube to be heard, I worry I’d run into similar mix issues with game audio… though to be honest, IF with sound wasn’t a thing I was aware existed prior to joining this forum.

Edit: Forgot to mention, but Rain is the best weather and I wish we got more of it around here. As vital as the sun is to life on earth, I personally would be happy never being exposed to sunshine again.

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When I listen to videos explaining something (for example how to use a certain game engine) I usually listen to it with 1.75x speed because I can’t stand the long pauses.

Sometimes I listen to youtube music videos (but in normal speed, of course).

I got rid of my TV. If I really want to see something I can watch TV over internet. But usually I don’t watch it anymore.

I rarely do double input that goes further than adding background music. But sometimes I do.

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I don’t know if it works on Linux, but “A Blind Legend” is pretty much made for blind people.

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Ahah. I’ve also learned that it’s fairly unusual for me to write with lyrical music on in the background- I don’t have curated playlists, it’s just whatever I’m usually listening to- so, nightcore, electrofunk, country, hyperpop, power ballads, etc. I find instrumentals understimulating, generally, and start getting twitchy / easily distractable, but I have reasons to suspect some of those quirks may be due to neurodivergency (due to childhood assessments, my child being diagnosed off of the basis of my recognizing my own symptoms in him, and also falling asleep after drinking 2 litres of espresso strength coffee.)

I actually will put on documentaries while writing in my diary- that I have no problem tracking along to. I can’t do the same while creative writing, but I think that’s partially due to how taking notes at university trained me to write whatever I hear and creative writing is more cognitively taxing than just babbling about surface thoughts in free writing.

As for comprehension- I find most people talk incredibly, painfully slowly. I get all frenetic and agitated and find myself zoning out mid conversation often, if I’m not doodling or daydreaming about my personal writing projects, or observing people or the place around me. I’ve spun this into being quite good at remembering details about people because I spin them into timeline structured narratives, and like to play guessing games of statistically likely trends I’ve picked up from other encounters- Mike Russo was baffled I was able to correctly guess that Dan hated rhubarb pie based on his upbringing and the usual scarcity of yummy treats and over abundance of rhubarb pie in more farm-y childhoods. Useful for character work. I also like to collect interesting names from people.

The really silly thing? I find crowds and public spaces incredibly overwhelming and physically painful in the context of like, a crowded university theatre for lecture. I think it’s in part due to the predictability of the noise- videos don’t tend to drastically spike in volume, especially not calm documentaries.

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I play a small handful of games, for the most part, and have clocked a very high number of hours in Stardew Valley, for example, (about ~1,160 last I checked). Others include: Don’t Starve (Together), Oxygen Not Included, and the Sims 4. Usually outside of SDV I’m more interested in building up bases and working towards mostly everything being self sustaining and functioning automatically, so that might be part of it.

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Back in the days of school, my brother could concentrate better on his homework when he listened to music. Experts say that background music is always distracting, but they are wrong for some people.

I have that, too!

Also I am definitely neurodivergant in some aspects. Which is mostly (but not always) an advantage for me.

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This is true for my wife as well - my understanding is that it’s relatively common, especially for ADHD folks, so I’m skeptical of the expertise of those experts :slight_smile:

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My brothers hasn’t ADHS, but it makes perfect to me that background music lets ADHS people concentrate better. They have too low stimulus. That’s why they take Ritalin.

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Aside from Oxygen Not Included I can understand that, those types of games can get repetitive if you play them for long enough. ONI is one of the “high cognitive load games” I mentioned though. I can only really play it with the default background music, anything more and I can’t concentrate on building my water recycling loop, oxygen system, etc…

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I feel mostly the same way but justify it to myself because it’s mostly not perceptible, just a bit above the PAL/NTSC framerate difference which is 4%. I’d feel guilty going faster than 1.1x…go much past that, and it’s just fast forwarding.

On one hand, I want to see the movie as presented or created as much as possible (I made a big deal out of author presentation in another thread).

On the other hand, I watch movies as the last thing of the day and need to make it to bed on time, or close to on time. That’s what I mean by “don’t like to watch more than 2 hours long”…I don’t like to set aside more than 2 hours because that will turn into much longer for various reasons and interruptions.

A 2 hour+ movie in the theatre is great because you’re not going to be interrupted barring technical problems or a fire or something. At home I still have all the worries and cares of home, unfortunately.

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Back when I had a working eye, I constantly had music playing in the background whenever I did homework or other text-based activities on the computer… and I have to wonder if those studies were comparing background music to silence or background music to ambient noise, because my subjective experience is that the music helped to drown out ambient noise that would be genuinely distracting.

Also, I’m not convinced neurotypical exists in any meaningful way.

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