VGCulture - Playing Games without Playing at all

No, I'm not making a reference to Bruce Lee:
Source: Youtube Channel proWESnet

(who was actually referencing Sun Tzu), but rather a very common act and past time by a lot of gamers.  A lot of us gamers in the past spent time watching our older brothers/sisters, fathers/mothers, uncles/aunts, friends or cousins playing videogames and shared the adventure and experience alongside with them when we weren't playing the game ourselves.  Now let's fast forward into the year 2006 when video sharing starting becoming more viable and viral throughout the world.  A trend called "Let's Play" that started on an internet forum called something awful where players took screenshots of their progress of a game and commented on each one started to catch on.  "Let's Play" in video form is a pretty common trend nowadays with players playing through an entire game from beginning to end documenting the strategies they used, problems they faced and being informative to their viewers.  These are sometimes considered as "video walkthroughs" although most walkthrough videos generally don't have voice overs.  There are also "Let's Play" series where they're meant to be humor driven videos for viewers to enjoy.
Source: Youtube Channel RoosterTeeth

The common place for these types of videos now are: informative, humor-driven, and experience without the play.  There was a certain period of time where some game publishers and the U.S. government wanted to ban the streaming and video uploads of a videogame playthrough as a lot of people began to watching full playthroughs of games to enjoy the experience without buying the game and playing it themselves.  For the music industry, it was a huge problem (and still is a little, record companies are making money off it now).  For the film and TV industry, this was a problem turned opportunity with Netflix, Hulu, Crunchyroll, and especially Youtube (well, more like Google) booming with business taking away the customers of DVD rentals.  For the game industry, I don't see how this is a problem.  Even when watching our relatives and friends play, it generally influences us gamers to play the game as well.  And for video uploads, it only excites more gamers to know more about the game and eventually purchase it to play.  So many other game developers and publishers fought back alongside the gaming community (as well as the rest of the internet population as it affected anything media related) to repel the ban of media sharing.  Despite the new age of internet video streaming, a good amount of games are still sold these days.

For me personally, I generally watch pieces of a game to get through parts I can't get through and don't understand in text format, I'll watch speed runs to see how inhumanly possible it is to get through a game, and I'll watch alternative endings to a game so I don't have to play the entire game again just to watch it.  And then there are times where I don't want to play through an old game and want to know what the rest of the game was like and watch a playthrough of that.  Still playing games without playing them at all is probably a trend that will never die off any time soon.