According to my PlayStation end-of-year wrap, I spent 800 hours playing nearly 100 different games in 2023. That’s a lot of disassociations, even for me! Joking aside, there’s one leisure activity that I am pretty sure I spent even more time on: watching YouTube about those same games.

Video game content on YouTube is huge. In 2020, teens watched over 100 billion hours of gaming content on the site. Like any successful genre, it’s split into various sub-genres. Here are five ways to watch games instead of playing them.

Lore Videos

Thanks to the staggering success of FromSoftware games, environmental storytelling is now the norm in a lot of gaming. What that means is that the story is often parceled out in small, easily missed pieces like item drops or background elements.

This has created an entire industry of lore experts who explore games looking for any tidbits of information to piece together a coherent cosmology. I’ve watched far more Elden Ring than I’ve actually played thanks to channels like Square Table Gaming, Zullie the Witch, Tarnished Archeologist, SmoughTown, and the gold standard of them all, VaatiVidya. Being able to process the mythology of games at a slow, scholarly pace rather than in the heat of a fight definitely helps me appreciate game worlds more.

Bizarre Challenge Runs

Gaming is an interactive medium, but a lot of games have more limited choices than you might think. One way to test those limits are with bizarre play throughs with unusual restrictions. Not only do these make you look at games in a new way, it shows you just how robustly built the design actually is.

My favorite of these is Lemon at The Backlogs, who has done everything from beating Ocarina of Time without a sword to getting through Salt and Sanctuary with only punches. PrimalLiquid does some neat ones for Final Fantasy games, and JK Leeds is another master of various FromSoftware runs. A good sense of humor helps when slogging through a game in a way most people would never play it.

Glitchless Speedruns

I have a concentration problem, and it means that I often spend as much time futzing around in games that I forget where I was supposed to go. Or, I’ll play a game like Hollow Knight that is meant to get you a little lost and I’ll lose the ability to conceptualize the experience enough to progress.

Enter the glitchless speedrun, which is often the “purest” way to play to a game. These play throughs focus on the bare essentials of progression. Watching them is a great way to course correct your save file and watch what the game needs you to do to move forward. It can be a godsend for people like me who find open worlds and big maps a little intimidating.

It’s also just fun to see people play a game at an expert level and use it as a guide to better your own performance. Watching GamerANH no-hit their way through The Last of Us Part 2 or LuRki Plays do a 100 percent completion on a Thief level without alerting any guards is a thing of beauty.

Glitched Runs

Glitches in a game are obviously mistakes, but they can also show you things about the game you never would have guessed. Most of the big speedrun records in video games involve some kind of glitch to skip necessary parts of the experience, and watching people move around in bits of the code they were never supposed to interact with is honestly like seeing black magic in action.

There are thousands of speedruns using glitches all across YouTube, but for my money the best experience actually comes from the user Bismuth. He does a series not only showcasing world record runs, but patiently explaining how they actually work in layman’s terms. To the extent it is possible to actually vivisect a game, glitch runs let you do that.

In a related category, there is something deeply fascinating about boundary break videos like the ones put out by Shesez. These videos use free moving cameras to explore areas of the game players were never meant to see. It’s a neat look at the programing tricks used to create certain illusions, and a vital tool for would-be developers.

Story Modes

Finally, there are games that are interesting but that you have no real interest in playing. For me, these are generally fighting games. I love Mortal Kombat and Injustice as concepts and just that. So, whenever a new NetherRealm game comes out, I count on channels like MKIceAndFire to put together all the cut scenes so I can watch it like a movie.

There are also games that I am just too much of a fraidy cat to actually finish. I’ve gotten review copies for every Amnesia game and I’ve never beaten a single one because they’re just too scary for me. Thankfully, I can watch channels like GamingHarry that will strip out all the pants-crapping terror and explain what’s happening. These are essentially another brand of lore video, but playthrough-based rather than video essays. Either way, it’s the only way I can endure the world of Amnesia.