On Friday, late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel made a video in which he mocked the very notion of YouTube Gaming, Google's competitor to Twitch, where people can watch other people play games.Kimmel's joke about people who watch other people play games was the easiest, least original joke he could make, but gamers' reaction to it makes them worthy of ridicule.The essence of the bit was that, if people are dumb and bored enough to watch other people play games, why not have a platform for people to watch other people watch people play games, and a platform for people to watch other people watch other people watch play games, and so on.Get it?! Games are already a waste of time, so watching people play video games is even a bigger waste of time.When he's not asking celebrities why their upcoming movies are awesome, Kimmel is a masterful troll. I'm not a fan of the skits where he asks viewers to steal their kids' Halloween candy, for example (it's just not that funny), but I urge you to listen the story of how Kimmel once fooled his then partner Adam Carolla into believing that he was being aggressively, romantically pursued by Dixie Chicks singer Natalie Maines. Kimmel's known for setting up these elaborate pranks, and they're sometimes pretty funny if you're okay with laughing at other people's expense.This particular joke, unfortunately, makes Kimmel seem extremely out of touch. Market research firm Newzoo found eSports had 89 million viewers last year, and is expecting 145 million by 2017. With 39 million subscribers, Pewdiepie, who just records himself playing games, has the most popular YouTube channel. Jimmy Kimmel's channel has a little over six million subscribers, by the way, and according to Nielsen, his show gets between two to three million viewers per night.As you can imagine, some portion of those million of people who like to watch other people play games took to the bit's comment section on YouTube, and they are absolutely vile, as YouTube comments usually are.Last night, Kimmel highlighted the internet's reaction to the bit, which he said was one of the worst the show's ever received, both in the number of YouTube downvotes (currently at 58,000), and content, with several commenters threatening to physically harm Kimmel and his family.I don't watch a ton of eSports or other people play games on the internet, and I don't feel the need to mock it, or deem it a more worthwhile way to waste your time than watching football, as Kimmel does. The moment one decides to dismiss the new things he doesn't understand instead of trying to understand them is probably the moment one becomes an irrelevant old man, which is what Kimmel looks like here.However, it's probably better to be out of touch than the type of person who's compelled to threaten someone's life or hope they get cancer because of a joke.There's no doubt that the audience of people who like to watch other people play video games is growing, and it's not hard to imagine that it will one day eclipse the audience of late night talk shows like Kimmel's.But that audience sure isn't acting like it. The numbers are there, sure, but one little joke and that entire audience regresses back to the primordial nerd, who defends his hobbies in a way only someone who's profoundly insecure about them can protect them.
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