Why do my kids waste hours watching millennials play video games on YouTube?

When I was 12 or 13, I busied myself with a range of pursuits, from the dumb to the very dumb to the hugely and galactically dumb. Every month, I purchased a new issue of Pro Wrestling Illustrated. I memorized the entirety of Young MC's debut album, which contained "Bust a Move" and 12 songs that weren't "Bust a Move." I got really, really into "Dr. Mario" (but I stand by that one, as over time I became startlingly good at it).

When you're in those weird culturally formative years, you explore a lot of weird culturally formative options. So I understand that it is a middleaged cliche to say that my kids' penchant for watching videos of bothersome millennials playing video games on YouTube is a remarkably idiotic waste of time.

There is a monster cottage industry of millennials who record themselves playing video games, and my boys, ages 13 and 6, have plunged into it. Mild-mannered on most days, my children, when presented with these videos, spot-mutate into glassy-eyed replicants who draw the shades, hide under blankets and watch as many as they can before I dramatically stomp in and do my impression of the dad at the beginning of that Twisted Sister video.

It is hard to overstate how much of this content exists.

There is a guy named Sky who plays Minecraft, and he amassed a fan base of nearly 12 million subscribers before shutting himself down a few months ago to focus on his music. (I know.) There is something that I know only as "Lucky Block Hunger Games" (12 million subscribers), in which two millennials whose voices sound like they've been digitally manipulated to resemble cartoon chipmunks talk for 40 minutes about cows and mods and mobs (if mods and mobs are different things, I actually can't tell because when one is talking about mobs/mods, the other one is holding an entirely unrelated monologue about "the Nether"). My 6-year-old recently announced, "Super Girly Gamer actually had the weird apple sword and she had a skelly armor and she looked like an apple!" (bursts into laughter) (falls onto floor) (would not eat an actual apple if I promised to buy him a real sword).

Interaction is conspicuously missing from these videos. Watching other people play video games for hours is the only thing more dismally sedentary than playing video games for hours.

Maybe the kids are picking up Minecraft building tips, or secret strategies on how to smuggle butter into the Nether, or learning if you can use axes to butter zombies (I have no idea how these games work). But in the conversations my kids have – the bottomless, ping-pongy monologues that have taken over our breakfasts – we're not talking about strategy, or building, or creating. We're talking about something funny the Homeless Goomba did with waffles.