The game is not afoot?

Regularly, I am exposed to my children’s interests. What they find entertaining and amusing, I don’t necessarily understand.

Years ago, friends and I used to haunt the Toronto pinball and video arcades and actually played the games. But today my children watch people on YouTube play the video games in which they are interested.

I am told by my children – who know more about this than I do – that the YouTubers they watch are very famous. I wonder if becoming a YouTuber today is an aspiration, a profession and an ambition, a career on which I am unable to advise. My kids tell me the people they watch make a lot of money from advertising owing to their high numbers of subscribers. I don’t know if that’s true or whether my children are simply being exposed to the exhalations of people with nothing better to do than film themselves playing video games.

But thinking about it, these YouTubers have transformed themselves into product somehow, making themselves into images people should want to see. Is this any different to the idea of celebrities over the years that we have come to love and loathe? Are we now living in an age where people want to become some sort of Barbie Doll? Or has it always been this way?