Young people nowadays are pretty into watching games without actually watching the game. This is because worst/best invention of all-time, our beloved Internet, has enabled viewers to watch their game on a variety of different outlets — Yahoo! Gamecasts, your various live-scoring tickers and most recently, your Twitter feed.
The relationship between sports and Twitter is an inevitable one, but it’s clearly one-sided. Twitter simply takes what’s going on in the sports game and makes it its own. It’s a strange form of virtual game watch, except that the game watch doesn’t exactly have rules as to who is invited where. And more importantly/somewhat disturbingly, there’s no bleu cheese dip.
Games on Twitter essentially turn into amorphous conversation that generally lack a discussion leader, and often have a lot of unfounded, insignificant people trying to be discussion leaders. Twitter watching is one of the more confusing accessories to sports in generally. But if done right it could enhance the game-watching experience more than almost anything.
Rules For Having A Productive Twitter Game Watching Experience:
1. Only open your laptop during commercials. Not only will you successfully avoid having to watch that annoying credit commercial about the girl who goes rock climbing/gets a wedding ring for the thousandth time, but it will also prevent you from being too focused on your screen to miss every important thing that happens in the game.
2. Similarly, always keep in mind that Twitter is a game accessory, not the game itself. Earrings are cool, but they have no purpose if you go Vincent Van Gogh on the actual game.
3. It’s always very tempting to make funny comments on things that are kind of related to the game, but are not actually the game. When doing this however, ALWAYS make sure that you’re not rehashing a banal occurrence, an old joke or something that nobody actually cares about. For example, if you tweet that Craig Sager is wearing a ridiculous suit, you deserve to be banned from Twitter for life. This type of tweet is less original than The Hangover 2, and you are no Zach Galifinakis.
4. Retweet people who deserve to be retweeted. The beauty of twitter is that 99.9 percent of the time someone else says what you want to say better than you ever would.
5. Mention people only when needed. For instance, tweeting “@gallinari8888 is playing really well today” is generally useless and does nothing for other than tell the world that you are some strange Internet version of a suck-up/celebrity stalker. If you need to mention somebody, do it in a way that tells the Twittersphere something they don’t know. Or make us laugh. As we all know, comedy to Twitter is like Imgur to people who turned hipster after high school.
