Via Marginal Revolution, an essay exploring the psychology of watching a sporting event after the fact on your DVR. Is it less enjoyable than watching the same game live when it happens? I love this question and I love the answers he gives. Strangely though, he divides his reasons into the “rational” and the “irrational” and with only one exception I would give the opposite classification. Here are his rational ones:
- Removing commercials reduces drama. I suppose he calls this rational because he thinks that its true and perfectly sensible. The unavoidable delay before action resumes builds suspense. But even though I agree with that, I call this an irrational reason because of course I can always watch the commercials or just sit around for 2 minutes if I’d rather not see yet another Jacob’s Creek wine commercial. If in fact I don’t do that, then that’s irrational.
- If you know it has already happened then it is less interesting. Again, this may be true for many people, but to make it into the rational category it has to be squared with the fact that we watch movies, TV dramas, even reality TV shows whose outcomes we know are already determined.
- Recording gives me too much control. Same as #1.
- I don’t get to believe that my personal involvement will affect the game. This one I agree with. Many people are under this illusion and it would be hard to call it rational for someone to think they are any less in control when the event is already over.
- If this were a really exciting game I would have found out about it independently by now no matter how hard I tried to avoid it. I would call this the one truly rational reason and I think its a big problem for most major sports. If something really exciting happened that information is going to find you one way or another. So if you are sitting down to watch a taped event and the information didn’t find you, then you know it can only be so good. Even worse, if the game reaches a state where it would take a dramatic comeback to change the outcome, you know that comeback isn’t going to happen.
I would add two of my own, one rational and one irrational. First, you don’t watch a DVR’d sporting event with friends. The whole point of recording it is to pick the optimal time to watch it and that’s not going to be your friend’s optimal time. Plus he probably already saw it, plus who is going to control the fast-forward? Watching with friends adds a dimension to just about anything, especially sports so DVR’d events are going to be less interesting just for the lack of social dimension having nothing to do with the tape delay.
Second, there is something very strange about hoping for something to happen when in fact it has either already happened or already not. Now, this is irrelevant for people who easily suspend disbelief watching movies. Those people can yell at the fictitious characters on the screen and feel elation and despair when their pre-destined fate is played out. But people who can’t find the same suspense in fiction look to sports for the source of it. For those people too many existential questions get in the way of enjoying a tape-delayed broadcast.
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July 5, 2011 at 11:54 am
David Miller
Numbers 1 and 3 sound to me like a rational response to temptation. I would prefer not to have the ability to skip commercials or even parts of the game, because when the commercials or the boring parts of the game arrive I will be tempted to fast-forward through them. So I rationally prefer to have these options removed from my choice menu.
July 5, 2011 at 3:03 pm
Evan
When the Stanley cup finals was on, the television feed that I got in my house was (for reasons unknown to me) about 10 seconds behind the feed that the pub across the road got. Because I live in Vancouver, I could hear Vancouver score (because of the roar from the pub) before I could see it on the TV. Hearing the roar didn’t bother me too much because I knew something exciting was about to happen and, in some sense, it heightened my anticipation.
The worst part was when I didn’t hear a roar. If I was watching Vancouver build a promising play, but couldn’t hear anything, then I knew that the play would not be successful, and this really killed the excitment.
July 5, 2011 at 4:52 pm
jeff
that is a great story
September 25, 2011 at 1:04 pm
jefferson
I have personally always enjoyed watching recorded programs, simply because of no commercial breaks which add to psychological restlessness.
May 1, 2017 at 5:46 pm
Selena
Love to record and watch lots of sports but annoyed by the ticker that sometimes tells scores I e recorded to watch later. So our family developed a solution! http://www.blockthescore.com