The Culture: Watching The Game Is Not Playing It

The Professor is conflating things.

The audience for the hobby is not the audience for shows about the hobby.

Furthermore, as the Professor notes, the space for these kinds of shows is even smaller than for the hobby: no one cares about anything but Critical Role or ever will.

Conversion from passive binge-watching viewer to active, engaged hobbyist is low, something even Wizards of the Coast acknowledges. The reason, as those at all honest or competent will admit, is that what you get out of watching the game is not what you get out of playing it.

It's the difference between First and Third Person, between Real Time and Pause-Enabled: Detachment.

When you watch a show or film, you are not there as if it was you doing it. At best you are along for the ride, as a witness, and often (too often) not even that. You are able, especially if you're watching this online or on home video, to skip over what you don't like or care about and get to what you do. (Less so when watching with others, but that's also on the decline.) You're the spectator in the stands, not the man in the arena.

When you play, that's you in the shit. You're doing it--and, again, your brain treats virtual and literal experiences as the same thing--for real for all intents and purposes; you will screw up, you will act suboptimally, your man suffers for it, but you also reap the benefit of seeing your struggles payoff- and the satisfication of seeing your plans turn out to be correct.

Yes, the hobby is far closer to sport and war than Hollywood, and that's why the audiences do not cross over.