I think the only thing Phil truly hates about his "job", is how streaming has forced him to actually interact with people while gaming. YouTube by itself was a comfort zone for him...he just games...talks to himself and then uploads. Streaming has forced him way outside his comfort zone. If YouTube was still viable...there would be no streaming.
Yeah, he despises streaming. No longer can he sit behind a camera and yell about shit to an audience he doesn't have to acknowledge. He can try his damnedest to feign ignorance, but every time there's a lull in the game or he wants chat to give him a solution to a problem, he has to see the emote spam, the memes, and a bunch of people who want to see him fail. Clearly he wishes he was still in his prime YT situation and he does his best to play pretend: look at how he has the unrecorded rants, how he pretends he finds things by himself when chat is telling him how to do it, how he ignores the cheese emote spam when he cheaps out a difficult part of a game, and all kinds of other shit like that. Everything he does on his stream is still built around a YT audience he doesn't have anymore; he only does his "verbal shoutouts" because he feels obligated to or else he won't get those shiny pennies.
I still think there's a bunch of games he despises playing, shit like MLB, Minecraft, and Subnautica, and he only plays them because he gets badgered into it by his "audience", someone buys it for him, or he doesn't have any new AAA release to fill the void. He's save scumming games like Phoenix Wright and DKC; he doesn't want to play these games. It's not like he's playing them for the world building, aesthetics, story, or enjoyment of exploration, he's playing them because other people convinced him to and he's trying to remove as much challenge as possible to get them over with. If he really wanted to play PW, it wouldn't have taken him 6 months to get to it after his patrons voted for it.
I think he might still enjoy games, but he wants to mash X to win for a lot of shit. If he's not visibly making progress like finishing levels, a % Beat counter, or something similar, the game puts a bad taste in his mouth. He can't just enjoy doing what he's doing if he's doing it, he has to be making progress towards some kind of goal and the game has to tell him he's doing it. The only genre I'd say this didn't apply to is fighting games, since it's a constant fight of learning and improving, but he doesn't even play those in any competitive capacity anymore, he plays them like he works for IGN (even though he doesn't do reviews) and needs to give his opinion on all the content a game offers, even if his audience doesn't give a fuck about that content.
I've always believed its just a way of sucking up to someone "famous" in the hopes of being that cool guy. Kinda like how our very own
@666EVE666 is our recognized resident archiver of Amber streams and modders like Hot Pocket Remix a is known name in the Dark Souls modding community and is often name dropped.
There's probably truth in that, and I think that's how his mod roulette works, too. Papavera is supposedly older than DSP according to the lore, and is probably lonely, so it gives him some sort of esteem boost when Dave acknowledges him a bunch during a stream of a game he knows stuff about, even if the advice given is ignored, trivialized, or followed incorrectly and he gets lightly berated for it. Sad case of 'at least he acknowledges my existence'.
