As I explained earlier, preparation is the first key to a great cast. It doesn’t make the cast great on its own and in fact, it usually wont have any impact on the cast being great at all, its usually how exciting the game itself is that decides how great it was. However, lack of preparation will almost certainly make a great game, a bad cast and a terrible game even worse.
Remember the viewer or listener is relying on you and will often put a lot of faith in you for information on the players, the teams, the backgrounds and the stories around them. They are relying on you to make these virtual characters come to life and for you to humanise what to the outsider, looks like a very non-human sport. To do this, you will have to spend the time required researching the match or tournament ahead. You also have to be 100% sure what you are about to say is 100% correct, again your integrity will be heavily damaged if you say something that simply isn’t true. Sure, we all make mistakes, but without preparation, you will make more mistakes and be taken less seriously and eventually you wont be trusted at all and that’s about as bad as it gets as a commentator.
I was once told that it would be better to say nothing at all than say something you are not sure about. In other words, say what you have to say with total conviction, even if it ends up being wrong, at least it will be seen as a genuine mistake. There is nothing worse than a commentator saying “I think that’s right”, it either is or it isn’t and if you’re not sure, you shouldn’t be saying it anyway.
I’m often asked how I prepare for large tournaments or TV shows and the simple answer is that it depends hugely on the type, size and length. If you take the North American Finals of the CGS tournament held in Los Angeles in 2007 for example, my preparation started 4 weeks before I flew out and involved learning 60 players backgrounds as well as the 6 teams they represented and their managers. I spent on average, 2 to 3 hours every day for the first 3 weeks learning about each and every player, collecting small snippets of information that might be useful during the shows, which would air on live national TV across the USA. In the week before the tournament, I ramped up the daily research to around 6 hours a day. I collected as many statistics as possible, their dates of birth, the home towns, what games they had played previously, any success they had outside of CGS, what draft pick they were and spent time ranking the players in each game and the teams overall so I could judge If a team were doing better than expected or worse during the season. I spent time reading every interview conducted with any and all of the players and General Mangers, wherever I could find them.
I also had to learn 2 new games, although one was easier than the other. Fortunately, I had played Counter-Strike Source for some years and was comfortable with it. I could say the same for FIFA as an Englishman; if I didn’t know how to commentate on football I should be shot. That left PGR3 and DOA4. PGR was relatively easy for me as I am also a motor racing fanatic; it was just a case of doing some research on the cars used and the tracks in play. I learnt the corner names for example on one track and made up corner names on others to give the viewer a reference point of where we were on each track.
I didn’t need to spend too long playing PGR3, however the opposite was true of DOA4, which I had to spend many more hours learning than any other game in the tournament. To do this, I played through every character in the game against the computer, experiencing all the moves, all the levels and all of the characters. I also had to play around with costumes and unlocking them so that I wouldn’t be thrown out should someone use a new costume I hadn’t seen before. I estimate that I spent around 2 to 3 hours a day for several weeks playing the game and learning its intricacies as well as signing up for a DOA community website, which was packed full of knowledgeable people on the game that were only too eager to help me learn more about it. I have found, its not enough to simply learn how to play the game, but you need to delve in to the community too, it helps tremendously when it comes to commentate on the game.
I was also lucky enough to spend time with several of the top players, playing 1v1 against them and getting them to teach me, not only how to play the game, but understand why and how some moves are harder than others, which enabled me to come to appreciate the depth of skill required by these players. In turn, that helped me explain those niche points to the audience when it came to commentating on the games.
On another tournament, I had to learn one game, it was a First Person Shooter, something that I am naturally able to pick up and play anyway, however I still spent 6 or 7 hours a day playing the game through its single player and online to learn it all in preparation for the event, but instead of spending weeks playing it, it took just a few days. You will need to learn how to gauge this prep time on a game you don’t know as it will vary greatly depending on your own experiences, genre’s and ability to learn.
In short then, by the time I flew to LA I was ready and I was prepared.
There are also some techniques available to you to aid preparation, but not replace it. I will usually have a large binder on my desk whilst commentating on TV, which will contain all the information I have collected on a player, but in a very short format and easy to get to including a photograph so if the player pops up on screen, I can easily identify him or her. I also use my laptop to display my stats, which is usually something I put together on a spreadsheet before the tournament. Make sure you double check your stats with someone else too, as blurting out a stat on air that everyone watching knows is wrong, is going to make you look like an idiot.
The final piece of preparation, particularly true if you are attending a very international event, is to check on pronunciation of player names. If in doubt, ask the player directly. All too often this is overlooked and a commentator says a nickname or real name completely wrong until corrected half way through a show or cast. There is nothing more embarrassing to you or the player concerned. Again it will add weight to the viewer’s impression that you have no idea what you are talking about!
