About a month ago, Kim "Febby" Yong-Min from MVP Phoenix spoke out on Twitter about the commentary at the recently completed Boston Major Regional Qualifiers of Dota 2. He claimed that the casts were too “black and white.” Casters would comment on whether or not strategies taken by either team were good or bad. However, Febby said the casters were simply incorrect, stating, “The problem is that the flames I heard were just wrong reasonings/incorrect stuff.” He argued that this sends a poor image to fans who start to agree with the commentators, which then affects the public perception of the team.

He went on to say, “If casters talk about how they think dota should be played the player in question looks bad/not hard working. I don’t wanna say you don’t know shit casters you probably do, but most players work 10hours a day 7 days a week to make those decisions in game and they know more shit about dota than you do. Respect players casters don’t make casts black and white there are a lot of viewers who listen to you like gods and are misguided most of the times.”

He seemed to suggest that commentators should be more “neutral” and just “theorycraft”, rather than suggesting possible alternatives players could have taken, which may have the unintended side effect of destroying the player’s career.

And he does have a point. The e-sports world is very fragile for competitors. The tiniest shift in public opinion can lead to once star players getting booted from a team, which can be crushing, especially for international players who may have spent a lot of money relocating to play on their team of choice. It’s easy to understand where Febby is coming from. No one wants to advocate for a pattern of behavior that costs players their jobs.

The Skills Of A Good Caster

Febby also hits on a tangential point that has been brought up in the past: commentary quality. Some e-sports are lucky enough to have trained and seasoned commentators call matches, but most e-sports fish their commentators from a pool of former pros. While we certainly respect these commentators for their skill and insight in their game of choice, it’s undeniable that nearly every major competition has some unbearably cringe-worthy moments.

It only gets worse as competitions get smaller, with local and “casual” casters often openly cursing, making inappropriate jokes, and telling personal stories on air. This sort of behavior might be amusing in small local groups, but deeply damages the mainstream image of e-sports as a respectable sporting industry.

But while increasing the quality of e-sports commentary is a noble pursuit, I don’t think wagging your finger at commentators and telling them to be more neutral is an effective way to produce change.

First of all, advocating for this type of "neutrality" is essentially holding up e-sports commentators to a standard that no other sports commentator is held to. Any football or baseball fan can tell you that commentators are often very opinionated. They spout out their opinions on bad plays and possible alternative calls all the time. While Febby calls this trash talk, most sports fans call this analysis.

Febby may be right when he says that most commentators would not make it as professional players, but that’s sort of the point. Professional players are constantly under the stress of having to perform to the best of their ability. That stress alone is enough to sometimes cause players to make bad decisions. That’s not just speculation; it’s fact. Mental fatigue causes a very real decline in maximal cognitive performance when a subject is forced into prolonged periods of cognitive activity. I think it’s safe to call a gaming tournament a prolonged period of cognitive activity.

The very purpose of sportscasters is to act as a body removed from that fatigue. They can analyze the game in progress without having to deal with the effects of mental or, in the case of traditional sports, physical stress. This allows them to report their analysis to the public with as much clarity as possible.

While they may not necessarily have the same skills as professional players, they don’t have to. The skills related to playing a game and the skills related to casting are two very different things. Players are interacting with the game-state, and while that does take a certain amount of observational skills it also requires a high level of split-second decision making when faced with incomplete information. Casters don’t have incomplete information. It’s their job to examine all the information provided and provide insight in a smart, unique, and digestible format to the home audience. In this manner, sportscasters take more from the skill pool of news anchors and journalists than professional athletes.

So it’s no surprise that a caster would have a different opinion on the situation than a player. That’s practically their entire purpose! That doesn’t mean they are wrong, it just means they are doing their job.

In addition, it’s basically impossible to tell anyone, caster or not, to remain neutral. Commentary is inherently an opinionated field.

Look at it this way. The audience already has the neutral data. They are watching the match itself and you can’t get any more neutral than that. Commentators are supposed to paint this neutral data in non-neutral ways. They are supposed to tell the audience what the players were thinking and what their strategies are. They compare and contrast the performance of players with their performances in the past, and with other players in their field. They are taking the raw and sometimes boring data and relating it to you in a more human way: a dialogue, and dialogues are based in opinion! If what we really wanted was neutral coverage we could have a robot voice relate the raw data to the audience and watch the ratings drop.

You Get What Your Pay For

But while it’s impossible to completely eliminate opinion from the world of e-sports casting, it is entirely possible to up the level of professionalism. The solution is one simple word: money.

Most traditional sportscasters have made casting their career. They appear on numerous shows, commentate on many different games, write sports columns, and even have daily or weekly programs entirely focused on analysis. Most e-sports casters, on the other hand, are former pros casting for the love of the sport. While major tournaments do feature paid sportscasters, most tournaments do not pay their commentators. Heck, just look at EVO, the biggest fighting game tournament in the world. While Street Fighter might feature a dapper bow-tied Ultra-David or James Chen, many other tournaments pull their commentators from the pool of competitors or, worse yet, the crowd.

If the e-sports industry wants to increase the quality of their commentators, then they have to invest in it. Right now, commentators don’t have anything on the line. If they mouth off, curse, trash talk, and generally make the stream unwatchable, what are they going to do? Get fired? They weren’t getting paid in the first place! They don’t have a stake in the game. Even if they never get to cast again, casting wasn’t their job in the first place. Playing is their job. So if they are banned from casting they will just throw their hat back into the player ring and do what they did before they became a commentator.

For casters to be held to a certain level of professional behavior there has to be something at stake, and for that to be the case you have to offer them something they can lose.

But this commentator problem is just one part of the tangled web the e-sports industry is encountering these days, and it’s unlikely that we will fix it without fixing underlying issues. Febby’s original concern was that commentators can shift public opinion, and shifting public opinion can cost a pro gamer their job. Instead of attempting to fix this on the commentator level, we should probably be trying to create an environment where a professional gaming career isn’t so fragile as to be shattered by the opinion of one commentator. This means leagues that offer team stability, contracts that are written with the best interests of the player in mind, organizations that aren’t in danger of disbanding after suffering one tournament loss, and tournaments that aren’t likely to disappear after one ratings drop.

On the bright side, we are well on our way there. Organizations like the WESA and Blizzard’s new Overwatch League are striving to make these changes so that professional gamers can truly treat e-sports as their careers. If they succeed, then it won’t matter if a commentator thinks your favorite player should have pushed harder in round one, since it won’t cost the player his job.

On that note…he totally should have pushed harder. I mean, what was he thinking?