Persona 4 Golden - part 1

I've been itching to write about this game ever since I started playing it. Let's start with a bit of background: the original Persona 4 has been my absolute favorite game since it came out and I've beaten it thrice already. There was no way I could keep my hands off from an improved version - even though it was released on a console I had very little desire to own. That did delay me a bit, but eventually I had to buy a PS Vita. I mean, I had already bought the game from a PSN sale anyway. I also delayed a bit because I knew from reviews that P4G would not have nearly as much new content and other improvements as Persona 3 Portable had. Anyway, It was nice to find out that the my most beloved game ever was just as lovable as it was over 5 years ago. I guess we are here to find out why.

Or we would have been, but the post started to get really long. Instead, this is part 1, and it discusses the game from a story/characters perspective, and the roleplaying aspect that I discussed some time ago when going through Dragon Age: Origins.



1. RPG?

This is a good continuation to my previous Dragon Age post. I have probably mentioned this in passing before: I find it peculiar how the term roleplaying game is used. As it stands, most titles in the genre have next to nothing to do with roleplaying at all. DA was one of the few exceptions, and in general it's more common to have some roleplaying in Western RPGs. However even here we have a legion of so-called action RPGs that have absolutely nothing to do with playing a role. What is generally called an RPG actually represents some other genre but has character development as a central aspect (a bunch of action-adventure games already have simple character development, but usually it's just glued on top). Japanese RPGs in particular have very little to do with roleplaying; they are linear like a railroad track, and their game mechanics are in many cases very abstract.

So although they supposedly fall under the same category, and even sound similar in many ways, there is very little common ground between Persona 4 and Dragon Age. You might think that all those Social Links in Persona 4 would be opportunities for defining the main character's personality like I wrote in the previous post. Alas, they are not. Although you are offered some choices during S.Link events, these are not really roleplaying choices. They are quiz choices that test how well you understand the other character's personality, and you are rewarded for making the right choices as your relationship grows faster that way. So the game does not only make value judgments about choices - they are also tied to explicit rewards. The relationships also grow linearly - only the speed of growth is accelerated. There is one roleplaying choice involved in some S.Links: with the girls, you can choose whether you want to be friends or lovers.

Likewise, on the first playthrough you might think there are choices involved in who you want to spend time with. Again, this is an illusion, and a result of poor scheduling on your part. In fact, it is possible to complete every S.Link within one playthrough. Therefore there exists at least one explicitly optimal path through the game where you don't need to make roleplaying choices because you basically get everything. At this point it's important to emphasize that this is not in itself a bad thing. It simply means you should make your choices from a strategical basis: you need to be able to understand the game's schedule in order to create your strategy (of course you can kill the fun by looking up a day-by-day guide). You also make strategic decisions about the order in which you raise S.Links. Beyond that there are yet other choices to make - indeed, whether you actually want to max all links is also a choice, because there are benefits in spending some extra time on other things.

The point is that, due to the nature of choices, P4 is not a roleplaying game by design - not in the sense of the word's meaning in tabletop circles - whereas Dragon Age is (at least to a much higher degree). It is however a game with meaningful choices. Indeed, the choices you make concerning how to spend your time have a huge impact when it comes to exploration and battles. All this means is that the game caters to different preferences - and these just happen to be pretty exactly my personal preferences. Almost every single thing in the game contributes to your overall strategy. This makes each individual decision interesting, as there are always strategical considerations involved. As much as I praise the game, one change would have made it better: it should have been impossible to max out all Social Links in one playthrough. Or, at least, there should be no special reward for maxing all of them.

The reason I feel this way about being able to max all S.Links is that it becomes a goal that is very irresistible. Although there are multiple ways to reach this goal, it still limits what you can or cannot do during a playthrough quite tremendously because most of your time will be contributed towards this huge effort. You can of course choose not to pursue this goal, but the game does portray maxing all S.Links as kind of an ideal result. The same problem exists, although more severely, in Valkyria Chronicles. There the way missions are evaluated strongly prefers one particular type of strategy that is very limiting and even boring to play - so the game encourages you to not have fun basically. It's not as bad for P4, because it is still a lot of fun to figure out how to accomplish that lofty goal. The game is lax enough that you don't need to follow a step-by-step guide to do so. Following a guide would totally kill it for me. For the record Persona 3 is much stricter in this respect.

Just to clarify, you definitely *can* play Persona 4 like a roleplaying game. I have some vague recollection that this could have been my approach on my first playthrough - if not in P4, then at least in P3. Roleplaying is simply not really reflected in the game's design. The main character does not really grow nor are you really presented with any opportunities to reflect upon his personality. Likewise, since choices aren't created equal, they are not exactly choices in the roleplaying sense.

Since it's not a roleplaying game in any traditional sense, using the abbreviation RPG sounds silly. I make a point of always distinguishing Japanese RPGs with the J for exactly this reason. It doesn't make it less silly that the letters R, P and G are still there, but at least it signifies the fact that there is actually nothing related to roleplaying in this game. To me at least the J in JRPG is a clear genre indicator, instead of place of origin.  It quite clearly states that this is not a roleplaying game. It's more like a mesh of tactical battle game + anime series + RPG style character development. The term RPG is there because early on these games shared a lot with traditional fantasy roleplaying games. Since then, tabletop RPGs have evolved way more towards roleplaying, while JRPGs have evolved into some other direction entirely. That's my best guess anyway why the letter combination is still used.

2. Real people

Another topic in my last post was about relatedness of virtual characters. Persona 4 is an interesting game in this regard as there is a sharp contrast between the protagonist and all his friends. It's not much of a surprise that characters in the game are generally super-relatable. The combined length of all cut-scenes in the game is way beyond normal - almost on an entirely different scale really. For comparison, a normal 26 six episode anime series runs for about ten hours. I didn't count, but I'd wager this would be at most half of all the cut-scenes in P4G, so it's at least in the "one season of Buffy" territory - at least; some sequences in the game are as long as movies. If you want to write an entire, huge anime series into your game, it needs to be good on TV standards or the entire thing becomes a horrible yawnfest. So falling back on game standard for your characters and their representation is definitely not going to cut it. 

Of course it also goes the other way around. The more screen time characters get, the more relatable they can appear. However, this is definitely not a 1-to-1 relation - simply giving characters more time to talk doesn't necessarily make them any more relatable. In the last post I used Mass Effect's characters as examples of poor presentation - despite given a whole chunk of time to talk, they never seem to become much more than audio book autobiographies. Another trope in video games are characters that are walking encyclopedias or plot explainers. They never really react to anything on a personal level. All in all, they appear rather emotionless, and consequently scenes where they do pour out their feelings come out as paper thin. Dialogue can be entertaining even in these scenarios (e.g. the plot can be interesting enough to warrant a few hours of explanation) so it doesn't mean these games are automatically bad - but you never really feel the characters.

Characters in Persona 4 dick around. A lot - so much you'd almost think they are just high schoolers playing detective. Oh wait... that's exactly what they are. They talk to each other constantly - often just to shoot some random crap - and they react to things that happen around them. Even serious discussions about the case or studying turn into food discussions or whatnot eventually. They make fun of each other in a playful fashion, they support each other and really just bounce around from topic to topic rather randomly. Most of the game's events aren't honestly about the plot at all, they're just all kinds of school events that usually end up weirdly for our heroes. Sure, they abide by anime cliches a lot, but nevertheless, beneath every set of bytes there is a person. Not only has a lot of effort been put to writing and designing each character, just as much effort has been put into showing off. Indeed, there's a ton of events in the game, from small dialogue scenes in the morning to the massive movie length plot ones. 

Overall, dialogue writing is just incredibly solid. Sure, maybe it's not on the godlike level of Gilmore Girls and not quite up there with Buffy either, but there's a coherent personality behind every line. I had all sorts of warm, fuzzy feelings as I followed the characters grow together as a group, and the game's humor worked for me. Of course it's a bit of tropefest and if that bothers you, then enjoying the game will probably be more difficult. However, if we disregard the content itself and just focus on narrative methods for a while, there clearly are a lot of things done right for a game with a linear narrative. There's this massive argument whether games should sway away from cinematic narration or not. I personally don't mind the lack of interaction with stories in my games. However, if you want to go that route, you should follow the writing standards of your source medium - and for your typical RPG, the equivalent video narrative is often a TV series. 

3. Unreal people

Spoilers. Minor, but spoilers nonetheless.

In sharp contrast to all the other cast member, the protagonist is enigmatic. Like most games in the Shin Megami Tensei franchise, Persona 4 employs the silent protagonist paradigm. Although he has a voice, the main character has no voiced lines - indeed, anything he ever says is selected by the player from a handful of options. Yet because of the game's highly linear nature, the player can only affect nuances in his character. No matter how badly you do in your exams or how few Social Links you attend to, in the end all your investigation team friends will still revere the main character. So although you can choose to fuck up as much as you like, in the end the protagonist is still written to fulfill the role of mr. perfect. Indeed, if you play well by any of the game's standards, the main character will come out as a superior being. As being mr. perfect is coded into the game's reward structure, I'd consider the main character pretty much written in stone.

I don't even think of the MC as a real person per se. If you look at how other characters in the game grow - especially in Social Links - they credit most of their change to the MC. However, he doesn't really do all that much. To me it makes more sense to think of him as some kind of a mythical paragon or a mirror of the soul. It's kind of consistent with his special power: he can literally assume multiple personas to fit his needs - or, more likely, the needs of his friends. Not only does this allow him to defeat anything thrown at them - it also allows him to be exactly what his friends need to overcome themselves. The game even hints at this: if you are carrying a persona of the friend's arcana, you get more relationship points when spending time with them. As the MC's understanding of a person grows, so does his power in relation to that arcana - and he can act as a better mirror, allowing people to face themselves more and more.

This is kind of a philosophical meta level to view the MC. I do think everyone - including the MC himself, at least consciously - believes that the MC is just a normal human person. This is why the only thing that really seems a bit off is his ability to be awesome at pretty much everything. Whether there ever was a true person inside or not is debatable; however, I do think that what everyone sees is just multiple reflections of people's hearts - and in a way, of the player's wishes. This is probably even more pronounced in Persona 3, at least to a Western audience. The MC of P3 is portrayed quite clearly as a sort of messianic vessel. It's not about just saving the world in either game. After all, the catastrophe in both games is ever-looming, secretly desired by mankind. This is why it's not enough for the MC to be a hero - he needs to be a paragon that truly changes people. On a higher level, P4 is about making mankind desire the truth.

So. How is this relevant? It's a viewpoint that makes all the pieces about the game fit. If you think about the MC as a roleplayable character, you are bound to be disappointed by the lack of possibilities to truly define him. Likewise, he is not a scripted character either - he barely has any lines. However, if you accept my rambling about how he is a presence more than he is a person, the contrast between him and the rest of the cast kind of disappears. In a way it could be said that he is a direct extension of "you" - the player - in that he is not truly present in the world as a character, yet he has more influence over the world than anyone else. The same thematic repeats with the main character in most Shin Megami Tensei games where you get to name the protagonist - with the important exception of Raidou Kuzunoha who is a person with a background.

It's worth remembering that as a genre, JRPGs generally position the player entirely outside of the game's events. The game may have a protagonist on paper, but ultimately it's always about the entire group, and the player can only follow from the sidelines. The difference between P4 (and others) and most of the genre is the fact that the player is observing from inside a character - but the dynamic does not change: even if the player is positioned inside a central character, their only purpose regarding the story is to follow and observe. That is all.

Conclusion

Since this threatened to be become yet another massive post, it's better to stop here for now. To wrap up: I absolutely love the characters in Persona 4, and they are one of the key reasons why I like the game so damn much. The story in itself is not massively impressive but it does create a better environment for the characters to goof around than the one in Persona 3 (I think the plot itself was better in P3 actually, but it's not as enthralling to follow). Sure it's a long game (actually it's effing huge) but there is something happening almost constantly. On top of that, there is the ever-present philosophical meta level to think about. This is a common trait in Shin Megami Tensei games, and I would not be surprised to find it among the reasons why people praise them. Still, what really makes P4 possibly the best game ever made, is first and foremost a matter of actually playing the game - and we'll go there next time. Until then...

Dragon Age: Origins - Part 2

It's finally time to continue where we left off some months ago. After bashing Dragon Age from several angles, we were wondering why on earth I chose to plow my way through the game. This post answers that question. Once again a lot of the things I'm going to say could be said of Mass Effect. I will be talking about my character a lot. Cath was a female city elf rogue. I wanted to play a rogue as it has been a while since I have played one; I wanted to play as an elf because for me it's always either elf or human, and once again it had been a while; I chose the city background to give my character a bit of cynical and practical flavor; finally, I chose female because that's my usual preference when choosing a virtual identity.

1. The roleplaying appeal

This is pretty much the main talking point of this post. I want to use an interesting description by James Paul Gee about the relationship "real person as a virtual character", or in this case, "me as Cath", as the basis of this discussion. The key point is that this relationship has three identities, not two. The first two are relatively straightforward: obviously there is myself as the player, and there is Cath as the character - we both bring possibilities and limitations to the gameplay experience. For myself, this means my mechanical and cognitive ability to play the game; for Cath this means her stats and other things that describe her in the game world. It's the third identity - the projective identity - that makes roleplaying games interesting. This projective identity is my interpretation of Cath's personality. It is not simply me, nor it is simply Cath - it's more like me making decisions for Cath based on what I know about Cath. If that doesn't make all too much sense, worry not - just read on.

This is bread and butter for those with experience in tabletop roleplaying games. You play as a character and in most cases it's not yourself. However, neither is she or he completely fictional - the end product is a combination of both the player and the character. The same can be said of acting. What you see on the screen is not the actor nor is it the character - it's always the actor's projection of the character. A different actor would portray the character differently - within the freedom they have been given. This freedom to interpret is also highly important when we talk about digital games. In tabletop RPGs the degree of freedom with which players interpret their characters is huge and they also typically have more agency in writing their character. The game master typically sets certain limits that are necessary for his campaign to work but beyond that, characters are created by the players themselves. When the game master and all the other players are replaced by bytes of code, upholding the illusion is much more difficult.

The ability to uphold a strong sense of roleplaying is BioWare's strength. This sense is particularly strong in Dragon Age, much more so than it was in Mass Effect. What I mean by that is, the game inspires me to think about things from Cath's perspective by providing me the freedom to do so. One important part of this is the way choices are framed - or rather, the way they are not. All kinds of value judgments about the choices are left to the player. Cath's companions did often chime in with their opinion, and that is fine - more than fine actually, because they *are* people, and people have opinions. What's important is that the game itself did not. Mass Effect has this problem with its bipolar morality scale - the game is disrupting my roleplay by explicitly telling me which actions are "good" and which are "bad". Note, again, that games definitely can tell things like this, but they have to do so implicitly, by showing consequences.

When choices are framed in one way or another, the decision-making drifts away from the projective identity to the player identity. This happens because the game is telling the player something the character cannot know. The extra information can cause conflicts that break immersion, especially if there are explicit game-mechanical consequences involved. For instance, if I - based on the projective identity - make a choice that I (the projective identity) deem "good", and then the game explicitly tells me that it was actually "bad", and punishes me for it (by moving my character to the wrong direction in a morality scale), it is severely inhibiting my ability to roleplay. The conflict here is that my character thinks the choice was "good", but me as the player is given information that it was "bad" and as a result my character is also now more "bad" by a bit even though I had her projected as "good". As you can see, this is a huge problem that comes with explicit morality scales.

On the other hand if choices aren't explicitly labeled and outcomes are only revealed later through consequences, it just becomes another opportunity for reflecting upon the projective identity when things end up going south. Choices can also inhibit roleplaying if they are too limited. This is the more difficult thing to avoid in digital games, because you would need one hell of an AI to truly abide to all sorts of projective identities. The general problem is that if none of the offered choices feel satisfactory to the projective identity, the player's agency in constructing that identity is taken away and put into the hands of the game's writers. Dragon Age generally upheld the illusion that I was able to make choices that seemed sensible to Cath. At the same time, choices made during the game - especially choices concerning companions - contributed to the growth of Cath as a character. This is no small achievement for a digital game. It is, indeed, more than enough reason to enjoy the game despite its shortcomings.

It is worth noting that while being able to create Cath myself (partly anyway - her background had to be chosen from a limited number of options), it is not necessary to have free character creation to provide a strong roleplaying experience. Even if the protagonist is pre-written, a game that supports roleplaying still easily allows the player to develop a strong projective identity. Case in point: The Witcher - especially the first one. Although the character is Geralt of Rivia with predetermined background and abilities, what I experience is my interpretation of Geralt of Rivia, and the game allows me to make choices based on that identity. In a way, even if you can freely create your character at the start of the game, the game itself still dictates a lot about what your character can become - in this sense, starting with a predetermined character is not actually all that different. In fact - to my knowledge - it's actually very common to have pre-written characters in live action roleplaying games. It's not unheard of in tabletop RPGs either.

2. Virtual relatedness 

We already know that I place a lot of emphasis on character writing in games. I know it's a bit silly, but I don't have that high expectations so it kind of works out. However, when we're talking about roleplaying, the importance of other characters in the game rises even further. A lot of choices in BioWare games concern how the player's character interacts with other people. To put it another way, the player's capability to express their projective identity is heavily influenced by other characters in the game. This, in turn, puts a lot of emphasis on a) how well these characters have been written and b) how well interaction with them is presented in the game. Creating interesting characters has been a strong point for BioWare for the longest of times - and Dragon Age is definitely not an exception. Indeed, without a strong illusion of virtual relatedness I would not have bothered with the game for long.

There is one clear sign that Dragon Age succeeds in creating this sense of virtual relatedness: I had very different opinions of companions when I thought about them as myself, as opposed to when I thought about  them as Cath. It is, I think, the best indication that Dragon Age succeeds first and foremost as a roleplaying game. Whereas I find Morrigan's antics amusing, for Cath - whose life depends on her companions - they made Morrigan seem incredibly untrustworthy. While Leliana might have been naive and even childish for me, for Cath she was the most comfortable person to be around. One more: I liked Alistair from the get-go almost, but it took almost the entire game for Cath to be able to truly consider a human male as a friend. All these companions had a huge role in building Cath. Her choices became influenced most by those she held closest, and she became skeptical of anything Morrigan seemed to approve of.

The sense of relatedness is created by making companions (and other NPCs) feel as much like people as is feasible in a digital game. They have their opinions, and they make observations in the environment. They also talk to each other when traveling with the player. Dialogue with them is written well, and it's delivered with very solid voice acting. In short, they make you want to talk to them, even become excited about being able to visit the camp between dungeons. This may in fact have been one reason why I felt the dungeons were so effing long - they kept Cath from having chats with her companions. Indeed, in contrast to camp conversations, the dungeons offered nothing to Cath's personality growth. They were merely obstacles between me and the content I actually liked experiencing. For the record, Mass Effect largely failed to create similar feelings in me because of one important difference.

In Mass Effect, while characters certainly are conceptually sound and interesting, they are portrayed rather horribly. The effort to make them feel like people has been either misguided or simply lacking. Having a conversation with anyone in ME felt a lot like reading an autobiography. That's a fancy way of saying that characters almost exclusively talk about their background. Some banter exists when they are taken with Shepard to missions and space stations, but not enough. I never truly formed any sense of relatedness towards Shepard's companions in ME because they did not feel like people. Even Garrus, probably my favorite character in the series, felt a lot like an audio book. In comparison, characters in Dragon Age feel more real, and thus more relatable - even though they also do talk a lot about their past. The key difference is that they talk about other things more.

Sense of relatedness is not strictly tied to roleplaying. I see it as a facilitator. Relatable characters aid the player in constructing their projective identity by putting the character in social situations - something that for us as social creatures is massively important in defining who we are. That is to say, it's not impossible to roleplay in an empty world. It's simply easier to construct a personality for your character if you can reflect upon that personality through interactions with other people. You know you're there when empathy replaces instrumentality as the player's basis of making choices (this is something I want to expand in another post). Likewise, relatedness is important in all games, not just roleplaying games. This is hardly surprising, as it is just as important when consuming other forms of fiction - be it books or movies. Narratives tend to work rather poorly if it's enacted by unrelatable characters - we need to care.

3. There is no freedom in a group

Although we have now concluded that characters in Dragon Age are quite relatable as people, there is one thing they are not - and that's a group. It did not bother me as much this time around, but it certainly bothered me when I was playing Mass Effects. A lot of dialogue occurs between the protagonist and her companions, but the companions themselves speak very little with each other. There are no group events in the camp - basically all dialogue between companions takes place when they are in the active party. While well written and somewhat frequent, it isn't enough to provide a sense of group. The relations between companions are superficial at best and while their antics are amusing, they don't develop into anything. In this respect, the game is heavily centered on the protagonist. This is actually a very common trait in roleplaying games of Western origin - it's also a cultural thing.

Culture or no, conveying a sense of group in a game with relatively high degree of freedom is far from trivial. By limiting most interactions to one-on-one, the developers have saved a lot of resources. Whereas one-on-one conversations only need to branch based on player choices and a few flags, group conversation branching is likely to get out of hand quickly unless certain limits are placed - and DA is just not placing them, opting for more freedom instead. This is fine, and supports what makes it good as a roleplaying game. It does however also mean that it would be almost impossible to convey a sense of group by having many-to-many interactions. First of all, simply accounting for the fact that there is no telling which characters will actually be present would require a ton of branching. On top of that, they would also have to take into account all kinds of status flags about the protagonist's relationship with each character etc.

I am somewhat curious whether this aspect has been developed further in, say, Inquisition and its war council. Meanwhile, a close comparison can be found from the Persona series, where the sense of group is immensely strong - especially in P4. However, the game is practically linear and while the player character can have different relationships with his companions through social links, these relationships are in no way reflected as branching in group events. It makes the entire group more relatable, but at the cost of player freedom and their ability to roleplay. In this scenario, writers are always guaranteed that certain characters will always be available for the group event, and there are not status flags to worry about. Even player choices during events are there almost exclusively for flavor, so there is no branching whatsoever. This is a common trait in Japanese RPGs and they play out much more like a TV series in this sense.

It may not be impossible to get the best of both worlds but I'd imagine it would be incredibly resource-intensive. With very careful writing, it could be possible to make conversations modular enough that you could simply omit and/or replace single lines without changing the entire discussion at each branch. However, doing this while still attempting to make the dialogue interesting and the characters relatable sounds like a massively tall order. In the future problems like this could be maybe addressed with AI when they learn to produce text in a credible fashion while staying true to the speaker's personality - but again, that sounds far off. Until a game comes along and proves otherwise, I am going to consider the lack of group sense in DA as a cost that comes from giving the player freedom. Therefore, limiting the game to one-on-one interactions has likely been a conscious choice rather than an oversight.

Conclusion

Last time Dragon Age: Origins took a serious bashing from me; this time we have come back to explore its redeeming qualities. What the game lacked in, well, being a game, it took back in being a roleplaying experience. The real story in the game for me was following Cath's growth. Being able to immerse myself in the game world through my projective identity as Cath was far more important than any game mechanical aspects. This, to me, is an appeal that is generally more common in Western roleplaying games but even among them, strong experiences that get close to what tabletop RPGs offer are few and far between. Getting so much out of other aspects of the game most likely made the dungeon parts even more frustrating though. While companions feel like more relatable than they did in Mass Effect, they still do talk a bit too much about their past and a bit too little about other things.

Finally, there is no sense of truly forming a group of people in the game as most interactions happen between the main character and a single companion at a time. It would seem like a necessary amendment that is required to provide the desired degree of freedom to the player.

Because of the gameplay shortcomings I am a bit skeptical about Dragon Age 2, given that it has been generally decreed inferior to Origins. For some reason I still feel bad about skipping a game should I move straight to Inquisition. There was also another consequence after playing DA. Since I really enjoyed the drama and basically everything except dungeons, I decided to finally look into Telltale's storytelling games and also to play other purely story-based games (although, I actually just stopped playing any games at all* for a while after finishing Walking Dead season 1). My next post will probably be about Persona 4 Golden though. I will still write about some story-based games in the future.

* Dota 2 is not a game - it's a lifestyle.

Dota 2: Casting

What do you do when you're just not fit to play a game professionally? Start casting it!

Joking aside, I have (somewhat) recently been part of the casting crew in two Dota 2 tournaments. The first one was in August and the second one was in November. Since I still have no new games to write about, I decided to share some thoughts about casting.

1. Casting? Dafuq?

To start things off, here's an overview of what a Dota 2 caster does. This is mostly applicable to all eSports, but I have no experience outside Dota 2 so I'll just stick with what I know. On the basic level, casters follow the game and commentate what is going on. Since stream viewers will only see what the caster sees in-game, it is important for the caster to have their camera where the action is. Another important task is commentating continuously. This includes simply describing what is happening on the screen and more importantly giving some more insight on what might be going on - what the teams could do next, what is commonly done in similar situations etc. Beyond that, the primary caster's job is to raise enthusiasm, typically by being enthusiastic. They should also be able to inject bits of knowledge about the scene, teams and players into the cast.

This sets certain minimum requirements for casting. In order to show meaningful things about the game, the caster needs to know the game pretty well. Understanding hero abilities, items, roles and lanes is pretty much mandatory. Some of this knowledge must be obtained through playing the game; the rest must be obtained from following the scene (i.e. watching professional matches). Knowing what teams typically do helps in making predictions and overall evaluating the game situation. Even if the teams currently playing are entirely unknown, casters can draw a lot of interesting information from the current meta game. It is worth noting that a caster need now know these things as deeply as professional players do - after all, most of their audience doesn't know either.

Besides, the role of the main caster is to be the enthusiastic commentator. Typically casters also have co-casters - often professional players -  who are more intimately familiar with both the game itself and strategy. Co-casters typically lack the verbal expression skills required to be a good main caster and also because they are not constantly talking, they have more time to think about what's happening in the game. They can give more specific details about how a particular skill or item works, and they are better in predicting strategy and answering questions like "how can they come back from this situation?". Having a co-caster also allows the main caster to have some dialogue in the cast which generally makes it more interesting to follow than if it was just pure monologue. Sometimes co-casters can also be personally acquianted with the players, and have more intimate knowledge about how they approach the game.

2. More personal view

The previous chapter is a rough summary of casting in general, and something that is pretty obvious after watching a few casts. I want to talk more about my personal casting experience. First of all, without any doubt I am much more suitable to the role of a co-caster. In case you haven't noticed, I love analysis and I study games - especially Dota 2 - with due diligence. I'm certainly not a professional player but I have pretty good knowledge of high level play (I just lack the execution). While my verbal expression is solid, I find it really hard to bring the required level of enthusiasm into the cast. Unfortunately our entire casting crew on both occasions has been made of people who should be co-casters.

Whether you are a co-caster or main caster, the experience is quite significantly different from playing (obviously) but also from mere viewing. When watching a stream, you have the caster(s) to help you focus on the most important things. When casting, it is you who should not only figure out the important bits but also draw viewers' attention to it. The level of awareness required is almost on par with what the players need to have - but as a caster you have more information to process thanks to being privileged to lot of stuff the players cannot see. I mean you see both teams of course, but can also look at all kinds of neat graphs and statistics.

Combat situations in Dota 2 can be very chaotic and these are the toughest moments to cast. When a teamfight involves all 10 heroes on the map, each throwing their abilities, processing everything quickly enough to actually say something intelligent about what's going on is not easy. Sometimes it's not even possible and here's where a co-caster is really helpful: they may have noticed other things and can fill in more details after the fight is done - usually nothing significant happens after a big fight for a while so there's time to recap a bit. Of course in order to do that, decent short term memory is required. Memory also helps when casting a longer series of games - a caster can recall similarities between drafts etc.

3. Advantages

In my experience, casting is a great way to improve your ability to read the game. When playing a single hero, it is too often okay to just pay attention to things that have direct impact to you. It doesn't give optimal results, but there is nothing in particular forcing the player to pay attention to peripheral things. When casting, every single one of the 10 heroes on the map are equally important to follow. Likewise, keeping an eye on the minimap is crucial in order to be able to react to action anywhere on the map quickly enough. This widened awareness can transfer into gameplay as reduced tunnel vision, especially during fights. It's not an unexpected outcome really - in this sense casting is a lot like teaching: through teaching, the teacher also improves their own understanding.

All in all it goes to show that as a player, it is advantageous to approach a game from multiple perspectives. Although playing the game is the main activity, peripheral activities like spectating and casting can provide advantages that cannot be gained through gameplay alone. The experience closest to casting is most likely viewing replays and preferably analyzing them with another player. Overlooking things is much more common when viewing alone largely because our brains tend to fill gaps in thought quite sneakily. To put it another way, gaps in understanding tend to become apparent only when explaining things to another person. If something is truly understood, it should be possible to put it into words. When everything happens in the mind, it's easy to nod in understanding, although no real understanding takes place.

Conclusion

I started writing this article like a month ago, but kinda run out of things to say and left it to hang. Since I still don't have anything more to say about the subject, I'm just gonna put this out there as it is. The bottom line is: casting is yet another way to appreciate a game you love - and it can also make you a better player. I will definitely be looking for more opportunities to cast tournaments this year, maybe even work on that enthusiasm a bit. I could also try casting in English when I feel confident enough.