"Mistake on the Lake 5" Reflections I
Series Introduction
Mistake on the Lake 5 earlier this month at the Round 1 in Mentor, Ohio-my fifth of six DDR tournament appearances this year-has so far been overall my favorite experience of a rhythm game event to date. There’s so many people I met, so many things I did, and so many mementos I came home with that it was at times overwhelming, but everything that weekend went just as I’d hoped.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then in theory I should have nearly 7 billion words to say over my four days traveling to and from and attending this tournament. I can at best put out 100 words a minute so uh… I’ll just prioritize a handful of topics!
In this first of a to-be-determined number of installments reflecting on my time there, I’d like to talk about preparing for and giving commentary for MotL’s inaugural Gitadora Drums (aka Drummania) tournament. It was a privilege to perform this task, but in being tasked to do so with minimal prior knowledge, I knew I’d have to climb uphill in order to pull this off successfully.
Receiving the News to Commentate
I forget whether or not I volunteered on the form earlier in the summer that I could give Gitadora commentary; but either way, when I saw on a volunteer scheduling spreadsheet that I was tasked to give it, I accepted the challenge and went “roger that” in my head and got on with preparing for the big day.
“Received orders given; expect results.”
The above quote is attributed to David Goggins, a motivational speaker and retired US Navy officer reputed for his extreme mental toughness, who on the Chris Williamson podcast gave his personal definition of the phrase “roger that”:
(please go to timestamp 1:44:00 if the video loads from the beginning)
I had in the late summer been consuming motivational content from Goggins. His extraordinary resilience in his life and work is something that resonates with me and inspires me to live each day with intention and purpose. Consuming this content put me in the necessary headspace to give my best work volunteering for the event.
The Task
The task was simple: co-commentate with someone the highest-level pool of the Drummania tournament and its subsequent top-4 double-elimination bracket that followed for 2-to-3 hours.
Despite its simplicity and the fact that this task was low-stakes, where I could’ve easily gone on the mic, chatted casually about the game for a few hours, and then gone home saying “that was that,” I wanted to give my best work for the following reasons:
Players will save livestream VOD’s of their tournament participation as a memento. I have a responsibility to them to produce as memorable and emotionally engaging a memory as possible.
Livestream spectators of all backgrounds and histories with Drummania will watch. I have a responsibility to them to in the moment explain the action and loop them in on the state of the tournament so they can most easily follow along and be maximally engaged with the event as it progresses.
As a commentator for the event, I am a representative voice of the community, even if for only a few hours. My reputation as a community member is at stake to improve or decline depending on how well I do.
Accordingly, I’m a community advocate for a few hours! I have an opportunity to bond the existing community more tightly in these hours and to get onlookers excited and interested in trying a new game!
As a volunteer for the event generally, event organizers are trusting me since I’ve said “I can do the work” to do the work! And if I’m going to do the work, I’m going to do the work well with intention and diligence so that they have one less thing to stress about and can focus their attention on higher-priority items during the event.
The Gameplan
Take Stock of Current Commentating Skills and Prior Experience
Commentating for MotL 5 isn’t my first gig; in fact, this is my third time ever giving commentary after doing so for DDR tournaments at last year’s MotL 4 and at Dahn Dahn Right. Coming into this assignment, my budding skills would be put to its first test by being thrown into a completely new context and game.
Fortunately, it wasn’t a complete throw into the dark: DDR and Gitadora are both rhythm games; and informed by the DDRCommunity guide to commentary (link here), I approached this task with a mindset informed by the guide’s headline rules as a means to apply what I’ve learned so far in a different context:
Don’t talk about yourself
During a match, talk about the match
Help the viewers follow the action
Talk up the players
I knew that on the day of the tournament, I’d have to be ready to commit myself to three things on the microphone:
Observe the gameplay and action.
Describe the action to the viewer clearly that ideally enhances their own viewing experience.
Incorporate context to enhance the viewer’s understanding of the players and the tournament state.
Accomplishing this first item began for me with closing a necessary knowledge gap by learning to play Drummania!
Learning Drummania
It is extremely limiting to commentate for a game one knows nothing about. As I was participating in this event, I reasoned that at minimum I should know enough of how to play the game to be able to communicate how to play it to someone else looking to play for the first time.
That meant that, at the very least, I should understand and be able to communicate:
That Drummania is a game where you hit different parts of a drum kit in time to music, and I should therefore have the vocabulary to identify each drum on-screen (hats, cymbals, snare, toms, and pedals)
That there are three metrics used to evaluate a gameplay performance (machine score, Completion Rate, and Skill) and that they all reflect slightly different aspects of that performance.
That the game measures difficulty from 1.00 to 9.99 in increments of 0.05; and that at Level 7.50 and up, earning Full Combos or Completion Rates of 90% and up is a very high level achievement.
Using Notion I - Digital Scratchpad
There were additional things I learned that got me up to speed on being able to communicate basic concepts about the game; for that, I set up a Notion website for myself to accumulate this knowledge in preparation for tournament day.
If you’ve never used Notion, think of it as a digital notebook where your mouse and keyboard are essentially empowered to become a pen and its “workspaces” become paper so that you can throw all sorts of information at it that suit your needs. I’ll link below a tutorial from the Notion team covering the basics, though plenty of third-party tutorials that may better suit your learning preferences abound on YouTube:
Here (linking the same page twice), I’ve used this software to collect everything I learned about Drummania during tournament prep into one place. Whether that knowledge was obtained through firsthand research or in conversation with veteran players on Discord, in centralizing where I could access this information, it became easier to recall it and locally cross-reference it.
Because it’s easy to forget it: knowledge not saved will be lost. Although Discord chat messages are written records of conversation, recalling them later is not only tedious, but requires remembering the necessary keyword(s) to recall that information.
Keeping Smart Company
With that in mind, one of the blessings and contributing factors to my success was that I was able to converse with folks knowledgeable in Gitadora to begin with, including Orca, the Gitadora TO, and my co-commentator Katherine. They and a few others in a group chat of MotL staff and volunteers gave their time to teach me the game to the extent that I’d have the necessary knowledge base to be proficient at commentary.
As a piece of advice, be able to ask other people questions, and accordingly ask them questions. It has been my experience that folks in the American DDR community often keep to themselves; when applying oneself to a team effort like successfully running or broadcasting a tournament, it’s imperative to do to the opposite and be communicative and seek out anything and everything you need to succeed if not to not fail at the task before you.
Learn Who’s Playing
Using Notion II - Databases
Armed with the software to accumulate knowledge and surrounded by the people who can enable me to do my best work, the next step was to leverage all of these tools and advantages to learn about who’s playing.
I’ve linked here an excerpt view of my player research spreadsheet that I used to learn about the players in the top-level pool. Spreadsheets in Notion are called “Databases”; linked below is an introduction video about them:
Anyway, Reiterating what’s shown there, for a commentator, I suggest that at minimum you know:
the player’s in-game name,
their pronouns,
where they’re from (state if domestic, country if from abroad), and
A few numbers that describe their ranking (e.g. Skill Rating, placements on leaderboards)
If you have the time, from there you can add:
Prior tournament credentials, and
A brief description of their skillset (or at least what you understand of it)
Finally, and this will be tough to do in initial research, if you can come up with a few sentences to describe their tournament arc based on what you understand of their prior tournament performance, that’ll help you lean into telling a story about this player at the tournament you’re commentating.
Once you’ve finished up learning about the players, you’re now fully prepared to commentate!
The Execution
It’s now tournament weekend, and you’re about to sit down at the livestream desk with your co-commentator. As you say your first words into the mic, send it! Greet the livestream and your co-commentator with energy and enthusiasm to be there, and go right off to the races.
Reiterating an earlier point, commit yourself to three things while on the microphone, using your knowledge of the players and of the game to inform the things you say:
Observe the gameplay and action.
Describe the action to the viewer clearly that ideally enhances their own viewing experience.
Incorporate context to enhance the viewer’s understanding of the players and the tournament state.
Additionally, try to synergize with your co-commentator in the moment. In my case, with Katherine, a veteran Gitadora player, that looked like:
Observing her rhythm of moving the microphone back and forth between the two of us to deliver commentary; and when the mic was on my side, to accordingly speak and pick up where she left off.
Picking up that she leaned into knowledge and technical aspects of the game to deliver commentary so that I could complement that approach with a more hype, high-energy, moment-to-moment story telling of play-by-play commentary.
Finally, be patient! You’ll pick up the rhythm in due time of:
pre-gameplay conversation,
in-game commentary, and
post-gameplay analysis and reflection
pretty quickly; and once that becomes second nature to you, step back cognitively and make iterative improvements along the way so that, by the end of the tournament, viewers can more easily attribute their positive experience watching the stream in part to your efforts to deliver riveting commentary!
Closing Remarks
And I think that’s everything! I’d like to thank again the OhioDDR core staff for MotL for giving me the opportunity to commentate at this year’s Gitadora Drums tournament, and I’d like to specially thank Orca and Katherine for enabling my success in this endeavor.
This was the longest post I’ve ever written to this Substack and took multiple days to write, so feedback on how I handled moving through different topics is appreciated!