Episode 1.6: Social Commentary ft. GPik

In this episode, AV and Peon are joined by GPik. GPik is a well-known commentator who has done work on Smash 4 and Rivals of Aether. They break down what it means to be a good commentator, analyze the development of the commentating craft, and connect it all to the bigger picture.

## Questions

### **AV:**

> Let’s assume that premise is completely true. I don’t think two negatives make a positive. A good commentator knows how to riff on the other person’s strengths really well and knows how to employ fancy communication techniques to make the other person sound better.
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> I think both of these personalities you described don’t have the ability to do that. So, I don’t think it would be good to necessarily just throw those them together because opposites may attract. Obviously, you might get situations in which they do, but you’ll notice like many really good casting combinations that know how to play on each other’s strengths.
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> You’ll notice that with me and Peon, on this podcast, as co-hosts we both fulfill certain roles and we know how to tap in to each other’s strengths. So, that would be kind of a good example of the fact that no I don’t that necessarily it will be good to pair those two types up. Rather, to help them develop skills that would allow them to know how to commentate with anyone else and how to bring out someone else’s strengths.
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> I think that it’s just a really complicated question and there’s not necessarily a good answer to whether or not it would good throwing two people together.
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### **Peon:**

> I’ll kind of walk through, very briefly, how I view this.
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> From low to mid, with low being your 0-2er at a tournament. To go from 0-2 to let’s say 2-2 or 3-2 you know and getting average in your local bracket, maybe top 8 of a small local and being a pretty good player in your community will make you a mid-level player. To do that you just have to play the game a lot. You really have to understand match-ups and to understand that the people going 0-2 generally don’t have the best tech skills or the best strategies in game. They don’t really know how to really abuse the strengths of their character and the weakness of their opponent.
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> Where it starts to get more dicey is when you go from mid to high
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> To go from a mid-level to high-level you have to put in an extreme amount of time and you really have to start understanding what your weakness are in your mindset and in game. So, when you get hit, why are you getting hit? When you win, why are you winning? Same for when you are losing. To get there I think you have to start doing things like VOD reviews and maybe going out of region a little bit and playing new blood and testing yourself and being very self-aware.
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> To go from high to top is a completely different level.
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> To go from, let’s say, 50th on the PGR or 100th in the world to number 10, I think at that point you really have to go full bore. You have to travel and fight people that are the best at their character and really make sure that you could never get upset by a random character. You have to understand everything that you possibly can about the game and you really have to just put as many hours behind the sticks as possible with different people, while already having refined your ability to improve and your ability to be introspective.
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### **AV:**

> Yeah, I think we should also kind of tackle plateauing as a player part of the question.
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> I think that, in terms of being able to consistently grow, there’s no really awesome answer to this. Obviously on the show we’ve talked about developing different skills simultaneously. We’ve talked about just the fact that having a deep desire for the game, understanding good practice techniques, understanding when not to play too much, and optimizing your time. I think that some of the stuff that in previous episodes we discussed how to really consistently grow.
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