LP Commentary Styles

The comments section on this old post I wrote about Monopoly suddenly exploded! The discussion is pretty interesting, and the opinions are quite varied! I guess this means I should try to write more posts about board games? I have been meaning to try and get an Arkham Horror night going…

But no, this post is about Let’s Play videos.

Having done several different styles of LP commentary, I’ve been asked to kind of run through them and give my thoughts on each one. The answer to the question, “What kind of commentary should I use?” is not  set in stone; it depends a lot on what sort of game you’re playing, how good you are at it, and how well you know it.

The decision, for me, always comes down to what I want to spend my time talking about, and whether or not I’m confident I’ll be able to talk about it and play the game at the same time.

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Live Commentary

This is, more likely than not, my preferred method of doing things. All you need to do to record live commentary is plug in a microphone and talk about the game while you’re playing it. It takes the least amount of work and is by far the most popular style I’ve seen across these vast interwebs of ours.

Pros:

• Once you figure out your tech, this is by far the least labor-intensive method of producing an LP. Either your game audio and commentary are being recorded on the same track, or they’re being recorded separately but will be trivial to stick together afterwards.
• Nothing gets that “reacting to a game in real time” effect quite like… uh… reacting to a game in real time. Why edit out your mistakes when you can instead indulge in some good old-fashioned self-depreciating humor?
• I’ve never personally done this, but a lot of people have: livestreaming! What’s better than playing a silly game and making cow noises overtop of it? Playing a silly game and making cow noises while being watched by a thousand people as crazy as you are!

Cons:

• Not only is editing out mistakes much more difficult, but so are retakes. If you say something too dumb for publication, or don’t have the volume set correctly, or whatever, you have to go back and replay a segment of the game. This sucks because your second round of commentary is never as good as your first round. (There’ll be a particularly bitter instance of this in a series I’m planning to start uploading next month.)
• Thinking of funny and witty things to say on the fly is not always easy, but if you’re playing ninety minutes of game you’re sort of expected to say funny and witty things for that entire ninety minutes. As a result, live commentary is often marked by long stretches of inane chatter. In the worst cases, this manifests as the player merely describing what he’s doing onscreen or, worse, reading text boxes out loud. Aaahh!!
• Believe it or not, talking and playing both require concentration. When you’re trying to go both at once you are very literally splitting your brain cycles in half. It doesn’t matter how good you are at a game, you will play it worse if you’re trying to have a conversation while doing it. Sometimes this can have hilarious results — my famous Spelunky death probably wouldn’t have occurred if the game had my undivided attention — but more often than not the mistakes you make are just going to make it look like you’re stupider than you really are.

I do live commentary if I’m playing  a game I don’t know particularly well, or will have long boring parts I feel I can fill with mildly amusing blather. This is also the route I’ll take if I do a spur-of-the-moment LP since, hey, no planning required. And it goes without saying that it’s my preferred method for co-op LPs. I mean, we’re both there playing the game, right? Might as well talk about it at the same time.

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Scripted Commentary

This is the style where you play the game first, then go back and record commentary later. I reserve this for games I know extremely well, since I neither want my gameplay to be compromised nor do I want to waste time talking about useless things. If I mean to show off a game, I’m going to by-gods show it off.

Pros:

• Since you’re not splitting your concentration, your gameplay will not suffer. And hey, even if it does, it’s easy to throw out a botched run and try again. If your goal is to show how good you are at a game when you’re not screwing around, that’s easy enough to accomplish by crafting an ideal segmented run.
• You have all the time in the world to think about what you want to say, how you want to phrase it, and get as many chances as you like to record your narration. Every second of your LP can be jam-packed with pertinent information about the game, the run, your playstyle, interesting trivia, whatever you like. And if you don’t like it? Rewrite and try again.

Cons:

• Writing and recording a script is very time-consuming. You’re essentially going through the entire game at least twice: once to play it, and once to talk about it… and you’re often doing each section several times.
• It can be quite a daunting task to think of enough stuff to talk about for the entire time you’re playing… and you can’t have dead air in a script.
• Unless you’re especially skilled, reading from a script sounds exactly like reading from a script. There’s really no way around this, unfortunately, but hopefully the stuff you’re talking about is interesting enough that it won’t be a dealbreaker for anyone.

I do scripted commentary if I think live commentary would be too distracting from actually playing the game, or if I know the game so well I could literally talk about it all day long.

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There are minor variations to each of these methods, but those are the two big blanket ones. I don’t really have a preference while watching LPs, because both styles can be used to excellent effect… and misused by people who don’t know what they’re doing. The end goal is entertainment, though, so making a stylistic choice based on what you’re playing and how you’re playing it is, really, the only correct answer.