Starcraft AI blog

I thought that Sonko’s first SSCAIT cast yesterday was not particularly accomplished. Nepeta doesn’t always understand the flow of the game and sometimes misses events that are visible on the minimap, but with years of weekly practice he has developed a smooth presentation. Sonko chose good games, but is not all the way there yet.

Casting seems to me a difficult skill; I wouldn’t try it without rehearsing, which is time-consuming. The caster benefits from strong knowledge of game play, the maps, and the players, and needs to follow the events of the game in real time while both showing them on the screen in a way that viewers can understand and fluidly offering useful and interesting commentary. That’s a lot of different subskills to coordinate at the same time. There is a reason that pro casters work in teams, with a game observer plus two or more commentators who always have something to say and can report background information or banter with each other if the game situation is not interesting at the moment. If you watch closely, you can see that top game observers understand the drama of the game, and can deliberately ignore important developments until suddenly revealing them at the most exciting moment. That requires simultaneously interpreting the actions of the players and foreseeing the reactions of the viewers; it is nothing simple.

I’m sure casting is like other difficult skills: You can’t help but improve with attentive practice.