Sketch – Game commentary

With this sketch, we took the ‘game commentary’ genre, which exists wholly online, and attempted to parody a particular element of it, in the hope of applying a narrative aspect to an otherwise non-narrative form. In order to do this, we looked for an element of game commentary videos that could lend itself to being parodied if looked at in an exaggerated and comedic light. The element we identified was many game commentator’s choice to include their own face playing the game in a small box in the screen’s corner.

popular game commentator - PewDiePie

popular game commentator – PewDiePie

While this is sometimes a useful addition to the video, other times the player’s face seems to potentially be included simply for their own vanity, as it provides no real value to the video’s content. This can often shift the attention from the game to the personality – something that we felt deserving of a playful parody. In doing this, we exaggerated this idea of a slight vanity, and questioned what would happen if the player was a great deal more concerned with their face’s role in the video – to the point that it grew as the video went on, as their face gradually took up the whole screen. In terms of being a hybrid of game commentary and parody, we wanted the parody initially to be subtle before eventually being quite blatant in its exaggerated comedy, as the sketch ends with a type of internal vision of the player, as he happily plays a video game in which he plays the role of each character. This conclusion was intended to seem both absurd and surreal, with inspiration being taken from a scene from the 1999 film Being John Malkovich, in which Malkovich enters a portal into his own mind where he is met with a world filled with multiple versions of himself.

With this final absurd moment of our sketch, the narrative aspect is most prominent, as all that remained of the non-narrative elements of the game commentary genre is essentially absent.

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