Reconstructing Christopher ‘MonteCristo’ Mykles’s sportscaster persona
Traditional sportscasting consists of a team of two people responsible for analyzing, critiquing, reporting and dramatizing sports events. They create suspense, sustain tension and give their audience the feeling that “they had participated in a game that had been decided only in the final seconds” (Fuller, 2008 p. 5). With the proliferation of E-sports and online viewership of gaming tournaments, sportscasting has been integrated into the broadcast to enrich the experience for their audience.
A sportscasting team consists of two people, the play-by-play caster and the color caster. The play-by-play caster narrates the action and provides their audience with imagery of what is happening in the game. The color caster is in charge of providing insight into the game, through anecdotes, statistics or reasoning in explaining the course of actions that have occurred during the game (Ferguson, 1983). Color casters can be classified into three persona archetypes in their presentation of the game, ‘expert’, ‘academic’ and ‘pro player’. According to Ware & Linkugel (1982), each of these personae has their own unique set of forms, particulars and participation, creating an inventive sense of authority to enhance their credibility by providing specific meaning to their conjectures.
Christopher “MonteCristo” Mykles is one of the most prominent color casters in the League of Legends E-sports scene. Many in the community consider him to be an extremely apt and intelligent analyst as well as the authority on many matters. He achieves this level of credibility through the use of lexical choices, style and turn taking structure.
This paper will examine how Christopher “MonteCristo” Mykles, a color caster, achieves his credibility (McCroskey & Teven, 1999) by developing his persona as the ‘expert’ through the use of lexical choices, style and turn taking with his partnering play-by-play caster Erik ‘DoA’ Lonnquist.
Assessing Credibility
Credibility, as measured in McCroskey and Teven (1999), consists of six different subjective metrics – believability, likeableness, goodwill, trustworthiness, competence and ethos.
In our examination of Christopher ‘MonteCristo” Mykles’s persona, we will be examining the following video and the metrics of goodwill, trustworthiness, competence and ethos.
OnGameNet. (2014 June 8th). SK Telecom T1 K vs Samsung Galaxy Ozone | Game 3 Grand Finals SK Telecom LTE-A LoL Masters 2014. Retrieved from
Breaking down ‘the expert’
The particulars of the ‘expert’ are ’specialist’, ‘Instructional’, ‘Truth Seeking’ and ‘Meta cognition’. Forms of the archetype are usually figures of authority, such as news agencies BBC, CNN, or revered thinkers such as Stephen Hawking or Noam Chomsky. The transcendence of such a persona creates association with esoteric knowledge, creating an augmented sense of authority, allowing the audience to perceive the persona as more competent and through the heightened ethos, increase credibility.
Understanding Jargon
Color casters often use in game slang as well as jargon to aid their explanation and analysis of the game. Christopher ‘MonteCristo’ Mykles’s presentation contains multiple instances of game specific jargon, using many terms that requires a familiarity with the study of the game to fully understand.
Such lexical choices help shape the audience’s perception of Christopher ‘MonteCristo’ Mykles’s perceived competence, serving as an indicator of his expertise in the area. (Keene & Cummins, 2009) Terms such as “scaling”, “turtling”, “team-fighting”, “hard CC” are all game specific terms that contribute to this indicator of expertise. On top of these, Christopher ‘MonteCristo’ Mykles also develops a few buzzwords of his own, that have come to be accepted under the same category of terminology. “Ward control”, “Vision control” and “rotations” are the terms often associated with his presentation, with “rotations” being a synonymous association with his presentation.
An internet meme characterizing the degree of association of Christopher ‘MonteCristo’ Mykles and the “Rotations” Buzzword
This perceived authority over the specific jargon further enhances audience’s perception of his competence and thus adds to the credibility of his persona.
Telling the players what to do
Christopher ‘MonteCristo’ Mykles’s style of color commentary greatly differs from other color casters. Other play-by-play and color casting pairs have the play-by-play caster provide agency of individuals and the color caster will then cite evidence, experience or some form of reasoning in order to praise or mitigate blame. (Hansen, 2010) However, Christopher ‘MonteCristo’ Mykles often diverts away from the agency established by his partnering play-by-play caster, developing the agency of different individuals or shifting it to the team instead before providing his own analysis of blame mitigation or praise giving.
In the process of blame mitigation or praise allocation, color casters usually provide conjectures or anecdotal evidence, often providing hindsight. (A. Hansen 2010) Christopher ‘MonteCristo’ Mykles deviates greatly from hindsight, often providing instructions and methods as to how a team should proceed through the course of a game. “They have to be so afraid of picks at this point they have to stick together” (30:10 - 30:15) “They still have to get that pick, they have to get that hard CC down” (43:40 – 43:44). This sets the premise for blame mitigation or praise allocation for actions that will happen in the future.
This shift in the timeframe of this blame mitigation praise allocation process creates a prophetic association, enhancing the perceived trustworthiness of Christopher ‘MonteCristo’ Mykles’s persona through his ability to correctly predict the outcome of situations. The accuracy in this future shifted blame mitigation praise allocation process also creates a higher competency perception for the audience.
Seeking truth
Unlike traditional sports where the action is focused around a ball or object that dictates the flow of the games, the action and important events in a game of League of Legends is not always able to be captured on the screen that the audience watches the game through. This results in many small events that can potentially affect the outcome of a game not being able to be presented to the audience watching.
Christopher ‘MonteCristo’ Mykles develops a different dynamic with his play-by-play partner in tackling this challenge.
In traditional sports, play-by-play sportscasters usually dictate a large portion of the commentary, taking a majority portion of the air time and structuring the turn taking system between the two sportscasters through the use of action summaries to indicate the start or end of a play.
However, Christopher ‘MonteCristo’ Mykles takes a majority of the air time and there is a distinct lack of a turn taking structure between himself and Erik “DoA” Lonnquist, letting the events happening in the game dictate the speaking order, with the play-by-play caster simply narrating on screen action when it happens and Christopher ‘MonteCristo’ Mykles providing explanations and gathering information from the various occurrences that the audience may or may not have been able to catch on to. “The teleport in terms of team-fighting is going to be monumental” (17:00 – 17:05) This provides a coherent explanation and a reasoned truth presented to the audience, enhancing the perceptions of goodwill and trustworthiness.
A further examination of this turn taking structure shows that the presented persona is perceived as more neutral. The usual turn taking structure between sportscasters often advocate partisanship, attempting to gain a more favorable response towards a particular team (Hansen, 2010). Unrestricted by such a structure, Christopher ‘MonteCristo’ Mykles is able to phrase and present his analysis of the game in a neutral manner, increasing the perception of trustworthiness and thus his overall credibility.
A figure of authority
Through his unique style of presentation, Christopher ‘MonteCristo’ Mykles develops a persona that transcends the archetype of ‘the expert’ creating a strong ethos. This combined with his lexical choices, deviation from the regular turn taking framework and shifted timeframe of analysis, creates a very strong perception of his competence, trustworthiness and goodwill.
Thus the audience’s perception of his credibility is that of a figure of authority.
References
Ferguson, C. A. (1983). Sports announcer talk: Syntactic aspects of register variation. Language in Society, 12(2), 153-172.
Fuller, L. K. (2008). Sportscasters/sportscasting: Principles and practices. New York: Routledge.
Ware, B.L., & Linkugel, W.A. (1982). The rhetorical persona: Marcus Garvey as black Moses. Communication Monographs, 49(1), 50-62.
Hansen, A. D. (2010). Narrating the game: Achieving and Coordinating Partisanship in Real Time. Research on Language and Social Interaction
McCroskey, J.C., & Teven, J.J. (1999) Goodwill: A reexamination of the construct and its measurement. Communication Monographs, 66(1), 90-103.
Keene, J. R., & Cummins, R. G. (2009) Sports commentators and source credibility: Do those who can’t play… commentate?. Journal of Sports Media, Volume 4, Number 2, Fall 2009, pp. 57-83 (Article)