This week in the U.S. is the Thanksgiving holiday. Mired in ironies from white-washing history to traditions of gluttony and greed, this holiday is somewhat fascinating. Compared with Christmas, it doesn't get much press, there are hardly any songs about it, and it is book-ended with Black Friday which is where most of the corporatization is centered on.
For better or worse, there's also a widespread tradition of watching American football on Thanksgiving day. First, you stuff yourself full of turkey and rolls, then lounge on the couch until your relatives start screaming at the TV like actual lives were at stake.
I'm not a fan of watching sports (even my own sport!), but I do give space for family who love to watch them, so here's how I survive such games and hopefully this is also a fun insight into some pretty intense technology...
Live Streaming
A few years ago, I tried my hand at live-streaming on my YouTube channel. I saw it as a possible means of getting more videos produced more quickly because I wouldn't have to edit the videos. While that's technically true, live-streaming is actually quite a production and I quickly realized that the work was front-loaded because it requires lots more preparation prior to the stream.
This experimentation gave me a real appreciation for what live sports broadcasts are, even if I don't particularly care for the content, I can absolutely appreciate what it takes to put on the show.
The first thing to note is that when you're live, you're live which means all of your mistakes, "ums," stutters, and awkward laughs are all available for anyone to see or hear. Doing a livestream on YouTube is very low stakes for me, because I might have one or two people join live. It's nothing like having millions of people tune in on TV, but it still gets my heart racing. That's what makes an American football production so impressive to me: it's a true team-produced performance.
In The Verge's video, "Inside the control room..." a few team members of the NFL broadcasting are interviewed and they explain how the production comes together. With hundreds of people at cameras or controls or panels, they tell a story in real time. Camera crew prep their shots and the producer will take recommendations for which shot to cut to otherwise he'll bark commands for what to show. Audio mixers help create the feeling of being in the stadium and opening up mics or fading out depending on what makes the most sense. Statisticians help update scores and track facts or help announcers. All of this is being done as it is actually happening.
Preparation is surely a huge part of the production. Putting my designer hat on (and borrowing from my live-stream experience), I can see quite a few assets that would need to be prepared, possibly before the season even starts.
Graphics called "lower-thirds" are used to provide extra information to viewers placed at—you guessed it—the lower third of the screen. You've seen this on the news and even YouTube videos where a person's name and title show up on-screen, usually in a fancy-looking box. For American football, the most important lower-third is the score bar (also called the score bug), and it can be pretty dense with information.
Sometimes announcers will talk about individual players, whether just to tell their story, give an update on an injury, or highlight something extraordinary. For that one or two minute focus on a player, we have the stats that have to be pulled up at the right time and shown to the announcers, we also have on-screen graphics of the player's photo, name, number, other statistics that would all need to be accessed and pulled up. From a developer perspective, that means having quite the substantial database of assets ready to show. Then there's the live-action side where the game updates are stored and displayed—everything shown in the lower-third graphic from scores to clocks.
The most impressive graphics to me, however, are the lines that show up on the field. The yellow "goal" line appears as the players set up, awaiting the snap of the football. This line is a friendly helper for those at home trying to figure out what's going on in the game. The goal is to get the football past the yellow line in under 4 tries. This line appears and disappears underneath the players, as though it were on the actual field and players were actually standing on it, making this an integrated piece of information that helps without distracting. Just about anyone can flip to a game and start to understand what is happening and what the current state of the game is, first through finding the yellow line, then by scanning the score bug.
Jordan from Corridor Crew breaks down the VFX side of sports broadcasting in the video, The Hidden VFX in Live Sports—it's a great look into the tech and how it works. He mentions how that yellow line is a story-telling element in the American football world. That is the key piece to this whole ordeal: all of the things that are added to the screen ideally support telling the story of the game.
I may not care for the sports content, but I can get engrossed in the story-telling and production of the broadcast. Interestingly enough, this practice of noticing these elements helps me notice what Marshall McLuhan often discusses: how the medium is actually the message.
The spatial sense generated by television experience is utterly unlike that of the movie. And, of course, the difference has nothing to do with the "content" or the programming. Here, as ever, the medium itself is the ultimate message.
Myth and Mass Media
We can't go too far in CYBORG_ without bringing back our friend Marshall McLuhan, mass media philosopher and techno prophet from 60 years ago. He wrote an essay called Myth and Mass Media (originally published in 1959) that actually might be easier to understand through the lens of our American football broadcast.
As we've seen before, McLuhan divides human history into halves: before ("preliterate") and after ("postliterate") the technology of the written word. Our preliterate ancestors, according to McLuhan, lived in an environment of simultaneous information and our primary means of engagement with the world was through sound. After the written word, we shifted to a primarily visual means of understanding and interacting with the world. As we entered the electronic "age" we find ourselves again in an environment of simultaneous information:
Electronic culture accepts the simultaneous as a reconquest of auditory space. Since the ear picks up sound from all directions at once, thus creating a spherical field of experience, it is natural that electronically moved information should also assume this spherelike pattern.
We've seen how our football broadcast has created this "spherical field of experience." The producers are trying to tell a story, and they give us elements to do so. Most importantly to McLuhan, I would guess, is actually the subtle audio mixing of the game. Re-creating the atmosphere of the crowd through the noises of chatter, shouts, cheers, and uproars throughout the game makes it feel like we're there or at least part of the action. The smack of huge bodies with shoulder pads colliding, the flurry of arms shifting after the snap of the ball, the whistle and subsequent commotion of upset players after the call all are captured and played through the speakers on the TV, making the game more than just a flat, moving image.
Everything layered after the audio further cements the football broadcast as its own, created world. And like Jordan from Corridor Crew noted in his video, ever since the technological innovation of the score bug, we've seen layers and layers of information, visual effects, and gimmicks being added. Some broadcasts can overdo it, like the complaint from this Redditor shows us:
McLuhan seems ready to jump into this mess of graphics and information to explain what's happening here:
It is this instantaneous character of the information field today, inseparable from electronic media, that confers the formal auditory character on the new culture. That is to say, for example, that the newspaper page, since the introduction of the telegraph, has had a formally auditory character and only incidentally a lineal, literary form. Each item makes its own world, unrelated to any other items save by date line. And the assembly of items constitutes a kind of global image in which there is much overlay and montage but little pictorial space or perspective. For electronically moved information, in being simultaneous, assumes the total-field pattern, as in auditory space.
The image above shows how electronic media leans towards this over-abundance of information, much like the newspaper example McLuhan provided, where each sport stat or game score that scrolls into view through the ticker is unrelated to the game you're currently watching, but it creates "a kind of global image"—a slice of the world at the moment that is only grouped by date or the subject of sports (although in the picture above, it seems like other news is also slotted in).
Cyborg
There are a few things that exploring sports broadcasting has shown me. First is that just like systems tend toward chaos, electronic media tends towards simultaneous information. That's actually quite helpful in understanding the overwhelm we feel in the virtual and electronic world. It is trying to replicate the natural, simultaneous world, but there is something off. We can become trapped in these worlds, especially when they are intentionally designed as traps, like with social media platforms.
Second, as a designer of information (whether acting the role of developer or actual designer), I am even more appreciative of whitespace or negative space. Having emptiness in a design is very difficult to maintain. It makes people uncomfortable, hence the constant barrage of marketers asking me: "Can we center the text? Can we move the image a little closer? Can we get rid of the space—people don't scroll." The reality is that we are in constant stimulation, so we become uncomfortable with restraint, with emptiness, with clarity. Even as we express that we desire those very virtues.
Seeing how the American football broadcast has evolved shows me a new perspective on my daily digital interactions. It's not the content that matters; the medium, the structure, the world-building is the message. We read the worlds that we inhabit, and that includes taking in a vast amount of information that is supplied to us by those worlds. The question is, how do these various worlds affect us? Are there toxic worlds that need to be avoided? Are there worlds that help us flourish?
Who would've thought that watching sports could be this interesting? ;)
Happy Thanksgiving.