eSports Visual Aid Reflection

To start, I struggled a lot with solidifying this topic because of two things.  eSports is not very interesting to many people and even to myself the whole concept is a bit interesting but not that eye opening.  The reason I believe this is the case however maybe due to my constant exposure to the eSports community.  The second reason I found solidifying this topic to be difficult was because I felt compelled to do dance as a visual aid.  I had decided not to use dance as a visual aid in the end because of my confusion of the fine line of speech and performance.

Now the reason I had initially decided to do a speech on eSports is because in my life I am committed to only three things: school, dance, and games.  Being that my past two speeches covered a bit on business and dance, the appropriate thing was to go with my last passion.  Besides my dancing speech I have had to do lots of preparations for my other speeches, but because eSports was something I had a genuine interest and involvement in I felt much of the information I had decided to share was mainly knowledge from what I had picked up.

In terms of the delivery of the speech, a comment that had always come up was that I was too reliant on my speaking notes.  I tend to find it difficult to give a speech when I had already written out how I would want it to come out therefore memorization came into play.  For this speech I tried to write a lot less in the speaking notes and let myself do an extemporaneous speech.  For the most part I was happy with the results and am glad I never felt too stuck anywhere.  Although I did not feel very stuck, there were times such as trying to describe the game in laymen’s that I found very difficult.  League of Legends is such a complicated game and unless you take the time to learn it, it will always be complicated.  I personally felt there is no way to quickly explain the game while doing justice.  Even so, I believe it was the right thing to do, opposed to going through the whole speech with the audience ignorant of the whole topic.

Lastly, what I want to touch upon in this reflection are the visual aids.  To be honest, busy/creative work is oddly fun for me.  I also was finally able to practice creating good slides by using techniques such as dark background white font, no bullet points, only using pictures/charts if it had a comparison, and adding short statements with charts quickly interprets my point.  In addition to these techniques, I tried to have the information on the slides to be understandable within ten seconds maximum and at the same time comfortable to consume.  The mentality I had going into making the slides was, "I'll do the presentation, not the PowerPoint", and I believe this mentality helped my create slides that did a good job accenting my speech rather than competing with me to give the speech.