grilled-montecristo-zero_to_thirty

Thorin: Hello

MonteCristo: Hi

T:
Okay, I'm here with MonteCristo and I'm going to do one of my “grilled” interviews with him.  Actually, this is the first grilled that I've done with anyone in League of Legends that wasn't actually a pro player in League of Legends.  So, you have a background in Warcraft 3.  People will know you as an interviewer in League of Legends.  People will primarily are going to know you as a caster for OGN and commentator.  Wthout getting too bogged down in the warcraft 3 stuff,  for anyone who didn't follow that scene or it's just ancient history to them, what I want to know is what are the interesting parts that came out of when you were in Warcraft 3 that then lead to you being in League of Legends.  Are there reasons  why you are now in League of Legends and how did you come to be in League of Legends, and get to where you are now?



MC:
From an Esports standpoint I was a caster in WC3, and I was primarily doing newswriting for a site called WC3replays.com back in the day.  So that's kinda how I got my start.  Then I was managing and coaching a north American team called Verge Gaming, the owner was a man named Matt Marcou.  This was about in 2005, and Matt Marcou became the first esports manager at Riot.  Also my college roommate started working at Riot when they had about 50-60 employees, and kinda hyped me up on League of Legends in beta.  I actually went and stayed for a week in the Riot offices just hanging out with my good friend, and that's kinda what got me involved in League of Legends initially back in late 2009.  So when the League of Legends Esports scene started picking bigtime in the second half of 2011.
I decided that there wasn't really good Esports coverage or Esports written content so I founded ggchronicle to start trying to improve the level of Esports Coverage.  From there I started getting corporate sponsorship for tournaments, and running tournaments.  I started casting them myself, and bringing on a bunch of other people to help cast those events.  Then I got picked up by MLG as a caster to do their events and work in the offices about once a week, sometimes more, sometimes less.  Finally, I was offered a position at OGN when they started looking for casters here in Korea, and I decided to take the job.  I continue to do a lot of writing as well, but it's been kind of mixed up from me starting as a writer, moving into a caster, moving to a management position, going back to being a writer, going to be a caster again.  So it's all been one big cycle that has brought me into League of Legends



T:
Oftentimes when people are casters especially, or commentators, or community figures, actually they tend to be known more personality-wise. That's how they build a following and build fans.  They do a lot of interviews, or they run a lot of those commmunity shows where people tend to see their personality more than necessarily what they are an expert at.  I can think of a lot of people in StarCraft 2 especially who are very very beloved by fans, but maybe their  fame level is above their actual ability level.
The reason I set this up like this is that when I looked around I don't think many people actually know you beyond your work that much.  They know you for your work, and then they know a little bit associated, like maybe some opinions you put on Twitter or something, but they don't really know you on any kind of indepth level.  There was an interesting statement you made in an AMA a while ago, where you in an off-hand manner mentioned how you once went through like a Guatemalan Mayan initiation ritual or rite that took a year.  And then someone saw off was like, “Oh, okay, what was that about?” and you were like “Ah, I'd really have to go into that in-depth at some point in the future”, so, the floor is yours.



Mc:
This is entirely personal history.  I was an English major in college, and a lot of my interest was in oral tradition storytelling and mythology, as well as early alchemy in it's relationship both to union psychology and the development of early science.  And the crossover between mysticism and early sciences, deeply fascinating to me.  I thought perhaps I would actually go to grad school for that, and there is still a lot of time in my life and maybe I will someday.  So from that what happened was I ended up through my current girlfriend, (who) was involved in this process where there is a Guatemalan Mayan shaman who worked with a community of Mayans in Lake Atitlán in Guatemala, and was run out of the country during the Guatemalan civil war in the 1980's because he was a major community leader.  It was kind of a civil war with alot of hate towards the native religions, let's put it that way.  His shamanic teacher told him that he had to go to America and keep the traditions alive, because now alot of the adulthood initiations have died off in Guatemala unfortunately.  So over a series of years he started running adulthood initiations which were, it's not really anything special, how can I describe this, this is what everyone was expected to do in this culture.  If you made some sort of horrible equivalency, it would be something like, what I did is graduating high school whereas a shaman is a PH.D/bigtime many many years of study graduate degree.  So it's what everyone in this culture was expected to do.
I ran into it because of my girlfriend doing it while I was in college. She had already graduated.  I ended up visiting the culmination ceremony of this year long process for her, and I got involved with an Irish storyteller there , moved to Ireland, and spent a long time doing sort of an apprenticeship with him in storytelling and some other stuff.  When I came back to the states I decided that I should go through with this process.  The process itself involved collecting or making hundreds or thousands of items and learning skills from brain(?) tannning deer hides to knapping obsidian arrowheads, and just making tons and tons of stuff.  Waking up at dawn every day to go running and doing certain ritual actions.  Abstaining from drugs, alcohol, sex, pretty much everything.  You just focus your life on daily ritual and, the term would be “courting items”, like trying to find certain things and meet certain kinds of people.  And you can't spend any money either.  The entire process is trying to...
It's hard for me to talk about without using specific words and I'm trying to avoid them because they don't mean anything unless they're in a specific context.  It's trying to convince people to give you things that you need or teach you skills that you have to learn for free, and that is extremely difficult.  It takes a long time to find the right people, go about doing things the right way, and at the end of the year there is a multi-day big ritual that takes about a week.  There are periods in that time of fasting for a few days, not drinking water, running, not sleeping, and it's a very intense process.  It's also kind of emotionally devastating too, that's kind of the point of it.  It really breaks you out of your own personality and makes you see the world in a very different way.  It's not for everybody, but I would consider it one of the best things I've ever done in my life in terms of self-reflection and getting to know myself as a person better.  I wasn't involved in Esports at that time.  I took a break for a while to go do these other things, and then my interest was rekindled once League of Legends came along.



T:
When people see this part of the interview, they're going to imagine we just did that part for background on your life to fill it in.  If you've seen a lot of interviews when people have the notion of getting to know someone personally they'll often ask a lot of things that are aren't really that connected like “what was your childhood like?” But actually I have a reason for asking about this topic, which is going to sound abstract, but I actually think it ties in directly to when we're talking about casting and thinking about the game later on.  In my own life and my own experiences, I've noticed that the more you improve things like your philosophical approach on life or you explore what seem like abstract topics it's going to seem to people like “okay, that has nothing to do with esports” and it doesn't on a surface level.  There are even times where the more I got into these areas in different areas in life and totally different interests I actually would have initially thought “okay,  if I really get into those areas I'm probably going to get drawn away from Esports because then I'm going to be like then I'm going to get into this area over here.”
But I actually found that every time I explored a totally different area or developed a skill in a different area then when I would come back to Esports it's like “oh now I see it in a different way” and actually now I had new skills that I could apply over here.  It actually kept me in Esports, because now I could do things on a different level, or I could think about the game in a different way, or I would approach things in a different manner.  So how does any of this stuff relate to your Esports career since then, or how you think about the scene, or games, or anything like that?  Can you see crossovers and connections and ways where it's helped out?



MC:
Oh, yeah, sure.  I think the biggest one probably is, a lot of this process what I didn't talk about earlier was, this idea of language is really core to the culture to this Guatemalan Mayan culture and particularly, therefore,  involved in the initiation that I did. There is a certain way that you have to learn to talk to people and learn how to connect with people to complete this initiation.  In order to do that you really have to understand how to read people and how to talk to them in a way that will actually touch them.  It's so hard to say it, this is not the right way to say it, but “cause them to want to help you”.  You have to bring them to a realization that this is something that they should be helping you with.  It's not about you though, that's the thing, it's about this greater process.  So that's why it gets a little nutty when you talk about it in certain terms.
But, as far as being a caster and coming up with language on the fly, it was and continues to be extraordinarily helpful for that process.  Just in terms of the way I think about the world in general gives you more appreciation for other people's work, how other people are feeling about things, how I think the Esports should go in terms of maturity, and the way that people react to certain discussions.  It sounds cheesy, but as you're talking about, the more you learn about yourself and your own interests the more you can apply that to other people as well.  Part of this process was deep introspection, and knowing myself and my own reactions.  It allowed me to hone my own personality, and cut out stuff I didn't think was working well, or change things about myself for the better.  I think that gives me a greater insight as an Esports commentator and as an Esports editorialist, an analyst whatever.



T:
Relate this now directly to casting.  People are going to think of casting, and we already have a meta about how casting works.  Most people are following the old television method where you have a play by play guy and the analyst.  And the reason why in that setup a lot of  people like to have a pro is because then it seems very easy for the color guy.  He's just saying things off his own experience,  or simple things he notices.
But obviously, if you look at all types of casting, and even in real sports, there are still levels to which you can develop the analysis element.  You can just focus on the mechanics of the game, like what someone is specifically doing.  You can focus on the individual playing and critique that.  Or you can focus on the strategy, and then there's not just the strategy, there's the tactics that are applied and you can go to almost any scope and scale you want.  Some of this is going to be transparent to people who know the game well, but to some of the fans it's going to be a bit invisible.  They're not really noticing what's going to be going on behind it.  Which overall is what you've aimed to do in casting.  Has it changed over the years, have you noticed things that (cause you to think) “I'm going to go in this direction instead”, has there been an overall philosophy?



MC:
I mean, I was very young when I started doing Warcraft 3 casting, I was only about 18.  I don't think I had really refined myself or my craft really very much at that point.  I'm only 26 now,  I still see a long way to go.
I think that's what coming to Korea has made me realize with  guys who are casting Legends here who are in their 40s and there's so much to learn that they can teach you and I have great conversations with them.  But, in terms of specifically League of Legends, I'm not a pro player.  I don't spend the time refining my mechanics. I don't spend time focusing on developing a diverse champion pool.  I, as we're sitting here, haven't played League of Legends in over a month.
BUT that's not really what's interesting to me about the game.  What I really love about the game is the team compositions and tactics.  And these are things that I can't actually learn in solo queue.  There is in my mind, and many other casters as well, the principal analyst here in Korea for OGN, is a man who was formerly the analyst for NBC game in broodwar named Kim Dong-Jun.  Caster Kim and I talk a lot and I consider him to be quite knowledgeable about League of Legends, but he doesn't really play the game either.  We both agree that the professional game of LoL is entirely different than what happens in solo queue. It requires vastly different skills, you don't see the teamwork and coordination, you can't get the same kind of team comps, you can't run the same kind of complex tactics.
So really all I do is watch VODs.  I watch VODs, I talk to pro players, I talk occasionally to other casters.   I just watch things in slow motion, I look at map movement.  When I cast I would say 80% of the game,  I'm just looking at the minimap and the items in spectator mode.  I'm not actually looking at what's happening on screen.  That's why it's so important to have a good play by play commentator in League of Legends, because I will just miss things constantly.
If a gank happens, it doesn't really matter to me how it happens, it matters, um, to a much greater...  I wouldn't say it doesn't really matter, that's an exaggeration.   I try to watch those things, but if I miss them I don't worry about it too much,  because I look at what spells are on cooldown afterward, what the items are, and what the effect of that gank was.  I tend to look at really big picture meta-tactics and shifts in the game.  And I don't watch pro player streams.  Ever.
I just watch VODs from around the world.  And that's my specialty.  There are other analysts who are much better players than I am, for sure.  My weakness in particular, is lane matchups and stuff like that.  I rely on my conversations with pro players for that information.  I feel that because I watch VODs, and the camera is constantly swapping between different positions, I don't ever get an entire laning phase to look at a particular matchup over and over again, or different matchups from each lane.  So that's something you can only get by playing the game, and I feel like that's the advantage to being a better player than being an analyst, but that cuts into your VOD review time.  I feel that as an analyst, there is a choice you have to make.  You can either be to a certain degree very good at analyzing lane matchups and that early stage of the game and give a lot of information to players that they can apply to their solo queue experiences, or you can go entirely for team comps and tactics.
Almost nothing that I say about League of Legends or that I know about League of Legends even, has any bearing to help people in solo queue.  It only applies to the professional teams.  You can obviously have some sort of mix there but I'm way up in the tactics, and then I would say my knowledge of that(laning and mechanics) is much lower.  So as a caster and an analyst, that's what I find the most interesting about the game.  I find the lane stuff interesting too, but laning phase is now getting shorter and shorter in professional games, and tactics are mattering more and more. Personally, I feel my interests have coincided with the importance of the game, but it can always be debated.



T:
This is actually directly what you are saying, just there, is a topic that I wanted to come onto because I have an interesting way to set it up.  Basically, I saw, I think it was in your AMA thread, maybe, you made a comment that you had a totally different approach to a lot of the most famous casters in League of Legends, like a lot of the LCS guys, because some of these guys, people like Phreak and Jatt et cetera, they were very much interested in the maths, or the things behind the mechanics of the champions, or how this specific spell will interact with something else, like this ability.  This was kind of the framework that they would set the game up in their mind, whereas you were actually directly saying “no, I'm going for team composition and how the overall strategy is going to work.”  It's not that one is better than the other, in fact it's good to have a broad light throughout the scene, but it's a different approach.  If you get the different approach you're going to go in a different direction.  So do you have anything to say on this topic?



MC:
Oh yeah, Phreak is a great example.  Phreak's knowledge of math...
I used to coach Phreak, Phreak used to be on the Warcraft 3 team that I managed.  And I used to cast a lot with Phreak for Warcraft 3 many years ago.  He's always been...  It's funny, he actually changed his name for a brief time on the team, his handle from Phreak to Rainman, because he was so obsessed with the numbers behind the gameand he's brilliant when it comes to knowing...
He would use the math behind the game to win.  He would know exactly how many of this kind of this unit it took to beat this meta-unit.  He didn't make the most, I would say as a player, interesting strategic decisions, but he was very precise with the numbers of units, and the way he used them and he was a very good player.  I feel that definitely comes out a lot in his casting too, and I find I learn a lot when I listen to Phreak, because he knows a lot of the stuff that I don't.
I think Jatt has changed from my perception of him, to caring a lot more about tactics these days.  But as for their preperations, I don't really know what they do to prepare, so I'm clearly not able to talk on that topic.  You have to look at the kind of analysts that they are, and the kind of analyst I am.  I feel like I can see team compositions, I can identify goals very quickly, I can see how their abilities will interact and chain together, I can say what exactly,  how they'll need to ward, how they'll need to put map pressure down in order to win the game.  I look at the conditions it takes for a team to win, and then I critique their actual in-game movement and in-game decisions as to, “do they align with the goal?” And it becomes very interesting in League of Legends.  If you listen to my casting, the games I get the most excited about are the ones where two team comps have very different goals, and it's a tug of war to see who gets their way in the game.  That's what I find most interesting.


T:
When you mentioned a couple of answers ago that when you looked at VODs, the style that you would use would be watching the minimap all the time, or you'd be looking at what items they've got basically for a similar scenario, like seeing what's going to emerge, or seeing what can.  This made me think, because when I used to do color casting and whenever I would do research in CounterStrike, a radically game, but again a 5v5 game, a game with strategy.  I would, even when I was doing the casting, the way we would do things there was: the person who was the play by play caster, he's the one who  controlled the camera, so he'd have it on one thing for a long time and he'd cast what he saw on the screen, and he'd switch to another thing and he'd kind of have a slow story mode is how he'd be doing it.
But on my screen I would be constantly flicking through all the point of views, checking who had what health, checking where someone was.  Because what I was trying to do was gather all the information, and using the structures I built per my mind of how I think about the game.  I'm then going to feed all the information in and try and see “what can emerge here?  What would be the interesting point?”  and a minute might happen.  Right now, no one knows what will happen, maybe even the player hasn't even thought this is going to happen.
But that's where sometimes the thrill would come from in the commentating, because sometimes you might even know “oh, I think somethings going to happen over here” where even the player might not have decided that, but that's an option that going to be open to him, and when he does then suddenly it it has a great effect on the game.  I think this is a component of this style of thinking, because it almost gets addictive trying to figure out why or how something could happen.
The downside to it though is, it's so interesting when you do yourself,  it sounds boring to someone who doesn't think of the game like this, but that's because you have to build up a palette of how to think about the game.  The more and more you do, the more refined (and) the more interesting it gets.  But then you also have the downside which is that if you get too good at it, there might be five people in the world who you ccould have that conversation with straight up.  How does this relate to to your approach and how do you translate this to the viewer, because it's a skill to do that as well?


MC:
I think that's a really good analogy, to tie this back to the last one too...
Let's say there's a matchup and Shen dies in lane.  Well, I may not know what exactly about that lane matchup  caused Shen to die 1v1, but I can tell you how Shen dying at that one time is going to set him behind for the teamfights and the big picture tactics that take over after the laning phase.
That's what I focus on.  It is difficuly, and in terms of casting, there's always a balance to be had in terms of accessibility versus knowledge and I feel that, yes, there are fewer and fewer people that understand casting as you get to that level.  I feel like a lot of the criticism of me, my perception of it, maybe it is justified, everybody has their own opinion of casters or their analytical abilies.
But when people say that I don't have a lot of knowledge, I think that it comes from the fact that nothing I say is very relevant to an in-game experience of 99% of players.  The things that I focus on ONLY happen, they ONLY occur in the professional scene, so I think sometimes I don't make sense to a lot of people because of that reason.  That obviously limits the level of audience that I think I can appeal to.
When I first came to Korea and Doa and I started working together, we had to have a conversation about what the casting at OGN would be like.  We do not get promotion from Riot in the English language client, or on the English language website.  The people who find OGN, who find champions, who regularly watch Korean tournaments, they are the hardcore fans.  You have to be involved in enough of the scene to know that this exists, then you have to be hardcore enough if you're in North America to stay up very late at night,  or buy a subscription, or you have to be maybe a college student, because in Europe people have day jobs when it's on it's like 10 in the morning/noon, or buy a subscription.  So we knew that due to these circumstances that the kind of people that were going to be watching champions, were really hardcore League of Legends fans.
We decided to tailor the cast to this audience.  I spent a lot more time in my cast, and I also cast in a way where I cast as if you've seen the rest of the season.  I refer back to other strategies, but I focus on “Hey, you remember this game 3 weeks ago, well this is a development of that strategy that we are seeing now” and I'll talk about that comparison.  In effect, the strategy for casting champions is that it is in it's own little self-contained world and we focus on that.  We cater to a viewer that is hardcore, that is consistently watching champions, that doesn't want the basics of the game to be casted over and over again.
Doa and I joke around when a baron dance is happening, we assume everyone has seen that a hundred times before and it doesn't need an explanation.  We try to entertain the viewers in that time, either by banter, talking about other...  analyzing other games or make comparisons between team comps to ones in other games like I was saying earlier, talk about the player performance and how they've been doing recently, kind of bigger picture or more entertaining stuff during that period.  It does limit the audience, definitely.  But we feel that the audience is already limited by the nature of OGN itself , and so we wanted to create a different kind of experience for the viewer.