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| Forums \ StarCraft 2 forum \ It's Gosu interviews MLG's chobopeon |
 
MaliSunSeT
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| (1626 reads, 0 replies, 5 months ago) |
While the majority of eSports interviews tend to focus on professional players, managers, and the like, sometimes it's the people decidedly out of the spotlight who have as much to say as any superstar, and can offer a different perspective to readers who really want to get inside the world of eSports from a ground-up point of view.Today, we at It's Gosu want to make that point as we share some words with Patrick “chobopeon” O'Neill, an MLG staff member who entered the public consciousness with his series of interviews at MLG Providence, punctuated by his time with Kim “SlayerS`BoxeR” Yo Hwan. In this interview, we talk shop with chobopeon as he explains how he climbed the ladder, found his new role at MLG, and what he sees in store for the future of eSports in North America. Some of the questions in the interview include: In the minds of many of our readers, you've got the dream-job of a lifetime-- making your money in the world of eSports, spending time around the most famous pros in the world, and the like. If you could, walk us through how you landed in your gig, and what it takes to make it as a full time eSports professional. Patrick O’Neill: The first key is simply to get to work. Instead of endlessly searching for the perfect new entrepreneurial product, you can just start writing on a forum and look for feedback. I started writing when I dropped out of college to seek a writing career. Eventually I started my own blog which got me invited to be a writer at TL. That led to many more opportunities and earlier this year, especially when MLG came knocking. As for producing actual quality written content, there’s a Pandora’s box of writing advice that I won’t open right now except to give the #1 rule any writer has to follow: read a lot. As we understand it, you're quite the eSports veteran, having started when you were age 11. Your career on the journalistic side of things, though, kicked off in 2010 and was marked by your joining the staff at Team Liquid. Despite your wealth of experience, why do you think it took you as long as it did to land on the journalistic side of things? Patrick O’Neill: Well, for a while I just played. I played BW and CS a lot during high school as well as dabbling in Quake, Unreal and a few other games (hi Warsow). Then I went to school. I didn’t land on the journalistic side of things earlier simply because life was happening. When I realized college and I were not a good fit, I found that writing about gaming could work well. In part, it took the shock of dropping out of school to push me to really work hard. Though you've made your name primarily with Team Liquid and, now, MLG, you also spent time with a number of other outlets, including SK-Gaming, GosuGamers, SC Center, and ESFI World. How would you say working with so many different organizations impacted your skills and background? How big of a factor were those experiences in landing where you are now? Patrick O’Neill: Well, I am familiar with a wide range of people, especially journalists. In the role of journalist, knowing people is always a huge plus. In fact, the biggest plus has probably been the fact that I’ve been able to speak with the people behind TL, GG, SK, ESFI, etc. I’ve been exposed to a lot of varying opinions and styles and I’ve come out smarter for it. Given how many players, tournaments, and storylines exist in the current international Starcraft II scene, the time requirement to have a proper gestalt of everything at once is quite immense... this often leaves little time for playing. Do you think playing the game a few hours a day is necessary to write and talk about the game in an informative way? Patrick O’Neill: You definitely have to play the game to talk about in-game mechanics. It’s all well and good to talk about the latest strategic turn the game has taken but if you haven’t experienced anything like it yourself, it’s hard to come off as anything but faking it. Sadly, my PC’s power supply died and I haven’t been able to play consistently for a while. It’s a very sad story. So, in that way, I have to fake it a bit when I get into talking about the nitty gritty of top level play. I’m working on getting it fixed right now. This year has marked an unprecedented rate of growth of eSports, both in the US and internationally as a whole. Do you think this growth is just the beginning of an upward slope, or, at some point, do you expect to see things level off a bit and resume a more cautious level of growth? Patrick O’Neill: I think we’ll keep rising but it’s difficult to get more specific than that. The major leagues have great opportunities but also, as any student of eSports history will know, there are numerous ways to fail and negatively affect the entire industry. Bubbles burst. Economies tank. Instead of shooting for that sexy prize money number or that sexy TV contract, we have to focus on the sustainability of the business. If we can do that with sexy prize money and TV contracts, great, but we can’t be tempted by shallow and shortsighted goals. That sort of thinking, even from a single organization, can lead to major problems for everyone in the industry. The full interview can be found by clicking the following link: http://www.itsgosu.com/game/sc2/articles/inside-the-trenches-i t-s-gosu-interviews-mlg-s-patrick-chobopeon-o-neill_376 |
| www.ItsGosu.com | #ItsGosu@Quakenet |
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It's Gosu interviews MLG's chobopeon \
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