11 GENIUS INTERVIEW Sabina Hemmi
FEED: How did you start your company, Elo Entertainment? SABINA HEMMI: I’ve always played video games and been involved in esports, as a participant and player; ever since 2000, when I attended my first esports event and caught the online gaming bug. For five years I led a top World of Warcraft (WoW) guild, Blood Legion. I studies computer science at the University of Texas, Dallas, but I dropped out and I was working in tech and finance for a while. Then I had a weird life situation and I quit my job and moved. I was young enough that I didn’t have an established career to worry about. I needed a job and I had all of this expertise in esports, so eight years ago I ended up starting a company with two other people, Jason Coene and Trevor Schmidt. The idea behind Elo Entertainment was really simple. We noticed League of Legends was just coming out at that time and we knew it was going to be a huge game. It was going to be an esport. FEED: What was it that tipped you off to how big LoL was going to be? SABINA HEMMI: In alpha and beta, people played and liked it. Riot, at that time, was an unknown publisher and was running it like a tech company, which was hot for that time. We noticed that when players started playing it, they seemed to really enjoy it. The growth wasn’t as instantaneous as, say, Fortnite, but League was intentionally trying to appeal to core gamers, which I think is, to some extent, necessary for creating an authentic esport. We knew the data existed and nobody was doing anything with that data. We said, ‘Let’s just do something on the web this week in beta’. We also knew from our World of Warcraft guild that really good players have data tools. In World of Warcraft, we would write our own simulations, we would write our own odds, and for that time period that was not very common. Really motivated, competitive gamers do that. We thought, could we take some of the tools that we would make for ourselves and apply it to League of Legends, and then take that data and democratise it? You’re looking to ideally make players feel empowered. You want to show that certain gaming strategies are more successful or less successful than others. Also at that time, you couldn’t get that kind of good game data anywhere. So there was a little bit of – I don’t know how to describe it – almost a journalism aspect
EVEN FROM A REALLY YOUNG AGE, IF YOU SHOWED ME A NUMBER, MY FIRST QUESTIONWAS, ‘WHERE DID THAT NUMBER COME FROM?’
about it. We were exposing this new data. Really good players would have instincts: ‘This feels really good. This feels really bad’; but they couldn’t validate that with data. FEED: Did you ever feel at a loss with what to do with all that data? SABINA HEMMI: It’s funny. At the time, I didn’t think of myself as a data person. Now, obviously, I do. I’ve established myself working with data for a while. When I see data, I just see opportunity. It was never like we saw new data and we thought, ‘I don’t know what this is good for’. It was always more that we saw data and had ideas. Back then people were asking, what is actually good? How do you measure how somebody is good? How do you quantify that? Is it better for you to play a character that you’re personally really good on, or is it better for you to play a character that is the most strong right now? I think as I’ve gotten more intertwined with the data, and have made it a career, I have realised that I’ve always been a data person. I just didn’t think of myself as one.
number come from?’ Which to me is the mark of a data person. I also think in a data visualisation way. Numbers and data are just a common way that I use to express things. I would rather express how I feel emotionally by showing you a graph of what an emotional journey looks like. That’s an easier way for me to describe or present an idea, than trying to use words or trying to show you a single number. I think data visualisation is an extremely powerful communication tool. FEED: How much does data match up with instinct when you look at how gamers actually play? How good a judge are people of their own skills? SABINA HEMMI: That’s a hard question, because now everybody instantaneously has the data. It’s hard to measure the difference because people are perpetually validating their instincts and validating their ideas naturally as they look at data, especially if they are analytical, smart game players. When we were first uncovering pro player data, one of the things I saw that I found really interesting was that there would be a new player on the scene and that player would be really famous for playing a specific character. But what we would see when looking at the data, is that they
FEED: When did you “wake up to data”?
SABINA HEMMI: Even from a really young age, if you showed me a number, my first question was, ‘where did that
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