12 GENIUS INTERVIEW Sabina Hemmi
IT TAKES THICK SKIN, IT TAKES A LOT OF TOLERANCE AND PATIENCE TO BE AWOMAN IN ESPORTS
would be really bad at playing against that character in the same way. You wonder why would they be bad at that? I have a theory that they are so good with the character, that they know how they would counter everything. They’re so focused on it, that they almost become a little scared of the capabilities of the character. For some pro players, that’s a hard thing. It’s their signature character and they are actually awful at playing against it, when they should be good because they know that character very well. FEED: How does data collection in esports compare with that in traditional sports? SABINA HEMMI: I think the digestion of the data is somewhat similar. But the data is less accessible in traditional sports. They have developed great data collection mechanisms, but a lot of them have taken years and years to develop these heavy data visualisations. They do things like measure a player’s body movements and position and things like that in an automated way, and that just takes a ton of technology to do. Not to say that esports doesn’t take tech, but the initial accessibility is a lot easier for us. We can see every single input that a player
has in a match. We gather billions of data points for a single Dota 2 (Defence of the Ancients) match. Then there’s a million Dota 2 matches in a day. There have been billions of Dota 2 matches over the lifetime of the game. The initial data gathering of it is a lot easier. But a lot of the adoption, interpretation and digestion of the data, I don’t know if that’s different from traditional sports. What’s unique about esports is that, because the data collection is so much more accessible, normal players can see it. If you played a pick-up game of basketball with your friends in the park, you wouldn’t expect a month later to be able to see all the data, the scoring details, from that game. But in esports, we can do that. On the surface we’re looking for game insights and reporting things, but in the long-term I hope that we’re preserving history and, on an individual level, we’re preserving your memories. I have this great memory of the international WoW tournament one year, and a pro game went really long, over an hour and a half. After a while, everyone was asking, ‘how long is this game going to go on?’ I was sitting in the stadium, watching people go to my website, asking questions like ‘what is the longest pro game ever?’ But we also have a personal records page for every player so everybody was asking,
‘how does this compare to my personal longest match ever? Is it longer than this?’ I could see them discussing the match with their friends: ‘do you remember how we used this strategy, and it went on forever?’ People can see the place where all those hours put into a game can get distilled down. They can revisit the individual memories that they had when playing. Everybody has fond memories, and being able to revisit them in an easily digestible way is a gift that you don’t always get in traditional sports. FEED: Do you work with any other tech vendors or have you developed all your data technology internally? SABINA HEMMI: We will look at other vendors, but I think because we’re a data company, we’re a little wary of vendors that don’t reveal how they get their information. There are a lot of aspects to esports data, and it’s very much still the Wild, Wild West. There’s not necessarily a warranty on how good data is, how well it was cleaned. A lot of the companies that are currently trying to sell or market themselves for the esports data are really focused on getting the biggest number they can, because that helps get them business. They’re incentivised to inflate numbers, rather than to use authentic numbers. For now, it makes sense for us to use internal tools and create things ourselves. In the long-term, I hope that space gets cleaned up. I’m not opposed to considering other options or maybe we’ll have our own option where we can share some of that data with the industry.
DATA OF THE ANCIENTS Hemmi believes data is more than just facts. To her, data is history and a way to connect to the past
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