 Welcome to the wide world of eSports, the show devoted to all things eSports. I'm your host, Catherine Norr. Today, my guest is Shoutcaster and streamer, Robert Artie Ross. Welcome, Robert. Hey there, how are you doing today? Terrific. All right, so tell us about your, what is your game tag and how did you get it? So I go by Artie's OP online and the reason for that is that when I was growing up, there was a few different people named Robert in my circles and so they kind of had to be a way to distinguish us. So my initials are R, D, R, and so the, it just kind of came about that people started calling me Artie, but I didn't like the spelling of just R, D, dot. So I just, also to kind of get me up on the alphabet list, I spelled it with an A, so A, R, D, Y. And so people just kept calling me Artie and my friends were telling me that Artie's overpowered. So Artie's OP, that's kind of how it came to be. All right, so tell us what you do in eSports. So I am a Shoutcaster and that's my main gig. I wear a lot of hats and so there's a lot of different roles that I fill, but mainly I am a Shoutcaster, which means that I am a commentator and mainly play-by-play. So during an eSports match for either Valorant or Overwatch or Counter-Strike or Rainbow Six or any of the games that I commentate for, I'm the person that just speaks really fast while the game is happening to kind of explain it or talk about things that maybe the viewer might not see or maybe it's something that's off of the observer camera and just kind of to sum up the entire match as it's happening. So you're definitely the voice of eSports. Let's show your reel. UCLA should have had somewhat of an advantage here, but UT Austin is just extremely... You know, they're just unpredictable. You kind of never know exactly when UT Austin is going to be rotating or not. That Omen Smoke is going to come through from UT Austin as kind of a decoy, which actually lets UCLA know, hey, they're going to become an A. They rotate, but that's not what the play is at all. UT Austin knew that that was going to be the reaction. Neon going to be getting blinded there and a CJ Sprinkler's around the corner. He's going to find a kill, but C.R.I.O. both get a refrag here, taking out Kyle and CJ Sprinkler. Catfish is going to start off strong though by taking out Cris. Before you get straight up by MX 1 here, Recker went also picking up a kill on Techneve. You see A.O.P. are coming in from the side here. This is a good rotate coming from UT Austin, but UCLA already has the sight. Let's see what's going to happen with this 1v2 situation. You're kimchi going to push through with a shorty. He takes out Teroi. Nojun with a 3k. Turtles pushing in here, going to be not seeing. Touching her gets a kill. He gets a double kill. He's going to get a 3k with a 3k. He clutches Arizona. He gets their first round. Ravie Thig, it's Eddie O'Peele. He's getting out of the 4v2 to start. Littice coming in from the back here, but Frosty has the ultimate. That ultimate is going to be riding on everything right now. 2a sighting. He takes out P.E. with a great as well. That's what he's going to be. Now he throws the gun down to his teammates. He doesn't need it. He can right click. He's on a 4k right now. It's going to be a 5v1, but this is not looking good for a line-eye. Now he knows. Troiway is hiding inside there. He knows what that sight for UT is, but unfortunately gets revealed here. It's going to be up to Littice. Littice, what are you going to be able to do? He takes out one, but he gets pushed by Totty. San Jose State University takes the win for split one of the radiant cubs. Oh my God. Ravie holds out. Fortunately, he's not going to be able to do it. He brings out the 1-11 HP, but he goes down in the process. Nazi with a 4k, though, going to be able to take out GJ. Let's see the 1v2 situation. Do you want to have one shot here? And he gets blinded as well. Nazi going to be tunneling behind him. And oh my God, they're disrespecting Nazi with the ace. Fuse here. This is going to be baiting out US to come through. And there we go. We see USF bacon going to be ulting, but Koi was ready for it. He's going to take something 3k here. Yurtaker going to take out VNS. Koi going to be going for the ace right now, but Yurtaker dropping down two kills there. Eric Appleton taking a mountain change. No ace for Koi, but Brusky. He clears it up against the clutch. USF takes the round. OK, what game was that and what were we watching? So that was Valorant. It is a game that came out last year during the pandemic. So it was hyped up for a little bit before. And not a lot of people knew that it was coming, that Riot Games is going to be making a first person shooter. Riot Games, of course, known for League of Legends, which is the biggest esport in the world. And so when they came out with the first person shooter, I was very early onto the scene to kind of get into it. And luckily for me, it was kind of a long time before everyone got in. It was a closed beta system, and I got in the first week. And so playing Valorant was just kind of key to learning it and whatnot. And so I positioned myself very early on to be involved with the collegiate Valorant scene. So all of those different games that you saw there were part of different collegiate Valorant tournaments. And some of that was the Red Bull Campus Clutch. Some of that was the MSI Student Radiant Cup and a couple other tournaments thrown in there hosted by a variety of different organizations. But yeah, so the game is Valorant. And that's my main game right now. All right. So how did you get into being a caster or a shout caster? So back in 2016 was when I first started. I got actually really lucky as far as getting an opportunity. So Counter-Strike Global Offensive was the game that I played all throughout high school. I started with Counter-Strike Source back when I was really just a kid and playing Counter-Strike all the way up. I learned about esports just because all the kids at school were like, they were talking about their favorite sport like soccer, football, and I was never really into it. But they were really invested into the competitive aspect of it and like the higher end competitive scene. And I knew that something like that existed, but I wasn't really too aware of it. So once I started looking into esports around seventh or eighth grade, I got really, really involved in tracking my favorite teams and making sure to know like what teams were local to where I lived at the time and who was going where. And around 2016, when I was a senior in high school, I reached out to, actually, I had just reached out on Reddit to an ad that was posted by the Esports Arena in Santa Ana in Orange County and they wanted someone to volunteer for shout casting for a tournament they were having. And I sent in a highlight reel of me just shout casting, kind of trying to emulate my favorite commentators that I had seen over the years. And they liked it and they brought me in and that started off about a year and a half of me just being a freelance shoutcaster for the Esports Arena. So is shout casting talent or practice or both? It's a lot of practice, but that practice rides on a lot of very specific skills. So one of those skills is just observation and just being able to kind of take in a lot of information at once and also apply that information to background knowledge of the game. So one of the, my biggest criticisms when I watched some other shoutcasters is that, they miss something on the screen or they miss something that's happening. And I know that if the commentator is missing some action that happened or a key event that took place in a round, then the audience is gonna miss it as well. And so as someone that's very passionate about the game, I play it competitively myself. I spend hours and hours shoutcasting or watching Esports tournaments and whatnot. And I try to see all of those little details. And so it's a combination of just trying to make sure that I know everything about the game and all the little details and changes of like, okay, well this person used this ability which has a couple of factors that will change the way that then a whole round is gonna be played. And I can talk about that during the round while there's three or four kills happening and those kinds of things are one aspect of it but the practice comes in being able to say that clearly, being able to see that, see what's happening and say it really, really fast. And most importantly, being able to get a lot of information across really, really quickly in a way that the audience can fully comprehend. Sure, it seems so difficult and you have such a nice voice and I would think that that would be important too. Thank you. I mean, that's definitely part of it is just making sure that it's something that the audience wants to receive. They wanna be receptive of it. And if I'm talking all dull like this or if I kind of make it seem uninteresting, then the audience isn't gonna get it. And the other big part of that too is kind of developing a storyline through the round or through the tournament. So you'll watch the same teams over and over again and you'll make sure that these teams have a certain roster of players and how are these players improving? Or is this an underdog story where this is like a team that's been dominating and oh, here's this team that's never won once, how are they doing? They're doing pretty well. And so when you're doing just regular commentary throughout a tournament, you kind of wanna bring in that storyline. And it's all about crafting that narrative mid game too of like, all right, this team won six rounds in a row right in the beginning. And when we get into the next round, oh, what's happening? Are they being overtaken? Are they still continuing to dominate? Is that what we expected to happen going into it? And kind of making sure that you're building the audience's excitement and anticipation as the game develops, as the round develops and not really like just starting off with, all right, here's the first round, 100% hype all the time. Like we're just gonna go as fast as possible from the get go because you don't wanna do that because then that kind of takes away from when you get into that level of hype later when it's actually deserved. So are you a caster for only university or do you do pros too? So I have done pro-am. I've done a few different circuits for amateur league, specifically amateur Rainbow Six. I'm currently trying to get into the professional scene for Valorant. I'm kind of slowly working my way into that. But at the moment, my main gig is mostly in collegiate. And so I've sort of positioned myself as the collegiate Valorant caster. Oh, that's terrific. And so tell us about your streaming. Was streaming a big part of your connection with eSports? So I had always watched streamers as a kid, especially when I was in high school and I'd always wanted to start streaming myself. If that didn't really start until after I moved to Japan. So I moved to Japan in 2018 and I went to a school that was 100% in Japanese and there was no English speakers that I knew. And so when I came home, I was kind of tired of thinking in Japanese all day. It was very stressful. So I wanted to have some sort of outlet in English. And so I started streaming and I started streaming in English for my English viewers that were all over. I ended up growing a community that was very multinational. All sorts of time zones were involved in either Europe or Asia or America or Hawaii. And I made a lot of friends by streaming. And so that kind of reinforced that I liked it a lot. I ended up having to take about a six month break from streaming because I moved into an apartment where that just wasn't possible. But once I moved back to America, I took it up pretty much full time. And I grew from around 400 followers to 1600 followers in less than a year. Oh, that's terrific. So what do you think about eSports and Hawaii? Does it have a future here? Absolutely. So as I'm sure you know, eSports and Hawaii has been developing quite a bit over the last 12 months specifically. But in the last few months, there's been a lot of hubbub about the Overwatch League coming to the University of Hawaii and specifically just bringing the Overwatch League to Hawaii. I was very, very fortunate to be a part of that and to take part in the student internship program at University of Hawaii for this specific event of the Overwatch League coming. But there's been a lot of work before that to somewhat set that up. And also to kind of bring in the conversation of eSports bigger picture in Hawaii. And so I think that eSports definitely has a reason to come here. Hawaii is very uniquely positioned in its geography between Asia and also the West. And there's definitely a reason to kind of have a sort of large scale eSports venue built here and operated here. I think that the only thing that's missing from the eSports scene in Hawaii is the actual infrastructure itself. And at the University of Hawaii, the program director and program assistant are working very, very hard to make that an actual future that will happen. Okay, so let's show the UH video. It is now Thursday. That means it's game day. This is for the students here at UH to actually be able to chill out during the match since we're not actually able to be in the player areas during the game. We're watching a rerun right now. The game is starting pretty soon, a couple of hours. For now, what we're gonna do is we're gonna try to get everything as set up as we can for when the teams are here in the ITC building, in the iLab. The iLab is mostly set up. We just have a little bit more that we gotta do over in the ITC building, but it's coming together. And now it is just a matter of getting the teams in, getting the teams to play. And in all honesty, I think it's gonna keep going this smooth throughout the entire event. And with that, the Dallas Fuel arrived and they received a very warm welcome from all of our staff and students. And the biggest thing was that they just had to get set up and get going because in just a few hours they would have their match. And it was a pretty big day for not only them, but also for all of us. Oh, that was a pretty exciting situation. Tell us about it. So back in around December, Overwatch League approached the university to say, hey, we are interested in using you guys as a venue for the Overwatch League. Due to COVID and the impact that that had on the whole world they were really hard pressed to find a way to bring the worldwide tournament of the Overwatch League kind of together and to make that happen. One of the solutions that they had was actually to bring in all the teams that were in the West to Hawaii in order to link up to servers that were in Japan. Because obviously Hawaii is the closest geographically that you can get as far as the world of e-sports and servers and all that kind of stuff. Guam exists, but it's just as hard to kind of get over there. It was a unique situation with the way that Hawaii had actually been dealing with COVID was actually working out quite favorably, especially to Activision and Blizzard and the Overwatch League. So they started to pursue this back in December. And it was February when I found out about it. And I learned what was going on and the tests that needed to be done. And so I helped out with the tests. Mostly it was actually the, at the university, the ITC building, they have very close access to the cabling, the undersea cabling for the internet that actually is obviously how all of this works out. And so they were able to create a direct connection to the servers in Tokyo. So what ended up happening was the teams that were based in Asia, they were playing from their home stadiums and they connected to servers in Tokyo. And that is where the players that came from the West, they came to Hawaii and they also connected to the same servers in Tokyo. So everyone was on the same latency. So it was perfectly fair for the competition. Now in April was when we really started to finalize all of this stuff and to really realize, okay, Overwatch League is coming. They're gonna be sending us all the equipment that they need. Here's what's gonna happen. Here's the schedule for the tournaments. And I started to put together an announcement video and put together all the announcements for our social media. And it was actually quite tragic because we were ready to post it probably two or three weeks before we were actually able to because of the fact that we were just waiting on like legal stuff. But I had my finger on the trigger, so to speak, for posting on Twitter and announcing it and making the official announcements. But we just couldn't, we had to wait until we got the clearance from legal which did not happen until the Monday that everything was starting. You know, that's probably why I didn't hear about it until probably right before it started as well. And I know that Sky was on my show maybe a month before then and he said something big was coming in and he couldn't tell us. And then when I saw this announcement, I knew what it was. That's so funny. What was it like when Dallas Fuel came on the scene? So it's funny because most of our students in the program were fans of either the San Francisco shock or the Houston outlaws. And we didn't really have too many people that had either known a lot about or cared much about the teams that ended up coming. But the teams actually like developed a really good relationship with our players. And a lot of our players got a soft spot for not only Dallas Fuel but also the Florida mayhem. They were just so nice. And when they came, it was kind of surreal to just be surrounded by these eSports pros. And we kind of set up our students to be like, hey, you know, these are just people like you. They also play games. They just get paid a living to play the game that you do. So it was a lot of fun though. And it was a really good experience for the students to actually interface with those players. Famously, there's been some information that has come out about Dallas Fuel players feeling discrimination because they're Asian. And do you think that coming to Hawaii would be a much more comfortable place for them to be? Absolutely. In fact, that was one of the conversations that we had with the players' community managers and their social media managers. Most of the players are actually Korean and speak Korean and very little English. And so the fact that Hawaii actually has a pretty sizable Korean population was really good for them to come out here and feel comfortable. One of the teams, I think it was Dallas Fuel, they had actually said that instead of practicing when they first got in, they actually wanted to go get haircuts because of the fact that Hawaii has such a very sizable Asian population. And so there are barbers and there are various places and restaurants that are very familiar with Asian hair and Asian culture and everything to do with it. And so the fact that they were coming from places that don't have that, it made them feel a lot of comfort here and it made them really, really happy. And we were just all stoked to see that, especially given the fact that the University of Hawaii actually has one of the oldest Korean Studies programs in America. And so for them to kind of come and also see that kind of stuff on campus, we know that they felt at home, which was really nice. Do you think that this will open the door to a lot more pro games at UH and at other campuses? I'm really hoping that it is. And as weird as this is to say, I don't think that UH is the future, but I do think that this opens the doors for Hawaii to actually have a future of this. We're obviously getting a lot of spotlight from various local organizations that are interested. And we actually had a lot of outreach from local communities that wanted to help out as much as they could. We had high schools with eSports programs reach out to say, hey, how can we get involved? We also had local bakeries and stuff saying, hey, do you guys need catering? Hey, what do you guys need for this? We can make it work. And the community that is here in Hawaii is just absolutely beautiful in that. And I think that what's important is that everyone is seeing that, even if they don't know much about eSports, they know it's important in some way, shape, or form, and they want to help with that. And so now that we're getting recognition as well on a government level, either the city legislators or the state legislators that are actually seeing this and saying, hey, how do we take advantage of this unique position that we have? It's really opening up a bright future for eSports in Hawaii. And specifically it opens the doors to kind of have that conversation of, is it worth it to actually build a proper eSports venue and have proper facilities in the state to support this kind of stuff? I mean, right now we're looking with Valorant and League of Legends, all of their stuff is happening in Iceland right now for the same reason, to kind of get everybody together to have these in-person LAN tournaments. And so they're bringing out the production crew, they're bringing out all the teams. The fact that Iceland has been very up-to-date with both vaccination schedules and vaccine passports and COVID restrictions have been very, very useful in getting them into an advantageous position when it comes to that has led Iceland to kind of be, hey, we are an island nation that can support this kind of stuff because of our unique position between two places. And Hawaii has the ability to do the exact same thing. And so the Overwatch League coming to the university and Riot Games going to Iceland, all of these things together are leading to a lot of ideas in very important people's heads that will kind of lead to, I think, a very bright future. You think investors should pay careful attention to this? I think that if investors are not paying attention to this, then they are missing out. And I think that there are already a few people that are primed to say, hey, if there's an opportunity, we want to invest, we wanna get in on this. And so it will really be kind of first to the scene type thing. I think that this is the next step for Hawaii, especially to kind of get Hawaii more vested on opportunities that will take the economy away from tourism or at the very least, we'll put Hawaii in a position where they can stop relying on tourism so much because as we've seen with COVID, putting all of the eggs into a single basket is not the way to go. And so having something like eSports where not only you have that ability to say, okay, cool. So this is an aspect where we can get a certain percentage of our economy bolstered without relying on tourism, but at the same time, you can also package this up with tourism in the sense that there's no reason that companies can't say, hey, we're gonna have this huge event, we're gonna sell 18,000 tickets to it. Why not also bundle in a hotel in a rental car with that ticket and a plane ticket as well so that people can come from all over the world? So now you're having not only the main event itself, but you're now also utilizing Hawaii's amazing tourism industry to bolster that. Sure, and then how did UH Handel COVID testing and issues related to keeping people safe? Oh, it was actually, it was very, very rigorous and it was a little bit, it was a little bit over the top, but it was for a good reason to make sure that everyone was safe. And that was one of the important things too is that everybody felt safe. So we had to take a mandatory COVID test every 48 hours. That meant for me waking up at 6 a.m. every other day, just to kind of like get on Zoom with the medical technician to take my test to make sure that I was doing it right and then scan the results. And then when I got on campus, I had to fill out a Google form to make sure like, hey, I'm logging it, this is my address in case we do contact tracing, there's all this kind of stuff. And then on top of that, signing into the university's Luma site to make sure, yep, I haven't had any symptoms, all this kind of stuff. And on top of that, everyone was already in the process of getting fully vaccinated. So I got my second shot two days before it all started. But the fact that everyone was taking tests, we knew everyone was negative. We knew that most people were vaccinated. It led to people feeling very, very safe about it. Okay, and I do have a question from a viewer. When you narrate a game, do you have to pander to the audience who doesn't really know the game or do you assume that the viewers know all the technical ins and outs of the game? So that's actually a great question because it depends on kind of what tournament and what organization is hosting. So one of the tournaments that I've actually shot casted for was for high schools. And in that, there's not a lot of pro viewership or enthusiast viewership of gamers that wanna watch high school level games. But what there is is a lot of parents and a lot of students classmates that wanna support their fellow students or maybe their teammates on other sports. And so when shot casting for one of those, the narrative does shift a little bit. You try to actually make sure that people are aware of what's going on. And for me as a play-by-play shotcaster, it doesn't change too, too much as far as like what I'm actually doing with creating hype or building the actual story of the game or talking about the stuff as it happens. But a lot of that falls onto my co-caster, which would be a colorcaster, talking in between the rounds to kind of overview, okay, so this team lost, so they're gonna have these individual problems over the next one. But if they can win this, they can take it back, stuff like that. Okay, and what advice would you give to someone who wants to be a shotcaster? So if you want to be a shotcaster, my best advice that you won't really hear from too many other people is to shot cast in your own unranked games. And so what I mean by that is, taking the time to actually shot cast over your own game while you're playing it, it's very difficult, it's very hard to do. And so by setting yourself up to do something that's harder than the actual shot casting itself, you're learning a lot of skills in that, you can also get real-time feedback from your teammates if they're nice people to kind of tell if you're doing a good job of shot casting or not. But it also is really fun. A lot of my teammates really do enjoy it when I do start shot casting in the middle of the match, but it's great practice to either check my observation skills to make sure I'm catching everything that's going on, but also to talk fast and clearly and to make sure that I'm not using the same words over and over. And just starting and doing something like that to then create content of it to put it on a highlight reel or on Twitter or on TikTok, stuff like that is a great way to get started. So what's your dream job in eSports? My dream job in eSports is eventually to become kind of like the face of an organization or kind of like a really just a bigger part of some organization or company's content. And whether that is through shot casting or through my streamer personality or through any form of just content creation and video production, that's kind of my dream job. And I look up a lot to a hundred thieves, like Nade Shot and also Kaide, like the way that they're able to kind of handle their content and at the same time represent a brand. I think something like that is my dream job, but I do still love shot casting and I am pursuing shot casting as a full-time career. Fantastic. Well, Robert, it's been great to have you on. Thank you to our viewer who sent in the question and thank you to everyone who has joined us today. Make sure to tune in next week. My guest will be eSports thought leader, Danny Martin of Esposier. See you then. Thank you so much.