Drei Ratschläge an Dein 14jähriges Ich!

I would say choose your own path, that’s something I always think is very important just believe in yourself whatever you do you can make it and don’t be afraid to try new things. If I would tell myself as a gamer I would say you can relax a bit. Because I was quit angry as a player in the begging where I feel that I put too much effort in the beginning, like you grow, when you get older you grow a player as well because you start to not put so much focus on trash talking or whatever, because it’s not important and you don’t move forward. Like if you’re in a team you always need to know that you are a team it doesn’t help if you point out mistakes that other people make if you can’t move forward by pointing them out and I feel that when I was younger, I found a lot of importance in telling people what they did wrong but I didn’t put so much effort in to telling them what they can do better. Something like that, it’s a very messy thing to say to your 14 year old self but I guess I will be good.

Was steht auf Deiner Visitenkarte?

I would say my name which is Jonathan Berg and then my player name which is Loda, L-O-D-A. I suppose it would say professional player and that I’m working for Good Game Agency it’s the company that owns Alliance.

Was ist das coolste an Deinem Job?

I think the coolest thing is that I get to meet a lot of amazing people, get to meet the fans that are just, will always, most of them will keep supporting you no matter what but on more professional level I would say the cool thing is that I meet so many people in high positions, people that I wouldn’t in normal day to day life. Like for example we went to China I would meet … I sat down and had coffee with … then it was a woman like the CEO of Dell in china and that was just through gaming. And I mean I wouldn’t never be able to get a meeting with her if I had a real job but now I can sit down and talk to her and she would listen to my opinions about things and what I think is people are interested in when it comes to E Sport. And yeah, it’s very amazing to meet all these higher people and they really respect your opinion and feel that you have an expertise a lot of people actually don’t have. It’s very hard to find and education where you learn about E Sports and try to understand this thing.

Welche Einschränkungen bringt Dein Job mit sich?

Limitation is that it affects my personal life, I have a girlfriend and we are in a very good relationship and everything but that’s also because she’s working with the same thing I am doing. If she wasn’t I think it could have been impossible for me to have a normal relationship almost it takes a lot of time, overall my personal relationships. I live in the same city as my parents and most of my siblings, so I’m quite lucky there I can squeeze some stuff in but you don’t really have a lot of time, you spend most of your time playing you just have to practice pretty much 24/7. It’s hard work and it really stresses you out after a while and I don’t think the fans especially realize that a lot of the pro players are like get burned out at some point just because you feel so much pressure from all the fans, the world, your organization and mostly yourself to perform. And then you just keep working so hard In a very stressful environment and sometimes if you do bad it can be tough to get back from, I would say that’s the worst part of it.

Worum geht es in Deinem Job?

Dota 2 is an easy game where you play five on five, it’s something like a really time chess with five players on each team something like that it’s very simple way. We just travel around and compete in Dota 2. There is a lot of tournaments around the world and is biggest in China, Eastern Europe, in Europe I would say it’s quite big in America as well but not as but not as big. Alliance is the organization that backs up my team that pays for our salaries that provides … pays for flights accommodation, all the stuff that organizations that host tournaments don’t take care of pretty much. On top of that there’s the GoodGame agency which is the company that owns Alliance. My position in Alliance is not only a player because I was there from the start. So I’m something of a, I guess shareholder, where I have a lot more impact than other players. So I’m not really sure what official job description would be because it’s a very special situation but that’s what I do in Alliance. Every day if I don’t practice it can be something to do with what T-shirts we’re going to release, all types of merchandise whether it’s physical merchandise or if it’s physical merchandise or it’s in-game merchandise stuff like that. I get to do a bit of everything actually it’s a lot of fun. My typical week is usually, I can decide quite a lot myself how to start a day and everything. And usually we do practice something between 3:00 and 10:00 in the evening nights, so that’s about seven hours when we practice as a team including there we usually have official games as well. So for example some days it might be two official games and then we do two games of practice or something like that. On top of that usually once every week I have some kind of meeting or something that I have to go to, maybe it’s an interview with newspaper, or it’s just a blog but usually I have to go somewhere for a physical meeting. But other than that that’s mostly how the normal week looks for me. At the same time if you go to another week I could be travelling the whole week and working a lot more, intense where I meet sponsors I play in a tournament and I have to do some PR stuff around that as well. It varies a lot when it comes to the work load for sure.

Wie sieht Dein Werdegang aus?

I grew up in Sweden 26 ago, lived in Gothenburg pretty much my whole life, lived in a highly educated family where they focused a lot on education and the importance of having a career and stuff like that. Started to get really interested in games when I was around 13, a bit earlier than that but it started to get more serious from 13, I was more and more interested around 16, I started to platy competitively. So I still focused on school but I played a bit online and stuff and it was when I went to high school a year later than that that I started to take it even more serious. But it wasn’t until maybe when I was 23 three years ago that I could go back In to E Sports and treat it as a real profession where I could get a salaries that is just as good as any other job. That’s my back ground I guess.

Ginge es auch ohne Deinem Werdegang?

Yeah, I think you could do what I do without having my background, I think that it doesn’t really matter how you get in to gaming to become good at it. I think if you are a captain for something you need to have some leadership abilities or maybe it’s good if you have done something, even boy scouts, when or whatever like doing normal sports. I think that it’s very important that you read a lot, so you know strategy and like these basic things. So it’s just a huge combination, we’ve had this discussion with other pro players and it’s seem like quite a few of the percentage are quite highly educated or they know a lot, they are quite smart actually. That’s just something we don’t really know if it’s actually like that or is it just that, it’s people that have a lot time to spend on other stuff than working and then you learn a lot about a lot of stuff and then you play games or whatever, it is hard to say why. But I think it’s very important you can take stress. If you can take stress you can play a game online, but what I do is you go to tournaments and play online and it shows very quickly players that can’t handle the stress of being in a … having a live audience and stuff like that. That is very important but most of all when it comes to gaming you need to be dedicated you need to play and work hard. You need to practice, a lot of people want to be pro gamers and they like playing games, but yet they don’t understand we’ve spent all of us as pro-gamers we’ve 10,000 hours doing this and in many cases more, so it’s a lot of time. When parents come up to and ask like, could you tell my son that it’s a good idea to try to be a pro gamer? I don’t know you need to be extremely dedicated and you won’t get much from it until you are at the top pretty much that’s how it is.