«It’s insane how similar we are with Jenkins!» Interview with Nattea
Interview by Roman Galeev.
At BetBoom Dacha Jenkins and Nattea worked as on-stage reporters. Did you know that Nattea has one of the most surprising paths in esports? I talked with Nattea about electrical engineering, working at Dota, LoL, FIFA and even Fortnite events, friendship with Jenkins and more.
– The description in your social network says that you are not only an esports host, but an electrical engineer too. Did you really work as an engineer?
– Yeah! I did 4.5 years of study and graduated with a Bachelor with honors in electrical engineering. Then I worked for about 3-3.5 years as an electrical engineer and my last year or even 18 months was juggling both doing talent work like esports posting and also working full-time doing 40 hours a week as an engineer.
– Was it interesting for you?
– I did consultancy, so sometimes you’re doing like data sheets or maybe like really small projects and they can get quite tedious and repetitive with the tasks, but towards the end of when I was working, I was really lucky that I was working on a mine site. I was doing fly-in, fly-out work and that was really interesting because you got to be at the mine site yourself. We were working on this crane and yeah, it was a lot of fun to be able to actually be there and test all this electrical theory and all this electrical work we’ve done.
– Do you agree with me that it’s actually a miracle that one day we just pressed “play Dota 2” and now we’re sitting in a five-star hotel in Dubai, chilling with tier-1 players? Do you think your life is kind of an ideal life?
– I would say I’m pretty close to it. The only non-ideal thing about working in this scene or doing freelancing is you’ve never guaranteed a job, you’re never guaranteed to work an event so obviously that’s a bit of a struggle but every other aspect definitely isn’t. There’s a lot of people in my life that I’ve met there. I went to university, I studied engineering, I have no business being friends with someone like Jenkins. I guess he studied math so maybe similar but he is from Canada. It makes no sense why our paths would ever cross like why we would ever be friends. Same about Quinn: he is from the middle of nowhere, (okay, not the middle of nowhere, from the US) and I’m from Australia. I’m never going to the US, he’s never going to Australia, so it’s like we would never be friends, like our lives would never have entwined. So it’s just not only the people you get to meet, but the locations you get to go. Everything is just definitely at its peak I think for me in my life.
– Is it your first time working as an on-stage reporter?
– I’ve done interviewing before and I’ve done stage hosting once before as well, but it was a much smaller event. It was a Fortnite event. So, yeah, it was a game I wasn’t as familiar with, I know Dota a lot more than I know other video games. So, I didn’t know Fortnite as much and the audience is a lot younger too. So, it’s a lot different.
– What do you prefer more? I mean, being a host or being a reporter?
– Being a host, I think. There’s just something really enjoyable about having more time to facilitate conversation. I just love facilitating conversation, that is why interviewing is also something I enjoy. I get to ask these questions, I get to probe a little more, but you’re on a bit of a timer. We only really get about five minutes. Sometimes I push it, you know, they tell me like, “keep it to two to three questions” and I’m there and I’m like “okay, question number six”, you know? (laugh)
Sometimes I just want to keep talking to the players so you get the benefit of talking to the players. When you work on a panel you don’t really get that as much so that is the benefit of interviewing but your time is just so much bigger as a host! The topics you get to talk about are a lot broader and when I’m interviewing it’s like I don’t really get to put an input in. But when you’re hosting one of your panel members says something and then you get to have an input based off of that or sometimes you can say a statement to provoke a conversation between two other people. So I think hosting is something I enjoy a lot more, yeah.
– What do you prefer to talk about?
– I enjoy drafting. Drafting is probably something I’m looking towards learning more about. Just because when you play pub games, you kind of just focus on your role, like what counters it, what’s good for you. You don’t have to always think about the big picture until a certain point. That’s just something you will never properly learn unless you’re looking to go professional. So it’s just like now that I have friends that do this for a living, that’s a part of their job so I have the access to be able to learn it a lot quicker.
Also I like talking about which plays are really cool, like my post game. I love just being like: “this, this play right here is what I deem as the turning point”. Someone else might be like “No, it was this fight in a different time”.
– Some Redditor claimed that it was too bad and too rude to do exit interviews. I personally disagree with that, and what about you?
– I think it’s easy as a viewer to pick and choose what you like. I sort of equate it to a movie, right? There’s a couple of storylines, like, you have your main storyline and for us, that’s the tournament. And there’s normally like subplots of like, maybe a romance or maybe a different side of friendships. And that’s what interviews or, you know, winners or exit interviews, content pieces. That’s what they are. They’re just like small things added in to keep you at all times. And so sometimes you might, when you watch a movie, you’re like: “Oh, I really didn’t like this character”, or “I really didn’t like this subplot”. It’s really easy for you to just ignore it or not enjoy it. And I see interviews as that. So, you personally might not like it, and that’s fine, but someone else could really enjoy it.
That might be one of their favorite post-game things is when a team loses, they want to know more about their emotions or why they think. Because when a team exits, they’re so much more open about their viewpoint of what happened and maybe some weaknesses. But if they’re still in the tournament, why would they share their weaknesses in an interview? That doesn’t make sense. So I think it is a mistake for people to overlook the value of exit interviews.
– What do you like the most here at Dacha?
– The people. It’s such an easy answer, but I really am an extrovert, so for me, having people that you love spending time with, having people that match your humor, that match your same energy, it’s probably more of a key thing for me than most other gamers or most other people at this event. So having such a wide variety or having people that you can really connect and click with I think have been my favorite. And it’s the same thing as I said before like why I think my life is very close to its peak is these people I would never meet in any other normal circumstance but here I am and I’m just like “I vibe with you, I vibe with you, like, we get along so well, I’m glad that we have this in common”. It’s, yeah, for me the people, and also the access to do whatever you want. Like the hotel we’re at, we can go and play tennis, there’s hookah around as well, which I freaking love, and everyone’s willing to, even if they don’t want to smoke hookah, just sit around and talk. Everyone’s very friendly and open.
– Do you play table tennis?
– Yeah, I’m not good. But I can play it!
– You were a host, you tried being a stage reporter. Is there any position that you would like to learn, but you didn’t have the chance to?
– Not really. I think I know my skill set and I know my limitations. I’m not a very good caster, I can stumble over my words sometimes and as a host that’s very forgiving: you can just continue on at your cadence or you can maybe backtrack, you can rephrase a question. I obviously could never be an analyst, I just don’t have that game knowledge yet and as a play-by-play… If a team fight is happening, you can’t just backtrack and be like: “Oh wait, let’s come back to the start of the fight and let me restart this”, so... Yeah, I’m not sure. But if we talk about behind the scenes, I think it would be awesome to be a set designer, or when you do the concept of tournaments, there are two things I would really love, just to... visualize a concept for a tournament and then see it come to life. Same with set design. I think those two things I would really want to try. But later, maybe.
– Do you have any concepts in your mind about tournaments?
– I just think about, like, themes.
– Something like Animajor, right?
– Animajor was so good, but I was talking to Jenkins and Karina [Azure Ray’ handler] earlier, and we were like: “We should do like a summer camp one, like summer camp vibes”. And it’s like the content writes itself. Like, imagine they do like canoe racing or kayak racing, you know, or like wood chopping or, you know, like just random things.
– At BetBoom Dacha in Yerevan I complained that there’s no “dacha” things, like digging potatoes etc.
– We could do that at summer camp! I think that one would be a lot of fun. And you could have so much fun with the set design. You could almost make an analyst panel around the campfire or something like that. And the casters, I don’t know, you could put them on the jetty, so they go fishing. There’s just so much that you could do.
– You sold it to me!
– Yeah? I’m glad I sold.
– I read that you played FIFA. How did FIFA come into your life?
– Growing up, I actually played a little bit of soccer (or football, depending on where you come from).. Then my life just turned a lot more where I didn’t really find interest in watching sports, it was very consumed by either reading or uni or video games.
And then an opportunity came to me, I just always knew people that liked playing FIFA and stuff because they loved watching football. And then an opportunity came to me to work in ELEAGUE in Australia, it’s like our FIFA league in Australia, and the players were so much fun to hang out with. The event gave me very similar vibes to this, but maybe with a lower budget. So it was a lot of fun. And from there, I was playing it a little bit more, I was watching it a lot more, and I was like: “Why did I ever stop enjoying these things?” So FIFA, I think, is something that if you give it a chance, a lot of people would actually enjoy watching.
– Do you have a favorite team in football?
– I don’t have a favorite team. I just watch for the sake of watching football. I only really watch the A-League and when the World Cup is on. That’s it. So the Australian League and the World Cup. Like I said, I’m not a massive football person right now, but I’m more likely to watch FIFA when... I’m a bit like a nationalist when it comes to FIFA. So I’ll watch when we have Australian FIFA players playing. I want to support them, you know. I want them to do well. I want to see them. And they’re also quite young too. They’re about like between 18 and 20, 21. So they’re quite babies, in my eyes at least.
– Moreover, you work as a talent in League of Legends Circuit Oceania. I’m not a big fan of League, I played a little, and I saw some streams, tournaments, and as for me, talents in League are more, not professional, but more, you know, calm and collected. Do you agree?
– I think the resources available for a lot of League broadcasts are really high. What I know from the back end is a lot of talent will do meetings with production, because it’s like a weekly thing, right? Whereas Dota doesn’t have that anymore. We’re very much just like, oh, here’s a two-week tournament. But they’ll do like three broadcasts a week. And so they’ll meet on one of their off days, and they’ll have a meeting with production. And they’ll talk about storylines, what graphics they want, maybe what matchups are the key matchups for the week, all this sort of stuff. So there’s a lot of input behind the scenes. When it comes to those show days I think it’s easy to be calm and collected and maybe not rely very heavily on content or gameplay because they’ve had this preparation together.
I think you see it a lot in Sheever’s panels as well because she does that quite a lot with her panelists and they talk about what they want in the future and so they give me very similar vibes to League of Legends vibes too.
– And now you play D&D.
– Yes, I do. Very, very new to D&D. Very, very new.
– Do you like it?
– I do. I thought the role-playing was going to be really difficult for me to get into. Like, I have no background in acting. I’ve never done D&D before, so I don’t really know the lore of D&D. And I thought role-playing would be really hard for me to get into. And so I leaned very heavily on a character that was similar to me, because then I’m like, I don’t have to role-play. But now I’m like, I almost wish I had gone for a character that was slightly different. So I had to be more immersed in it. Like it was then a clear change between this is me out of character and this is me in character. But right now it’s very blurred.
I love all aspects of D&D. I really enjoy combat. I enjoy this storyline. I enjoy a lot of the surprise aspects of what could happen. Am I falling into a trap? Am I pushing something too hard? Am I going to die in this? The emotions feel very real. But I always wish that I went more into role-playing than what I currently have.
– Have you ever tried a CRPG like Baldur’s Gate?
– Never played any of them.
– What about other single player games?
– Yeah, I really like story games. I play Ori and the Blind Forest. I’ve played pretty much every Zelda game except for the newest one, Tears of the Kingdom. I haven’t played that. The Spider-Man games are good. I play some Digimon games. I play Pokemon games. What else have I played recently? I’ve really gotten into co-op games because I love problem-solving and I love puzzles. So like Escape Room Simulator, there’s one called Operation Tango, there’s Bread and Fred, It Takes Two, pretty much all of those co-op ones. Mmm, love. They’re so good. They’re my favorite.
– How did you get through the scariest scene of It Takes Two? When you had to...
– Oh! I think I did pretty good (laugh).
– For sure?!
– I’m trying to think if I really struggled with anything. I mean the person I was playing with was really good as well. So I think that helped me. The story is beautiful, the gameplay is really fun and enjoyable.
– You were in Dubai Mall today by the way. It’s said that sometimes it’s overcrowded. What was your experience with Dubai Mall?
– So I’ve gone twice and we went like two hours before closing (it closes at like 11 p.m. or 12 a.m.). We went two hours before it and the crowd was, you know, fine. It just felt like a normal shopping mall but when I went for the first time with Jenkins in the middle of the day it was really busy! There’s one section of Dubai Mall and it is so busy that we went to the Sephora and couldn’t even move! It took us so long to get out of the Sephora. But if you go like two or three hours before it closes obviously you have limited time but the crowd’s fine.
– if it’s not a secret, are you looking for something special or just walking around?
– It was mostly to walk around, because the Burj Khalifa is also just outside it. So we’re like: “Oh, we’ll see the second biggest mall in the world and then we can see the tallest building”. But I was looking at a specific pair of Christian Louboutin. It’s a shoe with a red sole at the bottom. And I was looking to try them on and all that sort of stuff. But it was also just a general walk around to see this mall because it is massive.
– Who’s your Valentine for today?
– It’s Jenkins! He was very sweet. He bought me six roses and a bucket of Maltesers.
– So nice! It seems like you have a perfect match in terms of working together.
– Yeah! We’ve worked together once before – at Arlington. I know technically we were both on the talent announcement for TI12 and we did do the Late show together. But it wasn’t the same, it wasn’t really paneling, I was like a guest and he didn’t come on panel. So the only time we really worked together in what our main roles are was Arlington and we just weren’t like super close friends then. I mean it was the first event we’d worked with. But he had a lot of fun there. And now that we’re doing the same role, you know, we’re spending pretty much every day together. It’s insane how similar we are. And we tell each other, we come in every day, we compliment each other. And then we go: “How are we not friends before this?” You know, it just blows my mind that to have that many similarities, to enjoy someone’s company so much and just be like: “Bro, why did we not see the potential of this friendship earlier?”
– You both have such a similar sense of humor. I mean, your jokes are certainly not for everyone.
– I think the way we portray ourselves on the internet is very different, and so when you say that we have the same sense of humor, I think that would shock some people, that Jenkins and I would laugh at the same thing, or that we would make the same jokes, but we are actually VERY similar.
– What is the best thing in Jenkins?
– The best thing in Jenkins is... Hmm, there’s almost too many. Outside of humor, because I’m very biased towards that as we have the same sense of humor… His ambition. How driven he is for his work, what he wants to do. And also… I don’t know the word for it. I don’t want to say morals like that’s not the right word… For instance, someone gave me feedback and Jenkins stood up for me and said: “Oh, this isn’t her fault there was actually the reason as to why this was caused”. When you look at that in a vacuum he had no reason to say that. He doesn’t gain anything from defending me. I don’t know if there’s a word for it but his ability to stand by a friend… I think that’s his best quality – when he’s your friend he will stand by you and he will very much like to just defend you.
– And what about the worst thing about him?
– The worst thing about Jenkins is he laughs at anything! When you make a joke and you get positive reinforcement for a joke you actually think it’s a funny joke. But then he starts laughing at everything and you’re like: “There’s no way there’s all these funny things there’s just no possible way!” So maybe that and the second one is that he doesn’t believe in… He’s very bad at receiving compliments. I know most people struggle with that but he almost doesn’t believe you and I’m not saying a compliment for the sake of it. When I say “You look good” or “That was really funny” or “I really admire this part about you” I’m not saying it for the sake of saying it – I’m being genuine! So I wish he saw more of what other people see in him.
– Do you have any favorite books and movies?
– Books… I just finished reading the Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson. It’s a bit of... I think most people, player-wise, in the Dota scene might have read it by now, because it just starts a chain reaction. One person recommends it, they love it, then they pass it on. So I know quite a few people that have read it, but I would say that’s probably my favorite book series at the moment. But if we’re talking, like, ever, I don’t know… There’s so much nostalgia linked with the book series called The Vampire Academy. I don’t know if it’s actually that good, but I have a lot of nostalgia for it. So in my mind, when I was a teenager, I loved that book series.
– Do you consider yourself a star?
– A star? Not really. I think it’s on the micro celebrity level where it’s like maybe at a specific event or in a specific area I am but when I think of star I think of like ABC-tier celebrities and I don’t even think I hit like M tier, you know, like I’m all the way down that alphabet. So, yes and no. Only yes if I’m at an event like this, if there was a crowd or something, I’d be like, yeah, that’s where you kind of feel like a star. But overall in the grand scheme of life and people, definitely not.
– Do you have a dream?
– Do I have a dream? As in like an aspiration for my career or how so?
– Whatever that comes to mind.
– I think I have a lot of ambition for different things I want to try in my life. I think you really should try to do a lot of different things. And I don’t just mean like, oh, travel the world or do different activities. Like, yes, I do mean that too. Like, that would be really fun. But I know that’s not possible for everyone. But just sort of like… In the industry that I am in, it’s freelance, right? So there’s probably only a finite amount of time that I’m going to be working as an esports host, whether that’s two years, three years, four years, five years, whatever. But I see in however many years to then make the cut and be like, OK, let’s try a new career path or something different.
And so I have a lot of different aspirations. It would be really cool to try out acting for a little bit. I really want to go back to uni, and I want to study marine biology. I would love to do research and be a marine biologist. A part of me is also like: “oh, maybe I would go back to engineering, but I wouldn’t work in consultancy”. Maybe I’d work in design. Yeah, I don’t know. I think there’s a lot of different things in that regard. When you say dream in a broad way, I think I have a lot, yeah.