3/2/2024 0 Comments Esports commentatorI often didn’t even trust my loved ones, yet relied on their reassurance to keep myself going. I didn’t trust Reddit or social media when public sentiment toward me turned positive. Unfortunately, the higher I climbed, the less I felt I belonged or deserved my success. Later that year I cast my first BlizzCon early the year after I cast my first international event, and the week after I returned from Korea, I commentated Heroes of the Dorm on an ESPN channel. By the time I got to my first-ever live event a month later, I was reborn as Gillyweed, the caster who prepares more than anyone in the scene. I hired a coach, started learning techniques to memorize the vast amount of talents in the game, and completely revamped how I prepped for events. Despite my tumultuous opening, I was driven to make it to both. The next events in the Heroes ecosystem would be live events – the Americas Championship in Las Vegas, and BlizzCon after. That day ended up being one of my best days commentating up to that point.Īfter the show, I was taken aside by a mentor at Blizzard who told me that if I wanted to continue casting, I needed to improve. I honestly believed it would be my last day officially casting, because I didn’t feel like I belonged there with the rest, but I wanted to prove what I could do. I returned to the studio the next day hungry to prove everyone wrong. Thankfully, our observer at the time pulled me aside to help build me back up, but I again retired to my room in a panic and looked up flights to go home. On the ride back, another talent told me that he oversaw a private chat between Blizzard employees talking about how badly I did. During one of my later casts on the second day, I mistook one Nazeebo heroic icon for another and was corrected on broadcast by my co-caster. One month later, I returned to Burbank for another broadcast weekend. The content group I was a part of even made indeed mugs with a caricature of my face. Instead, I went on broadcast the next day and made sure the first word out of my mouth was a hearty “indeed!” After I got home, we made one of my stream emotes indeed. I wanted to go home and forget about casting. I learned about crutch words the hard way - by saying a word I normally never used about 10,000 times in a cast purely because someone else said it and my brain, after sitting in a pool of nervous energy, subconsciously decided that “indeed” was, indeed, the greatest word to ever exist.Īfter taking in the feedback from our talent coach and other casters, I held back tears until I got back to my hotel room that evening. Many people who knew me as a commentator at that time will remember this first official cast of mine as the birth of the “gillyIndeed” meme. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but I loved the game, and my goal at the time was to cast for Blizzard. By the time I was hired in July to cast an official, in-studio event, I’d been casting online weeklies for a few months. I started commentating in 2015, back when Blizzard Entertainment planted the seed of Heroes of the Storm esports as anything more than grassroots with their Road to BlizzCon event series. Here’s how I managed through it and what I’ve learned from my experiences in commentary. But here’s the secret I’ve learned: everybody does. My name is Jaycie, aka Gillyweed, and I deal with impostor syndrome. In the following opinion piece, Wisdom Gaming Vice President of Media and veteran esports commentator Jaycie “Gillyweed” Gluck talks about the challenges of dealing with imposter syndrome while working in the esports industry and the lessons she has learned through her experience.
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