Indiana "Froskurinn" Black is a League of Legends Color Caster for the English Cast of the LPL. Her past works include hosting China Talk, a weekly talkshow that discusses ongoing events that impact the Chinese scene, coaching Team Roar, and being an analyst for Team Dignitas EU.

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Hi everyone. I'm DIG Nightsend. I'm here with the English LPL Caster Froskurinn who's going to talk to us about her last year working for the LPL and her history in Esports! Hi Froskurinn!

Froskurinn: How are you this morning? It's really early for me.

It's actually pretty early for me. So tell us about how you got into Esports or video games in general. What led you into the career that eventually took you into working for the English LPL broadcast?

Froskurinn: I know we talked about this before the broadcast but it's funny cause I've been asked this question a lot but I've never really seen it get out there. And I don't know how relevant the story really is but.. I was always a big video game player growing up like most of us were. The game that I first played competitively was Mario Kart and people always laugh! It's funny because I tell people that I was like really into competitive Mario Kart and they're like "What? Competitive Mario Kart? That doesn't exist! I bet I could beat you!" Then all of my friends in college refused to play with me. I've always been obsessive in games to that extent. Mario Kart was really the big first one. I travelled to a lot of tournaments to participate in that. It's always weird because I watch the Smash Brothers documentaries and I'm like "I remember that tournament! I didn't participate in Smash Brothers but there was a Mario Kart thing that was happening really close to it!" So you kind of feel good about it but then you remember you just played Mario Kart and no one really cares.

But I got specifically into League of Legends around college time when one of my friends had keys into the beta and I had never played a computer game ever in my life. I remember using the control scheme for the first time and was like "Why can't I move with the arrow keys? What is this BS? Where's my ASDW?" But from then on, I was just kind of hooked. I played probably right after Nidalee was released and I think that was the first champion that really sold it for me. I remember conversations like when Kassadin was being released and you saw the galaxy come through his sword and how cool that was. "Oh man, Olaf's so broken! Do you know his DPS output is just crazy ridiculous if he hits all of his axes!" And so I played with a couple of different clans at the time. I don't remember if that was ever big but I remember all the 3v3 Twisted Treeline tournaments. I played for an organization called Zura and an organization called For Not and For Not later on became Quantic Gaming. I played with the likes of Bloodwater, Kramer, Bigbadbroad. Kind of like those guys and that time period, I was on their B team and then we got screwed over by a manager and that was my first taste of the corruption in Esports. It was pretty sketchy. Later on, Quantic was having issues with some of their management. Of course, there was that big issue with the players when they were trying to qualify themselves.

The very first thing that I ever published, I wrote a big long thing, and this was before the days of reddit; this was on the general discussion when that was actually a thing, about infrastructre problems in Esports because I had first hand experience. This manager, who was completely unqualified to be in that position within the organization was just ripping off a bunch of players and cause so much drama and hardship. I'm sitting here thinking like, if this continues to get bigger and these organizations continue to set up like this, then we're going to have massive problems. So after I got burned in that scenario, I actually decided to stop playing. I think the highest that I ever got wasn't that high. A) It was before Masters & Challenger so it was much harder, well, not harder since we had the elo system, but I think the highest that I ever got was Diamond 1 so not great on that perspective scale but I tried. Ya know, like I tried to be a professional player but I was just never good enough. So I stopped attempting trying out with teams and I started getting into streaming. Coaching didn't exist at the time that I was really doing this so I called it commentary. What I would do was, right as the spectate feature was released, I would go onto the general discussion board cause reddit didn't really exist and I would ask if anyone wanted their games spectated by a high elo player to give commentary or feedback on. What ended up happening is I would get these viewers and I would spectate their games and I had so many different matchups. Every single different type of champion matchup. Every single different time of elo. Everything from like bronze to diamond. I created like a library, effectively, of like hundreds upon hundreds of videos cause I could cut and edit them individually for the viewer to go back and watch.

Then I thought I might be decent at casting and so I quickly transitioned and contacted ESL cause ESL was fairly relevant at that time period, at least their North American branch, though obviously their European branch is very big. But Go4LoL was the big tournament and so I contacted ESL and tried out with a guy named Tastynubbins who was a great caster. Unfortunately, he's not casting anymore. And they hired me and put me underneath this guy named Spellruler who I think might still be casting in the European scene. He's also a great guy. He was kind of like a mentor. The big thing in ESL, at least in the North American branch since it wasn't as well established as the European branch, is what's called the EPS. And if people don't know what the EPS was, it's the Electronic Pro Series. It was effectively the North American Challenger Series before the NACS even existed. It was the tournament where they sent out invitations or you qualified through Go4LoL to participate in a bigger, higher end, challenger team kind-of tournament. So obviously, that was their main draw and the reason that it was a big deal in the ESL North American branch was because it was the only paid position for a caster at the time. So that was kind of the big leagues. My first year of casting with ESL, I decided, well, I was convinced to try out for that position. Formally, it had been held by kind of the same guys. These are guys like MalfusX, EGAD, Azumu, and Tastynubbins (who had it for a very long time). I was very fortunate that with all of my support structure, I was able to qualify for the EPS and another guy qualified for the EPS, his name was PiraTechnics. It was actually how Pira and I met. We casted at the ESL together and we go the EPS gig together.

From there, Zirene. I assume now, looking back at the timeline that Zirene was probably scouting and prepping for the North American Challenger Series which is why he was watching the games. But we were casting games together and it was just on a rotating shift. We never had the same partner. Pira and I happened to be casting this set together and Zirene was in the chat. He liked what we were doing so he contacted us immediately after the set and he just gave us some pointers and some tips. It was our first brush with Riot, not with Riot directly but with a more experienced caster, cause I think Zirene, right before I joined ESL was actually picked up from ESL himself although I would have to double check on his history. But I just remember hearing stories of "Man, if only you were here when Zirene was here. You could've gotten picked up together or brought up together!" So, don't worry Zirene. They were still talking about you at ESL. So yeah, Zirene reached out to us, told us he really liked what Pira and I were doing so we decided to become more of a duo cast and to cast everything together. We thought if this is working, and Zirene seems to think that it is, we can take his advice and maybe push forward. So we picked up a project for the LPL to do in our downtime to practice for the EPS and then from there, it was pretty much history!

So then, the last year or so, you've been working on the LPL English broadcast. If you want to share, I think a lot of us understand where that came from and the moves to make an English broadcast in the LPL, but do you have anything you want to share of your personal step-up into that or it's creation that you think is worth talking about?

Froskurinn: I definitely think that, and this sounds super arrogant to say, but I definitely think that there is a lot of lessons to be learned from LPL EN. Even if you didn't like the LPL, even if you hated the casting, even if you dislike me, I still think that the lessons learned there are fairly important for the community. Particularly for starting leagues like that. It's funny, people say "You've been casting for the past year" and yeah, I've been casting for like two years now in terms of starting with ESL and going to EPS, LPL EN, and now LPL. But I've only been professionally casting, in terms of working with Riot or under contract for 13 weeks. When you say it like that, people are like "Huh? That's not that long." And I've definitely, if this is your two year span and this is your 13 week span, the amount of growth over this course has been astronomical versus the amount of growth over the two year course simply because you have the resources and the peers to work with to like Pastrytime, Spawn, Rusty, everyone in the Oceanic crew, and the resouces Riot provides to you for training and things like that so I'm very grateful. Obviously, I recognize that I have a lot of work to do as a caster but I'm pleased with the growth that I've made in a short amount of time cause I've only cast professionally for one split and that was just summer. The thing with LPL EN is that it was just a grass roots project.

Literally, we took a stream. I remember that Spellruler and I were actually casting together. Kelsey was a good friend of mine. I was good friends with a lot of the China Talk people cause I was doing the show for them, hosting. When I started that show, I had no idea about anything about China. I just had no idea, they needed a host, and they convinced me that they wanted to do an English LPL stream but they needed a shoutcaster. I was the only shoutcaster that they knew of at the time. So I remember, we were just trying to figure out the mechanics of it and we were actually using my buddy Spellruler at the time. There's still videos of him and I casting and not knowing anything on YouTube and Kelsey's just sitting in the background going "No, that's wrong. That's wrong. This is awful. This is terrible." But after, we kind of refined it, because, you have to think, we took a stream of literally 8 people who were watching it to a grand total of 48,000. The stream was run by literally two people. So there was Piratechnics and I as the casters. I did all of the overlays and any of the graphics work if we weren't relying on the stream. So anything that you were using in between. And then Kelsey ran the OBS and was our entire production and everything. That was it.

And I remember when we did the finals which was super awesome of Twitch to reach out to us, cause obviously it was a big thing for Twitch. Beacuse, if we were able to be successful, which Twitch determined, well I mean Garvey thought we were very successful and he works with Twitch. He's one of their, I don't know his exact title is... Wizard? Of Esports? That might actually be on his business card. If you've ever met him, he's a great guy. But he just reached out to us and he was trying to give us tips on how to set up a brand and it was really important because that's literally what Twitch is about. It's about creating your own content, your own brand, and selling that. So you can imagine how excited Twitch would be about a bunch of these third party streams set up for English casts for like the Brazil league, the Japanese league, the LPL, or in any different language like French or in German. They wanted this to set up and we were kind of like that testing ground for it. Obviously, Riot stepped in and they wanted the rights to the LPL broadcast and the English rights in general to any stream.

I know that Brazil was trying to set up so they could cast an English stream cause I think the only stream available right now is the Portuguese one and Riot actually closed that down. I think a lot of that was with the lessons they learned from LPL EN and the hardships from transitioning a brand over from a third party into an official avenue. I'm not going to lie. It was super frustrating at first. I think the big issue was, when you're a such a small party communicating to a much larger being like Riot and trying to get those dates sorted. It was a scenario of "We'll let you know if we're taking this by December." And the date kept getting pushed back. Cause Pira and I, we were not living together. What Pira and I had would have to do for LPL was load up a Chinese stream and we'd have to try to sync it and that was almost impossible. It's fairly easy to do over Twitch for whatever reason but the Chinese streams... One person can lag, it was just like a nightmare. Then we'd have to get into Skype so we couldn't see each other's facial expressions.

And casting, what's really key about it is that there's a lot of cues. If I'm on a desk with someone that I can see and I want to make a point or I want to take a hand off, I can tap the desk. Obviously, over Skype, you can't do that. You're just listening to someone so it's much harder to do, obviously if you're not in a live environment. There's no hype to feed off of. It's generated. It's not natural. I mean, you try to make it sound as natural as possible. We would wake up at 9PM and we would stay up until 9AM and we'd have to do this every single weekend. So you'd have to be quiet. I remember Piratechnics was trying to soundproof his room because he didn't want to disturb his neighbors. I guess his neighbor was a giant pothead and was cool with it anyways.

There's one point where he just had his window open and, in between games we're trying to eat as quickly as possible cause we're just like dead to the world and you have those crazy breaks or pauses and Pira would be like "Yeah, I'm just sitting nude in my room right now and I think my neighbors hotboxed out of his mind cause he keeps waving at me." Like, these are the conversations we're having in between the games or we're sleeping on our desks. Obviously, you want that to go to Riot so I was super happy when Riot picked up LPL EN from a production standpoint because, yes, finally, the LPL is finally going to get the production that it desires. It's going to get the attention that it deserves. It's going to become more streamlined like the LCS. I wanted that to happen. The thing that I didn't want to happen is I obviously wanted to go with the LPL as soon as it was picked up cause I felt I had taken all of this time to raise something from the ground up and would have liked to have road it or at least helped out. So there was definitely frustration with that in terms of the communication. But the first thing that I did when I heard that it was going over to the Oceanic team was I got online and I added the Oceanic guys and was like "How can I assist you?".

It was funny, they were actually fairly surprised. I remember I was having a conversation with Atlas and Atlas was like "Ya know, I'm actually really surprised that you're acting this way cause I had heard certain things and you're nothing like I had thought you would be like." I'm like "I think that's a backhanded compliment!"

Alright. Let's move onto the next question! You said at one point, you went from 8 to 48,000 viewers. Then recently, you were casting IEM. Did you ever get stage fright?

Froskurinn: I had stage fright every time.

Even now?

Froskurinn: Before interviews, yeah. I actually get jittery. In highschool, I did speech and debate, specifically dramatic interpretation and after dinner speaking, which, if you're familiar with speech and debate, is pretty much emo acting and comedic speaking. After dinner speaking typically has to have a meaning or commentary on social issues however but it's very humorous. So I'm used to speaking in front of big crowds but it's actually kind of scary because it's very different when you're speaking to a camera or you're working with a camera versus working with an audience. I would much rather prefer being on a stage and working with an audience or working with a small group of people than working with a camera a lot of the time. But yeah, I do get nervous.

So casting IEM rather recently was probably the first exposure a lot of people got to your casting because the LPL English stream is still rather small compared to the NA LCS stream. There was a fair amount of backlash on Reddit and you gave a pretty good response about that. What were your general thoughts on your first time casting on such a huge stream and immediately having the kind of "feedback" that you can get from the community in general. What are you hoping to change and what did you really like or enjoy about casting such a huge event where you were seen by many people who wouldn't specifically watch LPL but are now seeing you cast?

Froskurinn: First and foremost, I'm incredibly grateful and honored to work with the crew that I did. I mean, this is such a PR answer but, in all honesty, working with talents like Chobra. Chobra is so smart and he's so well-rounded in all of his experiences. So anytime you ever get to meet that guy, he's one of the nicest guys. He's super intelligent. He's been through pretty much every facet of the industry. That in itself, not even just casting or being on the event, but being able to network, connect, and communicate with Chobra was a huge plus. I was super stoked too because I got to hang out with Christopher "Papasmithy" Smith, one of my good friends, Devon "Piratechnics" Younge, another one of my huge good friends, and I got to meet Mitch, and I totally will space Mitch's last name, but the Australian "UberShouts". He works for ESL and he was kind of like the non League of Legends caster. He was really cool.

Working with the ESL staff in the studio, have you ever been to that studio? It's so cool! They used to hold the EU LCS there and it's very tiny. I understand why people prefer that EU LCS is now moved into the Riot studio. It's much bigger, you can accomodate. But it [ESL's studio] create's a very intimate setting. That thing will only seat about 25 people, maybe max. I didn't count the seats. But it's very tiny, like you're right there. There's walkways and and you can go into a lounge area and ESL will bring food in for guests to eat like pizza or Mcdonalds and stuff like that. People will be lounging around on coaches and it just creates this really cool intimate, festive vibe where you get off the desk and you can immediately walk over and watch the game with a bunch of different fans. But it's not like so overwhelming. You can have like 1 on 1 conversations which I really enjoyed the vibe of that and the office structure in general so that was really cool.

In terms of actually getting to cast IEM and the backlash and everything, I definitely will agree that my cast with UberShouts was actually my much better cast. I don't want to be like "I didn't do that terrible!" cause obviously there were problems. There's always going to be room for improvement. Again, I've only casted professionally for like 13 weeks. I think I understand what my weaknesses are better than anyone else. Of course, I always accept and love constructive criticism. I'm actually a super critical person. I love getting as much feedback as possible. It was cool to have the community do that. So many people did reach out to me to try to give pointers but you have to take it with a pinch of salt.

Using reddit as a tool is incredibly important. It's a place where a bunch of information is condensed. But you have to understand how to use it as a tool. The example that we always like to bring up is... What we typically like to do is when we go into LPL threads, if no one says anything about the casters, we're like "Yes! We did our job perfectly." We don't need threads that are like "Man, Rusty's awesome! Froskurinn's amazing! I love these casters!" If we go into an LPL spoiler thread, as long as no one's like "These caster's fu- suck! We hate them!" As long as it's just "Masters 3, they really dropped the wall. OMG really dropped the ball this time. EDG yay!" We're like "OK, yay! No one's saying anything about us. We did our job! It's perfect!" But if people are like "These caster's don't know anything", and that's kind of like a big thing we get a lot. We as a casting team, we understand that we do know things about League of Legends.

I mean, there's like a bar to get hired for this job. Rusty was an ex professional player. He's ranked in Masters right now. Spawn has been a coach for multiple teams as well as an analyst. I've coached for multiple teams as well as been an analyst. So we've gotten jobs before our casting jobs that have like a bar or line of knowledge. I'm not saying that we don't mess up because every caster messes up. Sometimes, you just lose what you're doing on air and say stupid stuff sometimes. So if you get this feedback, "These casters don't know anything", how you have to define that is obviously our audience doesn't think we know anything.

So what does that mean in terms of casting? Typically, what I found is it's the difference between macro points and the difference between micro points. A macro point is map objective orientated like making a rotation or cross mapping whereas micro is anything mechanical so champion interactions or spell interactions or how something goes down. If you throw out micro points, people seem to get very excited or use this as a baseline of "This guy knows what he's talking about." Which is funny too, because if you think about Montecristo, everyone has this general acceptance that Monte is a very intelligent caster, which he is, but Monte, if you ever listen to him cast, he does not touch micro points. I think this is very smart. I don't know the in-depths of it but I'm assuming that he's probably sat down with his co-casters.

I know when I sit down with a co-caster, I'm like "Don't ask me this. Don't ask me this. I want to talk about that." But we do that. Because every caster has their specialty. But go listen to Doa and Monte cast, go listen to Papasmithy and Monte cast, Monte will never be like "This is how intimately this champion interactions works." He's all macro, very intelligent in terms of what the teams want to do. Look at someone like Phreak. Phreak is very micro oriented. He's the numbers guy. He has great rune page breakdowns and things like that. So it's taking that feedback from reddit and saying "OK, so what do they actually want from us? If this is what they think, how do we actually deliver that?"

The second part of my point is, what's it like having such a huge number of people seeing you, and I guess it goes back to my stage fright question, knowing that this many people just saw you and it's so much more than before. How does it help you to interpret what they're saying just knowing that there's probably triple, quadruple, ten times the number of people watching that and giving you feedback compared to the relatively small LPL community which is probably a lot of the same people giving the same feedback?

Froskurinn: First and foremost, when you're on broadcast, no one is reading twitch chat. We don't know. We have no idea. There were times when you'd look over at Chobra and be like "What's our viewer count at?" and he'd be like "I don't know". We don't know. We don't have any sort of production in front of us where we can check that so it's not really even a facet when we're on camera or we're preparing for things. Like, I'm on the desk and I'm looking at Yamato and Dexter and I'm like "What points do you want to cover? What do you want to take?". I don't think there's a big understanding of how things actually work in a broadcast or how things actually work behind scenes in terms of prep, in terms of pressure, in terms of organization. The scripting joke is a perfect example of that. I mean, it's funny obviously but that's not how it works at all. When we're doing a desk, you're watching a game together, cause effectively you do the analyst desk, you do the picks/bans for ESL which is kind of interesting, and you stand up or you watch your monitor and you can talk to people and you can talk to colleagues. Then you come back when you think the game is ending and say "Hey, I think this point was important. I think this is the overarching narrative and I want to talk about this." The host, in that case it was Chobra's like "OK, in that case, we'll go to you first and then tap if you have something." If Chobra wants to take the point and move it along, his hand will point which means it's coming back to home. I mean, nothing's scripted. It's not like we have a teleprompter in front of us. But you do kind of organize your thoughts on how you want to go about it.

In terms of the lashback, I'm not going to BS. It was really hard. That really sucked. There was a moment at IEM where I did breakdown. The thing is, obviously I'm not on reddit while I'm doing it. At best, you'll get cellphone reception so you'll check twitter or you'll have it signed onto skype. I cannot tell you the amount of messages that I got. Obviously, twitter is a much more funneled gate in terms of the feedback that you're getting because you can choose who you want to see or who you know you can mute and block people.

So there's typically a lot more positive feedback when I use twitter as a tool which is why I prefer to use it. But the amount of people that added me out of the blue to tell me how much I suck and how much they hated me. Then you get a lot of messages saying "Don't check reddit!" So I know something's going on reddit because everyone's telling me "Don't check it. This is disgusting!" but I already know that. Unfortunately for me, I'm one of those people who love constructive and hard criticism but I take the Day 9 approach. I can't go into those threads. Like, I can't go and sit down and read them so I typically send a friend and say "Can you go through these threads and explain to me if there's anything worth what I need to take out of that. If there's anything constructive that you see. Or ask Kelsey to go in and do it." But like, straight up, I totally did cry that day. That was pretty awful. The cast itself, it was Fnatic versus Qiao Gu.

The big feedback points is that they thought I was talking too much, they didn't like the sound of my voice, and they thought I was really hard on the Qiao Gu Reapers when they decided to make that teleport play at Baron as opposed to ending the game. Those were kind of the big three ones that I saw. There was actually a dedicated thread pointing out every single time Pira and I made a mistake. There was like four threads that day. It was pretty not fun. The explanation of why I didn't touch Fnatic cause... I can't really watch any... At Worlds, I had Worlds tickets for pretty much every single event and I didn't go to any Chinese games.

And the reason I don't go into any Chinese games or I don't watch any of the Chinese games live is the immediate lashback that I get, in terms of if a Chinese team does poorly or loses. It's just not something that I enjoy or particularly care about. Sometimes I feel like I'm the actual jungler for LGD or something with the amount of hate. What was it that he did, he Vi power fisted into Xpeke's shockwave? Oh TBQ, god bless. I don't know. I don't watch any Chinese games live because I have to get off social media at those points. I don't check any reddit or twitch chat things when I'm streaming on broadcast. And I think now, it's getting to the point that I can't have any social media in front of me at all. I understand that being in the public, it's par for the course and I understand that the Fnatic vs Qiao Gu game wasn't my best cast. I mean, obviously, you should never have your best cast. There's a base line standard where you're like "I want this to be acceptable!" But you're constantly looking for "OK, what can I do? How can I retro this?" which is like review.

OK! Do you have any final remarks or shoutouts that you'd like to make before we wrap it up?

Froskurinn: I want to thank everyone at IEM Cologne. Working with the ESL guys was incredible. I hope that I get to work with them in the future. If not, I think everyone should strive to work at one of those events, especially working with Chobra. Spoke very highly of him, was really cool. I obviously always love working with my peers like Papasmithy, like Piratechnics. Big shoutout to the Riot Oceanic branch. That's going to be Jake "Spawn" Tiberi, Max "Atlas" Anderson, Zack "Rusty" Pye, and Julian "Pastrytime" Carr. Those guys are incredible. Julian and Atlas are two of the best play-by-play casters in the world. Their amount of talent is incredible. I love talking to Jake and Rusty. They're very intelligent people. And the Oceanic branch in general has been so fundamental in helping my development and, not only as a professional but also as like a person. I very much appreciate them. And thank you to you! I have a history with Dignitas and everytime I interview with you, it's always pretty enjoyable so thank you!

Thank you and thank you to all of Team Dignitas' sponsors and good luck with casting this season and I'll see everyone later!