Name: Joe Rogan Experience #651 - Jordan Gilbert (c9n0thing)
Uploaded: 2015-05-22T02:17:43.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #651 - Jordan Gilbert (c9n0thing)' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2015-05-22. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #651 - Jordan Gilbert (c9n0thing)' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2015-05-22. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #651 - Jordan Gilbert (c9n0thing)

We are live. That's it. Hello, Jordan. How's it going, Joe? What's going on?
Joseph. Professional video game player, you. What's up?
Dude, you're living the dream. That's what every teenage boy who's sitting in
front of his parents' television is,
"You fucking loser. Get some shit done with your life."
That's actually how I pick up girls. I go on Tinder and I say, "I'm living the
dream."
So they don't actually see that I say I play a professional game. I just say, "I'm
living the dream."
Yeah, but it's like, "What's your dream?"
The childhood dream. Everyone's like, "Well, if you're a boy, I guess, right?"
Well, when you first started playing video games, was there any professional
option?
Um, well, kind of. There was these teams, Team 3D, that was the first big team
in North America,
and they, like, I remember going to a local Fry's and buying a keyboard and
seeing, like, one of their players' quotes on the box,
like, "I use this keyboard because I'm going to be the fucking best with this
keyboard."
So I was like, "Awesome." Like, that was actually a super big part of my
motivation.
Like, "I want to be on a box."
A keyboard box.
Yeah.
Now, when you first started playing, like, how old were you?
Uh, I think I was nine when my brother introduced—I have two older brothers.
My oldest brother was playing Counter-Strike, and, of course, I wasn't allowed
to play,
so I'm sitting there watching him play all day.
You weren't allowed to play?
No, it was his computer.
Oh, okay.
He would, like, shoot me out of his room, and then I would kind of, like, crawl
on the floor, walk in, and, like, try to, like, watch him, like, get into his
room, watch,
and then when he would leave, he would go to school or something, and I would
hop on his computer and I would play.
And Counter-Strike is a weird one because that was—it was first—it was Half-Life.
Half-Life, Team Deathmatch, yeah.
And then, like, nobody even talks about Half-Life.
That's the engine.
Yeah.
Then it became Counter-Strike was, like, the big game that people—so, Deathmatch,
when you're playing Deathmatch, Counter-Strike,
you're playing one-on-one or team versions of the Half-Life engine, but against
other people.
That's what a lot of people that play Counter-Strike competitively use to, like,
warm up, Deathmatch mode,
because you just keep dying and respawning.
It's like a Quake insta-give or something, you know, you just keep restarting
and just kill each other
to kind of warm up your hands and whatnot and get them working well together.
Do you have, like, a ritual or anything you do before you play?
Well, I mean, it is muscle memory. It is calisthenics.
At this point, though, like, obviously, if you're a golfer, you might not train
as hard as you did when you wanted to make the tour,
but you still have to do maintenance stuff, so, like, when I hit a Deathmatch,
I'd get maybe a hundred kills with each gun,
and then I just - then I obviously have team practice, which is a different set
of coordinating strategies and stuff,
but for personally, yeah, I just try to make sure I'm still playing, so if I
ever feel off, I can identify what's really off pretty quick,
and then I'll just go hone in on that gun or that part of a map or whatever,
but, yeah, it's a mix of both, right?
Do you think that people don't respect how difficult it is to play competitive
video games?
'Cause...
Yeah, definitely, I mean...
It's fucking really difficult. Like, the level of competence, the level of
skill, like, if you've watched, uh, you can watch a lot of games online,
and that's, like, a big part of all this now, which is really fascinating, is
how many people watch live games, or even with Quake, the big thing was
watching demos.
I love Quake, yeah.
Yeah, people would watch demos of, like, really good players. You do that, too.
Yeah, I think, I think part of it, obviously, is people don't know what the
fuck they're looking at, from an outside perspective.
Right.
So, like, certain games I can understand. StarCraft, or League of Legends, or
World of Warcraft, you're looking at all these spells flying around.
Yeah, that's ridiculous.
And that, and those, those, like, action key moments normally happen over the
course of, like, ten minutes or something.
Whereas in Counter-Strike or Quake, it's like, that guy just got that point, he's
about to kill this guy, there's just 30 seconds left on the clock.
Right.
So I think that's actually more intuitively easy for a spectator to watch as a
spectator sport, but, you're right, yeah, a lot of people, I don't think,
comprehend what you go through.
They're like, "Oh, this kid just plays all day for fun and doesn't think about
what he's doing, he just happens to be good."
Yeah, it's always been fascinating to me how certain games get, they get taken
seriously. Like, certain games garner respect. Like, chess.
Chess, yeah.
If you are a really good chess player, like, "Oh, he's a sophisticated
gentleman, he's a chess player."
Yeah.
What do you do for a living? "I play chess." Whoa, interesting. What do you do
for a living? "Oh, I play video games." Oh, you fucking dork.
I say I play Counter-Strike, right? I've progressed over that. I play Counter-Strike.
What the fuck is Counter-Strike? Yeah, well, I do this.
Well, that's extra geeky, because you're naming the video game.
Well, you have to, because you say play video games, it's like saying you play
pro sports, to me, you know?
Oh, right, right, right, that's true.
After a while, so I try to make that distinction to do justice to my profession
or whatever, so in the future people start questioning more about what I do.
Now, what level is the, I mean, obviously there's Half-Life that came out, and
then was the game engine continually upgraded?
Yeah, like, I started playing in, like, beta version. So, beta 5.2. Beta is
basically before the game is full-released, for those who don't know what a
beta is.
There's, like, alphas and beta, right? And then the full release. So I played
beta before it was even a game, a full version in stores, and, uh, yeah.
All the weapons were different, and then 1.0, 1.1, 1.3. The longest lasting
version was 1.6, which I went pro in, like, I went pro in 2008, but it went...
Now, how do you go pro? Do you have to join a league, or do you have to pay for
anything, sign up for stuff?
Well, there is a process. It's not a conventional one like sports. You don't go
to, like, a high school team or a college team. It's, it's, there's no coaches
in eSports. Well, recently there are, but, like, that's...
There's coaches?
Recently, and that, we'll get into that, but, like, you know how, obviously, if
you're gonna play in NHL, you try to, like, play for a college team, or you go
to juniors or semi-pro AHL.
In this case, there's, like, I play in a league called ESEA. They have the Open
Division Intermediate Main Premier Invite.
If you're an invite, you're really the only people that have a chance that can
get paid to play by companies.
So, when I say I went pro back in 2008, it's because I joined up a contract
with an organization called Evil Geniuses, which is, like, my agency for an
actor.
And they had sponsors from Intel, Newegg, a bunch of peripheral companies for
my gear, and they pay me to fly to the tournaments, and I market them like I'm
an ASCAR car.
I have their logos all over them. I tell people why their gear is good, et
cetera, et cetera.
Wow. Okay. So, now, back to the Counter-Strike, the Half-Life engine.
Yeah.
So, is there several versions of it that they've come up with? Like, what
version are you on now?
So, now it's the most recent, called Global Offensive. Yeah.
And is this a new version of Counter-Strike itself, or a new version? There's
not a new version of Half-Life, right?
Nope. They came out with Half-Life 2 at one point, but that was the Source
engine. So, Counter-Strike Source came out, it was on that engine.
So, for folks who don't know what the fuck we're talking about, this is what
that means. Like, video game engines, they take the engine-
That's the physics, everything that controls your world.
Yeah, the 3D geometry, the video, like, the way it looks, the graphics, and
then they take that engine, and then they can port it over to other games, and
they can develop games based on that engine.
So, it cuts a lot of the development process out, because a big part of the
development process out is coming up with a video game engine.
Yep. So, yeah, I think Half-Life 2, I don't know when it exactly came out, if
it was like 2004 or 5.
That's kind of old, right?
Yeah, that was that.
10 years ago.
Like I said, I went pro in Counter-Strike 1.6, and that was like, everyone
loved it. It was like the original Quake, like, the registration of my bullet
shooting when I hit a guy, like, it worked. It hit him when you shot him in the
head.
Like, some of these new versions of Counter-Striks that were coming out, it was
almost too easy. Like, you would shoot a bullet, like, right here, because the
guy was moving weird, it would still register as a headshot.
Why is that?
Like, something was up with the engine, and it was like they were trying to up
the graphics and the feel and to make it look more realistic, but that took
away from, I guess, how fast the computer talked to the server.
You know, so then there was a discrepancy between, like, when I shot, when it
actually hit the person. And obviously that's why, like, I can't, when I
practice, I can't play against Europeans, because of internet lag, right?
Right.
So, like, that's why you would play on a LAN, because that's the fastest
interaction between the server and the computer.
Yeah, if you've played online with an internet lag, and you get used to it, and
then you play without the lag, it's like you go to paradise, like you're in
heaven.
Yeah, it's like having to wait on your baseball bat or something.
Yeah, but some guys got really good at it. Like, some guys get super good at
timing their own fuck-up, their own lag.
Yeah, and some of it's bullshit, though, because then they're harder to hit.
Yes.
You know, some of them are just glitching around.
They disappear.
Bullshit.
So, that's annoying. So, at our level, we're really, like, prima donnas about,
like, what server location we play on, because my teammates are spread around
the country.
Right.
So, we all play on, like, a Denver server.
And you have to make sure that your ping is very low, right? Like, the ping to
the server.
Yeah, I mean.
Like, what's a good ping these days?
Well, playing in North America for Counter-Strike player, like, 40 to 50 is,
like, what we play on.
But, like, if I were to play in a Los Angeles server from San Diego, I get 15,
because I'm closer. But, as a team, since we're all spread out, we're in, like,
Toronto and all this stuff, and across the country, we play centralized.
And that's milliseconds. So, it would be, like, 15 milliseconds.
Uh, I guess.
So, does that register in your head? Do you notice the difference between 15
and 40?
Oh, yeah. Well, I could feel it. It's really just, like, the gun itself. I
could feel it. It's, like, a very small, like, a lot of people don't notice the
difference for the first couple years.
They probably play the game. But once you start realizing the different action
of the recoil of the guns, you could feel it between each bullet.
This is super nerdy. Yeah, I mean, I know you played Quake. We'll talk about
that later. Yeah.
Um, but, so, my question is, like, how do you decide what game to become super
adept at? Because it seems like there's a lot of them now.
Well, how do you decide what sport you become adept at?
But, I mean, well, games have a life, like, where people won't play them
anymore. Like, it gets to a point. Like, try playing Quake 1 today.
Well, that's what happened with Counter-Strike 1.6 was kind of what I was kind
of talking about.
Oh, I see. The new version came out, and because 1.6 was getting stagnant, like,
since the developer doesn't give back to the ga