Meet the Team — Kristján

A streamer, an ex Formula pilot, a marketing manager and a sports commentator walk into a bar. It’s the same guy. Only one guy walked into the bar. That’s Kristján Einar Kristjánsson.

Add to that he has like an army of kids, and we are truly left wondering how on Earth he still finds time to sleep and even d̶i̶s̶r̶u̶p̶t̶ entertain the Civitas Discord community with a̶n̶n̶o̶y̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶o̶u̶t̶-̶o̶f̶-̶c̶o̶n̶t̶e̶x̶t̶ funny messages about burgers. No, I’m not salty at all, why are you asking?

— Giorgio ‘Error 404’ Crosali

GM Kristjan, can you tell who you are and what’s your role at Civitas?

GM FRENS, I’m Kristján, an Icelandic dude with a passion for a lot of things, a huge nerd when it comes to all my interests that are anything from motorsports, fly fishing, wilderness exploring, and gaming and tend to go “all in” on anything I fall in love with.
I’m currently the Marketing Manager for Civitas, so I head up the marketing and communications department within the company and try to make sure that everyone that should know, knows about what’s happening at Civitas.

We heard you had quite an interesting career — Formula pilot, top gaming streamer in Iceland, sports commentator, and now web3 gaming marketer. How did you pull that off? Do you have clones?

No clones unfortunately but yeah I do quite a lot of things and have been doing various things for my relatively short career. When I was younger I did indeed race cars; first in go-karts locally in Iceland and then moved over to international single-seater racing. This set me up for a career in media covering motorsports such as F1 in Iceland and currently I work a lot on that as well as running a successful podcast about the subject locally in Iceland. This accidentally had a spin-off where I headed up the broadcasting department for the Icelandic esports association, hosting and commentating, starting up when it was still in its grassroots with most games that went through there but then moving solely over to the CS: GO division, after hosting 6 seasons I retired end of last season when joining Civitas. However during this time we managed to get esports into the mainstream locally, a TV station was born solely focusing on gaming/esports and the scene along with the interest in it has grown tremendously. During this time I joined forces with one of Iceland’s oldest gaming brands, GameTíví, to revive a show that started in 1998, and in 2020 we moved it into streaming, this has now grown into a channel with 6 shows per week all shown on national TV alongside streaming services and is growing every month. Since I was young I have been working on startups and after a spell of both success and failure, I decided to move over to the marketing side of things, first working for a medium and then as a business development and concept/strategy specialist at one of Iceland’s top marketing agencies. During the esports time, I had the first contact with the team working on Civitas when I hosted the inaugural The Machines Arena world championships, and after that, the ball started moving and I ended up within the project, super stoked to have a truly interesting challenge on my hands.

How do you think web3 gaming differs from traditional games? How can players benefit from blockchain technologies?

I personally think the difference is overstated, at the end of the day it’s all about making games and the truly great ones will succeed, being a big MMO player and a FPS player I see so many elements that just fit so easily into the Web 3 space, be it true ownership of your things or simply the fact that when you want to move on from the game the assets that you have assembled have actual value (I would have loved the payout after 8 years of playing EVE Online…)

Web 3 is evolving and the games with it, there will always be the larger elements to it such as high-value items however I think we will see a big growth in smaller transaction items trading between players.

I personally think that it’s not necessarily right to keep talking about “web 3 games”, but rather talk about how Web 3 is a utility of that game, just one aspect to it, and that’s where I believe the mass adoption will happen.

What’s your favorite aspect of working on Civitas?

Other than messing with Error 404 every day?

Firstly, I love working within a highly creative team that delivers things that raise the bar every time we go into a meeting. I keep getting surprised and I love it. Also, the challenge of taking on a completely new venture is something I love, be it racing, esports, or even some of the startups were pioneering projects and that is where I belong, if the things I work on are not a challenge or have an already established blueprint how things are done, they are not for me.

What are your favorite video games, and why?

I really like racing sims, obviously… So I have a good rig for that and try and drive, my all-time favorite is probably EVE Online and Counter-Strike, however, after joining the GameTíví project I moved from being a gamer that focused on 1 or 2 games at a time and now I have a lot of variety in the types of games I play at any given time.

Lastly, can you tell us the recipe for the perfect “Monty’s Burger™️”?

This, fren, is only for the people of #montysburg … we will be recruiting.

Want to know more about the Civitas team? Check our previous Meet the Team issues on our publication page: https://medium.com/playcivitas/tagged/meet-the-team