Yeah, so, I am Adrienne Hunter. I am 29 years old. I live, and was born and raised, in Seattle, Washington.
And I am one of two founders of a virtual-reality game studio based out of Seattle, Washington. I have also worked in the game industry since I graduated from high school. I started at Nintendo, and was there for six years. Put myself through college working there and have, for better or for worse, been unable to completely leave the gaming industry. [Laughs.]
[Laughs.] Yeah, we're gonna get into that a little bit. So, you're with an independent company right now. Are you doing contract work or anything else?
So, I run an independent game studio on my own. I am working with my other founder, who is also conveniently my best friend, Keith Bradner.
That is convenient.
Yeah. He's the lead developer. I'm the lead designer. And we are both -- this is a side project for us. So, we have full-time jobs in our respective fields. He's the lead VR developer at a VR start-up in Seattle, and I'm a user experience designer at a start-up in Seattle. But, in our spare time, we make videogames.
What did you do at Nintendo?
I started at QA. So, I worked in QA at Nintendo. I started there and got to know friends, etc., and basically grew up into an adult version of myself there. I still have a handful of friends from those days, the narrative designer at my VR studio is an old coworker who I enjoy working with. A couple of years into working at Nintendo, I decided to go back to school and really had no idea what I was doing but was just determined to finish, and so that's actually where -- I finished my undergrad degree and promised myself that when I got my degree and I finished it and I walked that I wouldn't work at Nintendo at that job anymore because I was better than that. So, I left.
Better than QA or better than Nintendo?
Better than that part of the games industry, in QA, because that corner is where aspirations and hopes and dreams go to die.
A lot of people have told me QA can be sort of a dead end. I did interview someone earlier this year who worked at QA for eight years in Scotland and said that he felt like he wasn't even part of the industry.
Yeah. Yeah.
So -- just to make it clear you're not the only one picking on Nintendo or that role specifically.
There is a -- I feel free to expose this a little bit because I don't work there anymore and I have no intention of working there ever again.
[Laughs.] Okay.
But there was a reputation for QA for swallowing up people who got fine arts degrees or design degrees, or what have you, and trapping them forever in purgatory and never allowing them to rise up into the positions or the places in their respective fields where they actually aspired to be. Like the system wears you down even just on the periphery and it’s just easier to stay in QA because at least you can tell people you work at Nintendo or whatever and the prestige of that is somehow supposed to make up for it.
So, it was a personal promise to myself that I wasn't going to let myself end up -- like, my story wasn't going to end the same way like so many other stories that I've heard.
How is it people get stuck? Are there fewer opportunities for advancement? Is it, like, more people are willing to come in and do the same jobs for cheaper because it's a "cool job?" A combination of both? Neither?
It's, in my experience there, it was that you get ingratiated into the Nintendo QA clan. That's where all of your friends are. That's where everybody that you bond with works. And it makes you not want to leave that place. And that's not unique to Nintendo. That's everywhere, right?
And any job.
You get comfortable.
You get content in that job and you get comfortable and it pays you just enough to have the lifestyle that comforts you. You can afford the videogames you want to play. You can afford to go out to eat sometimes. It supports you just enough to want to keep you there, and then it also kind of holds everything that you love and care about hostage, because all of your other friends are stuck there too.
And, I see this recurring issue, and not just at Nintendo, but other places I've worked at that I've done QA, where everybody kind of is holding hands and trying to keep everybody collectively afloat, coworkers will loan each other money and there are carpools and people become roommates, but everybody's paralyzed and feels really afraid to leave.
Well, you know, it's the Hollywood dream of, like, you get a job at the mailroom in CBS and you want to be the next Stephen Colbert. Like, I don't even know if that really happens anymore.
Yeah. Yeah. The more that I think about it, there's a lot of parallels between the fantasy of what people imagine rising up through the ranks, climbing the corporate ladder, used to be. And there's not a whole lot of opportunity like that internally. At least, of the videogame industry that I've seen where -- I have very rare stories that are true of some of my friends that I made at my time at Nintendo, who have risen through the ranks through some means or another. And inevitably those means are, "I became friends with somebody in another department and I got hired into that department and that kept happening over and over again and then eventually I became a writer or I became a designer or whatever.”
Yeah.
But that's few and far between, in my experience.
You just gotta want it really hard and wait 20 years.
[Laughs.] I have seen and heard enough of that to know that that is a lie. [Laughs.]
Well, in my experience, in my time freelancing with Adult Swim, I had a lot of colleagues who were hoping to get a show on the air and hanging in. But more often than not, there were a couple people who got bit parts or the chance to be an extra, but they were never asked to write or to do anything beyond that.
Yeah, but the thing about QA in particular is it's somewhat rare to watch people burn out after trying for so long. Like, you'll get the people who have one opportunity and completely blow it and then burn right the hell out of there.
But then you'll have these people who get the opportunities, like, they cling to them like pieces of driftwood, and they're constantly swimming from bit part to bit part, hoping that the next one is the one.
Yeah. Twigs in a river.
Yeah. And it's so demoralizing. [Laughs.]
Oh, no. I know. At least, I mean, I know from my experience in different companies. The specifics are the same, though.
So, but you went independent. You got a job not at Nintendo. I don't want to make a snap judgment or anything, but it seems like you're pretty aware of a lot of the nasty, toxic shit a lot of people don't want to talk about. You seem pretty aware of that but you don't seem completely bitter or burnt out. So, I'm curious, how do you do that? Is it 'cause you have an unrelated job? Or what do you think it is? Or, am I wrong and you're completely burned out?
[Laughs.] I think what you said is true, that part of the equation -- like, the equilibrium that I've achieved is because my day job and where the bulk of my income comes from is not related to games whatsoever anymore. The straw that broke all of this for me was doing QA for a third-party company. They do a lot of the QA contracts for ArenaNet. OK, so you have a room full of QA veterans in love with their game and who were laid off a couple of years ago so QA could be parted out to a third-party contracting agency, I’m assuming to reduce costs, and then the company asks us to do illegal things like work for free on the game after hours. Because they know if you love the game you’ll do it. And this was in 2015 for fuck’s sake, this isn’t some war story from working QA in the 90s and having to sleep under your desk to make a ship date.
Imagine asking a room full of people who are being paid $11 an hour where you have to stock the staff kitchen with supplies for PB&J sandwiches because half of us can’t afford to feed ourselves, asking us to work for free. And the sacrifice was glorified by the floor manager and we were praised for reluctantly submitting to things like last-minute overtime. I still bring up that job to my friends who were working there with me and we’re like, “Yeah, that was dehumanizing.”
And the crazy part is that while I’m over here making next to nothing to test this game -- I had still been spending my free time, spent literal years making games in my spare time with friends. So then if I can’t work in games to feed and house myself and be treated with respect, then what? So I spent two months on a design portfolio, transitioned out into a software startup as a designer, and the rest is history.
The best part is that games and what I do now are still really closely related in terms of I have a design position. So, I love cross-pollinating between the two. I think there's a lot of good design work and best practices that happen in the games sphere that I can bring into more traditional, like, web and mobile product design.
And then, vice versa, I have brought a lot of what I understand about the product development process from more traditional software companies and start-ups into the game-development process, and that's kind of why I'm manning the ship at this studio that I'm running right now.
It's trying to prove to myself that my hypothesis is true about how you can make games differently. And not treat people like shit in the process.
Yeah. Well, so, tell me a little bit about why, as you said, you feel alienated from the gaming community at large and in and out of the gaming industry as well. Which, I know is incredibly broad, but we were emailing about that a bit.
So, looking back, I treated playing videogames no differently than I would reading books or going out to play in the streets with friends or going to the park or whatever.
It was just another piece of my childhood. It wasn't particularly important. It wasn't what I wrapped my identity around in any respect. So, I ended up picking out videogames -- let's say my brother and I get to go to Blockbuster, when that still existed, because my mom took us. We would get to pick out a Super Nintendo game or an N64 game and we would have these -- be mulling over these options that we have between my brother and I, but we didn't have any context to decide which game was better or worse. And so, as most people could remember from picking out a rental movie from Blockbuster, it's kind of just, you got what's there, and you have to pick something. So you kind of just cross your fingers and pick one.
And hope you don't regret your choice for the next three or five days.
[Laughs.] So, I played a lot of crap, and I played a lot of crap that I guarantee you I don't really remember anymore. I don't even remember the names of most of the games that I played. But the ones that stood out to me were the ones that I ended up buying for myself as I came through elementary and middle school and into high school and had more control over the games that I decided were important to me and that I wanted to invest the time in. And, the games that I chose were not the games that a lot of other people chose when they were growing up. I did not pick out and play Castlevania or Final Fantasy or Xenogears. What I was picking was whatever caught my fancy.
So, it was widely scattered. I played Sonic a little bit and Kirby and Super Mario, of course, like Super Mario 64, absolutely, but I also played a lot of really strange -- I don't know if there were necessarily independent way back then, like, late '90s or early 2000s.
Oh, it would have been what we used to refer to as third party.
Yeah. So, I ended up playing a lot of games like Roger Rabbit, Krusty’s Fun House, The Haunting, SimAnt -- that made a mark somehow on my decision-making process about, like, what I value in games and what I enjoy.
And then, I was at this really awesome crossroads when I was 10 or 11, when PC gaming started becoming a thing for me and then I started getting invested in this idea of buying the graphics cards and building the computer components to build this gaming computer. And my mom actually supported my efforts to do that. So, I switched from console gaming around the N64, Playstation era to PC gaming, and there was a lot more freedom of choice in that arena. Because, then, now instead of going to Blockbuster I could go to Best Buy or whatever and I had my free pick of all these PC games that had come out. And that's when I started getting into stuff like Warcraft 2 or the original Starcraft, which I didn't actually play a whole lot of.
If you look at my cross-section of all of the different types of games that I played, it's pretty evenly scattered between -- like, I played a couple of shooters. Like, Goldeneye, Perfect Dark. I wasted an entire summer playing the shit out of those games. And everybody can relate to those games because everybody had that summer. But then I also played the shit out of Yoshi's Island far beyond its shelf life as far as most people are concerned, because it was a game that kind of stayed with me and kept bringing me back to it.
So, my relationship with games growing up was really piecemeal and scattershot compared to what a lot of people I met, who would call themselves gamers, would consider the classics. Like, I missed a lot of what they would consider the classics, and so my experience with gaming is a lot different. My point of view on what a classic would be is different.
Yeah. Which, normally, wouldn't be a big deal, but I think surprisingly some of the problems come in when you try to talk about your shared experiences with other people. And I mean, what I gleaned from your email is, yeah, you've played a lot of games, but for some reason you played "different" or "not the right" games than what a lot of other people did. The way you phrased it is you "constantly have to explain myself in the absence of familiarity." Do you mean it's very hard to find common ground with people because you didn't play the same games as them?
Yeah. So, I'll give you a great example. When PAX -- the first PAX, 2004.
I knew this was going to be a game-convention story.
[Laughs.]
[Laughs.] Because I've had that experience, too.
So, I went to the first PAX as, I'm trying to remember correctly, a 17-year-old. Or about to turn 18. So, freshly out of high school. And I had been reading Penny Arcade for a long time, and was really excited at the prospect of what kind of community or event that they were trying to build because I had been to a couple of other smaller conventions and it's really energizing to me to be able to be around your people. Right? And that's what PAX was going to be to me, was being around my people.
Yeah.
So, I get a pass, I get a "bring your own computer" room pass, I pack up my rig. My boyfriend at the time and one of our good friends packed up their rigs. We all go into the BYOC room, set up shop, and I look around and I am one of very few women in a sea of men. And that's pretty normal to me, but to see it kind of in physical reality and to actually look at the face of it for the first time -- because when you're online you can't see everybody's faces. But, then, there was a physical real-ness to how rare I was in that respect.
Did that surprise you? Did you have any expectations?
Absolutely not surprising whatsoever.
Yeah.
It was just -- I hadn't felt it before. Felt what it feels like to be one woman in a sea of men.
Or smelled it.
[Laughs.] As it was, yes, that was a particularly smelly room.
I mean, I've been to stuff like that where literally the employees are spraying Lysol on crowds of people playing videogames.
[Laughs.] I remember the first year that PAX Prime put little deodorant sprays in the swag bags for everyone.
Gentle suggestion.
[Laughs.]
All joking aside, really, though, what is that feeling like, being the only woman in a sea of men?
It’s like, I don’t know if you’ve ever walked into a room where you are just not supposed to be there. You walk in on a private happy hour like a mixer for doctors or something. It was a lot like that feels you know, maybe no one noticed at first but then heads turn, people stare. You’re not like everyone else. It felt like people were waiting for me to do or say anything so they would know how to react or treat me. And I had this attitude at the time where it was all stars in my eyes, just like so optimistic that at the time it didn’t bother me at all. I mean I noticed it but it was just some side thing compared to the Holy Grail of being in one huge room full of people who play games like I do.
And we were laughing a bit about it now, but as we mentioned above -- well, why does this sort of thing become problematic?
At the time, even then, it wasn't problematic to me because I knew where I was in the scheme of things. You know, because I've been through grade school. All of my female friends didn't really have anything to do with videogames. Except for [Dance Dance Revolution]. That was, like a really early game-changer. So, for the exception of the Japanese imports, DDR, Para Para Paradise, all of my friends that were female didn't really play games, but my male friends did. And I had a pretty even split, and so it was easy for me to relate to my male friends through videogames, except my male friends in high school were all about the Castlevania and the Final Fantasy and all of these other games that I didn't really play while I was growing up, let alone really have an interest in to begin with. And so, the way that I bonded with those male friends of mine that played games was not through games. It was through, actually, let's say anime or comics or whatever.
So, when I got to PAX for the first time, I fortunately was there with a couple of people that I knew and was able to have a pretty good time as it was. And I say "a pretty good time" because at that moment in my life, I was over the moon. I was in a room full of people who had brought their own hand-built computers, and I was so excited to talk to these other people who had taken such care with their computers and had named them and decorated them. And those were my people. I was thinking, "These are my people!"
And I sit down, and it's a LAN, of course, because back in 2004 it was still a little bit rough on the whole Internet-access end.
Yeah, it would've had to have been a college campus with a T1 line or something. Otherwise, it's just going to be incredibly dicey.
Right. So, I was, like, trying to talk to the people around me: "So, like, what LAN games -- what does everybody have?" I was, of course, savvy enough to hop on the network and see what folders people were sharing as you do and check out the things everybody has available. But a lot of the games that people wanted to play -- like, let's say Counter-Strike, I had never played Counter-Strike, didn't know anything about it, and wasn't interested in playing a game that I was just going to get my ass handed to me repeatedly over and over again.
Yeah.
And my friends that I had come to the first PAX with that had set up their own computers next to me were interested in playing videogames, including Counter-Strike. So they were able -- they felt like they got enough of a good time out of playing Counter-Strike, but I just didn't feel like it. And so for a lot of the first PAX that I ever went to, I spent a lot of time trying to find people who were playing a game that I actually wanted to play.
And I wasn't -- I didn't feel compelled to play a game that I didn't want to play just because it was a videogame. I got a sense that there were a lot of people in that room that were so hopped up on the atmosphere and the energy of what was going on around them that they were playing, like, literally anything because it was just so exciting to have a roomful of people who knew Penny Arcade and liked videogames.
You know, it was, like, 250 people with their own computers in this huge LAN area.
Right. And this is pre-Steam, before matchmaking being as easy as it is today, pre-streaming, pre-anything. I mean, it sounds so archaic now.
[Laughs.]
But that was when you would show up and have to be like, "I hope we have the same game and maybe the Internet'll work!"
[Laughs.] Yup.
Otherwise, it was not gonna happen.
Yeah. So, there was actually one game that shook out of it all, which, it's a really popular LAN PC game, that's like a racing game. And I can't remember the name of it, but I ended up playing that almost the entire weekend and it was really fun. The people that I was playing with were all scattered throughout this big space, right? So, you don't necessarily know who you're playing with and there's some degree of anonymity.
But for the most part, I showed up, I participated enthusiastically, and found a game that I was really into and I walked away from that weekend having been there, been involved, stayed up all night. I was present for the Bawls booth running out of Bawls soda and having a last-minute shipment come in at midnight and announcing it over the PA system and by the time the woman announcing it had finished her sentence, everybody had just made a mad dash for the Bawls booth.
But, I came away from that weekend having felt no more connected than I was when I started it. I had met nobody that I could even say I made a strong connection with. I was so ready to connect with someone who was more like me than any of my friends were and showed up and did all the things to participate, I played the game I wasn’t familiar with and brushed off the awkward social stuff. But I didn't make any friends, I didn't talk to anybody who talked to me at length about getting to know each other, or any of the other kinds of conversations that you have when you go to one of those things.
And I didn't really think about it at the time, but in retrospect, I guarantee you that it was some combination of the fact that I was a girl who showed up to this kind of event coupled with the fact that I had showed up with two guys, and there's this barrier that gets created when you're a woman who is with men in certain social atmospheres, which is obviously outside of gaming, but PAX included, where they just assume that you're claimed or that you're taken, and so there was nobody -- nobody ever even really approached me. Like, I got a lot of side-eyeing, but nobody actually came up and talked to me.
You mean, like, in a relationship "claimed?" Is that what you mean?
Yeah. [Sighs.] Yeah, I think so.
So, there would be no reason to talk to you because you're with somebody?
Yeah. And it's actually something that I continued to experience as I got older and kept going to PAX and then PAX became PAX Prime because East became a thing. And every single time I would go to one of these events, I started noticing that if I was with a guy or a guy was, like, talking to me and in proximity of me, then I would get treated differently. I think that's one of the first times that I noticed that there's things about me that are out of my control in terms of what kinds of social interactions I'm allowed to have or can have based off of how people perceive me.
I've even, at this point, can admit to in my earlier years, after I recognized that this was an issue, I've gone to great lengths to be by myself so I seem more approachable. [Laughs.]
And so that people feel like it's easier to talk -- and by "people," I mean men at gaming conventions.
No, I knew what you meant.
Or any kind of event or meet-up or whatever, it makes you seem more approachable and easier to talk to than if you have a male in your proximity.
You were saying part of what was going on was that in combination with because you don't have a shared history of playing the same games, people just didn't know how to bridge the gap with you?
Yeah.
You were saying a little bit about how you think "men are used to talking in the narrow dialect of best or favorite with regard to whatever they're familiar with."
Right. Even as early as high school, with my male friends, as I mentioned who played the "classics," I had a friend in particular who loved Castlevania and that was actually one of the first things that he tried to talk to me about because when he found that I played videogames he was like, "Oh, well, of course: We'll go with this Castlevania lead-in and we'll have so much to talk about and be the best of friends."
And when I told him that I had never played a Castlevania, let alone knew what it was about, he had one of those moments that I imagine he might remember even to this day where an assumption that he had was just proven wrong utterly and he kind of paused and had to kind of reboot the conversation and then approached me from, "Well, okay, so what games do you play?"
"This changes everything. You're not who I thought you were."
[Laughs.] Right.
So wait, is this different then? Because in your email you said you had a friend who mocked you for not playing Chrono Trigger. Is this the same person or is that a different instance?
Different instance. I don't know if I would say mocked so much as it was that he was so --
Oh, you said "shamed." "Shamed" was the word that you used.
Yeah. I go to great lengths to try to describe the feeling that I had, and I think "shamed" struck it closest. It felt like everything was riding on me enjoying this videogame that he held so dearly. And I could feel the sense of obligation on me as I was putting the cartridge in and starting it up and going through the very first screens.
While he scrutinizes your appreciation of it?
Right, while he is examining me for making sure that I am appreciating it sufficiently so we can continue being friends. [Laughs.]
And it's easy to say, like, "Oh, isn't that kind of weird?" But where do you think that attitude comes from? Because obviously this is a sort of thing that gets normalized in videogame circles.
Yeah. I think that there's an identity association -- like, an attachment that happens really early on. I think that this also happens with other niche subjects. Let's say, like, superhero comics or board games or whatever it ends up being. Like, that's your subculture. It becomes your niche. It becomes a part of how you define yourself.
Yeah.
And if that piece of you isn't sufficiently represented as being genuine or sincere, then you get shamed and judged for not having that same level of sincerity or borderline obsession. Like, for a lot of people it is actually obsessive. But if you don't prove that you're actually a gamer or that you actually enjoy games, then it's seen as some kind of front or some kind of falsification of who you are. Like, you're trying to trick people into thinking that you're somebody else than you really are and that it becomes this really strange "burn the witch" situation.
So you mentioned your first experience with PAX. How do you go from there to saying you feel alienated? But you seem at peace with your alienation.
[Laughs.] I think working at Nintendo for so long -- so, I was there from just about to turn 19 to 24. And so, I went through the vast majority of that whole awkward young-adult phase where you are legally an adult but you still don't have your legs yet and still don't have your bearings. You don't know how to orchestrate yourself with friend groups. You don't know how to behave appropriately in different situations. And working at Nintendo in this pit in QA, it was actually a really easy segue into true adulthood for me because I was surrounded by people who were as equally socially deficient as I was, regardless of whether they were much older than me or not. [Laughs.]
Yeah. Yeah.
It was a really safe space to kind of be fucked up a little bit or be wrong about or to act weird or to be yourself as some people would probably. And I found some kind of solace in being there and being able to let out some of these sides of me. Like, the part of me that does like videogames doesn't have a home anywhere else, and this was the closest to home that I was going to get. And so I took whatever was offered, which was Nintendo, and which was staying in that community and that friend group that I built.
Yeah. But, I mean, I think maybe it's difficult to chart a timeline of why maybe you feel disaffected. Does some of it have to do with job prospects within the industry, since you chose to a different direction?
I voluntarily decided that finishing my undergrad degree was my hard line. Prospects had nothing to do with it, even if there had been an opening -- it was time for me to go.
What did you get your degree in?
I got my degree in linguistics, which has nothing to do with videogames.
I don't think that's a bad thing. I think it's good to have "outside" influences.
Yeah. At this point, I would agree with you. At the time, I had no inclination to stay in the gaming industry. I actually felt like I had seen enough of the seedy underbelly of what actually happens to understand that the game industry, as much as, if not more so than other fields, is a meat grinder. It really just eats people up and spits out broken dreams. [Laughs.]
Even if you personally made it, or whatever, even if you scratched success out of it for yourself, how many people around you didn’t? And why is that? Why is there so little room for individual success in such a big industry?
Yesterday, in another interview with someone who also considered a career in games and changed his mind, he also also considered a career writing about games but called all of it a “meat grinder” as well.
[Laughs.] It's actually a pretty common way to describe what's going on around you internally. Like, everybody's disillusioned inside of games to some degree or another. Unless you're brand new to it. Like, if you stick around long enough, you can kind of see it. But the people who see that and experience it and decide to stay in it, that takes some strange combination of surrender and self-delusion that I just don't possess. I'm one of those people where if I don't have the freedom to call things like I see them and to engage with things as they truly are, then I get incredibly frustrated and I will inevitably leave. That's part of the reason why I ended up leaving Nintendo, because I didn't feel like I could make an impact or be effective there.
Yeah, and you were there for six years. And I think that's enough of a furnace for you to reach some conclusions.
Yeah.
In your email, you were saying, like, "Indies are stuck in a hard place right now, trying to carve space for thinking differently in an industry that hates them for eating into their profits and yet desperately needs them in order to sell them more consoles." Tell me a little bit about that hate and resentment.
As you can probably imagine, there is a lot of bitterness that's grown since indie games have become a feasible, alternative path for people who are in the AAA vortex and can see how good it is and how good it looks on the other side.
Is it, though? Is it really feasible?
I think AAA and indie take different constitutions and I think that there are often times, as there are in any other industry -- here I am inadvertently apologizing for how the games industry is, right? [Laughs.]
I think that the way that AAA gets sold, that starry-eyed dream of what working in AAA games gets sold to people who aren't quite there yet, it requires a certain type and constitution of person. And if you're not willing to become that or if you aren't that already, then you will hit the wall. And that's where I see a lot of people getting burned out and going off to do other things in other fields.
And conversely, I think that indie games also, too, requires its own type of person and constitution. And if you don't have that then, you, too, will burn yourself. The only problem is that in AAA you can burn yourself and then take your experience and go do work elsewhere easily. If you burn yourself out in indie games, you've probably squandered your life savings and all of your extra income and you're left with little to nothing to show for all of the work that you've put in.
Yeah.
So, that's a whole other level of risk-taking that I think that a lot of people are not willing to engage with. And I think that's why AAA becomes a life raft for a lot of those kinds of people who see the greener grass on the other side of the fence but they're not willing to make the leap because they know what the risks are and they're not willing to take them.
Well, there's this intense pressure cooker going on of how no one has a full picture of what's going on. Like, it's really interesting to see the way the independent circles are mirroring the big industry circles as far as how no one's really clear on what the working conditions are even among themselves. Among independents, it's really difficult to glean, "Okay, was your spouse supplementing you? Were you living with your parents? Did you give your parents a loan? Did you just inherit a bunch of money?"
Like, you very casually up top telling me you have a day job, I feel like people never really disclose that. And it puts, from what I see, people think they are expected to starve and starve and starve and expect coverage and somehow ascend to hopefully breaking even.
But I don't really see people labeling that. Do you have that perception as well?
So, in my experience. I had to go find a day job where I am not defined by games at all, and that pays me what I’m worth and what my time is worth, so that I afford to have my outside life at the studio where my work is entirely defined by that industry. And I knew what I was getting into when I left Nintendo. Nintendo was the only AAA experience that I had, except for I did that stint doing QA on Guild Wars 2. But for the most part, my experience is indie.
Yeah.
And the crew that I roll with now, they're all indie developers, too. There's this really sharp divide on some level between the indiest of indies and AAA, and there's no accessibility in that direction. So, you've got these really hardcore hobbyists, like, indie people who have all banded together and they've kind of drawn this dividing line between -- you can almost call it the hipsterfication of game development where they pride themselves on certain definitions. And I know that people have oftentimes criticized the label "indie" because oftentimes these companies who label themselves indie are not actually truly independent of publishers. They have publishers that work with them, or at the very least, they have a publisher as Steam because they sell their games on Steam and can get ad spots or whatever.
Right.
But there's a lot of, like, animosity or Othering that happens from the indie side of the fence. Because the further the distance that those people get from AAA titles and from the commercialization and marketing blitz that happens around AAA games, the more well-defined they are as indie. You know, it becomes this kind of, like, "Well, I'm not that, which defines me as indie.”
Right.
And I struggle myself with having gone into indie mode and wanting to embrace that community and understanding very well that a lot of these people have AAA experience and got burned on it and wanted to come out here into what they thought would be fresher, cleaner water. That they could spread out and do their own thing and pursue products the way that they wanted to pursue them. But then there's also this risk of struggling, like you were saying. Struggling for exposure and struggling to "make it," whatever making it ends up meaning.
And I think oftentimes, the motivation behind “making it” is operating under the illusion that the indie games space carved out a place where people could work on their pet projects and treat it more like art instead of entertainment and still make it. And so, you know, we had this whole Indiepocalypse fluff thing going on earlier this year.
My friends in the indie space were reflecting on the outrage that was coming out of it and saying to themselves, "Well, those people who were so angry about failing, like, trying so hard and failing are just now tasting failure for the first time. They're people who have probably succeeded or been passed through grade school or what have you, graduated with passable grades, and this is the first time that they're actually being shown by a market or a force of economics that their thing isn't good enough and meditating or reflecting on that in a very public way." And thus, Indiepocalypse. And so, there's that perspective again of, "Well, they just didn't do it right or they just didn't know that failure was possible. They didn't consider that failure was possible."
So, you've got a camp of indie people who are probably on the side of Indiepocalypse outcriers who are thinking, "Well, if you just try hard enough and believe in yourself, surely." And then there's the other side, the other camp who are seasoned veterans of failures and false starts and whatnot. And those are the people who you'll find me among them, in the back corner of every meet-up who are, like, drinking to ourselves and sharing war stories. And it's funny how much more vocal the Indiepocalypse camp is than the people who, I think, don't usually get heard and don't usually speak up about stuff like this. Just because they’re so, so, so over it. There's marketing that you have to do. There's all of these different mechanisms just inside of game development that have to get done, and it's such a complex process and it takes so much out of you that at the end of the day, those people in that second camp just don't have the fucking time or energy to do it.
Well, it's understandable. The other thing that the guy yesterday said that it's no longer -- your game just can't be good. It has to be great. It just seems incredibly discouraging. If you don't happen to get coverage, or whatever the other metrics of "making it" is. I mean, I know people who are $40,000 in debt, their game is coming out in a couple months, they know it's probably going to fail, and they're already trying to figure out what to do after but also know they have to still finish and release it and still live their lives. And yeah, it's true, it might be a huge, huge success, but I know so many stories like that and I doubt this is the first time they've failed.
Yeah.
It's even hard to quantify it as a failure because maybe something will happen five years later because of it.
Yeah, you get yourself into this funny position now that the indie space has matured enough to take on indie publishers where you have the same mechanisms that keep failing start-ups afloat. Let's say, like, a web start-up and they have VC funding. They've done a seed round and a series A, and they're still failing to gain traction and they're still failing to make up the net losses that they're accruing and they just keep taking on more and more funding. If you peek under the hood of indie games, that sort of climate is happening now also, where you have indie studios who have grown big enough to support 10, 20 people and they have games that they're putting out there but they're not covering their own costs anymore, but they justified bringing on the people to get the game out. so that they could make the money. And then you have these publishers who are trying to float them to try to get to the game that's going to be the big payoff. And it's really frustrating to me to watch that happen.
From where I'm sitting, of course I would want a publisher. Of course I would want to make some sort of relationship with another company who's trying to support indie development and put indie games in the hands of more people and get more exposure. But at what cost? There's a cost-benefit analysis that I don't think a lot of these indie companies are necessarily making where they show up to the plate and they think, "Oh, I'm gonna make games now. And that's just gonna be what I do. And I'm just gonna make money doing it and I'm gonna have the support of the rest of the industry.”
To go back really quick, you mentioned the industry hates independent games because it cuts into software sales. Could you touch on that a little bit?
Like, the rise of XBLA for example, or WiiWare or what have you, like, those storefronts weren't opened up altruistically.
What?
They were a money grab.
Wait a minute!
[Laughs.]
Well, but this is a thing that I rarely see get articulated. And it's like, what do you think the reason is the game industry and really big companies all of a sudden are really sounding the alarm for this stuff. Part of it is because game costs have gone up so ridiculously high and this is a group of cheaper developers taking risks that they don't want to take themselves.
I'm sure there's parts of them that really like the games, but they love more that it's going to cost them less money. [Laughs.]
Yeah. So, reflecting on my time at Nintendo, I was there for the entire Wii cycle and when the Wii came out -- even when it came out, the Internet channel wasn't quite ready. It was actually one of the first patches that people downloaded. So, the WiiWare channel, like, buying and downloading third-party software onto their console wasn't even a thing. But, as I was working there and as we progressed through the first three to six months of the Wii being on the market and watching the reaction that the consumer market had was astounding because a lot of us internally, by self-identifying as gamers, we're thinking to ourselves, "Okay, Nintendo, you're gonna make this console that has a goofy-ass name and you're gonna try to sell it to moms and old people. Sure, okay." But we're along for the ride because we're working there, and of course as any human being would, we were curious to see what happens next and how it all pans out.
The Wii comes out and then the WiiWare channel follows that. And I wasn't privy any of the conversations about why the WiiWare channel was made or anything. I can only reflect on what I saw and what I understand now.
Yeah. Yeah.
But the vast majority of the titles that got put out on the WiiWare channel were shovelware. And a lot of it was companies from overseas who had slapped something together and saw it as more of an opportunity to get on a market channel and a distribution channel with what they called blue ocean, which is where nobody else is selling anything. And so, mobile apps is a great example of how it used to be a blue ocean and now it's a red ocean because everybody's just, like, eating each other. [Laughs.]
Yeah.
It's the proverbial bucket of crabs, as I refer to it.
Sounds delicious.
[Laughs.] The WiiWare channel and a lot of the games that came out on it, Nintendo tried to seed the pot by releasing things like -- if I remember correctly, it was called Fluidity. It was an amazing WiiWare title. But that was independently developed and Nintendo just kind of scooped it up and put their name on it and then sent it out to the world.
So, as very often happens and it's just not really called out either, right? Like, the first party publishers will scoop up the third party development titles and then put their name on it and then everybody will think to themselves, "Oh, well, that's a Nintendo game." And it's actually not. It's made by a studio somewhere full of poor, starving developers who are just trying to make it like the rest of us. [Laughs.]
But they just signed a publishing deal that may or may not see to it that they never get money.
Right. Right. There is that. The visibility problem crops up again, right? Because Nintendo put their name on it. You don't get the credit. Which means you don't get seen. Which -- of course.
Which means you don't exposure. Which means people have no legacy at all to attach to your name.
Yeah. And the WiiWare channel was my first experience with watching Nintendo create a space on their platform for indie developers. But the thing was, as many if not more of those studios and developers were people just releasing games because there was an opportunity for making a quick buck.
So, that's kind of an interesting instance of maybe -- I don't know if you'd characterize that as hurting independent developers, but I'd be curious to hear about how you feel the press hurts independent developers.
[Sighs.] You know, to be honest? I don't and really haven't ever gone out of my way to regularly read, like, gaming news sites.
Yeah.
Everything that I understand about marketing for indie games is from the perspective of having tried to run a studio or tried to put a game out there into the world that got the attention of these channels. So, I helped out a couple of acquaintances, like, fellow indie developers. I helped run their marketing and press for them at PAX East in 2014, and I got the full exposure to interacting with the press by cold calling or cold emailing, as it were, and everything that I got out of that experience is that it's kind of like hitting a brick wall at full speed. [Laughs.]
What is it about it that's like smashing and braining yourself?
[Laughs.] I think it's a couple of things. One of the pieces of the puzzle is definitely that the people that make their email addresses available or the catch-all, general, "Email us at business@ourwebsite.com." The people who are reading and checking and following up with those are people who themselves have a lot of pressure on them to pick the cream of the crop, the thing that's going to get the most attention, the thing that's going to be the most outrageous or whatever.
Right.
So, there's this kind of self-selective process that happens on the other side of all of these press outlets where they're trying to find what the story is and there's a lot of marketing material out there oriented towards indie developers that says, "You gotta tell your story. You gotta help them find the story." And oftentimes that means writing it for them. So, in your introductory email, there's a very specific format or template that they suggest that you do because it helps people who are skimming their email recognize where the stories are, and then they might pick up yours easier because you've made it really accessible.
So, that's definitely a huge hurdle for a lot of people right up front, is just knowing how to communicate that to the press outlets. And then there's also this aspect of if your story is good but not great, like that guy that you mentioned is saying, well, your game is good but not great, then there's no reason for them to give you the time of day. Let's say you have 100 emails in a day and five of those sound promising, but two of them are really good, meaty -- you might get a good pat on the back for publishing the first story about this game that's gonna be released in a couple of years or whatever, then that's your opportunity and you take it.
That's one more aspect of this whole shit-cake. [Laughs.]
That sounds less delicious.
[Laughs.]
In theory I agree with you, but I feel like I rarely see people who are trying to be the first to expose their audience to something new. There's a lot of, and not just in games, but a whole, "Well, this other place covered this thing and this thing seems cool, so we should cover it, too."
And I've heard that, too, people saying, "Oh, you have to tell them your story." What are the stories that the press likes to tell about games that they're championing?
They like to tell stories about games that they know that their audience is going to like already. At face value, they pick out the games that look the most like the other games that were really successful. And I know it's not necessarily that that's the way that the games industry operates, this whole, "Well, we made Black Ops. Why don't we make Black Ops 2?" And it's the same game. Surprisingly.
There's also, like, this idea of, "Well, if we told this specific story and it was really popular -- it went viral, as they say -- you wanna hit that button again." From my time in online marketing that I spent after I left Nintendo, that's one of the things that I took away from that: If people think that they've struck gold, then they're just gonna keep hammering in that direction over and over again until it's completely dead.
I mean, you were saying, speaking of "hitting the button," you had said you wouldn't mind if just all of games journalism got burned to the ground and start it over right.
[Laughs.]
You are not the first person to tell me that. Several writers working in it have told me that. But what specifically needs to be burned to the ground?
I would say it's -- so, back in the day, there were publications like Nintendo Power that were driven really hard -- they were marketing pieces, right? Nintendo Power was owned by Nintendo and run by Nintendo and therefore wasn't what you would consider an objective third party. [Laughs.] Because it's almost like Nintendo is playing up and marketing their own games under the very thin veiled guise of, "We're objectively reviewing our own games." But they don't even say up front that they're objectively doing anything. However, it's packaged -- if it looks like a duck and it walks like a duck, then it must be a duck, right? So, if it's a magazine in the same section as all the other gaming magazines, then of course it's taken at face value.
It's advertising.
Right. I think the whole premise of having a gaming publication website where the premise and the front that you put out there is, "Yes, we're a legitimate source of reviews and gaming news and whatever else." That, if that's not actually true, then the only people that really know that and can hold them to those standards are the people that are part of the organization internally or that run those organizations. That's what I was getting at about maybe just starting over from scratch, like, getting rid of the pre-existing pillars of that community.
For people further outside of this stuff, what's really the damage that's being done by having this tightfisted narrowness?
There's a lot of skepticism that anything that's published on your typical gaming news outlet is actually true or wasn't actually secretly an advertisement or paid for by somebody under the table or is somebody playing favorites with -- maybe I am the lead editor at a really popular game news organization and all of my friends are game developers and publishers and whatever because the industry is so small. And so there's a lot of perceived, maybe actual collusion that happens. I mean, I don't know. That was the premise of Gamergate, right? Like, the premise was that they just took it at face value that there was that kind of collusion. And then they concocted -- they reverse-engineered all of these reasons why it was actually true.
I mean, there's collusion and all of the stuff that was being talked about. Just not in the places they were choosing to look.
Right. Right. Which is hilariously ironic. Right. [Laughs.]
What does a games press doing better look like? You said that there's no sincerity or deep analysis coming from the hive mind. So, what would you rather see?
Yeah. Well, so, there's no sincerity even in games journalism as it is right now because of not just this problem of the perceived collusion or the potential for that because of the proximity of everybody next to each other, but it's also, like, what traditional journalism has come to be defined as and the fact that games journalism in particular has not adhered to those standards in general.
Yeah, well, games writing got its start in enthusiast publications, as opposed to something like film writing, which got its start in journals.
Right. Right.
From there, here we are.
Yeah. And I think that it is going to be people gathering together and collectively deciding that, "No, we're going to do things differently and better." And refusing to take part in some of the gray areas that more traditional game websites do right now. The whole, like, sponsoring the industry parties or being so close in proximity that you actually become involved in the story somehow. The lack of disclosure about people's relationships with each other or how the news story fell into their lap or whatever -- there's no telling of the story around the story that happens in game journalism. And that's something like -- what you're doing with your website is part of that missing puzzle piece. Like, the frame around all of the stories that come out of the industry needs to be more transparent about what's happening.
Thank you. That's very kind.
I mean even if you’re going to try to critique games and not like, the culture around games, gaming criticism hasn't found its voice. We don’t have our Roger Ebert yet, whatever