S4 · Episode 9

Online communities are societies

with Faye V

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Today’s guest is Faye V, Community Lead Advisor at Chaos Manufacturing. Faye got a psychology degree, taught English in Japan, and spent years as a professional circus performer. From there she moved through the Pokémon Company, Singularity 6 (Palia), and Fantastic Pixel Castle, finally landing at Chaos Manufacturing today.

We chat about how her psychology degree shapes the way she thinks about online communities as cultures and societies of their own, and why understanding a community’s context is the key to communicating with honesty and transparency when things go sideways. Faye also draws a great parallel between circus troupes and game development studios, and how years of “the show must go on” live-event experience taught her to stay zen when a patch needs to be delayed.

Games mentioned in this episode:

Find Faye on:

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Transcription

Steve McLeod
Today I’m joined by Faye V. Faye is currently community lead advisor at Chaos Manufacturing. Faye’s very interesting career to date includes community-oriented roles at Fantastic Pixel Castle, Singularity 6, and the Pokémon Company, but there’s more. Faye has a degree in psychology, and on top of all that, she used to be a circus performer. Welcome to the show, Faye.

Faye
Hi, thank you so much for having me. I’m so happy to be here.

Steve McLeod
Now, I don’t know where to start with all of this.

Faye
Sure.

Steve McLeod
Normally my first question would be Tell us how tell us how you got your path into community management. But I mean, do we start with the psychology degree? Do we start with the circus stuff? Where do we start with your story?

Faye
It’s all sort of the same path, honestly, which I think is part of the fun of it. You know, I there’s no direct path into the games industry. And I love when people ask, how did you get into games? Because I get to tell them, well, I started as a circus performer, which is always sort of this, you know, that the question marks just start popping up over people’s heads.

But my hope and dream is that people realize that you don’t have to go get a degree in community management or in game development to be in the games industry, that so much of what we do is learned through other experiences and other paths. I can give a quick rundown if that’s interesting. I’m sure like the jump is probably a little bit hard to connect.

Steve McLeod
Please do that. St yeah, a little a little rundown.

Faye
Sure. I majored in psychology in college, which I I’ve just always been really interested in the way that you know, people’s brains work and why we behave certain ways. And obviously I think when people get into psychology, a lot of it can also be like, why am I like this as well? And, you know, that’s just part of the human condition.

And that is a huge part of what we do online is think about like why is somebody responding in this way? What else is going on in their life that might be contributing to like why they feel so passionate or even so angry about something that’s happening in this game, right?

I’m gonna come back to that though. I will say though, graduating with a degree in psychology, I 100% did not know what I wanted to do with my life. So right out of college, I actually ended up applying to the JET program, moved to Japan for a few years where I taught English. And that was a wonderful experience just in terms of kind of taking myself out of a culture that I’d always lived in and grown up in and immersing myself in a place that was very different.

And I think if people have the means or have the opportunity, and especially if they have access to a program like that, which helps provide the means and opportunity, people should do that just to, you know, build a little bit more of a cultural awareness. I think, especially in America, where we can be very America-centric in our thoughts of American culture, American media, and moving to a place that certainly has access to American media, but is not America-centered in that same way, completely changed how I think globally of different…

Different ways people think about talking about the things they’re passionate about, how they interact online. When I came back from the JET program, I moved out here to the Pacific Northwest.

I had been a performer and a dancer all of my life. And in in college, one of my hobbies was I joined the circus club. I know my college had a circus club, which sounds like a thing that colleges would have.

Steve McLeod
I’ve never heard of such a thing. uhuh.

Faye
But I came out here because I heard there was a circus school, and there are a number of circus schools on the west coast of the United States. There’s, I think, a bunch just all over the place now, which is great.

And I sort of dove right back in and I ended up… What you have to do when you are excited about performing is you’re performing but you also have to coach a lot of the times because it’s very difficult if you’re not like immediately on a touring show to sort of keep enough, make enough bookings happen that you’re actually paying your rent.

So I also was a I was a coach while I got into a performance troupe. And so I started performing as well, which was, which had always kind of been my dream. and to clarify what I did, I was with what people would call a generalist. So I did a little bit of everything. But my favorite things to do, my specialties were dance treppies, fire performance, and stilting. And I’ll make sure to send you some pictures.

Steve McLeod
No line taming these days, right?

Faye
No, yeah, it’s so actually, yes, that’s a kind of important point. I was involved in what we call new circus arts. There’s actually this is a whole thing in the circus community. There’s old circus, which involves like more animals, and new circus, which is all, as we said, all human tricks, people tricks. But I ended up also training to be a social circus coach or there’s a program through Cirque du Soleil about Circus for Social Change. And I got really involved in that, which was a very positive experience.

Steve McLeod
Okay.

Faye
And through that, I started working to build sort of curriculums for school programs and kids for all like alternative physical and arts education for kids who maybe don’t feel as comfortable in gym classes or who want to pursue something a little bit differently, or maybe kids are coming out of a very highly competitive gymnastics environment that wasn’t a great fit for them. What do they do now with all of these incredible physical skills they’ve built up? They don’t want to put those, they want to keep using those, right?

So that’s how I got into developing sort of all like I would say alternative school curriculums for this. And that’s when I got picked up at the Pokemon Company. they were looking for somebody to really build curriculum and like a club program and to focus on what they called their ‘learn to play’. So for the trading card game especially. And at that point, I think I was 29. So I had a bit of a what we might call a late start in the industry. So I was 29 and I remember getting this message on LinkedIn from this recruiter.

And I messaged my friend and I said, Hey, they worked at Pokemon. And I messaged my friend and I said, Hey, I think there’s somebody trying to impersonate a recruiter at Pokemon. I just got this message on LinkedIn and it I just wanted to let you know that that, you know, that this is happening. And my friend wrote back and said, that’s one of our recruiters. You should message them back. And so, my gosh. and so I did, and I ended up getting this incredible job as the social play manager at the Pokemon company, which was just an absolute dream.

And beyond that, after about three years, especially sort of at the height of the pandemic, it was one of those things. It’s like I started a Pokemon in November of 2019. And then by like spring of 2020, we were not in the office and we were 100% like work from home, fully quarantined. And my job very much transitioned to this like online space instead of working in person with the trading card game.

So after a number of years of that, I said, you know, I really do love this, but I want to get into video games. I was excited to try my hand at video games. So I moved to Singularity Six, where I helped to launch the cozy MMO Palia. And then after launching Palia, I moved to Fantastic Pixel Castle, where I worked on the prototype MMO Ghost. And now I’m at Chaos Manufacturing. So that’s sort of how that snowballed, I suppose.

Steve McLeod
So probably a third of all the guests I’ve ever had on this podcast kind of came into community management a bit later, five after already having a career somewhere else. But yours is probably the most sequitous, the most unusual, there. And it’s just amazing how these things you did along the way actually pulled you into the industry. You didn’t go looking for it, the industry pulled you.

Faye
Ha ha ha. Yeah.

Steve McLeod
But was when Faye was ten years old or fifteen years old, did she ever think to herself, I would like to work in the games video games industry. Were you or were you already a heavy gamer then?

Faye
You know, I really was. I’m lucky to have grown up in a family that really celebrated. I would say I guess like nerd culture. Like my dad’s a big Lord of the Rings fan, right? I remember the first video game I ever beat was The Legend of Zelda, A Link the Past on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. And to be clear, when I say beat by myself, I mean my brother helped me a lot. But like to this day, Zelda games are some of my favorites.

I think it didn’t occur to me that adults like made games until a little bit later in my life. And, you know, in retrospect, of course adults make games. They have to get made somehow and children are not like, you know, children are not in the video game mines, right? Like working to make games. But I think the concept of making games was I don’t know. It didn’t it didn’t really strike me until a little bit later that this was something that you could do for a job.

And then once it did, I thought, I have to have, you know, a computer science degree. I have to be a programmer or I have to be like really brilliant with game mechanics, which to be clear, I am not, you know, I love playing games, but I think if I were trying to sit down and design like a really strong like combat system or like a trading card game, I would be absolutely a fish out of water. That is not my strong suit.

But over time, and especially when I was in college, I really got into MMOs. I played Lord of the Rings online with my dad. That was our way of staying in touch when I was in college.

Steve McLeod
Cool. that’s so cool.

Faye
Very, very smart. Yeah. fun fact, if you if you are worried about your kids not calling home when they’re in college, get a subscription to an MMO with them and play with them.

Steve McLeod
Haha. Awesome.

Faye
So that’s when I started to think, this is a really social, really social experience for me. And a lot of the friends that I made in the MMOs I was playing when I was in college, I’m still friends with those people today. So when I realized, that is a job, the process of making a positive social space.

To build connections is not done by accident. It is a thoughtfully curated experience. That’s when I started to think, maybe that is something I could do. Right. But again, I had wanted to be a performing artist so much that I was and I was so hard pursuing that.

That it didn’t really strike me again, it’s like I just didn’t think there was any way into games at that point until Pokemon messaged me and I thought, for the first time I saw, my experience actually applies here. And like that is that’s one of the core messages I always try to tell people is I understand you don’t think you have experience that applies in the games industry or that applies in community management or any other part of games. You might have more than you think.

Steve McLeod
Yeah, that’s a good message. Although I can’t get this idea out of my head of the other children working in the video games’ mines.

Faye
Yeah, it’s just right, well that’s what Minecraft is, right? The children yearn for the mines.

Steve McLeod
True, true. Yeah. Literally.

And then Roblox is pretty much that. I mean, more metaphorically. Hey, let’s go back to the psychology degree because this I’m very curious to hear how that comes in handy when working in large online communities. And you did say put a footnote put a pin in that. We will come back to that later. So how has this psychology degree been helpful or how does it continue to be helpful?

Faye
Yeah. So I think anytime we have to confront how people think and why people behave in a certain way is really helpful for not just examining our own behavior, but examining behavior in small, medium, and large groups, right? That’s that is the entirety of psychology and sociology.

Psychology is the study of you know, the individual, the brain, and sort of applied as well. There’s cultural psychology, there’s social psychology. And then we start getting into sociology. Why do societies work the way they do? Why do cultures start to diverge or converge or work the way they do? Anytime we start to think about that, we are better at our jobs because online communities are cultures. Online communities are societies.

Steve McLeod
Sure. Oh one hundred percent.

Faye
Right. One of the I the this comes up in very large and small ways.

So many community managers are also social media managers. And there is something I talk about in social media management, which is make sure the content that you’re posting is appropriate for the platform it’s going on. Twitter has a different culture than Reddit, which has a different culture than TikTok. And if you try to compare those three, everybody will get very mad at you. Even if people still use all three platforms, they are not the same and the social expectations are not the same.

Similarly, moving between online game spaces, just because a community of one game is in Discord and the Discord server icons are next to each other on the same list, does not mean the social expectations are the same between each community space. And a lot of that you can get from like community guidelines, which the community manager of that game has probably helpfully written up and put it in the intro space in the Discord server.

But some of that also comes from watching the way people interact. There are societal expectations when you move into a space. And part of that has to do with genre expectations, part of that has to do with, you know, what kind of game you’re moving into. But I think anytime we start to think about that, you know, we step back and think about this as a bigger picture. Why did this culture develop this way?

What does that mean for the people involved in it who have put time, who care about this, who are, who are making their home in this space? We are better equipped to walk in and help to set a healthy foundation. I think this is important when you’re growing a new community from the ground up, but it’s also important if you’re coming in as a new community manager into a space that is very well established.

And that happens, especially with online games with strong legacies. If you come in and say, okay, well, we’re just gonna manage this community my way, I can’t imagine that community manager is going to make friends.

Steve McLeod
Ooh… That won’t go well.

Faye
Right. I think there is an there needs to be an understanding of like how the gameplay and of the game itself has contributed to the behavior of the people in the online spaces. A more competitive esports-like game is going to have a different psychological and social behavior expectation than a cozy game. Right. And that doesn’t I’m not saying one is better than the other, but they’re just different. And that’s fine.

Steve McLeod
Yeah, gotcha.

Faye
So when I think about the way that people behave online as well, and kind of coming back more to the individual person, say you’ve posted patch notes for a game. You’ve got an update coming out, you’re really excited about it, and you’re caught left field by the interpretation or the implementation of something in the patch by the players. This is going to happen. You can’t prevent this.

Like there is, it’s that joke, right? Of, you know, I’m in game development. It doesn’t matter how many different shapes. People will always put whatever shape block through the square hole in the like players are going to play a game they want to play in the way they want to play it. They’re not it doesn’t matter how much yellow paint we put in the game.

Steve McLeod
Yeah, yeah.

Faye
So when I think about that, or I think about being caught left field. Being caught out of left field is to like maybe a really negative interaction or a negative interpretation. And it’s starting to catch some traction. Maybe there’s a little bit of drama. We’re doing sentiment reports. We’re thinking, this is actually really not being perceived well. Being able to step back and say, like, what else is going on? What other things in the context of the game or the world are contributing to why this might be landing poorly.

When we have context, we’re always going to be able to better communicate with honesty and transparency why we made a decision. And when I think about that, or if we don’t know, when we take all the context into account and we still aren’t sure, we are still better equipped to then go to the community and say, what’s going on?

Right. And that’s a huge part of our jobs too, is being able to go to the community and we’ve built up enough trust and we’ve built up enough rapport that we can say, I can see this as being perceived really badly. Like this is not landing with you guys. And we wanted it to land. What’s going on?

Being able to approach that question with the understanding that we are, we have power in the sense that we have developed this game and we’re sort of handing it to people who are playing it. They don’t have development power. But we also still value their feedback. We value their interpretation and we value their enjoyment, right? Being able to understand human behavior and all of that, that’s going to make our ability to go to them and actually use that information that much, that much better.

Yeah. I could talk for hours about this.

Steve McLeod
So perhaps a a tip for perhaps a tip for community managers who don’t have psychology degrees is go get yourself a psychology-101 book because it really sounds like everything you learn there is going to be very helpful for the job.

Faye
Ha ha ha. Yeah. I could I could send you a book list if you want. I have thoughts. But yeah, I think there are some, there are some fantastic, and it’s I like don’t go get a psychology textbook, you are going to bore yourself to death. But I think there are some really wonderful books out there about psychology and a related field called behavior economics, which sounds very mercenarial, but is actually more of sort of like applied behavior, yeah.

Steve McLeod
Yeah, yeah, Fascinating stuff. I’ve got into that that field of like pop books, like popular books some years ago, yeah, and I couldn’t get enough of them. All these like really surprising findings of how humans behave in the face of unexpected motivations.

Faye
Mm-hmm. Yes, absolutely.

Steve McLeod
Hey, should we should we should we touch on the circus performer part of your background and how that has been helpful in your job in community?

Faye
Sure. Sure. I, yes, because I think it feels different.

Right. It’s a circus performance is a very it’s a very visceral, it’s very embodied, it’s very on stage, it’s very in person. And then you have all the work that I do in the digital space. How can these two things possibly intersect? And the answer is again, I think it comes down to it first of all, it comes down to human behavior. It comes down to kind of trying to create an experience that is like an entertainment experience, it’s enjoyable for your audience.

Steve McLeod
Yeah.

Faye
A game development studio is not that different from a circus. In my experience, a circus troupe and a game development studio are a collection of highly specialized experts working together to put together a show or a game that is a cohesive and a whole experience that can be enjoyed by the audience without them seeing the places where it breaks into different parts.

If you’ve done your job correctly in the circus and you’ve done your job correctly in games, the show is one show. It’s not individual soloists, it’s not unless it’s variety show and that’s different.

But it is a cohesive whole. And the same thing is true about games. You don’t want to be able to pick out like engineering versus systems design versus combat design versus right. And then the combined with just the sort of event person mentality, anybody who’s been in esports or event management, the show must go on, right?

When you are working in live performance, you’ve booked a venue. You have to have a show there that day. You’ve sold tickets. It doesn’t matter what’s going on. The roof could be leaking. This did actually happen to me one time. and you don’t have a way to fix this. There’s a sudden downpour, the roof is leaking, and so it’s like you and three other people are holding a tarp up so that the performance out on stage isn’t getting water to slip on, and then like you’re taking shifts holding the tarp up to make sure that the performance can go on until a facilities person can get there to fix the ceiling.

Steve McLeod
That has happened, you’re telling a real story there. Wow.

Faye
Yes, that did happen, yes. Yeah. I again, if you want to have an episode where we just talk about all the ridiculous stuff that I’ve seen backstage at both like working in, you know, competitive training card game and also working in circus, the stuff that can go wrong, again, if we’ve done our job rights, nobody, nobody sees that. My coworker from Pokemon, Dan Brandt, I feel like I have to cite him because I love the way he said this. He said, It’s an event should be like a duck on the water.

And you see the duck, if every if we’ve done our jobs right, you see this duck, and he’s just sort of gently, gracefully, calmly gliding along. And then we are the feet underneath the water, paddling away furiously. but you shouldn’t ever see that, right? That’s what makes the duck go. Yeah. so shout out to Dan, because he’s also doing community. Incredible person.

When I think about that and just the amount of like, well, we have to keep going. We don’t have an option. Moving into a digital game space, I am, I don’t know. I feel like shockingly zen about, we have to delay the patch. we have to – Okay. It’s a digital patch.

Like, yeah, we said it was gonna come out and all right, I’m going to, I’ll write the comms to say it has to be delayed. We’ll explain why. We’ll be as clear as possible. People are gonna be pissed. That’s okay. They have you know, people feel emotions. They have a right to their feelings.

Steve McLeod
Mm-hmm.

Faye
I’ll get in the community, we’ll chat with people, I’ll try to clarify as much as I can, and then we’ll pick a new day and we’ll put the patch out on that day. We didn’t book space. We didn’t, we don’t have set pieces. We don’t have, you know, a tour bus full of performers speaking various languages coming in, or like, you know, a bunch of seven-year-olds flying in from different countries with their shockingly, shockingly valuable Pokemon decks trying to, you know, come to a tournament that that, you know, has to happen that day.

I think there’s something about event people where we get very used to whatever has to be done, has to be done. And that is incredible experience. It’s incredibly valuable experience. Very stressful, very stressful at the time. But you look back on it and you build that camaraderie. Yeah. Yeah.

Steve McLeod
I can imagine. Yeah. Yeah.

And yeah, yeah, there’s so many things. You you’re making my mind wander into or not wander, but think of all those things I’ve been involved with long ago where things just happened on a particular day and everyone knew they did and you know, didn’t matter. If somebody was sick, well we rolled with that, you know. They if they were too sick to be on stage or perform or do something backstage, we would find a replacement. We just did it, yeah.

Faye
Yep. Yeah.

Steve McLeod
My experience is not like yours, but yeah, and then coming into the games industry being so zen. It must be really calming having you and the team actually. In in the in the in the video game team.

Faye
I hope so, I think I can be a very energetic person. I you know one of the jokes that I say it’s like you can call me a community manager or you can call me a personality cannon, right? Turn the cannon, fire it whatever way you just need like energy and personality to happen.

Steve McLeod
What does that mean? Explain that. Personality cannon.

Faye
I guess like I just like I just said yeah, it’s we do we need comms or conversation, or we need somebody to go explain, or we need somebody to I don’t know, like just go be an energetic hype person. Turn the cannon, whatever direction you need that to happen, fire, right? I’m going. I’m gonna go be that personality over there as necessary.

I think people joke a lot about a personality hire, but yeah, community managers are personalities. That’s a huge part of what we are. and I think the thing that makes that successful is like being able to be the hype person, being able to also shift gears quickly, be the you know, the understanding apology person if we need to be, being able to communicate authentically and genuinely and with transparency and trust and love of the game and the community.

That’s all part of like the personality and the ability to do that with just like constantly is a job. It’s work. But it’s work that we love. So yeah. We’re all personality cannons.

Steve McLeod
Is it emotionally exhausting having to change gears so quickly? That’s all part of the job.

Faye
I think it can be. Thankfully, hopefully we’re not doing both like big hype up and also apologies in the same day. If that’s happened, I do have questions about what what occurred in the last patch, do you know what mean?

Steve McLeod
Ha ha. Mm-hmm.

Faye
But I think that there are definitely times, you know, when a patch goes out, for example, and like some people were really, really excited about this thing, but other people are disappointed that the update they wanted or a new edition they wanted isn’t in this patch, right?

And so there are always a lot of emotions around, especially if you’re working in in an MMO or a live service game that people have poured hundreds and hundreds of hours into, right? Like that’s their home. They’ve made their home there. Sometimes literally, right? And wow and Final Fantasy XIV, other I think even Lord of the Rings online, which is still going. Incredible.

There’s player housing. They’ve poured time into this, right? That’s their home. It’s our job to curate that well. So yeah. Yeah.

Steve McLeod
Wow. It’s amazing how old, not old but how some of these MMOs now they’ve just been going for so long and they keep going and they keep having large player bases and it’s incredible. Faye, I’m just debating what to do here because in our shared notes we have so much good stuff still to cover, but we don’t have time for it. Maybe just, maybe we’re gonna have to schedule another call to do a like a part two very soon.

Faye
Oh no. Okay.

Steve McLeod
Yeah, I really can’t keep doing that now because I have to take it’s a very hot day here in Barcelona and I have to take my daughter to the swimming pool. And she’s just coming home from school very soon. Otherwise I’d keep going, but yeah, because I I don’t want to rush through the rest of the stuff we’ve got there because I think you’ve got some really good things to add.

Faye
Sure, Absolutely, yeah.

Steve McLeod
So why don’t we just go to the final question that I ask everybody in this podcast? The most important question some would say. What games have you been playing lately?

Faye
Of course. I am sort of I call myself an agnostic, a full stack gamer. I will try just about anything. even if I’m bad at it, right? Like I’m absolutely terrible at Souls Likes. I still tried Elden Ring. I was bad at it. But what have I been playing lately? I’ve been really enjoying Fields of Mistria, which is you know, it’s like a cozy farming, I would call it like a Stardew’s like at this point. There’s an entire genre of that.

Steve McLeod
Yeah. huh.

Faye
But it’s very also inspired by like nineties anime, especially graphics-wise, especially Sailor Moon, which is a which is like a TV show that’s very, very near and dear to my heart from my childhood. and I also have been really enjoying Icarus, which is we were talking a little bit about it earlier. It’s it’s a survival roguelike almost.

I probably am actually describing that wrong, but it’s it’s there it’s like it it’s got these ARPG style skill trees, you play with your friends. It’s a base builder on a foreign planet, but you also can pick up these little missions and go do the little missions and maybe go do the missions over. And that’s that I guess that’s what kind of gives me that like a little bit of a rogue-likey feel. But it is more of an open world than a roguelike. I want to be clear. I’m gonna get absolutely lambasted for calling it a roguelike on the internet. I already know. I know I know.

Steve McLeod
Apologies already there. Okay.

Faye
But it has that, Yeah. I’m sorry. I’m learning and I’m listening, right? But I really enjoy how light it is in that sense, where I can get in and play with my friends. And if I just want to sit and build a house for like three hours, I can do that.

But if I do want to go run some missions and learn the plot, I can also I can also go run missions, open up the plot a little bit. So it’s got a little bit of that like light, light MMO ARPG flavor, which I’m really enjoying. And then of course Final Fantasy XIV is my current MMO of choice and has been for the last like six years. So I’ve been I’ve been getting back into that as the new expansion has finally been announced and I’m excited.

Steve McLeod
So many gamers have an old faithful friend we keep going back to. Mine was The Binding of Isaac. I just need to mention about Icarus two things. This game is near and dear to my heart for two reasons. First, I’m from New Zealand originally, although I live in Spain, and Icarus is a big New Zealand-based hit. It’s the studio is in New Zealand. I can’t think of the name of the studio off the top of my heart, off the top of my mind, but Rocket, Rocket Something, Rocket Works. Secondly.

They are a Feature Upvote customer too, which I’m really proud of.

Faye
They are. They are. Mm-hmm.

Steve McLeod
They and they have been for a few years. And in fact they we learned things from them because they got so much feedback on Feature Upvote. It actually encouraged us to go and sort of streamline the way you bulk manage, you deal with lots and lots of feedback. So yeah, that that’s why I’m really happy to hear you mention Icarus.

Faye
They’re amazing. They’re they put out content every week, which I’m just constantly surprised by. And you know, not every patch has to be just- That’s actually one of the things I love what I what I think of as the Icarus model, because while they are doing updates weekly, which to like a live service open world multiplayer game sounds very stressful, not every update is huge. And when they do have big updates, they clearly gear up for them in a way that I mean I haven’t met anybody who works at the studio, but it seems like a much healthier sort of development cycle than just trying to have tons of new content every single week.

But I am really, really impressed with the way that they manage their development cycle. It’s part of what keeps me coming back to the game constantly. Also, they just released like animal husbandry so you can go tame and then like, you know, like breed your mounts for rare colors or abilities. And I’ve been obsessed with it. So I now have this like increasingly large barn of desert raptors in my game. So shout out to Icarus.

Steve McLeod
Ha ha, don’t you find as a community manager when you’re playing games you are always analysing how they’re doing things, how they’re communicating and so on?

Faye
Yes. Yes. Yes. There is always this part of our brain that’s like, ooh, I like how they did that, or like trying to like how did they make that happen or let me look at their I want to go look at their communication style and this is so fun for me but I must be a nightmare to my non game industry friends because I can’t not talk about this this way anymore.

It’s one of those things though where you develop a different layer of love for the medium. And I think what it is that we can’t, we can’t just enjoy a game for a game. But part of that is that we now have a new, we now have a new vantage point from which we get to enjoy, if that makes any sense. It’s a different it’s a different layer of enjoyment. It’s not ‘not’ having fun. Yeah.

Steve McLeod
Exactly. What I find has changed me is I will now wishlist any game that wants to be wishlist, I’ll do it because I realise how much it is important for their morale to see these wishlists there. Even if I’m not gonna play the game, I look at it and it’s like I’m not gonna do it, but I’m still gonna wishlist it.

Faye
Yeah. Absolutely.

Steve McLeod
Faye, Faye, we need to wrap up. hopefully we can schedule a part two. So thanks again for being on the show.

Faye
Yes of course, thank you for having me. I’ll try to make sure I wear the same shirt the next time we do this so that there’s like easy continuity between the two. Yeah.

Steve McLeod
Haha. And where can listeners get in touch if they’d like to know more about what we’ve discussed today?

Faye
So you can always find me on Bluesky where I am A-C-O-B-I, Acobi. And you can find me I don’t really use Twitter anymore, but I do have an account there. You can find me there as well, but it’s A-C-Zero-B-I because somebody had taken in my screen name. Of course. But Bluesky is where I’m most active. You can find me there.

And I am also on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/fayevis/, And I’m happy to chat with anybody. Yeah, this is this is one of my favorite parts of the community of the industry, right? Is just getting to know folks.

Steve McLeod
Likewise. And we will of course have those Bluesky, Twitter and LinkedIn links in the show notes. Okay, bye Faye.

Faye
Bye.

Steve McLeod
Bye, bye everyone.