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“I’m doing this because I love doing it” with Jeremy Fielding

The Community Lounge Season 1 Episode 2

Today’s guest is Jeremy Fielding, currently working at Stunlock Studios on V Rising, a vampire survival action RPG.

Jeremy and I chat about how community management took him from Florida to a small city in Sweden, how you learn to be a community manager, and what the upward career path for community managers can look like.

Games mentioned in this episode: V Rising, Battlerite, Shogun Showdown

Find Jeremy on:

The Community Lounge is brought to you by Feature Upvote: Painlessly collect feedback from your players. More insights, less noise.

Transcript

Steve McLeod
Today’s guest is Jeremy Fielding, currently working at Stunlock Studios on V Rising. We chat about how you learn to be a community manager and what the upward career path can look like for community managers.

Welcome to the show, Jeremy.

Jeremy Fielding
Yeah, thank you. It’s really nice to be here.

Steve McLeod
Tell me briefly what you’re currently doing at Stunlock.

Jeremy Fielding
Currently I work as a community manager. I’ve been doing that for about three years now. I also worked for them for a year a few years before that in like 2018 as a Discord manager. So that was like a part time gig. So overall this is like my full experience in the game dev industry. So I have about four years total.

Steve McLeod
Okay, what games or game are you working on at the moment?

Jeremy Fielding
When I was a Discord manager, I worked on Battlerite and Battlerite Royale. For this one I’m working on V Rising and I also work on Battlerite a little bit just like to keep things maintained. But our primary project is V Rising right now.

Steve McLeod
Now I want to hear the background story. V Rising is this big Swedish, huge mega success story. But you’re not Swedish. You told me earlier you’re from Florida. Tell how it happened. How did you end up getting into community management and going from Florida to Sweden?

Jeremy Fielding
Okay, well, okay, so I mentioned I was a Discord manager back in 2018. That was because a little bit before that in like 2016, I started running tournaments for this game called Battlerite which was like an offshoot of a game that I loved back in 2012 and I was like amazed that it had popped back up, its spiritual successor had like been made. And I was really excited about that. So I got really involved in the community. I was moderator in every Twitch stream for people who were streaming that game and they were kind of like my people for a little while.

And I started running tournaments for North America because I got scooped up by like a Rocket League org that wanted to get into doing tournaments for this game.

And my experience with that led to me getting to know some people at Stunlock because it was a Stunlock Studios game and eventually they needed someone to run their Discord. They reach out to me because I didn’t seem too crazy. And I did that for them for a little, little while. And then when they stopped active production on Battlerite, I ended up getting laid off. And a few years later I was kind of looking for CM positions because I thought, you know, I got like a little taste of it and I was like, you know, this is kind of like, this seems like something I’m actually really good at. And, you know, when you find that thing, it suddenly becomes like an obsession. So I was trying to work my way into the game dev business, which was very hard.

And then out of nowhere, the marketing director for Stunlock reached out to me and said, like, hey, we’re looking for a community manager for our next game. Would you be interested in applying? So I did. And then like a little while later, they ended up getting back to me and interviewing me. And I went through like a whole long process. Took like a couple months. And then finally they decided they wanted to hire me. And that’s how I ended up getting picked up by Stunlock. And when I did, I said like, hey, just letting you know, I would like to move to Sweden. Like, I don’t want to be here in America. I would like to be moved out there. So eventually after they decided I was a good fit, they decided to move me out.

Steve McLeod
Okay, so you actually set that as the condition, not them?

Jeremy Fielding
Yeah, no, they were totally fine with having me in the U.S. I worked fine remote and it was kind of cool having someone in that time zone, you know, and if they needed someone to go to like shows in North America, it would be convenient to have me over there. But I really wanted to be in the studio. It’s actually really hard to do what you do as a CM, I think, well, without having a lot of close contact with the devs.

Steve McLeod
You know, it’s an industry that is embracing remote to some degree, but I think in person it’s hard to beat for some of the advantages, right?

Jeremy Fielding
Yeah. Well, the thing is, like, when you’re, you know, we’re both adults, we’re grownups, you know, it’s really hard to meet people and connect with people when you’re an adult because you have so much to do.

Like, you’re always just trying to keep your life in order.

It’s so much work and you don’t have a lot of spare time to just socialize and reach out to people unless you have like a specific reason to do it.

So as a community manager, I think it’s like really important that you know your game really well and you know your devs really well and you know how they think and like why they’re doing the things they’re doing. Right?

Steve McLeod
Yeah.

Jeremy Fielding
Because I view it as primarily my job to communicate to the devs what the players think and the players what the devs are thinking. Like to be that bridge of communication, to make it so everyone understands each other. Right.

Steve McLeod
And you can’t do that completely unless you sometimes having lunch together and maybe doing something after work, I don’t know. In Sweden is there a culture of after work drinks?

Jeremy Fielding
Yeah, sometimes.

Steve McLeod
Yeah, just the casual conversation leads to a much better understanding. Sorry for putting words in your mouth.

Jeremy Fielding
No, you’re totally right. And in Sweden especially, actually, they have this thing called Fika, which is like sort of coffee break.

And it happens like at Stunlock we do it every day at 9:30am and 3pm.

Steve McLeod
Okay, tell me about Fika.

Jeremy Fielding
Okay, so you come to work at 8am. At 9:30am, we like do a little sort of bell ring inSslack. Everybody gets together in a big room upstairs and we all sit down in this big lunch room/lounge/whatever. And we all hang out and just talk for 15-20 minutes, have coffee, like a little snack of some kind. Usually like a sandwich or a pastry or something.

And you just have a small snack, talk, get your caffeine, go back to work, you know, have lunch at noon. Then, you know, you come back from lunch, you work for a little bit longer. Then we have Fika again at 3pm where we all get together and we just chill for like another 15, 20 minutes. And then you go back to work, you finish out your day and you leave.

And these like little times you spend together, you get to like, talk about stuff. And a lot of times, like, you know, you’re thinking about work because it’s the middle of the day. So you’ll sit there and maybe you need a break from work and you just need to talk about something else. But a lot of the time you’re just like, hey, here’s this thing I’m working on, or I’m thinking about this, or like I’m having this problem and you talk to your coworkers about it and it’s like really nice. I learned so much about like how we think about game design and like what we’re working on and what we’re thinking about.

And if I’m remote, like, you don’t get to spend these Fika breaks with them. Like you or lunch, like, you know, you’re remote and like lunch today and lunch and lunch. A lot of days actually I eat with like the game designers and we’re talking about concepts of game design and how we think about making games.

And I think if I wasn’t doing this, I would have such a much poorer understanding of how we go about things. I’d be so much worse at communicating with our players.

Steve McLeod
That’s great. Thank you. Stunlok is based in – I think that’s the company based in this really small Swedish city where lots of games come from.

Jeremy Fielding
Skövde.

Steve McLeod
Skövde. Oh, wow, you’re learning some Swedish.

Jeremy Fielding
Yeah. You can never guess how it’s spelled. It’s like S-k-o with weird dots over it-v-d-e. Skövde.

Steve McLeod
And how is it living in Skövde?

Jeremy Fielding
It’s nice. It’s really nice. It’s like a tiny, walkable city.

I walk to work, which is something I could never do in the us and I walk everywhere. I get my groceries, everything. I haven’t driven a car in a year and a half, at least, which is amazing. I didn’t realize how much I hated driving until I didn’t have to do it anymore.

It’s just really nice and it’s got a really nice game dev culture here. We just had Swedish Game Conference last week and that was really nice, where a bunch of people came to our town and did talks and I did a panel with some of the community managers from Irongate and Coffee Stain and that was really nice.

Yeah, it’s a great little town with a great little game dev culture.

Steve McLeod
So Irongate and Coffee Stain are both in the same town?

Jeremy Fielding
Yeah.

Steve McLeod
Yeah. That’s amazing. I was at Nordic Game earlier this year and I talked to somebody who’s involved in the business side of running a hub or an incubator there, and I just couldn’t believe this. I couldn’t believe this whole story about how a whole games industry has come to be in a city of maybe. Was it like 50,000, 100,000 people?

Jeremy Fielding
Yeah, 50,000.

I can actually see the incubator from my window. Like, I can see it from here.

Like I said, it’s a really small town. There’s this place called the Science Park that we’re in that is like, it’s us, it’s Palindrome who are working on a Legend of the Five Rings thing, there’s FRAME BREAK, who made Lightyear Frontier, which just came out, was really good.

They just moved out of here, but they were here for a long time.

Every time I walk down to like the cafeteria. I see like a million game devs from a million other studios and it’s just really nice.

Steve McLeod
Let’s move on to the topic of being a community manager in general.

So as I was, one of the reasons I’ve made this podcast is that I actually found it really hard to find good information on the Internet about how to be a community manager, how to do it better, how to learn.

So where do you go to learn how to do it better? Where did you go when you first got the job? How did you learn to do this job properly?

Jeremy Fielding
So someone asked me this at SGC recently, actually. Like a student walked up to me. Cause I was representing Stunlock in the career fair and a student walked up to me, he’s like, so what would you do to learn how to do your job? He’s like, what would you recommend that I check out? And I was like, oh God, dude, I have no idea.

Absolutely no idea. It’s just like my whole life I’ve been really interested in psychology and people and how they think and how communities form because it’s just human psychology on a higher level of a bunch of humans interacting with each other and why they do the things they do and how they interact with each other. I find it so fascinating.

Other people’s perspectives especially are so unique and so interesting. And the ability to comprehend that another person can look at the same sentence you look at and derive a completely different meaning from it just because they have different experiences and they just relate words in different ways and get different feelings just from reading different words is like, so fascinating to me.

And I think that interest is part of why I learned to be good at what I do.

Which is something I was not comfortable saying until sort of recently after I’d been doing this job for a year or two and realized like, oh man, this is a skill.

I had no idea.

Steve McLeod
It’s really nice that you’ve come to accept that about yourself. I think it’s too easy to have that negative idea of what we’re doing.

Jeremy Fielding
Yeah, I think in game dev imposter syndrome is really, really common because you really do never feel like you know what you’re doing. But I think that’s just like adulthood in general is realizing like, oh, none of us have any idea what we’re doing. And it’s just learning to not stress about having to improv something because you realize, like, oh yeah, I’ve had to learn how to do my taxes. I can figure this out too.

But it’s like that with every single thing in your life.

Steve McLeod
I think one day after you’ve been doing the same thing for a few years, one day you just realize, I actually know what I’m doing. Especially when you see people new to the job and you see them making mistakes that you know you’ve made, and you realize, oh, they’re going through that phase I went through long ago.

Jeremy Fielding
Yeah. But you also know at the same time that there are so many things that will crop up that you know you will not know how to do. Like, you’re just like, there’s gonna be an infinite number of ways for whatever I’m doing to go wrong, and I’m just gonna have to figure it out, and I’m okay with that.

Steve McLeod
Okay. So far, about resources that help you learn to do your job better as a community manager, we’ve listed zero. We’ve said that it was really hard.

Jeremy Fielding
I would say that it’s just doing it. Because it really is just that you really just need to. I don’t know if you find yourself in a space and you see people getting into an argument about something that you think is really dumb because you understand what they’re both saying, but they’re both just talking past each other, and you feel the urge to step in, be like, no, no, no, no, no, look, he’s just saying this. He’s saying this. You guys need to listen to each other.

If you find yourself needing to do that, then you have the building blocks to be a community manager, because that’s a lot of what it is. It’s not like moderating people necessarily, but when you are moderating people, you’re building the skills necessary to understand communication. And that’s really what it’s all about. It’s just like understanding how people communicate with each other and sort of practicing that and learning to be understood, learning to be patient, and learning how to make people understand each other.

Steve McLeod
Okay, great answer.

Do you have any memorable positive moments as a community manager? Any story or experience that particularly stands out to you where you’ve really thought, I’m glad I’m doing this job?

Jeremy Fielding
Yeah, there are lots of moments where I’m just like, I can’t believe this is my job, you know, where it’s like, I have to kind of stop. So one moment, it wasn’t with community members or anything, but I had a moment fairly recently where I was walking home and I was talking to someone, and I stopped, and I was like, oh, Yeah, I get paid to do this. Like, I forgot that I get paid. Like, I am lucky enough to be in a position where I make enough money that I don’t have to really worry about, you know, money, like, because living in Skövde is also super cheap, like, compared to what I was in Fort Lauderdale.

I remember what it’s like to live in Fort Lauderdale and have no money and always be worried about money.

And I realized at some point that I wasn’t worried about money. And I’m also just doing this because I love doing it. Like, I’m not thinking about, like, I gotta do this because I need to eat. Like, I’m thinking about this. Like, I need to do this because, like, I really want our game to succeed and I want people to be happy.

I want everyone to understand each other and everything to go as good as possible. And I love having a part in that. And when I realized that I was doing it for those reasons, that really struck me.

Steve McLeod
That’s so nice. I guess there are many, many young adults or college students or even high school students who would look at what you’re doing – I mean, it’s their dream to work in the games industry, right? For a lot of people. And a lot of people realize once they get there that it’s not quite what they imagined it being. So it’s so nice that you’re actually happy and you feel we’ve got a good job situation. That’s really nice.

Jeremy Fielding
Thank you. I mean, it is easy to burn out. I’m lucky because my company cares about that. They’re very good about trying to give me time if I work a lot of hours, because there are, you know, there have been weeks where I’m working, like, 70 hours, you know, because there’s a lot to do.

And when you’re in the marketing side especially, you’ll go through just phases where it’s just like, there is so much to do and it all has to be done right now. Time is finite and tomorrow will be completely different than today. Like, when it comes to marketing, things need to happen at that moment. Very often there’s no, like, pushing it off till next week. So sometimes you have to work some crazy hours. But my company is very good about, you know, giving you those hours back, encouraging you to take time off, trying to get you to be like, you know, it doesn’t have to be crazy. They really try to respect your time and be wary of burnout. And also, we just feel that if you’re happy, you do better work.

And also we’re human beings and more than our work, so should have some sort of balance with that.

Steve McLeod
Do you think that’s an unusual attitude for a company to have in the video games industry.

Jeremy Fielding
In games especially? Yeah, I think in Sweden it’s more common in general with, with all companies.

But when it comes to games, like even in Sweden, it kind of melts in a little bit, that culture of like overwork. Because it’s a passionate field, right. And also like in pretty much any part of the games industry, like if you’re a programmer or something like that, you could be working any other job than this one and be making like two to three times your salary because game studios can only afford to pay you so much. And in the tech industry, you can make so much money.

But if you’re passionate about making games, you’re making games. And that often means grossly overworking yourself because you can. You’re never really finished, you know, like a painting, like you can just keep painting until… cause it’s just done when you say it’s done. And that’s it.

Jeremy Fielding
There’s really never a shortage of things to do as a community manager.

It’s like a very interesting position because it’s a lot of soft skills type of stuff. And also it’s very fluid. Like what work there is to do is very fluid. And it is just whatever you decide you have time to do.

And at the same time as a CM, because your work is very fluid a lot of the time you’ll also pick up lots of little jobs. Like someone’s like, do you have time for this? And you can usually say, yeah, I can do that. If I cut a little time off of this, I can make time to do that. So you end up picking up lots of little jobs.

Also because as a community manager you have a sort of wide variety of skills, like you’re good at writing, you’re good at communication. You’re usually knowledgeable about a lot of little things. Like you have your fingers sort of like in every little bit of the studio because you have to know what everyone’s doing to be able to talk about it.

And often you’ll have a lot of tertiary skills related to those things. Like, I do a lot of writing on our game.

Steve McLeod
Really? I had no idea that a community manager can be given that opportunity to be involved in writing for the game.

Jeremy Fielding
That sort of thing can happen pretty often. Cause we do a lot of like copywriting and stuff like that. So a lot of times we also have interest in like narrative stuff or we, you know, we do marketing stuff. Like all sorts of little jobs in marketing, from like copywriting to, you know, other things. Just like I do a little bit of writing on like the trailers and stuff like that. When we have like narrative parts of the trailers or if we’re just talking about the wording or like giving feedback on stuff or just, you know, help just forming our campaigns and stuff like that.

We do a lot of little things and then, you know, there’s a lot of little stuff – like social media and the billion things to do with social media. You know, creating media for that involves like, you know, Photoshop skills and like working media players and video editors and things like that.

Lots of little things that you might want to ask someone from the art department to do. A lot of times we just sort of do all that stuff ourselves.

And how much you lean into which aspect of that often defines what sort of community manager you end up being, which mostly ends up being whatever your studio happens to need.

Steve McLeod
Well, this actually leads to a nice question we discussed briefly before we started recording. Where do you go upwards as a community manager when you’re learning a little bit of everything? What job do you go into? Is there like a senior community manager? Like director of community is a sub position I’ve seen very seldom.

Jeremy Fielding
Yeah, it’s really so like at bigger studios that have like tons of community managers or if there’s like publishers and stuff, sometimes handle the community parts of like their smaller studios.

Like you might have like a head of community. Like I think they do that at Paradox. Paradox has a trillion community managers that are all managed by a head of community and they have like a bunch of tiers of community manager. But at my studio, for instance, The position directly above me is marketing director.

Steve McLeod
It’s quite a different set of skills and a different job responsibility.

Jeremy Fielding
Yeah, it’s completely different.

Our whole marketing team is kind of set up and with different skills with mild overlap in some places.

Steve McLeod
Does the head of community actually do day to day community stuff or are they more a manager? Which is a completely different set of skills too.

Jeremy Fielding
Yeah, that’s the thing is that – I don’t know.

Steve McLeod
You haven’t been there yet!

Jeremy Fielding
Well also just community manager is such an ill defined role in general. What I do is so different from what someone at Paradox does I think so At SGC we had a community manager panel. It was like me and Mikhail from Coffee Stain from working on Satisfactory and Josefina who works at Irongate on Valheim.

And all three of us have completely different jobs.

We have some overlap in that we are all interfacing with the community. But Mikhail does more of a sort of like he makes like YouTube videos and he does a lot of like production like he’s producing content that they share and that’s like the style of community management they have.

Whereas Josefina is more of like a comms director sort of role it seems like. And like I’m more hands-on sort of direct communication sort of thing. And like we all have our completely different styles and like if each of us were to take a head position, like I don’t know what that would look like. Our positions now look so different that I don’t know what a more advanced position of that necessarily looks like for any of us, right.

I did a lot of research on like where community managers tend to go and it is like if there’s a head of communications position sometimes they’ll go to that. Sometimes they go and become producers because the producers do a lot of sort of communication between departments and organizing people and getting them to talk to each other and communicate what they need because that’s what they do and that is very similar to what we do.

Steve McLeod
It’s almost like managing the internal community where the community are the employees.

Jeremy Fielding
Yeah, that’s exactly it. It’s like they’re the internal community manager when the community manager is like the external version of that – in very broad strokes.

And then sometimes you just go into general management positions some sort of administrator of some kind or. Cause it’s managing people, it kind of makes sense. Or some of them go into HR I think.

And some of them go into game design or something. Like they just find they’re really good with game design. They just end up there. So it’s really hard to say.

Because we have our fingers kind of in everything, we can kind of get pulled in anywhere. Or you could just end up being marketing and just be a marketing director or something like that.

Steve McLeod
And I think even if one day a community manager has had enough of working in the games industry, they’ve still got skills that will give them a whole lot of other career paths outside of the games industry, which could be anything.

Jeremy Fielding
Yeah, I hope so.

Just because, you never know what’s going to happen. It’s like a very volatile situation right now in our industry.

I’m lucky because I think I’m in like a pretty safe position compared to a lot of people.

Steve McLeod
Tell me about V Rising, the game you’re currently mostly working on.

What will you be doing next in your community manager role for V Rising – that you’re allowed to mention.

Jeremy Fielding
I don’t know when this is going to air, but right now I’m working on a dev blog. It’s been a while since we went to a 1.0 and we’ve been kind of quiet for a while, so it’s really nice to have. Yesterday I sat down, we did like with Ku, the creative director and like we went through sort of point by point, like what sort of features we have and what we’re going to be doing next.

So I’m going to organize that into something digestible and put out something like that relatively soon.

So I’m working on that, you know, announcements about our upcoming like Halloween events. We’re doing an art competition, which is always really fun, has a great turnout. So I’m working on that.

So that’s what I’m working on right now.

But we’re probably not doing any content stuff till maybe next year. So right now we’re in a little bit of a lull communication.

Steve McLeod
Just enjoy it while it lasts. Enjoy the relaxing time while it lasts.

Jeremy Fielding
It’s not enjoyable, really. No, no. When we’re in a lull, it’s kind of like I feel bad because people keep asking me for stuff and I’m just like, I can’t say anything. But sharing stuff is super fun. When we finally get to that, that part gets like really exciting. It’s hard work, but it’s like, you know, it’s fun.

Steve McLeod
Yeah. That’s one of the good parts about the job, right, is bringing good news to people, to the player.

Jeremy Fielding
Yeah. It seems excited about the stuff that you’ve been, like, working on and talking about and getting to see everything grow. And then when it actually happens, you’re like, it’s so nice.

Steve McLeod
So I think a lot of people work in the games industry, they spend all day making games and then they go home and play games. Is that the case for you?

Jeremy Fielding
Yeah, a little bit. Sometimes I go home and I just lay around and watch super trashy tv. But a lot of time, whenever I can, I play games.

Steve McLeod
So what are you playing at the moment?

Jeremy Fielding
I jump a lot between tabletop RPGs, you know, D&D. And I’ve actually been…

Steve McLeod
Do you mean real-life in-person, with friends, tabletop RPGs?

Jeremy Fielding
Yeah. Sometimes I play on Discord with people too.

But I’ve been straying away from D&D into more obscure games, so I’m not gonna get too into that. But on Steam, I’ve been playing Shogun Showdown.

It’s like, really fun. Like little 2D, like, almost like a strategy roguelike. And you get a random set of skills and you have to work your way through these waves of enemies.

And it’s just a really satisfying game. Like, you, you, whenever you get hit or you take damage or something, it’s like, okay, that was my fault. Like, you feel that and every time you get hit, you’re just like, ah. You know, if I had thought one more move ahead, I should have seen that coming.

So I don’t feel bad when I lose. When I lose, I’m just like, okay, I can just do better next time.

And I’ve been really addicted to that.

Steve McLeod
So this is a question I’m asking at the end of every episode is what I just asked you. What game have you been playing? You might like to know that the last guest, when I asked him what game we’ve been playing lately, his answer was V Rising.

Jeremy Fielding
Oh, really?

Steve McLeod
He mentioned that he plays it with his girlfriend together and that I think they were talking about V Rising. Does V Rising have, like, an end to the game?

Jeremy Fielding
Yeah.

Steve McLeod
I think that he said his girlfriend enjoys the game so much that she doesn’t want to keep playing because she doesn’t want it to end. She wants to still think there’s a game ahead of her to play.

Jeremy Fielding
Aw, that really warms my heart. Because game devs we have so little time and our game is so long, man.

So when I hear that other game devs are playing my game, it makes me really happy because I’m like, I know how little time you have. So the fact that you’re spending your time doing our thing makes me. I don’t know, it makes me really happy.

Steve McLeod
I think that’s a really positive note that we can end the discussion on.

So thank you very much for being here again.

Jeremy Fielding
Yeah, thank you for having me. It was really nice.

Steve McLeod
And where can listeners get in touch if they’d like to know more about what we’ve discussed today? If they’d like to know more about being a community manager or other things?

Jeremy Fielding
Oh, yeah, you can email me. I’m JeremyF@stunlockstudios.com I usually answer any emails there. I’m also @jeremybearson on Twitter.

I’m @bearemy on Discord. And you can just add me. I don’t care.

Steve McLeod
All three of those are okay to go in the show notes?

Jeremy Fielding
Yeah, go for it.

Steve McLeod
Great.

Jeremy Fielding
All right.

Steve McLeod
Okay. Bye, Jeremy.

Jeremy Fielding
Bye. Thank you so much.

Steve McLeod
Bye, everyone.

Jeremy Fielding
Goodbye.