Above: Cuphead tutorial. It’s different in the final version.
Kim: I would love to get you guys involved in this, too. This is such a relevant issue for you as app developers. How many of you are building games? How many of you are building apps? How many of you would like your apps to feel a bit game like?
As developers of games and apps, you know that understanding who you’re designing for is critical. You all know that. This is what’s going on with this conversation with Dean. In gaming, there has been, in the last five or six years but really over the last 10 years, a huge shift going on to more and more casual games. More and more games that are simple and accessible, games like Gone Home that are just clicking through, not a lot of skill required. But there’s also still very skill-based games — puzzle games, RPGs, combat games — that are super hard as well. Some people like really hard games, but it’s a much bigger audience that likes accessible games. Same is going to be true for you with your products.
What’s going on in Dean’s story has a lot of threads. One is what’s happened to games journalists. How many of you are familiar with the “let’s play” phenomenon on YouTube? If you aren’t, you should figure it out. YouTube and Twitch and platforms like that have exploded. Someone sitting in their room at home wanting to talk about a game, wanting to play through a game, wanting to just say, “Hey, I’m playing this game, come watch me,” is that games journalism? Hard to say. It’s bleeding over into what you do.
Above: Forbes’s list of top influencers. Mari Takahashi (gaming) is top left, Lilly Singh (entertainment) is top middle, King Bach (entertainment) is top right, Markiplier (gaming) is bottom left, Baby Ariel (entertainment) is middle bottom, and Brian Kelly (travel) is bottom right.
Takahashi: It’s part of what they call “influencers” now. Samsung has talked quite a bit about influencers here.
Kim: Right. So, you have influencers who are not critical of a game. Influencers don’t necessarily review games. Influencers are more about spreading the word about games. They’re more like the marketing department. They’re not a separate critical voice. In fact, anybody who pays them can get a nice review. It’s clear what it’s about.
Then you have journalism, which is under attack from other sides right now in our political climate. Journalism is supposed to be dispassionate, honest, doing a service for customers and so on. But it’s changing. You have a journalist being very transparent, making a video that’s not necessarily very polished, but that video could have been made by an influencer on YouTube easily. Would they have gotten the hate? What do you think?
Takahashi: I don’t think they would have done it like I did. They would have played through 30 or 40 times until they got through, and they were very good at it, and they would have captured that. High quality gameplay is what they would have posted. Maybe if they were a live streamer, they would have taken more of a risk there and said, “OK, I’ll roll the dice here and see if I can play this game competently while a thousand people watch me.” That’s not something I do. Who would want to watch someone who isn’t skillful?
Kim: That’s the interesting issue. Lots of these YouTubers are very skillful, but many of them are an avatar for the customer. They’ll play through and giggle at themselves — “Oh, my God, I can’t believe that happened” — it’s all very entertaining and funny. My 10-year-old daughter watches these and learns a lot from them.
But then, you have a journalist. People were attacking Dean and saying, “You’re not a real game journalist because you’re not an expert at this super hard game.” Now, Dean engaged with these people. He waded into Reddit and talked to them. [Laughs] Here he is alive, surviving that horrific experience.
I would never have done that myself, and the reason is — my interpretation of this is why the hell do you care about this tiny shrinking minority of hardcore gamers who want to argue with you about what a real gamer, a real journalist is? You have to be somehow magically expert at playing this ridiculously hard game to be taken seriously? That’s the point of view that got thrown at Dean.
I’m here to tell you that that is a shrinking minority, in the same way that, pardon me, white nationalists are a shrinking minority in our country. They are a minority. The demographics are changing. The overall attitudes are changing. Same thing with the game industry. I’m a woman. I’ve worked in the game industry for 20 years. Believe me, I have my stories about harassment. But mostly, I’ve worked with awesome people and made awesome games. That’s most of what my stories are because I steered around those ridiculous idiots.
Above: Clinkle’s “Haters gonna hate” T-shirts, as shown in a 2014 video about a hackathon the company organized.
Takahashi: The devil’s advocate in me asks, well, what if I’m the idiot? You talk about super fans. These people I ran into, they kind of sound like your definition of super fans.
Kim: See, that’s where there’s a razor’s edge. It’s different. Super fans are, by definition, people that have a burning need for the thing that you’re building or that you have to offer and the ability to give you feedback that can help you make it better. That’s my definition of a super fan.
My answer to you is they’re made because you’re not representing them. But your job isn’t to represent them. Your job is to represent gamers of all kinds. If there are hundreds of thousands of gamers who would have just as much trouble as Dean would playing through that game, by showing that, Dean is representing all those gamers. He’s representing me. He’s not representing this narrow slice of gamers who want to say who’s a “real gamer” and who’s not based on their ability to play something arcane and hard.
I’ve met those people. I know those people. I’m not focusing my business on those people because, one, there’s a much bigger group of people who aren’t them. Two, they’re assholes. I don’t care what they think a real gamer is.
I had lunch with somebody — she used to be the head of product management at Slack. She told me, “I’m looking at new jobs right now and getting a bunch of people from the gaming industry, the hardcore gaming industry, wanting me to come in and interview for head of product. I’ve been playing Dungeons and Dragons since I was 15. I was in a D&D group with Stewart Butterfield, the head of Slack. These people still tell me I’m not a real gamer. I don’t even want to talk to them.” Here’s the thing. I don’t feel like you need them.
