‘Spokesgeeks’ for Game Publishers Learn to Grouse Privately, Pass the Buck

SEATTLE -- A Twitter feed has the power to sink the stock prices of game publishers, but bad games can make it through the pipeline if someone at a publisher doesn’t challenge the conventional wisdom. “Spokesgeeks” for big publishers, charged with giving voice to fans, described at the Penny Arcade Expo over the weekend how careful they've learned to be when speaking publicly about their companies. Often it’s better to act as a liaison than to make an off-the-cuff announcement, said Larry Hryb, director of programming for Xbox Live, better known to fans as Major Nelson. “I'm the guy who knows the guy."

Activision Blizzard Social Media Manager Dan Amrich has a “daily struggle” over being himself versus speaking for the company, he said. Technically part of the PR team, Amrich was greatly relieved to learn that “I don’t have to be part of somebody’s plan,” he said. “I can do stuff my own way.” His job is to “speak gamer” and translate what fans are talking about for executives. “They can’t decode those layers of sarcasm” across community sites and social media, he said. Amrich said he also tries to head off disaster for people “drinking the Kool-Aid,” unable to see problems in the games they're working on, by telling them, “'Your baby’s ugly. You need to know now.'"

A spokesgeek serves as the “VP of common sense,” said Jeff Rubenstein, social media manager for Sony Computer Entertainment of America. “Gamers know when they're being marketed to.” Executives are surrounded by “yes men,” said Jeff Green, who left Electronic Arts as editor-in-chief of EA.com in August after several months of friction because of his outspokenness. “It does get surprising how little common sense there can be” at the top, he said. Green said his departure was “not a canning.” He said EA simply wasn’t ready “structurally” for the position that he pitched last fall, to create a unified “brand voice,” and he has an open invitation to return when the company becomes ready.

Green said he was often left out of the loop for EA events, even in the San Francisco area, where he lives, and he caught flak for seemingly innocuous personal tweets, such as “OMG” in commenting on a pending game developed by a partner studio. A higher-up told Green that the tweet irritated the “politics” between EA and the studio, which was under pressure to deliver the game on time. Hryb said he learned to zip his lips shortly after joining Microsoft, when he got in trouble for saying the company wasn’t buying Nintendo as rumored. Even denying rumors can create a “stock event,” affecting a company’s share price, Hryb said.

Spokesgeeks said they serve their companies best simply by keeping fans updated on known problems. Buggy digital-rights management technology in an EA game drove Green to tweet “DRM fail, we need new solutions,” he said. That was a mistake, because the game community interpreted it as a criticism of EA policy, Green said. Hryb said he lost a holiday vacation in 2007, when Xbox Live went down for weeks, just by updating fans regularly that Microsoft was hard at work on the problem. SCEA’s Rubenstein said he mistakenly implied the company had solved an outage problem on a day that came to be called the “PlayStation Network apocalypse” and just as his Twitter feed doubled to 100,000 followers.

Speakers said they served in less of a media capacity than they originally expected. Activision wanted Amrich to brainstorm “really juicy stuff” to then suggest to game blogs such as Gawker Media’s Kotaku, he said. “I'm the first to the table, but the last to get served.” Green said he rarely got scoops from EA, which wanted “third-party credibility” from game sites. A top use for spokesgeeks is to “take any bullet” for authorized comments that might backfire, Green said. To shield its CEO from making a political statement, EA had Green criticize California’s videogame law restricting sales to minors, now under Supreme Court review, he said. (See separate report in this issue.)

The game industry can learn much from the film industry, where rumors and tidbits regularly leak before movies come out, with no repercussions for their standard-bearers, Green said. It shows the “infantilism” of the game industry that it’s so protective of its products, he said. “This is not Pentagon secrets."

Penny Arcade Expo Notebook

Academics have an uphill battle convincing their colleagues and the public that studying games is useful social research, they told the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle. The University of Washington’s Mark Chen said he just submitted his dissertation on collaborative play in World of Warcraft and the use of math in game strategy. For a postdoctoral project, he’s recruiting gamers to contribute to scientific research through the “protein folding” puzzle game Foldit, Chen said. Nathan Dutton, a media studies grad student at Ohio University, said he'll publish a paper next year on the gamer outcry over a Fox News segment on the Electronic Arts game Mass Effect, which featured an author who claimed incorrectly that the game is full of nudity and sex. “There’s a real gap in the way we talk about games” between gamers and the general public, said Christopher Paul, assistant professor of communication at Seattle University. He has an article coming on Grand Theft Auto saying the franchise’s well-known graphic violence is almost beside the point in reviews by gamers, who praise its plot development and “flourishes” of humor. Students in Paul’s game class are invariably horrified by players’ ability to kill prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto, but after playing it themselves, the students are less judgmental toward those who enjoy the outlandish abilities, he said. U.S. players of Grand Theft Auto are more disturbed by the bad behavior of American characters than of foreign ones, which “makes me a little queasy,” Paul said. For game studies to gain legitimacy in academia, “more old people need to die,” said Todd Harper of the Singapore-MIT Gambit Lab, which works with technical students and develops game prototypes to illustrate its research. “It’s a matter of generational change.” Academics who are gamers are stigmatized by colleagues, who say they're too close to their subjects, but “I study the way I study because I am a fan,” Dutton said. The interdisciplinary nature of game studies, which gives the field low visibility in academia, is one of its greatest strengths, he said. “The last thing we want is to see it pigeonholed” and “drift” into a specific field such as media studies, he said.