Join us in this insightful episode of Let’s Talk Player Feedback (Season 4, Episode 36) as we delve deep into the world of video game communities with special guest Alysia Sanders from Kongregate.
What will you listen to in this episode?
What are some common types of crises that can occur in a player community? How do these crises typically manifest themselves (how do you spot them), and what are the top challenges that they present for community managers?
When a crisis arises within a video game player community, what are the key steps a crisis manager should take to effectively address the situation? Are there any best practices or strategies that have proven particularly successful in mitigating crises?
What are some effective communication strategies that crisis managers can employ to engage with the affected community members and maintain their trust?
Dealing with toxic behavior and online harassment is a significant challenge in many player communities. How can crisis managers effectively address instances of toxic behavior and create a healthier and more inclusive community environment?
Video game player communities often consist of diverse individuals with varying opinions and interests. How can a community manager navigate conflicts and disagreements within the community during a crisis, while still maintaining a sense of unity and cooperation?
Crises can sometimes lead to a loss of reputation for both the video game company and the community. In your experience, what are some effective strategies for rebuilding trust and restoring a positive image following a crisis?
As video games continue to evolve and expand, new platforms and technologies emerge, presenting unique challenges for crisis management. What are some of the emerging trends or areas of concern that community managers should be aware of in the context of video game player communities?
Listen
Watch
Transcript
Caro Solari:
Well, hello, welcome everyone to season four of Let’s Talk Customer Feedback. We are actually changing our name for this season. We’re going to start calling it as it is, Let’s Talk Player Feedback. And with us, we have Alicia Sanders from Congregate. Hello.
Alysia:
Hey, Caro! Hey, it’s so good to be here! Player experience and community management, all of these words, they’re the words that I live by on a day-to-day basis.
Caro Solari:
Well, I know that Alicia, that’s why I love working with you and I love having you here as a guest on our podcast. And today, first of all, if you would like to introduce yourself a little bit, like tell us a little bit about your background, what do you do?
Alysia:
Sure, sure, sure. I just want to start out by saying, like, I feel like most of my career has been an accident. It’s always been things that I wanted to do, but I wasn’t sure, you know, did I fit in? Am I qualified to do this? But after 12 years, the imposter syndrome is fading away. I’ve been involved
Caro Solari:
Ha ha!
Alysia:
in the gaming industry for a very long time. I started with Neopets, which was an online game, you know, with flash games and all that stuff. watching out for the baddies, keeping the children safe. And then I found Synapse Games and they really brought me, you know, up and coming star here. I was a community manager, I was their main customer support person, all within a very small studio. I was, I think employee number 19. So
Caro Solari:
Wow.
Alysia:
I was in the door fast. And then as the years went by I got more responsibilities people started, you know trusting me more and now whenever there’s a full-blown Emergency they looked to me first because that’s my jam That’s what I really like to do as bad as it sounds As long as there’s something else to focus on there’s a million other things going on communication you have to really just Be comfortable being wrong And be comfortable
Caro Solari:
100 percent.
Alysia:
Bothering people
Caro Solari:
Hahaha!
Alysia:
Are both very good qualities of mine.
Caro Solari:
That’s great. I must say that those are good qualities of mine too. That’s why, Alicia, I always think that we will be great friends if we lived closer. We will make it happen. We will make this happen. It will be GDC Gamescom, something in between. One day we’re gonna meet.
Caro Solari:
Were you playing games when you were younger, when you were a kid? Or, oh my god, you have an amazing cat. In the background, I see a white, beautiful cat. For the ones listening to the podcast in audio version only. This is what will make you go and watch the video next.
Alysia:
Yes, she hears me talking and she thinks that she needs to be in the center of attention as well.
Alysia:
I’ve always been a gamer. I remember I being six years old and getting the original PlayStation and we got Wipeout and back in the days of game demo discs, you know, you could go to the grocery store and get not tips and tricks, but like the PlayStation magazine and they would have demo discs. I would basically memorize those demo discs until I got the money to buy the game that I wanted to play.
Caro Solari:
That’s so amazing. I remember those magazines myself. I used to play a lot of like a PC adventure games when I was a kid. So I remember buying those magazines to try to get the, you know, the tips and tricks on how to pass to the next level and the monkey islanding, like, you know, the night of the tentacle and all those games. So I love those magazines. I think I still have some actually. I need to,
Alysia:
I was published in Tips and Tricks in two different series. One was just an article and one was… I was like 13, so please, please if you ever find it, don’t judge me too hard. And then one was a question that I had, the Super Nintendo was a lot of fun and there’s a lot of Easter eggs, so I found one that was really cool.
Caro Solari:
That’s amazing. That’s very cool. So Alicia, when we were talking about having you as a guest in this podcast, we were talking about many, many subjects, but for some reason we decided that navigating turbulence in video game communities, AKA crisis management was the first one that we want to go for. Right?
Alysia:
Absolutely, yes. And it was due to unfortunate circumstances going on in our game that have somewhat continued and the theme is still very prevalent right now in my life and day-to-day work.
Caro Solari:
You know, crises are everywhere, in every product, in every game, in every studio.
Alysia:
Always, there’s always something that you can do better, always something that you can do more of.
Caro Solari:
And I’m sure that there’s a lot of things that people can learn from you and your crisis management skills. So let’s dive right into the subject. So to start, I think that the first questions that I wanted to ask you is just to bring everyone on the same page. What are some common types of crisis that can occur in a player community?
Alysia:
Oh my goodness,
Caro Solari:
How do how do they manifest? You know, how do you spot them? What are the challenges that they present for your, for community managers? Alicia, you go. Hehehe.
Alysia:
Alright, I’m gonna go. So the most common… Okay, I want to preface this by saying that almost everything that happens in a live game is an emergency to players. So you really… there’s level of crisis management, but whenever we get a really big fire, say we find… There’s been exploits, you know, and we have to maybe take the game down for a couple of hours and roll everybody back. Or recently we’ve been dealing with a scoring issue and… That part has been very frustrating because we couldn’t find a common denominator. We couldn’t find what was causing this. Those easy to spot, easy to find because the players don’t manifest them, but the players are telling us, hey, when I click on this card, the game crashes. And we’re like, whoa, that’s not something we really want to happen. So
Caro Solari:
Right.
Alysia:
We had an issue on Friday where players didn’t get the energy that they needed for their game. And I determined, hey, it’s an urgent issue. It’s happening right now in the game. So we round up all the people that have, the stakeholders is what I’m going to say. Anyone that has a horse in the race, we get them into a Slack channel and we say, hey, here’s what we’re doing. Here’s, you know, community’s perspective of it. And usually the engineers will ask us to write a bug ticket and we’ll take screenshots from players and then they’ll start their investigation. And that’s when the hurry up and wait comes. So we pushed ourselves all the way forward to the front of our seat and we put our hands on our face and we’re like, all
Caro Solari:
Yeah.
Alysia:
right, now we can’t do anything. But while that is happening, while the engineers are taking care of their business, we are drafting community announcements. We are you know, looking for ways to make whatever’s happening less painful for the players that are experiencing it. So sometimes that comes out of compensation. Sometimes we’ll try to restart the event if it’s just barely started. Fairness is something that I look for the most whenever we’re doing crisis management or crisis responses. I want as many people are as affected to be compensated or feel good about the resolution that we have. And that is always a challenge. Because
Caro Solari:
Of course.
Alysia:
They always want more, right, Caro? We’re so hard done by, please give us the max amount of everything that you can.
Caro Solari:
Of course.
Alysia:
I would love to do that, honestly, personally. you all deserve it, you’re very loyal to our game, but on the other hand, if we give you everything, what else do you have to play for?
Caro Solari:
100% and you know, after all, we’re running a business here. It’s like.
Alysia:
What? Exactly. Nothing’s free in this world, unfortunately.
Caro Solari:
That’s true. And I wanted to ask a question about that because my background is also community. That’s how I started. I started as a community manager and I enjoyed
it so much.
In times of crisis, another thing that we would do, and maybe I wanted you to tell us how you managed, so maybe in the games community is different. I didn’t work for the gaming industry when I was a community manager. I was working for a website builder. but we also created some sort of a timeline, like trying to understand, okay, if this bad problem, feature, whatever is going on, that is not working, continues within, I don’t know, one hour, six hours, 24 hours, do you also do that for games?
Alysia:
Oh my goodness, I try to be on top of things. We have a tool in our Slack that tells us how many tickets we’ve gotten in the past hour and it sends me an alert if we get more than 12 tickets every hour. To me that’s the danger threshold. So
if we’re not getting a mass amount of reports, if we get one or two an hour, I’ll be fishy. I’ll say something’s stinky, let’s investigate.
Caro Solari:
We’re looking into it. Ha ha.
Alysia:
Yeah. And then as the day goes on we might get one or two more and then I’m like, okay, this is a clear problem Let’s you know flag this to the engineers. I don’t sit on my hands very much I would rather make a mountain out of a molehill every day just in case you know within reason I’m not saying oh this person’s missing some hard currency What can we do where I would know I could fix that and be totally fine,
Caro Solari:
Okay, that answers my question. So for the next one, and you’re very welcome, whenever there is a crisis in the video game player community, I wanted to know, what are the key steps a crisis manager should take to be effective in addressing the situation? Do you have any best practices or strategies that have proven success for you in mitigating these kind of situations?
Alysia:
Honesty is my best policy. Honesty drives the community forward. I like to be as open and honest with them as possible. When I’m upset about a game or something, the more information that I get, the more reassured I feel that the developers are taking that seriously, the more reassured I have of knowing a timeline of when it might be fixed. So getting the… the community strategies together. That has been a process, you know, two or three years in the making, where every time we have something come up, we have to iterate on that process. What worked for us, what didn’t work. I think that that’s the same kind of like process that most companies would take or most teams would take. Let’s just keep getting better. We don’t, I don’t allow my team to rest on their laurels. I don’t let them
Caro Solari:
Yeah.
Alysia:
Rest at all, really. Okay, this was great and let’s do this better next time. Right now we are having a little bit of trouble with communication with some higher ups, some stakeholders who need to make some decisions. And that part has been frustrating. However, I’ve just been holding their hand, dragging that horse to water. Please, please, please help us. I’ve seen very big improvement in that area, just as an anecdote, you know. We really strive to keep the communication open, tell players as soon as possible what we know, when we know it, and when they can expect a fix. That is the most important thing, or when they can expect this to be over. When can they get back to what they’ve given us money for?
Caro Solari:
100%. So if I can sum it up in like three key takeaways from your answer, it will be honesty,
clear and straightforward communication within the teams that are fixing or communicating, and a clear timeline for the players. Is that correct?
Alysia:
That’s correct. A clear timeline for the players is a clear timeline for the community team as well. So we understand how long we have to wait.
Caro Solari:
Totally. And how much, I guess, content for the future you need to continue to create, you know,
Alysia:
Exactly!
Caro Solari:
and sometimes I remember when we saw that a bag was not fixed and we already saw that it’s going to go on for another 24 hours or something like that in my previous job. We were like already drafting content for every two, three hours for the next 24 hours because we knew that the community will continue and continue to ask, hey guys, what’s going on? It’s been 24 hours. So we were like redrafting content and just saying kind of the same thing because we didn’t have much more to say, but just to make sure that the community understands that we’re still there and we’re still listening, we’re still on it. So the timeline is such an important part of crisis management.
Alysia:
We were a relatively small studio. So sometimes we do have to sleep. Sometimes we do have to go eat. Sometimes we had to step away from the computer and I consider the community a shield between the developers and the community. We’ll absorb all of that, but at the same time, we have to give them something too.
Caro Solari:
Yeah. And I think that sometimes, you know, I think that when you’re not a community manager, when you’re a user and you see a community manager telling you two hours later, kind of the same message, like, you know, we’re still looking into it. We appreciate your patience. Don’t worry. Our teams are like working around the clock.
Alysia:
He he.
Caro Solari:
I think sometimes it gets them kind of upset. That is kind of the same message. But the ulterior motive of these kind of messages is, hey, we’re still here. We didn’t let go of your hand.
Alysia:
Yes.
Caro Solari:
And sometimes it’s difficult for them to understand that, you know, a bag is not going to be fixed in 30 minutes.
Alysia:
Software and technology just in general is tough.
Caro Solari:
Yeah.
Alysia:
If it was so easy to have zero bugs in your product, then everyone would be doing it. Yeah.
Caro Solari:
100%! That’s not how it goes, people.
Alysia:
I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it happen over and over again.
Caro Solari:
Totally. And this takes me to a very interesting topic, I think, for community managers, that is trust. How you know, your job is to gain trust, you know, to maintain trust. And these kinds of moments in crisis, is when trust can be broken, destroyed and disappear. The work of months, of years in the community can be put at yes. It can be, so can you talk to us a little bit about, like if you have some effective communication strategies that you can employ to, you know, maintain trust within the community?
Alysia:
We’ll go back to the effective community strategies, just the top one, honesty, and open communication. The more you say and do what you say you’re going to do, um, the more trust that you have, the more they say, Oh, this person may be only a community manager, but I’ve seen them wrangle a bug before I’ve seen them, uh, take care of a really bad community issue, say someone was swearing an awful lot in our discord. And so it’s really a give and take situation with the trust. We have to trust them that they’re going to be mostly mature. Our game isn’t super mature, so we don’t expect that. We have fart jokes and stuff, but being able to play around with them also, show your personality, that gains trust. They understand. for the most part that you’re a human and humans are fallible. You know, we’re totally
Caro Solari:
Yeah.
Alysia:
always capable of making mistakes. And I think that, you know, one or two mistakes does help build your trust. You have the little ones where you say, Oh, I messed up with this announcement. Here you guys go. I’m so sorry here, you know, and given an explanation of how you were wrong, making a mistake and admitting it. I feel like this is just stuff that I learned in a maybe Sunday school, where you treat everyone the way you want to be treated.
Caro Solari:
100% it goes back to that Alisya. Goes back to Sunday school. You see.
Alysia:
Just be nice to everybody and if they’ll want to be around you, hopefully.
Caro Solari:
I just want to say that I’m not just saying this for a hook, but people, if you’re listening to this podcast, you have to go and watch the video version because you have to see that actually you think that you’re you have two people in this podcast, but there’s actually a third guest. It’s the cat, the white cat of Alicia. What is her his name? What their name?
Alysia:
Her name is Boo Kitty. She’s just a pure, yep, Boo Kitty. White cat and I’ve loved video games for so long. Mario, you know, original Mario, their ghost name is Boo and she looks like a ghost because she’s pure white and that’s how her name came to be. Always more games.
Caro Solari:
What is the community? Community is people, is players, is, you know, community managers for the studio, for the game, and it’s actually people. So in times of crisis, some toxic behavior can appear here and there. And sometimes it’s toxic for the game, for like against the game, against the company, against the studio, blah, blah. But sometimes community members, they start to get angry at each other.
Alysia:
Yes.
Caro Solari:
So that is a very delicate subject in communities like toxicity, online harassment. So I wanted to ask you, how can like crisis managers effectively address instances toxic behavior and, you know, overall create a healthier and more inclusive community environment.
Alysia:
This is sadly a topic that I loved. Sadly, because toxic isn’t fun to talk about for anyone, but it’s something that I really like to bring about whenever we’re talking about just communities in general. Toxicity drives players away. Toxicity will tank your DAU. Toxicity, just from one player, can cause several other players to not want to interact with your game. So I take that very seriously. I implement, I can implement a timeout for both of them, send them both warnings or whoever’s arguing, I assume it would be two people at the first and send warnings and hope that they calm down, let them know, hey, we expect this level of behavior, we expect you to be nice, we expect you to not harass people, we expect you to just give us really good information and… behave. Sometimes that doesn’t work out whenever they’re going at each other. you have to set the boundaries with the players or with your users to make sure that they understand this isn’t going to be tolerated. And unfortunately we’ve tolerated some less than desirable behavior in the past and those habits are so hard to break. So in a crisis mode we will probably go harder than we would softer. I would say we would mute them a lot faster. We would get rid of the noise. Whenever they’re making a fuss, they’re obviously very upset. And that’s something that we definitely don’t want. But at the same time, if they’re so upset that they’re upsetting others, we have to take that step and remove them, at least temporarily, from the situation.
Caro Solari:
Yeah, I was going to ask you that. I was going to ask you if, you know, banning a community member, is it forever? Can you do temporary bans and then, you know, maybe try to get them back in? How does something like, how does it go?
Alysia:
For our Discord, we have a timeout room where we will place players and they can, you know, it depends on their behavior. If they’re apologetic, if we feel that they’re sincere, or mostly sincere, it’s a video game, it’s Discord. So, I don’t want to say contrition, but they just have to show that they understand why they were put in timeout and then they can get out of timeout. Unless they’re, you know, doxing people, doing egregious behaviors such as wishing horror or death to someone else, or, you know, posting bad pictures. We don’t tolerate porn or gore or anything like that.
Caro Solari:
Obviously.
Alysia:
So, yeah, as long as they are willing to show that they can behave properly once they’ve calmed down, more than willing to join us back in the group, happy to have you. We all have bad days, we all have bad moments. We’re not going to hold that against you forever.
Caro Solari:
That sounds great. I think it’s a really good balance. And I’m happy that, you know, I’m happy that like modern platforms like Discord, which obviously didn’t exist when I was a community manager, have these kinds of possibilities and this kind of flexibility because, you know, back then in the old platforms, like they, they once started it all. I don’t want to name them, but you know, you could just ban someone, block, ban, like report and like it was done, you know, there was no balance. And people, again, communities are made of people, players, community managers, you know, and it’s good to have like middle grounds and the opportunity to just, like, you know, come back and show a better intention. And this brings me directly into, you know, the fact that video game player communities, they have, they consist of very diverse individuals, sometimes different. really big age gaps and different type of interests and different opinions and interests. So how can a community manager navigate conflict and disagreements within the community during a crisis while still maintaining a sense of unity, you know, and making all feel like they are cooperating with each other?
Alysia:
If there’s anything that…
Caro Solari:
What’s that gift that you’ve got, Alicia?
Alysia:
Oh my goodness. So I think that it’s not really a secret. Anything that can bring people together is going to cause them to feel like a community. They’re all mad about a crisis at the moment. Let’s ham it up. Let’s make fun of it. Let’s jump in and say, aw man, this is impacting me too. Not only is it impacting me in work because I have to deal with the back end of making sure that the developers understand the bug and answer all of their questions, what I’m seeing in the community. Um, but then I also have the community that’s fired up. Um, what are we going to do? Oh, let’s, let’s rag on the game a little bit. Let’s say, ah, I wish that this was better. Um, hopefully, you know, whenever they’re done, we can have a brand new tomorrow. You know, give them hope, but rally with them a little bit. Commiserate empathize with what they’re going through and I think that really goes a long way And I’ve seen players just make funny memes while they’re waiting for the bug to be released Or or posting funny gifts. Those are my weakness. I will always post those So it’s like hanging out with a group of friends, but you know that you’re in charge but you use
Caro Solari:
And they’re angry.
Alysia:
Yes, and you’re like, ah little bit of people pleasing when it coming into it. You have to really feel out the community whenever you’re doing that sort of stuff. If they’re not into it, they’re not into it and like don’t force it. If it feels wrong, it probably is wrong. Listen to your gut. That is something that I will always say as well. Whenever it comes to honesty, please listen to your gut too because sometimes honesty is not the best policy.
Caro Solari:
Honesty with tact, that someone told me
Alysia:
I love it.
Caro Solari:
Tactful honesty, it’s important. There’s another person on the other side also.
Alysia:
Very much so, and I mean if there was a secret to healing the world, it would be more of that, wouldn’t it? Just listen to the other person, empathize with that person.
Caro Solari:
Alisya, the more I work with, you know, I worked with so many community managers in the past and the more I interview people that have to do with, you know, player facing people, like community managers, player support, player experience, professional. I think if someone is gonna save the world, I said a boat, it’s like I’m gonna make a new park only with community managers.
Alysia:
I think you’re onto something.
Caro Solari:
The player facing park. I’m going to save all of you, because if someone’s going to save the world, it’s going to be people that know how to manage communities.
Alysia:
Oh my goodness, yes. I think that running for president of the United States could
be a group platform and we would say, hey, we’ve got crisis management over here, we’ve got the live ops person over
Caro Solari:
Yes!
Alysia:
here who knows how to manage the economy, we’ve got a whole video game studio.
Caro Solari:
You can make it work, Alicia, you can make this work.
Alysia:
I’m into it. I’m only just now old enough to run, but… We’ve got a few years, we can drum up some support.
Caro Solari:
100%. And I wanted to ask another question. I’m going to go a little bit away from this. It is still about crisis, but I wanted to talk to you a little bit about reputation, right? Because crisis
Alysia:
Oh
Caro Solari:
can always lead, sometimes not all of them, right? But the big ones, they can lead to a loss on reputation for the video game company, for the community itself. for the game, etc.
Alysia:
Yes.
Caro Solari:
And in your experience, if you can share with us some strategies on how to rebuild trust to restore a positive image
Alysia:
Oh my goodness,
Caro Solari:
after a crisis.
Alysia:
that is a layered question, Caro. But something that I have a lot of experience in, reputation is something that’s so hard to get back. Once you’ve lost it, it goes down into a
Caro Solari:
Yeah.
Alysia:
deep chasm and you have to jump in with tweezers and find that one specific piece of reputation. It’s honestly a lot better to stay on top of the chasm and… Play Kate, make people happy, give them compensation, make sure that it’s healthy compensation. And
Caro Solari:
Yeah.
Alysia:
when games are very stingy and there’s like differences between, or there’s studies between the differences of do we give them too much stuff and do we give them not enough stuff? In my opinion, the more stuff you have to do in the game, the more resources that you’re given. the more you’re gonna wanna play that game. So I lean heavily towards compensation. We have recently developed another way to deal with any, or a new bug that has been coming up, and we’ve started, it’s a different form of compensation, but we just make their score bigger. We make them feel like, hey, this was our bad. We’re so sorry that you had to experience this, and here’s a top score for the day one of this event.
Caro Solari:
That’s very cool.
Alysia:
use that as a jumping off point to keep being successful. And the players have actually, we’ve only done that once. And the players were more happy about that than I can remember them being happy you know about any other previous fix that we’ve done. So we’ve accidentally stumbled onto something here for our community and it probably
Caro Solari:
That’s very
Alysia:
won’t work.
Caro Solari:
interesting.
Alysia:
Ha ha ha.
Caro Solari:
You know what you made me like, you know I’m feeling like having another session of crisis management where,
Alysia:
Okay.
Caro Solari:
and pairing up, you know, you,
Alysia:
Mm-hmm.
Caro Solari:
and a game economist that probably is like pulling his hair, their hairs out during the
Alysia:
Yes!
Caro Solari:
crisis, and how much are we giving? How much are we taking? Because this story, like, this idea of actually giving them a top score. which is great, it will not be affecting so much the game economy
Alysia:
Exactly,
Caro Solari:
and
Alysia:
because I still
Caro Solari:
it
Alysia:
have
Caro Solari:
will
Alysia:
to…
Caro Solari:
be great for everyone if it makes them feel better and
Alysia:
Mm-hmm.
Caro Solari:
it’s not affecting the game economy and people are feeling good about the game.
Alysia:
They
Caro Solari:
Sounds like a
Alysia:
still
Caro Solari:
plan.
Alysia:
have to participate to get the rewards, you know, but setting their score for something that we’ve messed up it’s just been really great. I’m more trusted than I think most people would feel comfortable trusting a player experience manager because I’ve been in LiveOps before and I understand
Caro Solari:
Hmm.
Alysia:
the economy. I understand that it’s not good to give out everything. I mean, obviously I’ve known that from player experience before I’ve been told so many, no, so many times, you know.
Caro Solari:
Yeah
Alysia:
What are you thinking?
Caro Solari:
You got it in the end.
Alysia:
Exactly, so experience has really helped me balance out expectations with what I know that I can get away with and what I know I will have to fight for. And
Caro Solari:
100
Alysia:
it’s always
Caro Solari:
percent.
Alysia:
for the community. I want them to be happy. I want them to trust us. And that brings us back to reputation, is that the community managers are always working on that reputation. We know that the games aren’t going to be perfect, like I’ve said. So we build up that good faith, even if there’s not bad faith. We want them to want to be around. So we have implemented listening days on our Discord. We’ll listen to music. We just really create a place that they want to be in. And I think that that’s easy when you don’t allow toxicity. I think it’s easy whenever you have really a development team behind you and they’re cheering you on. They want the community happy as well. So it’s really a team effort on everybody’s part to maintain the reputation of the game. And
Caro Solari:
100%.
Alysia:
if it tanks, then we start at the bottom. And we, unfortunately, it’s something that we have to do as community managers Sometimes the best thing you can do is start over, have a new day, get some fresh perspective for everybody. The players too, once they’ve all gone to sleep and woken up and the world’s still turning, things start to click back into place and it’s a video game and no one’s actually dying.
Caro Solari:
It’s not a surgery table, like people say.
Alysia:
I tell that to my agents all the time. They’re like, this person is so mad. I’m like, okay, but are they dying? No, let’s take 30 minutes
Caro Solari:
No,
Alysia:
and let’s…
Caro Solari:
we’re just not
Alysia:
Exactly.
Caro Solari:
making it to the next level today. It’s going to be okay.
Alysia:
So I’m like, let’s take 30 minutes, let’s both get a breath of air, let’s come into this with a clear mind. And I think that’s the best way to really solve a problem is take your time. And haste makes waste, I think is the saying.
Caro Solari:
Yeah, Alicia, can you ask you one last question?
Alysia:
Oh, is it already almost over? I can’t believe it. Ah!
Caro Solari:
We’re almost there! Can you believe this? We’re gonna have
Alysia:
I have
Caro Solari:
more
Alysia:
so
Caro Solari:
podcasts.
Alysia:
much fun with you all the time, Caro. It’s my pleasure to be here. So while
Caro Solari:
We just
Alysia:
I’m not
Caro Solari:
go
Alysia:
happy
Caro Solari:
mad.
Alysia:
about one more question, I’ll do one more, no, I’m joking. I’m very happy about it. I want more. We are gonna have to do a second session.
Caro Solari:
We’re going to do a second session for sure. We spoke about it even before we did this session,
Alysia:
Hahahaha
Caro Solari:
so now we’re nailing it.
Alysia:
I’m so excited!
Caro Solari:
So the last question is, as video games continue to evolve and expand, new platforms and technologies emerge. They present, obviously, unique challenges and advantages, I guess. for crisis management. Can you tell me please, what are some of the emerging trends or areas of concerns that community managers should be aware of in the context of video game player community?
Alysia:
say that the toxic levels are getting to different heights. Previously in the forum days, I’ve been around long enough to have seen this technology unfold as more time and time goes on. There’s TikTok now, you’ve really got to be careful with what you share with the world.
Caro Solari:
Yeah.
Alysia:
Oh my goodness, the internet is forever everybody. I just want everyone to know, whatever you put on the internet, it stays there forever. unless you have some really good lawyers and really good money, which I don’t.
Caro Solari:
I’m sorry.
Alysia:
So for crisis management, it’s always have all of the facts, have all of the information that you know, reasonably available to you and watch out for, I think, fakes, I think, people pretending to be other people, which is a really good podcast about Delta Green. But anyway, I digress. As technology expands and grows, the players get that much more knowledge. So, and they’re not looking to use it in a very productive way, or in a productive way professionally, I should say.
Caro Solari:
Yeah, I understand.
Alysia:
I’m sure it’s productive for them. Making sure that… players have their accounts, their account information is able to be safe, multi-factor authentication, all of this is going to save you so many headaches in the future. Just future proofing is really good.
Caro Solari:
That’s a great tip. I think that is an amazing tip. And OK, so our time is up. Can you
Alysia:
I can’t
Caro Solari:
believe
Alysia:
believe
Caro Solari:
it?
Alysia:
it!
Caro Solari:
It’s
Alysia:
No!
Caro Solari:
like a surprise to me.
Alysia:
I wanted it to go on for hours and hours.
Caro Solari:
So we have to do more sessions and that’s it.
Alysia:
in count
Caro Solari:
I wanted
Alysia:
me
Caro Solari:
to
Alysia:
in
Caro Solari:
say thank you so much Alicia. Alicia Sanders from Congregate who brought
Alysia:
Thank
Caro Solari:
us today
Alysia:
you, Caro.
Caro Solari:
and taught us our knowledge. I appreciate it so much and thank you everyone for listening.
Alysia:
Yeah! Yay, bye.