Transcript

Aaron Nemoyten (00:47)
your experience with TTRPGs changed how you think about lore in video games, even that are not sort of inspired by those types of worlds?

Kay Purcell (00:47)
Do the.

I would struggle to think of a game that has not been inspired in some way by TTRPG mechanics. It’s just so big, maybe, like don’t play a lot of shooters, so maybe some of the really hard, know, Call of Duty, First Person, but even those I feel like came out of War Games, right? And War Games were the predecessor to TTRPGs. again, it has made me a little bit more flexible.

in my thinking, if only because.

I have run modules, I love running modules.

If given the chance, I do not run modules, I write my own settings, my own worlds, because, look y’all, I’m femme, and I run my games online. So I knew the moment I showed any kind of maybe this person doesn’t know every single detail about the fake geek girl, uh-uh, uh-uh. So I’m like, I don’t wanna mess with that. So if I do my own lore, my own rules, my own setting.

Aaron Nemoyten (01:56)
Hmm.

Kay Purcell (02:02)
which kind of says a little something about how I prefer to run my life. But again, I look at developing TTRPGs the same way I think about running a module, which is like, this is the ideal. And if we don’t get there, that’s fine.

I also majored in English, so I have always approached media, be it books, television, video games, with a very dissecting mind because that was what I was taught is like, look for the plot hook, look for the twist, figure out why was this put this way.

I’m a person that only certain people can watch a movie with me, because more than once I have accidentally spoiled the movie, because I just went, that’s not blank, that’s blank, and then the big reveal at the end was exactly that, and people look at me and like, why did you spoil it? I’m like, I didn’t know, it just seemed really obvious, and apparently no one else thought it was. So.

You know, and that again, reacts a little bit to why I’m so good at community management is it’s like constantly anticipating what can go wrong. Hey, the way we’ve worded this communication, someone’s probably gonna take issue with that. But I mean, the whole reason I wanted to work in video games was actually Link’s Awakening. Back on the Game Boy Advance, because I’m playing through it and.

Very, very light spoilers for a literal 20-year-old game that has a remake that’s now at least five years old, I think, maybe older. Like, you’re going through the game and you’re doing your typical hero thing, right? Just smashing stuff in your way. And I had a moment, something is revealed, and it was like, wait, should I be doing this? Is Waking the Windfish actually the thing I could be doing? Because it will be destroying everything in this world.

Am I the bad guy? Wait, you can tell this kind of story in a video game? And it just like ignited baby K’s brain. And all I wanted to do was work on video games. But back then in my mind, video games just came out of Japan. It was this strange nebulous thing that happened in another country and a language I didn’t speak. And when we were lucky enough, they translate one over to us. But yeah, like that’s.

Aaron Nemoyten (04:14)
You

Kay Purcell (04:24)
Those are the kind of things that spark me is how can you tell a story in a compelling way? How can you make someone question their reality, their morality, what they see as black and white? That’s what excites me. I don’t know if I answered your question or if I just completely rambled away, but there you go.

Aaron Nemoyten (04:40)
I mean,

it wasn’t exactly what I was thinking, but it was also very interesting. So it doesn’t really matter. Honestly, I’m with you on one of the things that I enjoy about media is when it makes you say, wait, you can do that. And I love any kind of subversion. Well, not unconditionally. It has to be done well. just about all of my favorite media.

Kay Purcell (05:03)
Yeah.

Aaron Nemoyten (05:08)
has a component of, wait, you can do that?

Kay Purcell (05:16)
That’s why I like cats. Wait, you can do that? How?

Aaron Nemoyten (05:21)
You mean actual cats, not the movie cats, right?

Kay Purcell (05:23)
Yes, actual cats.

You can get up there since when? That’s 15 feet off the ground, my dude. It’s just…

Aaron Nemoyten (05:34)
Do you have any favorite war story that you want to tell about your adventures in the industry?

Kay Purcell (05:41)

What, what are you looking, cause I got a lot and a lot of them I don’t want to necessarily air. Like, are you looking for funny? Are you looking for traumatic? Are you looking for like…

Aaron Nemoyten (05:57)
best war stories are, they are funny, the funniness is often a component of it, right? Where it’s, it illustrates a more fundamental truth or something really interesting, or it’s an adventure, or everybody learns something, but also it’s funny because you learn something by like, somebody screwed up, maybe you screwed up, right? Like it could be, right?

Kay Purcell (06:05)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron Nemoyten (06:23)
I think

straight up traumatic isn’t necessarily the right way to go here.

Kay Purcell (06:26)
Yeah, I’m like, because

that’s where my brain like immediately like, and I’m like,

Aaron Nemoyten (06:30)
Yeah, I mean look,

if it’s your favorite story to tell people, I assume it’s not too traumatic. Because then you wouldn’t.

Kay Purcell (06:38)
have levels of friends that I can tell things to.

Aaron Nemoyten (06:41)
Sure, sure. Right. Okay.

Let’s how about how about you the story that you tell a bunch of people that you are hanging out with at a meetup and you’re all industry people and you can trust them to that degree, but you don’t know them now.

Kay Purcell (06:50)
Yeah.

See if you like this one. might be, this one feels a little name droppy sometimes, but also it’s like, so back when I worked at TV and Art, my CEO was super ridiculously into the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And right, to the point where Kevin Eastman would often show up to our office.

Aaron Nemoyten (07:15)
as everybody should be.

Kay Purcell (07:23)
And hilariously, I was doing moderation with my desk directly outside of the CEO’s office with my monitor pointing to his door, which was brilliant office layout. Let me tell you, had a couple close scares there. It’s not going where you think it is. I have other stories about that.

Aaron Nemoyten (07:35)
no. no, I can guess where this is going.

good.

Kay Purcell (07:43)
So multiple times, you know, he would bring him in and be like, this is, know, Kay Julie, CEA, hi, This is Kevin Eastman, hi, bye. And then they go in and do whatever they were doing in the office, right? But so multiple times it had always kind of been in a passing high, never really had a chat with him. You know, I was just a worker bee. It’s fine. Fast forward a couple of months and we were hosting Artist Alley for San Diego Comic Con.

And so we’d gotten there early, we’d set everything up, we’d gone through and made sure all the artists had carpets, padded chairs, we had little goodie bags for them, all of that, take care of people. And then we had been told because of the Kevin Eastman connection, we had invites to the heavy metal party that night. So it’s our first night at comp, we’ve worked the whole day, done all the setup.

We hike over to this location where this is, and it’s like me and my buddy Ben. And we go up, and the dude at the door, you know, we’re like, hey, okay, Ben, DeviantArt, we’re on the list. And he’s like, mm.

Doesn’t check, right? And we’re like, he’s like, who are you with? And we’re like, well, we’re with DeviantArt, we’re sponsoring Artist Alley, Heavy Metal, know, and he’s like, mm, Heavy Metal isn’t in Artist Alley. And we’re like, mm? And it’s just kind of just like, he’s like,

And so at this point, you know, it’s our first Comic Con, me and Ben are kind of like, we step to the side and we’re like, so what do we do? Are we gonna like, should we just go? Right? We’re kind of doing that little. Right then. Yeah, we’re like, it’s like, let’s go get some drinks, get off of our feet. And if we’re just gonna stand out here in the dark, right? Like, right then, Kevin Eastman and a couple of his friends come rolling up to the door.

Aaron Nemoyten (09:31)
And you’ve been there all day, so you kind of want to go, right?

Kay Purcell (09:46)
He looks at the bouncer, he’s like, hey man, I got these two. And he’s like, yeah, cool. And then he looks me in the eye and he goes, by the way, I’ve been meaning to tell you, I love your hair. And walks inside. And like at the same time, Ben and I both look at the bouncer, the door guy, right? And we’re like, eh? And he’s like, yeah, go in. So like.

Aaron Nemoyten (10:00)
Nice.

Kay Purcell (10:08)
And I promise there’s an industry reason for this, and it is whenever I am interviewing for a position, especially the higher up it is, the more important this is to me, I make sure that whoever this person is interviews with someone, let me be clear, they are not, they are incredibly vital, but someone who is generally considered lower on the totem pole, right, I make sure they interview with the community manager or the QA person or the office manager, because I need to know if they are rude.

to those people. If they treat those people poorly in an interview, they’re gonna be a nightmare in the office. The industry, I know so many games journalists who are now narrative designers within video games. I know narrative designers who are now department heads or creative brand managers, creative people. Never forget that this industry is large but it’s so tiny and it’s so interwoven. And just remember, like,

Don’t be rude to people because it will come back to bite you. Also, Kevin Eastman likes my fricking hair.

Aaron Nemoyten (11:13)
That’s awesome.

Was it a good party? Was it worth it?

Kay Purcell (11:19)
was pretty cool. It was a pretty neat time. And I still have, somewhere in one of my background pieces, I have the heavy metal spread of Art Germ’s character, Anfella, the DeviantArt mascot signed by the heavy metal crew in Art Germ from that San Diego Comic-Con. It was really cool.

Aaron Nemoyten (11:39)

And then one of the final questions, what are you excited about right now?

Kay Purcell (11:47)
goodness. Okay, I’m gonna reveal to people exactly when this was recorded. I need you all to understand that today is Silksong Day.

I watched every storefront crash at 7 a.m. It made my coffee time so entertaining, just scrolling that. I am not excited about Silksong. Happy Silksong Day to everyone who celebrates. I am so happy for you. It has been a wait well worth it, I hope. I am excited about a little tiny game called Fields of Mystria. I am a farming game nerd.

Aaron Nemoyten (11:57)
you

Kay Purcell (12:21)
And this is honestly the farming game to me that challenges Stardew Valley. Rivals Stardew Valley. It’s got magic. It’s got all the things that I love that just push all those happy buttons. As well as lots of new cool.

innovations and new things to the genre and lots of NPC personalities and character developments and cute stuff. So that has been my, especially as I’m unemployed, you you wake up, you do all the applications, you do all the house tours, then you’re like, now I can just lay on the couch and play fields of this, I could just play this game and just get the serotonin release. So that is my happy place and.

related, concerned, and just announced there will be a Stardew Valley 1.7. God’s alone no win, but I can’t wait for it. I don’t know what it’s gonna be, but I’m excited.

Aaron Nemoyten (14:13)
to some degree, it sounds like it boils down to just there’s something about the mentality or the sensibilities that appeal to you about not all Western media, but the sort of now the sort of weirder, more experimental side.

think the lobster and the lighthouse are good examples. I haven’t seen the lobster, but I know what the story is. And I think it’s really cool that those are major influences. I’m wondering, based on what you said about Indian media that’s modern, not appealing to you, if they’re going through a phase that’s sort of akin to what happened to American media in the 80s, where the economy was exploding and so a lot of…

Sahil Bajaj (14:36)
Yeah.

Hmm.

Aaron Nemoyten (14:57)
what was going to get made, especially on the larger scale in movies and what was going to get promoted in music, et cetera, was the stuff that the money people felt would give them the most return on investment. And so that’s why.

in a lot of ways the 80s are a time for both music and film where a lot of the mainstream stuff that’s coming out is not as daring and not as interesting as what came before it in the 70s when people are really finding their way and what happened in the 90s when people are starting to sort of feel disaffected. The 80s was this weird sweet spot where you had the blockbusters and you had the know Arnold Schwarzenegger movies and the hair metal and that kind of thing and so I’m wondering if there’s something similar going on in India right now.

where the economy has been exploding and getting much bigger and so the influence on what gets made sort of changes and the priorities change.

Sahil Bajaj (15:49)
Before I answer that, I need to ask, because I do not remember the timeline. When was Reagan?

Aaron Nemoyten (15:55)
Reagan was the 80s.

Sahil Bajaj (15:56)
Okay, so it’s yeah yeah, Modi. Shout out to Modi man. He loves yellow, not this kind of yellow, but the other kind, saffron. So here’s the funny thing, India kind of had that in the 80s too. It’s weird because like a lot of our blockbusters from like that 60s, 70s, 80s era partially were inspired by Hollywood blockbusters.

Aaron Nemoyten (15:58)
India has a conservative government now.

Sahil Bajaj (16:24)
And there was a tonal shift in media where we sort of had this more daring storytelling. And that was selling tickets there, right? I think that mentality definitely happened in India before too. But what’s happening now is, so coming to today, I don’t know if the economy is booming. In fact, I think globally, there’s some funky things going on with the economy, I feel.

I don’t think it’s 2008 but it’s a different beast. We don’t know what it is. But regardless, India is not like on that. But what India is doing is I feel like it’s partly, you know, Modi being like, I don’t like this film. But you know, he would say that like an Indian accent and not probably on English because his English is not good. That’s fine. But like, I just don’t like Modi. The other thing is like

So there’s suppression by the government for certain movies, which it did happen. There was a movie by Payal Kapadia, which I think was last year’s. So there were two movies from India that were supposed to be going to the academy. And so one of them was Lapata Ladies, which is a

This movie, like you know, the title of the movie is like, you know, Missing Women. That is also like kind of rooted in like, you know, like real Indian, like Indian Indian culture, but also as all we imagined as light, which is another film that is like, you know, rooted in Indian culture, but it also is like dealing with themes that like the Hindu supremacist government might deem risqué.

as in is dealing with things that are like, know, not okay with like Hindu conservatives. And so what ended up happening is Lapa Tha Ladies, which fine film, I haven’t seen it, but my dad has. It was not the better of the two movies, but that was submitted because all we imagined as like was anti-establishment. It wasn’t, but you know, that’s what we’re dealing with. And so there’s that.

Aaron Nemoyten (18:46)
Yeah.

Sahil Bajaj (18:49)
there’s been like several movies like that which is just bonkers but the other part has been india is really really trying to get to gen z and i guess gen z likes this and or not gen z gen alpha like because they like all the humor in like comedy movies which used to be some of the cleverest in the game has now been replaced with like tiktok humor instagram humor or like you know just like one-liner jokes like that

And it’s everywhere, even in comedy movies or non-comedy movies. Like, I kid you not, that’s part of it. And the other part is they are trying to like do franchises like American films do. So we have like an action movie, an action spy movie franchise now that has like so many different spin-offs happening. And there is no plot. There is nothing being said. It’s just, you know, three hours, you’re in the theater, you’re eating popcorn.

and then you eat more popcorn because unlike the US, India has intermissions in their films. And it’s not just for Bollywood films. Hollywood films have intermissions too. I found this out because the Batman, when it came out in India, which three hour long movie, come on, Matt Reeves In India, Batman had an intermission and I’m like, bro, three hours.

Aaron Nemoyten (20:11)
We need intermissions in

movies here, to be honest. Like, I don’t mind long movies. Yeah.

Sahil Bajaj (20:14)
they would sell so many popcorn buckets, man. Like it would be so

much money. They’re leaving money on the table. Nicole Kidman could not get this many people to go to the theater. But I digress from this small segue. They’re really trying to appeal to Gen Alpha because as you introduced that question to me about my influences being Western, Gen Alpha is also like trying to be Western.

they’re trying to see what works in the West and what does work in the West. Silly Instagram humor, because that goes viral, right? Like straight up just like trying to be like Americans. Like we have a movie that is based on Archie comics. Like if you know Archie comics, we have a Bollywood movie based on Archie comics where everything from Archie comics is happening in Mumbai, which spoiler alert,

nothing about Archie comics is like Mumbai. Mumbai is not like Archie comics, but they’re trying and the film is all Nepal babies. I’m not going to get into that, but that is where we’re at as Indian culture. We’re really trying hard to be like the West and that is just not interesting to me. And I feel like it might be interesting to like the youth. It might be interesting to like older people who just like Bollywood, but to me it’s just like not there. So I do think like

It’s them trying to do like the thesis of this question, is, your influences come from the West, mine is coming in a good way, theirs is coming in a bad way.

Aaron Nemoyten (21:52)
Yeah, like it’s cynical.

Sahil Bajaj (21:54)
Yeah, yeah, it’s not call, but that’s the thing. There is good Indian media being made. It’s just that we don’t hear about it. Like, I’ll give you an example. Three weeks ago, chatting with my buddies, both of whom, you know, I grew up with in school in the UAE and now they’re not in India. They are in like other countries, one’s in Sweden, one’s in Australia. And one of them brought up a movie I hadn’t even heard about. It sounds entertaining as hell. And

I’m like, why didn’t I hear about this? He’s like, I don’t even know, man. I discovered this because my mom told me about it, because she saw it on Netflix. And I’m like, well, that’s the problem. We’re not hearing about these movies. Indian cinema is being advertised like Apple advertises their TV shows. You just don’t hear about it.

Aaron Nemoyten (22:42)
Yeah, well like except yeah, then Apple does their their Emmy campaigns and then they’re like now you know about our shows

Sahil Bajaj (22:51)
yeah.

Yeah, yeah, you hear about Severance, you will not hear about Central Park, which is so sad.