Transcript

Aaron Nemoyten (00:00)
what are you drinking?

Kay Purcell (00:01)
I’m embracing my Southern in the middle of a heat wave and I am having some iced tea right now because that’s how we

Aaron Nemoyten (00:06)
Nice.

Kay Purcell (00:46)
Hey, you all, I am Kay Purcell. I use GNA pronouns. I am originally from Texas, but currently living in Los

do community management, moderation, marketing, comms, production. If you need it, I could do it. And I am super excited to be here today.

Aaron Nemoyten (01:01)
Kay Purcell. Am I saying your last name right with the right accents? Purcell cool Kay Purcell. Why don’t you? Purcell Kay Purcell, where are you?

Kay Purcell (01:04)
You got it. You got it.

or if you’re from where I am, it’s Purcell. Purcell.

I am currently in Los Angeles, but even though I mostly don’t have the accent, I grew up in Texas, y’all.

Aaron Nemoyten (01:19)
Nice, nice, we’re in Texas.

Kay Purcell (01:21)
the Dallas area, but way, way, out in the sticks.

Aaron Nemoyten (01:25)
Nice.

Okay.

me and my wife drove all the way across Texas, cause we were on a road trip and we went from, we, we had a wedding to go to a Newport beach and then we were going to go visit a friend in Houston. So driving from Southern California all the way to Houston was, that was a thing. Yeah.

Kay Purcell (01:40)
That’s a ways, yeah.

Yeah, when I lived in Dallas I had friends going, yeah, I’m going to Texas. You wanna meet up for lunch? What part of Texas? I’m going to Austin. No, we are not meeting for lunch. That is six hours one direction if I speed.

Aaron Nemoyten (01:51)
Nope. Yeah,

yeah,

so you are a community also a bunch of other things and you have a ton of experience going back outside the games industry. So you were at Deviant Art, you were at Red Bull. Can you, how, why, what happened here?

Kay Purcell (02:11)
Yeah, I cut my teeth on community and social media before social media was a term. I was one of the first 50 employees at DeviantArt. Our rival was MySpace because Facebook didn’t exist yet when I started. Yeah, it was wild days. It was really the wild west of the internet. It was an incredible time. Super tiny, scrappy startup team and we did a lot with very few people.

Aaron Nemoyten (02:23)
Man, good times. I miss it.

Kay Purcell (02:37)
and got to do some really cool stuff. Like we sponsored Artist Alley at San Diego Comic Con. And thing about being a community manager, especially to start up, is you kind of do a little bit of everything. So I got really good at, you know.

we weren’t just community manager, we were also moderation. So we did marketing as well as moderation and then we also had to communicate the rules. I helped write the rules. So I had fingers in a lot of pies at one point. DeviantArt started up an editorial branch and they were like, hey, we’re trying to like.

do more writing stuff, you’re a really good writer, you majored in English, do you wanna write some things? And I’m like, sure. So I started writing articles about like Pokemon and Harvest Moon and kind of some of these older IPs that were still around and people were like, that’s still around, how, why, what do you do? Filled them with fan art, explained about it, just kind of talked about why people play these games. That became a marketing product.

a bunch of companies looked at that and went, that’s really cool. Can we have something like that written? And we want that person to be the one to interview us and write it. became a writer that way when they finally shut down that side of deviant art, I was like, well, I kind of miss that creative outlet and I kind of miss writing. I wonder if I could just do this.

and started reaching out to a couple different gaming blogs and ended up writing for a little website called Gaming Trend. Already knew how to write, already had con experience, so the next thing I knew I had been promoted up to lead editor and was onboarding people and assigning things and editing and building their Twitch channel up to affiliate so they could make some money off that, all of that stuff.

after something like 17 years at DeviantArt, because a bunch of that was volunteer before I actually got hired, I was kind of like, I’m kind of burnt out and I kind of need to step away. And by this point, the company had been acquired more than doubled in size. And I was like, there’s a changing of the guard. And I stepped away, dealt with a little bit of burnout and then started throwing apps.

at places and finally got hired at Red Bull as their first gaming community manager. They had a lot of community managers for sports, but I was their first gaming one. So that was a fun adventure.

Aaron Nemoyten (05:06)
Nice,

nice. they let you kind of bring your own, tone or style to that? Or was it more like we’re Red Bull and this is how Red Bull communicates and this is the Red Bull attitude? Because when I think about Red Bull and energy drinks, I think about they have this very specific tone and target audience. And so like, how did that work?

Kay Purcell (05:28)
Well, I will say at least Red Bull’s tone is very specific from and different from Monster, which Thank goodness They definitely had goals You know Red Bull has actually been involved in video games

Aaron Nemoyten (05:35)
Yeah. Yeah.

Kay Purcell (05:43)
for a very long time. Red Bull was throwing LAN parties when it was pack up your PC and show up in the space, right? Like they actually have very deep roots in the space. And we’re kind of realizing, you know, they’ve always been more on the competitive side and they were like, well, we need to maybe look at doing some more community oriented stuff. like, how can we lean more into cosplayers and artists and have more than just the, you know, I have a personal custom fight stick

and I go to tournaments, like how do we expand this? So I got some leeway in that, I got some freedom in that. Pandemic kind of changed a lot of things, as you can imagine, and that’s, I ended my time with them during the pandemic because, you know, it was really hard to throw events, but I did get to work on

the Red Bull Solo Queue with League of Legends and it was their first online only tournament. And because I’d had all this experience with DeviantArt and how do you throw online events and support a community, I got to really help the sports team, well the eSports team really built out the tournament brackets and all of that, but I got to do a lot of the messaging, I got to do kind of the writing about, there was a whole thing about the climb and I got to write this whole little thing about what it’s like to climb.

and finally get to the top of the ladder and beat the top of the rank and you know got to do a lot for that and so that was that was really kind of a cool way to step away from that and I still have two two Red Bull cans that were made specifically for that project sitting on my shelf. I did that but you’ll appreciate I got hired in December the end of the year

Aaron Nemoyten (07:19)
That’s really cool.

Kay Purcell (07:28)
And which, I mean, it was great. was kind of like, okay, new year, new job, right? This is a cool way. I get hired, I show up to the Monica campus, and they’re like, cool, guess what?

End of the month is Ninja New Year 12 hours live stream in New York. Get on a plane, you’re going to New York and running this 12 hour live stream. By the way, this is going to be the first time that Twitch is testing a public test of the new poll system and you’re going to be running it with a person from Twitch standing over your shoulder, making sure you don’t mess it up. So, you know, no pressure.

Aaron Nemoyten (08:00)
Okay, that sounds fun. Yeah,

yeah, no big deal.

Kay Purcell (08:03)
But it was very fun and they have the mechanical llama that you could ride.

Aaron Nemoyten (08:06)
OK, yes, I I’ve seen that at I’ve seen that at GDC.

Kay Purcell (08:09)
I got to ride the Fortnite llama.

It was also formal, so I was doing it in a dress.

Aaron Nemoyten (08:16)
Did the llama.

Kay Purcell (08:19)
Lama did not have a

Yeah, I mean, I guess they make special exceptions for hooved

friends.

Aaron Nemoyten (08:31)
That’s cool. I want to give you a chance to say something about this if you want to. it is a can of worms. So I just wrote in my notes, I wrote in big capital letters, games journalism. And then I’m just gonna say, do you have any hot takes about games journalism? Or would you like to not touch that one?

Kay Purcell (08:38)
so excited!

every games journalist you know needs encouragement and a consensual hug. Games journalism is a really interesting place because…

Aaron Nemoyten (09:01)
Fair.

Kay Purcell (09:07)
Games journalists are fans, and I am also of the opinion, and there are a lot of people who get mad when I say this, and I don’t care, fight me. Reviews are opinion pieces, right? And good games journalists can look at a thing and go, I don’t enjoy this, but I can see the potential behind it, right? Or like, hey, you know, this isn’t.

Aaron Nemoyten (09:18)
Mm-hmm.

Kay Purcell (09:32)
this wasn’t for me, but these mechanics were really, really solid, so maybe someone who enjoys this type of game play. It is a much more professional kind of opinion piece, but it’s still an opinion, and you can’t be mad at people for not enjoying a game. I’m sorry. But currently, journalists are caught in this really sticky place of like,

Games studios and marketing would love to treat games journalists as part of the marketing machine. And a lot of games journalists are, I mean, you do have to play politics to a certain extent, because of course you want the early copy. Not selfishly, but because if you don’t have your review up the day that comes out, you’re not getting clicks. That means you’ve wasted time, because clicks, unfortunately, are what sell. So you have to play nice.

But also you have an ethical responsibility to report on these companies when they’re doing really bad shady stuff. But often those companies

will retaliate against your platform for you know covering these kinds of stories breaking these kinds of news and so you’re kind of like you’re losing from the fan side because they’re mad at you because your opinion doesn’t match often when they haven’t even played it they’re like no I think this game would be great it’s not out yet I can’t play it you played it you say it’s bad and I’m mad about that

They’re mad at you if you politicize things that are legitimate problems. And then the companies get mad at you for calling out bad behavior.

And again, you are slaves to the clicks. how do you, you know, we’re gonna shout out to Rogue News that just started up. That’s the old IGN and Polygon people. It just started up with help from Rascal and we support them to go support, creator-owned platforms. Rascal is great if you like TTRPGs. Rogue is for video games. Go support small creators and create our own platforms. It’s the only way to survive right now.

Aaron Nemoyten (11:34)
I totally agree with that. think that we, we went through a phase where there were a lot of acquisitions of games media that, and the games media was as far as I know, profitable. but the problem is that when they become a part of a much larger company that has this idea that profitability needs to reach a certain threshold to be worth it, then they start being looked at as an area to maximize and maximizing profits to

to their minds for some reason means getting rid of the most experienced people who are actually like why the audience comes. And then they’re left with nothing. And apparently like this has happened to so many outlets where now their online presence is a shell of what it was. And it makes me wonder if the people that made those decisions even like understand what happened or if they just kind of see this line item on a spreadsheet and go like, well,

Kay Purcell (12:32)
day.

Aaron Nemoyten (12:33)
That expense is not an expense anymore, so I win.

Kay Purcell (12:36)
Yeah, they see line goes up. And what’s really tragic is like it’s hurting the industry in so many ways, because when you don’t have those senior people who can teach the juniors how to navigate a situation, who can teach their juniors how to stand up and push for a story all of that’s a problem. But even down to you don’t have the most experienced people who can quickly edit someone else’s.

paper or call out something, like it is, it’s a huge loss. Just like when you lose, you know, all the senior membership at a game dev studio and you’re suddenly like, well, we’ve just lost so much institutional knowledge. Same is true for journalism.

Aaron Nemoyten (13:13)
I think we’ve reached an interesting inflection point where there are a lot of experienced people that are coming out of sort of big companies that were doing these things poorly and relying on ad revenue entirely. And they’re going out to places like Patreon and saying, look, if we can just get enough people to support us directly.

then we can probably do a better job and make the content that we care about and do a better job of responding to our audience needs, et cetera, et cetera. And weirdly, I see that as being a similar trend to what’s happened with Blue Sky, for example, where they’ve basically said that like, we are going to try to operate under a different business model. We’re going to be leaner. We’re not trying to become a multi-billion dollar company. We’re just trying to do the thing that we were founded to do. And

Do you see that as being like a large trend or do you see it as being a bunch of outliers where the most famous people just happen to be able to do that?

Kay Purcell (14:12)
I think it is very sadly, it is the most famous people have the audience to be able to do it because how do you look at, it’s so difficult to become an up and coming Twitch streamer. It’s so difficult to become an up and coming YouTuber. The same thing is true, it’s even harder with written media, because what are attention spans these days? People don’t read. People want to watch the video.

Right? So unless you’ve really built up that audience, then yes, you, you can try and there’s no guarantee, but it’s kind of like when everyone says, yeah, you lost your job at a AAA. We’ll just start your own studio with what money my dude, like my, my sibling in dice. That sounds great. Are you going to fund it? And no, they’re not. So, you know, that’s the sad truth is like, yes, I, this is why I’m like screaming about Rogue like go support these creator-owned platforms because

Yes, supporting these people is so incredibly important. I just had on my tabletop talk show Chris Hutton who does TTRPG Insider which is a TTRPG news outlet that’s just him and it’s incredibly informative and great journalism but it’s also just him. like how much can he do? And it’s much the same if you are a journalist, it’s kind of like,

Hbomberguy. He has the audience where he can put out one video every year or two and he’s fine and he’s got the support to do that. But if you’re not Hbomberguy, good luck putting out one deeply researched YouTube video, much less one deeply researched paper, you know, article a year, you’re not going be able to feed yourself.

Aaron Nemoyten (15:41)
Yes.

I wanted to ask you about this really probably one of the most unusual line items in your bio, which is professional Dungeon Master.

Kay Purcell (16:54)
Yes, I am, if you couldn’t tell from my background, if you’re only listening, I have a lot of D &D and TTRPG stuff in my background, including the My Little Pony Friendship is Magic official book, which is incredible. It is actually a really robust and amazing system. It’s level one to 20, and it has some of the most granular character creation I’ve ever

Yeah, I run TTRPGs, I run especially D &D, but I will play just about anything. I started my little production company, Chaotic Wholesome, and we run various games, but mostly TTRPGs for charity. We’ve raised over $30,000 since the start of the pandemic. We’ve gotten to work with some incredible people, including Danielle Radford of Dimension 20 fame. She’s incredible.

And I also have run several paid D &D games. And as we all know, you only have to be paid once to be considered a professional. And I have definitely run more than one. I’ve run a lot of D &D. And

Aaron Nemoyten (18:01)
That’s so cool.

Kay Purcell (18:02)
A lot of the skills that I have built up as a community manager and in my communications background, like, does that come in useful at a D and D because you learn to anticipate and you learn to think on your feet and you just, you don’t panic, you push through it. And then after it’s done, you sit down and go, I pulled that off.

Aaron Nemoyten (18:22)
do you think it is that put you into the position of being, you know, considered qualified to be a professional dungeon

Kay Purcell (18:29)
Well, first and foremost, I have over 400 hours of D &D content online. You can watch me play or run games, and I think I’m a pretty decent storyteller. So, you know, that’s worked out. I also…

talk about D &D incessantly to any of my friends who will tolerate it for any length of time. And more than one occasion, one of my friends has gone like, hey, I’ve got friends in town who are looking to have someone run a one-shot for them. Could you do it tonight? Yeah? Okay, they’ll throw you this amount of money. you? Yeah, sure. Yeah, I’ve got a pre-written module. they’re down to clown, I’m down to clown.

Aaron Nemoyten (19:09)
That’s cool.

Kay Purcell (19:18)
And then, you know, without saying too much, there are other things that I can’t talk about, but there are other reasons that I was considered good enough to run the game.

Aaron Nemoyten (19:30)
Interesting. Are these NDA reasons or other reasons? Okay, okay, that’s fine, that’s fine. I mean, what’s a podcast for if not breaking an NDA?

Kay Purcell (19:34)
Very strong NDA reasons.

But yeah, I’m in the D &D Creators program, which is why I’m lucky enough to have a bunch of the alternate covers. I spend a lot of time reading lore, adapting lore, creating my own lore, customizing things to my players and their characters, and going, yeah, sure, you can break that rule this one time, because it’s really cool. But if you do it again, I’m calling your BS.

Aaron Nemoyten (20:06)
Nice. So do you have strong takes about lore?

Kay Purcell (20:15)
My strong take is lore changes the minute you start a game.

Lore kind of like the rules is a guideline. And if it doesn’t work for you, then it doesn’t work for you. If you want to play a game set in Ravnica and your entire party is like, mm, not really down with the sex cult guild.

cool, don’t have the sex cult or make it, you know, just, just tone that down a lot because it doesn’t matter how strictly you adhere to the lore. Your players are going to make decisions that change the very fabric of that world. If you and I sit down and run the exact same module by the time we get to the end, what happened is going to be different. Our modules change based on what the players do. So there is, there is a universal pristine lore and that lore is out of the window or changed the moment you start playing.

And, you know, to be incredibly nerdy here, that actually came in really handy. Like that mindset and understanding came in really handy when it came to game dev. Cause it’s like, yes, this is what the schedule in the GDD says. We cannot get that done. So what do we do to adapt to get us back in the module where we need to be for the next session?

Aaron Nemoyten (21:30)
Oh my gosh! So

the production plan is the company lore.

Kay Purcell (21:34)
Yeah, it’s like this is the ideal, right? Something went wrong, right? Someone failed to seduce the dragon. Now two people have been eaten. What do we do?

Aaron Nemoyten (21:49)
That’s a good way to think of it.

I think my, my follow up to a specific thing you said was, I see that you have all this experience with, with story and creating and consuming story and in sort of a professional capacity. And that has made you, it sounds like more accepting and flexible rather than more of a critic. am I hearing that right?

Kay Purcell (22:12)
Yeah, like think Yoshi P just posted online. He’s like, please remember that the people who make video games are people

I spend a lot of time dissecting media that I don’t like because I want to figure out why don’t I like it?

because there’s always a reason for it. And sometimes it’s just like, I don’t like that because that’s very clearly like a hero’s journey or a fantasy for someone who’s not me. And that’s fine. Maybe I don’t like it because some of the themes are not themes I enjoy. Sometimes I don’t like this TTRPG system because of the way this mechanic works. How would I fix that mechanic? Well, it’s actually not that mechanic. It’s just the whole way this thing is. And that one mechanic is what bothers me the most about this whole thing.

just isn’t for me. Because there is a big difference between I don’t like something and this thing is bad.

Aaron Nemoyten (23:09)
Yes, this is true.

Kay Purcell (23:12)
That is a fascinating juxtaposition to me and it really does help you understand, especially as a creator, yeah, not everyone is gonna like everything I create and that’s okay because the right person will find it and it will mean the world to that person. That’s what’s important.

Aaron Nemoyten (23:30)
Absolutely, yeah. I think a really important framework for me, at least, for evaluating stuff is like, did you accomplish the goal that you were trying to accomplish? I think in video games and movies especially, you’re trying to give the audience a really specific experience. And there are ways to fail to do that. And in video games, obviously, it’s…

way harder to fix those problems depending on the scope and the amount of time that you have and other requirements. But, you know, there’s definitely like a toolbox of ways to accomplish certain things that are pretty well established now. And so then it’s the question of like, are those the right things to use or do we need to come up with something new and that’s gonna take longer and, you know, or do we just kind of call good enough, good enough and move on?

Kay Purcell (24:25)
Yeah, like video games is still, they’re far more established than they were, but there’s still an element of Wild West to them, right? We haven’t figured it out 100%, which is part of why it’s exciting to be in video games, especially as, you know, processors improve and, you know, are we leaning into the 100 % realistic, uncanny valley, I can see everyone’s pores stuff, we gonna keep it more cartoony, but really crank up what we can do with those more simplified graphics? Like, that’s really fun.

Aaron Nemoyten (24:33)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Kay Purcell (24:55)
One really important thing though is, I think especially for indie devs, especially for indie devs who are doing this for the first time, did I accomplish what I wanted to do with this?

And am I happy with that goal? Because a lot of times, you know, I have known more than one indie dev who went, I’m making this game and I know other people aren’t going to like it. And people have told me they don’t like it. And they’ve told me they don’t like X, Y, and Z about it. And I don’t care. I’m making this game. This is my thing. And they make the game and they put it out and no one likes it. And suddenly they do care that no one likes it. Right. And so then it’s like, okay, now that you’ve kind of had that reality check,

Were you happy with that goal? Are you gonna go back and fix it or are you going to remember that for your next project? Because yeah, can tell any story you wanna tell and usually there’s an audience for it, especially the more, I don’t necessarily wanna say this on your podcast, but the more kinky it is. Yeah, there’s always gonna be an audience for that, right? Y’all, I work at DeviantArt, I know this stuff.

Aaron Nemoyten (25:47)
Yeah.

Well, the real question is, will you find that audience? Like, will the audience find the thing because there’s so many other things? And I think there’s something, there’s a lesson there in the, know, if it’s kinky enough, because the more specific you get, the more you have an underserved market, right? And then the question is just like, do they even know that there are things for them? And…

Kay Purcell (26:09)
But.

Yes. Well.

And certain

niche markets will go out of their way to hunt down anything at all that has to do with that niche. And then some are like, I like this thing, but like, I would love a game like that, but if I find it, yeah, if I find it, great. And, you know, good games don’t sell themselves. Having a good game makes it so much easier to market the game and get people to buy it, but you can make the best game in the world. And if you just throw it on steam and don’t tell anyone.

Aaron Nemoyten (26:38)
Yes.

Yeah, but who’s gonna make it?

Kay Purcell (27:00)
It’s not gonna get traction.

Aaron Nemoyten (27:01)
Yep,

Yeah, nobody knew they wanted to play Getting Over It until that game came out. And then I’m sure a lot of people that did play it still didn’t want to have played it, but you know, it happens.

Kay Purcell (27:09)
There’s…

you know, find your audience and hope they find you.

Aaron Nemoyten (27:21)
What is your favorite game and why?

Kay Purcell (27:22)
if you look at my play time, which we’re not gonna discuss the hours I have logged, by the numbers, my favorite game is Pokemon.

because I have a legit living shiny dex. have, well, I’m 11 away from now having every single one from Scarlet Violet, a legit legally acquired copy of every single Pokemon, male, female, regional variances. And…

In case y’all don’t know, shiny Pokemon are exactly like regular Pokemon. They’re just a very slightly different color and there is a one in roughly 2000 and something chance to get them based. are different things you could do to increase your chances of getting a shiny. But I have been shiny hunting since the Game Boy Advance and it’s a problem. Don’t be like me. Don’t be like me.

Aaron Nemoyten (28:07)
Holy moly.

Everyone’s gotta have something they collect, I guess.

Kay Purcell (28:23)
It, shiny fishing, chain fishing back in the day was kind of my version of meditation or like yoga, right? Cause I could just like close my eyes and just, could do it completely by sound. And it was just kind of this meditative. You listen for the sound, you push the button, you’d repeat the thing. Again, it could do it, eyes closed. And then in the end, if you were lucky, sometimes it was just like an hour of just kind of this Zen state. And sometimes you had an hour of Zen state and you had a shiny Pokemon at the end. So that’s how that started.

Aaron Nemoyten (28:53)
So, Kay Purcell, thank you for being a guest on Make Games Drink Coffee.

Kay Purcell (28:58)
Thank you for

having me. I am sorry I did not come equipped with coffee.

Aaron Nemoyten (29:02)
That’s okay, that’s

Kay Purcell (29:04)
I will raise a mug tomorrow morning.

Aaron Nemoyten (29:07)
Perfect, yeah, a retroactive podcast mug.

Kay Purcell (29:10)
exactly.