This week, Aaron chats with Monica Fan in the second of a two-part interview. Monica is a game designer currently working at Pipeworks on an unannounced AAA game, but they consider themselves an eccentric creative at heart, having worked in entertainment media including newspaper, radio, theater, and film.
In this second half of our two-part interview, we went DEEP on just a few topics: The importance of consuming more media to broaden your knowledge (even if it means playing games you don’t like), short vs. long-term thinking in life and in your career, and the value of unconventional protagonists in games and how they could contribute to helping people love themselves as they are.
00:00 Introduction
00:59 Hot Take: Consume More Media, Even If You Don’t Like It
10:25 Short Vs Long-Term Thinking
17:24 Unconventional Protagonists And Loving Yourself
29:49 Outro
Monica Fan: my hot take no university will ever take my suggestion because it doesn’t make business sense, we should game design school or game development school, like how we teach film school and art school. Because when I was an artist, when I was in art school, we had to go to art show every week. Every week, ⁓ we have a class. We literally have class ⁓ is to watch other people’s art. is to see other people’s art. And I got exposed to so many art that I wouldn’t otherwise seek it out before. Because up until then, it’s like, how to draw, how craft. The reason art school is to, it’s not about getting you better on your craft. It’s about getting you good at understanding how big the world is and how many possibilities it is. And that’s the same with film is like when I was in film school, we have to watch a new film like every, every day. I barely made film I was in film school. I think I made like, there’s like one class that is like film making class. ⁓ And the whole film was about watch films, talking about film my advantage as a game designer. is I play a lot of game that I wouldn’t play if I have a regular job. Like I play a lot of bad game. I judge for a lot of game awards. Like Steam demo week is happening. I play all those games that to be fair, I’m not having a lot of game. I’m not having fun. A lot of game I’m playing. I’m like, it doesn’t bring me joy. I’m very aware of the game that bring me joy, but most game I play does not bring me joy, like, I’m not getting paid to do this, but like, it’s my responsibility because I’m from this school of education where it’s all about art education is about art exposure. It’s about seeing how other people do stuff as much like I’ve played a lot of that game. I’m not a dad. I would never be a dad. I play a lot of military sim. I don’t care about military. but to me it’s like, I want to see how different people approach art. I’m from China where our culture is very mono culture. Most people look like me. Most people have the same background. ⁓ And to me, the biggest luxury being in America your access to the culture, to the global culture that is just like. unthinkable when I was a kid in China. It’s like, I can go eat African food. I can go eat Indian food. I can go watch like a Korean movie. And those are all reach of my fingertip. And to me, that’s the biggest luxury of being like in America. when I was studying game design, we will learn the whole game design. I spent three years learning game design. We learned how to make game in Unity. We learned how to make 3D model. We learned how to make, like, we learned the craft. But I don’t think we ever had a class where it’s about appreciate game. the thing is like video game has a specialization issue. if you play, if you like, you can spend your whole career making FPS game. So there isn’t a lot of incentive to play a dating sim. There isn’t a lot of incentive to like for me, because if I just leave on my own without any, will play dating sim and cat game all day. But I know that would have.
Aaron Nemoyten: you
Monica Fan: devolved my career very far. So I have to play FPS. I have to play card game. have to play like chess game because I know I need to do this because that’s where the job is. But if you, if your job is to make like MMO and you only play MMO, you don’t really realize what you are missing There’s like, I, the stuff I know now is from 10 years, 20 of like media literacy. It’s not something you can like force fed someone in like a week. And I have a lot of time at work where we have two creative solution, but one is easier to be measured by number than the other. And that one will almost always win because it’s easier to measure. But We are definitely seeing this, like, is a lot of game makers do not have the media literacy training to make good art. And like the abstract thinking is like one reflect, like one thing. And the other thing is like, like when it comes to system design is people always focus on the genre. Like if you are making a souls like game, you start finding resource for other souls like game. and it’s always really narrow. And then we train an audience that get agitated when our design does not match their preconceived notion about what game of X genre should be played this is what I was hoping Game Pass would do ⁓ is
Aaron Nemoyten: Hmm
Monica Fan: let people access games that wouldn’t otherwise spend money, but they can check out. But what we learned from Game Pass numbers is people only play the game they already know they like. ⁓
Aaron Nemoyten: I mean, I think it raised their profile of some like weirder games a bit, right? Like we wouldn’t have had Pentament without Game Pass. But also I haven’t played Pentament yet. I really want to, but I just haven’t got around to it. So I don’t know what it says. Like I’m not representative. I’m 41 and I have two kids. So I don’t have like the same amount of time that I used to.
Monica Fan: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that’s the other thing is I understand I can watch movie by putting it on TV and it just plays. I don’t need to do anything to watch the movie. So it’s much easier to watch more movie versus like every time I play a new genre, it’s just what is going on. How do I, especially like full X game or like RTS, it’s just like everything is a shortcut.
Aaron Nemoyten: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Monica Fan: It’s not just like, it’s not so easy as purchasing the game. It’s like, had to learn, relearn muscle memory. have to learn like a whole culture of like the language that they use. And this, I do game translation and that’s why AI will never replace game vocalization because we don’t use regular English when it comes to talk about video game. We don’t use regular Chinese when we talk to video game.
Aaron Nemoyten: Yeah.
Monica Fan: Every genre developed their own culture, their own type of muscle, their own type convention. ⁓ so ⁓ a lot harder to venture outside. ⁓ takes a lot more. I can imagine if I have kids and I have a responsibility, or if I have ⁓ work 80 hours a week, ⁓ can imagine why it’s so hard. That’s why I think school is a good time to do that because hopefully you don’t have as much.
Aaron Nemoyten: Yeah. I think that you’re absolutely right that media literacy is a really important part of it, not just being able to make art, but also being able to make a variety of art that different people can understand and understanding the experience that they’re going to have and what the context they have, you know, is going into it. I went to film school and, you know, I at some point knew how to load multiple kinds of 16 millimeter film cameras. ⁓ is not useful to me now, but ⁓ the ⁓ fiction film class that I took ⁓ what I learned watching a bunch of films that I may not have watched otherwise, because they were a little more obscure, weird, same with the foreign film class, that stuff’s definitely useful. And I think even if I’m not going to go and make stuff like what I saw in those classes, ⁓ Knowing that it’s out there, it does make the world a little bit bigger and more interesting for me. And I think there’s huge value in that. I think that teaching game development is important, but also if you’re teaching game development and you’re not also saying like, hey, you should be aware that the following games exist and you should check them out and like, I think anyone that goes to school to learn game design should play. ⁓ papers, please, for example, things that push at the edges of what game design can be and what video games can accomplish and how they can make you feel. I think that stuff’s really important. And I think one advantage that indie games have is that a lot of the a lot of the most interesting examples of those things are not long games. And so you could sit down and if you play it for an hour, you might beat it
Monica Fan: Yeah.
Aaron Nemoyten: at least you’ll get enough to understand what people are getting out of it. Like you can beat the beginner’s guide in an hour and that game has a lot to say. ⁓ you’re going to get more interesting stuff out of that than you are playing the whatever fourth installment of some series that you’ve been into since you were a kid.
Monica Fan: the contradiction is. There’s a skill you need as a student that can get your job much easier out of school. And then there’s a skill you develop that makes you go much further later in the career. And those are different.
Aaron Nemoyten: Yeah. ⁓ yeah.
Monica Fan: I think America like talk about like the technology is like, we are always talking about a quarterly result. we are always thinking about near future. ⁓ And a lot of those stuff is like, you got to wait. there’s a Ted talk about is like language like in Chinese, there isn’t a language distinguishing between current and future and
Aaron Nemoyten: Mm-hmm.
Monica Fan: Like we don’t have tense. So people think a lot long run because future seems a lot closer versus like American English. There’s like, it’s the tense language. It’s like one day I will. And that just feels like so far away. So people, the way people think things is very different. So the sense of time is different and it’s, changes how you see what, how to invest in your time. and I think that’s like really hard to, ⁓ persuade people is like, yes, do this, but you may not see results in the next three years, but you should still do it. ⁓ Yeah.
Aaron Nemoyten: Yeah, ⁓ absolutely. And I actually think I have a number of things that I probably would have done differently if I had a better concept of that, because I was in bands. The longest I was in a band that was playing gigs was nine months. That happened three times. It was nine months for each one of them. But. At some point I was like, you know what? Like I graduated college. I’m done with this. I’m going to, I’m just going to do other stuff and have a career. But I know people that are successful in the music industry that were playing gigs. You know, my band opened for their bands. Those bands did not make it, but the people stuck with it. And they’re now in LA, you know, getting nominated for Grammys and stuff, doing songwriting and production. I think that being able to acknowledge to yourself that you just enjoy doing a thing and you just want to do it for the sake of doing it. And if you can make money at it, that’s great. And you are lucky is a much better attitude than thinking that there is a jackpot that if you can’t see yourself hitting the jackpot in the next ⁓ few years, then like, it’s not going to work out. That’s a bad attitude in hindsight, but I’m no longer 22, so you know, things are different.
Monica Fan: You can always go back. Also, like I would say, I think about like me doing acting a lot is I have like I was doing acting when I was a kid and then I quit when I was like 14, 15 because I had like at the time my agency was like you either do this list of cosmetic surgery to make yourself marketable or we don’t see a career. We’re not going to keep signing you. So I quit.
Aaron Nemoyten: Ugh. Yeah.
Monica Fan: And then I did it when I was in college and I had to quit again because I was on like student visa and stuff. And everyone is like, yeah, just go to LA and like grind your way up. can’t legally grind my way up as an immigrant. So I had to quit. And now I’m like going back because I have a job where I’m stable, where it afford me to explore. And to me, it’s like, I don’t think those times are wasted. I’m always coming back to it. And, but I,
Aaron Nemoyten: You
Monica Fan: I also, like, I’ve been doing a lot of like learning in the past couple of years is just have compassion for yourself, have compassion. Just it’s okay. It’s okay to stop. It’s hard to like grind when you don’t see hope, but always know you can always go back. You can always go back and do another band. And ⁓ the previous experience is wasted.
Aaron Nemoyten: you Yeah, I mean, I understand that, especially, you know, in the context of when my son was born, like, of course, you know, when you have a baby, like, you don’t know what’s going on, you’re sleep deprived, whatever, but at some point you sort of come back to reality and realize that ⁓ a kid growing up is a yardstick by which you sort of measure your own life. they give you a concrete, like this was a year ago, this was two years ago, you know, this was a month ago in a month from now this will happen because the way kids grow up is much more clear than the way adults are grown, you know, from 30 to 40, you don’t change as much as your kid is going to change from like ⁓ zero to two. So see the differences very clearly and then you can compare, you know, that creates milestones in your own life. was for me kind of scary at first because ⁓ ⁓ in some way also a sort of take life as it comes kind of person. I don’t think I really meant to be, but it kind of just happened. ⁓ something that ⁓ ⁓ perception of time like that was a big shock at first. And it made me really like step back and think about things and Now I sort of have more recognition that there are certain things that I would like to do ⁓ and ⁓ because I enjoy and so I should just work towards doing them eventually, you know, and because I, you know, I’m ⁓ I like doing artistic things creative things and whatnot. And I I need to make sure that that becomes a part of my life because otherwise ⁓ If I just keep taking it as it comes, then I’m just constantly like putting out fires and solving problems and doing the next thing. And then the long-term stuff that I just would like to do never happens.
Monica Fan: I was watching a TikTok today and they were like, the difference between like Chinese and American is like my, like, we can go back to like four generation, probably even longer. Every generation have a different, is under a different political regime, under a different political stuff. like, I think my generation was the, like, I was the first generation in our family that I, made to 18 without war, without fundamental political change. So my whole family, we are what it’s like to ⁓ live a life without preparing for that can happen anytime. And really changes the state. mean, politics is not so stable now, so who knows what’s gonna happen.
Aaron Nemoyten: wanted to ask you, is there anything that you ⁓ really want to talk about like topical or that’s on your mind that just would, you know, ⁓ would be great on a right now?
Monica Fan: Yeah. kind of curious about ⁓ Heated Rivalry and the whole… explosion queer And those are, I think, different in the way that I was around during the DEI era where it’s like you need to have a queer character. I’ve been thinking a lot about why now those queer games, like a very few of those game has the same cultural impact we are seeing right now. what is different and can we replicate the success in game?
Aaron Nemoyten: is what getting at the sort of question of like, is this the thing that is ⁓ gonna feel and right for the story that’s being told? Or is it like central to it or ⁓ like pivotal it?
Monica Fan: Not even that. like I grew up around, I was a Tumblr kid. ⁓ I’m from that generation where like I spent a lot of time on like 003 and Tumblr. like, so I find it really interesting as in the past couple of years where even like not even Hiderari, like Uma Busume, I don’t know if you know that. It’s just like horse girl ⁓ game that is extremely, yeah, yes.
Aaron Nemoyten: Mm. Oh, the horse girl racing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Monica Fan: And the funniest thing is like, like love and like loving deep space is I had a lot of conversation with like older executive and try to explain this to them. And they all just be like, what is this? Why is this successful? Why are people doing it? But like to me as a tumbler kids, it’s like, yeah, first of all, this is not new. This being around for as long as I have been, I have remembered, have gained consciousness. I know this is a thing and. It’s never like, never see this, will be like, I don’t know why people are like, I know exactly why. And I think this is something I guess I want to talk about is we have a hidden market of just misfit kids. We have this hidden generation of people who there’s so many potential and there’s so many market, but every time a success like this happens, I just see a bunch of executive become so confused. And this keep happening. And to me it’s just like, what about is hard to understand?
Aaron Nemoyten: Yeah.
Monica Fan: And I think that’s the thing you don’t get if you just check a box is like you said, abstract connection between character I would like to call parasocial is this idea of like, you know, even like AI lover is like a version of that is this you can absolutely fall in love with a fictional character and The reason I’m so passionate about it is like, I seriously believe I wouldn’t be alive. had like, I spent my whole teenage year become very suicidal. and what keep me going is those tumblr art is those like fictional character, those parasocial relationship. Because when you don’t see kindness, when you don’t see acceptance in your life, you seek these type of stuff in fictional world. And.
Aaron Nemoyten: Yeah.
Monica Fan: And I’m just really surprised that we don’t see these type of stuff in Western game a lot. would ⁓ most that are popular in Western media ⁓ are, they were human, they would be equally popular in real life. it’s kind of defeat of purpose. ⁓ It’s like, they will be popular. It’s like, yes. What is like, what do you like to be a jock in the school? What do you like to be the like homecoming queen in the school? But what about those kids who never even want to be a homecoming queen? What about those kids who are emo who they just want to stop getting bullied, but they don’t want to change. They don’t want to be popular. about those kids? do we have for them? I feel like this is like a lot of like going back to the story, a lot of fantasy is becoming the one other people want to be. But what if you don’t want to be that? What if like, you know, I think queerness is a good example, because queerness is something you cannot change about yourself. And so like, it’s about
Aaron Nemoyten: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Monica Fan: Okay, this is who you are. You cannot change yourself. You cannot change your character customization. Now, can you still be happy? Can you still live? Yeah. Yeah. You cannot respect. I’m sorry, but you cannot respect. There’s no drug to like magically respect you. Can you still be happy? Can you still be just live a fulfilling life? And which I think the answer is yes, but we don’t see that a lot in like
Aaron Nemoyten: you already have the points in that attribute. You were born with those points in that attribute. So you can’t change it. Yeah. Yeah.
Monica Fan: games. Or like even in a lot of Western media.
Aaron Nemoyten: I agree. And it’s something I actually think about a lot as a parent in the context of, you know, if you know, my son is the right age where if he doesn’t like a rule, if he doesn’t like some, know, how something is going, he’s looking at me and, you know, his mom, my wife and going like, well, you’re adults and you get to do the stuff that you want to do. And so he’ll say like, ⁓ I wish I was you. And I’ll say, don’t wish that
Monica Fan: Yeah.
Aaron Nemoyten: you should want to be the best version of yourself, whatever that is. you’ll get to do all the adult stuff when you’re an adult, right? But let’s figure out what’s the best version of you right now. And think we’re in an interesting point in culture where people are seeing a lot of problems in culture and in…
Monica Fan: Yeah.
Aaron Nemoyten: politics and in the economy and they’re seeing that, you know, the difference between like freedom from versus freedom to being able to do the things that you want to do in your life. And, to me, it all sort of goes back to the idea of, ⁓ are we able to ⁓ be the people that we were born to be in some way or another. And I look at like, I know this is getting really big and philosophical, but you know, but I look at like, I look at freeways and streets and houses and cars. And it’s like, look, if you’re not happy in the life that we have now, like consider we didn’t evolve for any of this. And so, you know, the idea that like we should be able to be happy in this
Monica Fan: Oh, I totally agree. Yeah.
Aaron Nemoyten: reality that we constructed, not exactly by accident, but like it was a series of events that no individual person happen, right? Like this is this is what we live in. How do we how do we make the best of it?
Monica Fan: I want to like, ⁓ one thing is I want to spread this idea is you can be loved. Because I think like going back to Manosphere and like, ⁓ I being ⁓ a redditor, like I read a lot of Reddit and like, a lot of ⁓ young men has this idea is like, if they’re not muscular, if they’re not big, if they’re not x, y, they will never be loved. And like,
Aaron Nemoyten: ⁓ yeah.
Monica Fan: I was growing up in very ⁓ strong culture. Like if you are not skinny, if you are not like looking like X, Y, Z, you’ll be loved. You’ll never like, find like find a husband. You’ll never find love. ⁓ And that has like, And like, think a lot of video game is like, you can’t beat that X, Y, Z. It’s the fantasy of you can’t beat that attractive muscular man. You can’t beat that skinny, beautiful girl. And then you turn off the game. You know, when you turn off the screen, there’s a reflection of yourself. And it’s just, this is not like a lot of, think we have a lot of metaverse, a lot of other stuff is like, you can forget who you are in real life and you can be that version that, that person.
Aaron Nemoyten: Mm-hmm.
Monica Fan: where society telling you is what do you need to be to be loved. But that doesn’t change who you are. And like I’m at the age where I accept that I will never be super skinny. I will never be the version of XYZ without like harming myself in a lot of like harmful way. the reason I’m like when I was younger, I like even now I’m like mostly surround myself by queer culture is queer culture has this radical idea is you can be any shape and size. You can still be loved. You can be loved even when you feel you are very unlovable. You can be loved even you are level one. All you can kill is a slime. You still can be loved. You still can be treasured. And the love is not something you need to work towards. I think that’s the thing is like one thing about Heated Rivalry is they try to pitch this to American network ⁓ and American network is you need to change the show to be XYZ. ⁓ because otherwise nobody will ever watch the show. So they had to like go to Canada and have a smaller budget. And I see this with our game. It’s like every time you talk to like publisher, they’re like, you need to make your game X, Y, Z, otherwise nobody will outplay. And then we have like so many indie breakout success was like, your game doesn’t need to be X, Y, Z. You can still find people who love to play your game. You can, and, and this is like a much larger, deeper like topic, but like I just, I feel like that’s like one thing I’ve been thinking a lot about is what if you cannot be that version of person you wanted to be? What if you are still loved? What if you are still accepted? What if the world still have a space for you? if I like, you know, I mean, I’m a woman in my thirties. have, I have been dealing with a lot of, ⁓ conversation about people around me is like you need to get married having kids otherwise you’ll be miserable I don’t want to live in a life where I’m always afraid of what if I don’t become the person other people want me to be. again, I started playing video game after my concussion, video game opened a world of possibility to me that I even thought was possible. To me, video game is a wonderful avenue to open up possibility for people. I want, like one of the question you had in the notes is what makes you hopeful is, is I hope by a lot of like queer media become mainstream. It inspired people to explore what is possible if you don’t become someone else. What is possible if you just be yourself? What is possible if everyone is different? I always see America as a space as a place where things are possible, because coming from like a like a monoculture and
Aaron Nemoyten: Mm-hmm.
Monica Fan: When we like our whole conversation about like what VC want from AAA, like the instantification stuff, it’s all about like, we have one standard. have like the standard changes over the year, but we have a standard where everyone should aspire to be. But I feel like what if we don’t have to like you have kids, like, I hope you will wish your kids will be happy regardless what and how much they achieving life.
Aaron Nemoyten: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Monica Fan: And to me, that’s what I wish video game do more, is to not just create a fantasy you can escape to, but teach you how to love yourself even when the screen is turned off. So when my screen goes dark, I don’t get jumpscared by my own face.
Aaron Nemoyten: ⁓ That is too good a point ⁓ not to ⁓ end on. Monica fan, thank you so much for being on Make Games Drink Coffee.
Monica Fan: Thank you.