Want to Be a Community Manager in 2025? Start Here with Victoria Tran

0:01Spawn on Me is the premier podcast spotlighting people of color. Every week we talk new, what we've been playing, and tell you who's invited to the cookout. Our show is all about talking about gaming through a prism of blackness because we are the culture. Welcome to Brokago, y 'all. Yo, what's good everybody in Brokago. This is Kahlief here. This is the Spawn on Me podcast with Kahlief Adams and this is episode 554 of our show. Welcome to the new folks and shout out to all the old folks for coming through, rocking with us this week and every week on the podcast. Go check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram.

0:39We are everywhere where content happens and nowhere at the same time. We are in the multiverse of dopeness in all times, at all places. This week, we have a really fun and fantastic interview with somebody who I know and love and someone who I think is completely brilliant in everything that she does. Victoria Tran from Inner Sloth is going to be joining us this week to talk about her new book, Mastering Community Management. And it is a really good conversation because it really brings a lot of stuff together that I am thinking about in my role. I know a lot of folks in the space who do this work I've also been thinking about.

1:15And if you want to learn about this stuff, there's no one better than Victoria than than anybody else on the planet. She is brilliant in all the ways possible. So go check out the interview. Go check out all the goodness there. And then after the interview, we're going to talk a little bit and get up out of here for this episode of 554. Go check it out, listen to it, and we'll have more right after this. What's good, everybody in Burkago? This is Khalif here. We have another dope interview with somebody who I am so excited to have on the show. Returning guest, returning champion to spawn on me.

1:48One of my favorite people in the industry, Victoria Tran. coming to us communications director from inner sloth and writer author and maker and creator of mastering community management hey this is so dope to have you on the show retoria so so much to have you on the show thank you so much for being here how you doing great thank you so much for having me i wasn't expecting that like transition to the book so i I was like, technology. Oh my God. We only bust out the cute graphics for the dope people. We got to make sure it looks good for everybody at home. And again, like I am so excited, proud, and honored that you would be here and proud of you for continuing to do this amazing work.

2:38All of those words, I mean, from the bottom of my heart, you have been one of the best people to talk to you about this work as a person who is doing this work. So again, thank you for being here. The big question is, you've been doing this work for a while. What was the impetus to write a book about community management and how to really do that job well? God, yeah. So I may have underestimated how easy it is to write a book or how hard it is to write a book. But I was approached by my editor to write a book about community management and I've always kind of wanted to do one because like there's a lot of great resources out there but as you probably know like especially if you're just starting out it can be hard to know like where do you even start there's so many resources out there um so I wanted to create a book one just because there would be like way more structure uh when it came to like okay like because that's the way the book is structured it's like what is community management like what do you do during like pre-production what you do during production launch post-launch um and it also allows me to go like way more in depth than i normally could in like an like an online article or like a blog or a newsletter which i usually do uh so i just thought it would be fun and then obviously yeah it was much harder than i thought uh but we we got through it much like making a game i was like surely this will only take a little while and it really it really just it really took a long time I mean, the beauty of it, too, because I got my copy this morning.

4:12I snagged a copy and started to thumb through it to kind of poke through for our chat today. And what I love about what you've done is you've really brought out and given a blueprint to folks like us who are doing that work. And again, you're doing this work as well. So it's like seeing the fruits of your labor be reinforced through the lineage of all of us kind of walking through this space and figuring it out. But what I love is the fact that it does really give you all the nuts and bolts. Like if you want to go through and you're like, I'm a newbie at strategy, I'm a newbie at kind of understanding the impetus and like what is what is the kind of like underlying foundation of what community management is.

4:57You can read this book and have a really good understanding of what that is. While doing this work and kind of writing the book, did you go back to some of your own practices and say, oh, I need to tweak that a little bit because things have changed or I've learned a ton, a ton much more about, you know, the space and and how things are moving? What were the learnings that you found for yourself while writing this book and bringing it to the market? yeah that's actually a really good question because i i think it's one of those things where one you don't know how much you know until you have to write it down and try to teach someone else right like that's a whole different skill for sure um but also just like how jumbled everything is like i realized again because i was trying to put it in like sections of like pre-production production launch post-launch i was like where does this go like uh and because you know community management work can kind of span throughout like all stages of game development it was actually a little bit interesting and difficult to try to plot these in places but also because the book has like a lot of activities because i don't think um the way that i do things necessarily is like the best way for every single game and every single studio so having activities there and trying to think like okay like this is the way that i do it but actually if someone were trying to apply it to like i don't know let's say i've never really worked on like a true like jump scare horror game like how could they work with this and how can they um think about this and having to kind of get outside of my own expertise and think about that and like analyze what other people have done was really cool actually yeah while going through it there were nuggets of of just like awesome information and great advice and you know i love how even in the beginning of the book you talk about what is kind of the role of community management and the higher-ups in those companies the c-suite folks to kind of treat the internet well right to give it a good space to think about not only again we're doing things for fun like games should be fun we should be finding good ways to have fun with this work but the internet and the outside world has gotten a lot more terse it's gotten a lot more problematic it's gotten a lot more full of all the isms that we don't like but it is a thing that we can do to kind of help push back against some of that stuff with the work that we get a chance to do how important has it been for you to to figure out while writing this book of like how much do you give to folks to give them good guidance without scaring them the hell off because i know that that's a part of it too where like i have a problem sometimes when people like hey how do you get into this work i would usually say a QI is a great space, community management is a good space.

7:45And now I'm having a little bit of trouble even recommending that for people who are just trying to get into the space because it's become so toxic. What are your thoughts about how this book is kind of balancing that, right? Of giving good information while also giving newbies some potential hope or even veterans some potential hope to keep going? yeah i think that's interesting in the sense that like i kind of approach it and sorry are we specifically talking about just like the getting into community management like the industry being toxic in the sense that community management you have to deal with a lot of toxic players or like the industry being kind of on fire right now yeah version one version two is a whole other show I was like, wait, I guess there's two ways this could go.

8:35Yeah, no, I think it is. The mental health of community managers is always something I think that people, or us in the industry, try to think about a lot. But it's really hard to convey that, I think, through text. I think it's similar to, I don't know, if I had to think of an analogy. It's like, you know, if you had a teenage daughter and you're like, oh, that boy is bad for you and she's trying to date someone. She's like, you don't know me. I can definitely handle this. And then, you know, it just it kind of just sometimes you kind of just have to let people live through it and like figure it out.

9:10So it's less me being like, hey, if you can't here's like if you can't handle it, like don't do it or something. It's more like, hey, these things are probably going to happen if they happen. here's the things that you need to think about to hopefully like you know keep yourself safe hopefully get keep your mental health like in check and all the kind of warning signs and it's kind of up to you to decide if this is right for you because yeah it's really hard honestly to talk about the delusion of comments and you know toxicity that you can face on the internet and And also because, you know, people are weird and people who do terrible things can post really specifically horrible things that I haven't even seen before.

9:57Or I'm sure like you've seen things I haven't seen. I've seen things you haven't seen. And so while it's hard to necessarily like strictly be like, hey, these are the things you should expect. It's like something is going to happen when this thing happens. Here's how you can deal with it. And also here's how you can proactively try to prevent that from happening. Yeah. Yeah, it's the seeing of the things is the, you know, having lots of conversations with folks this past week over, you know, my wants for understandings of what the industry is doing and pivots in and out of my role and then this stuff.

10:29It makes you really think of just like you've seen every permutation almost of the negative stuff. And then you get a chance to see some of the really great positive things that come out of this work. talk to me a little bit about how in the book you've talked about the positive layers of this role because i think this work is is again we've talked about how hard it is and you know it can it can definitely add some some years to your life in ways that you didn't expect but i think at the end of it it is again like a kind of great position to be in where you're at the forefront of potential joy right you had a chance to kind of see really good things happen for folks or you know, interned inside the team and outside of it.

11:11Talk to me a little bit about what your experiences have been. Of course, with Among Us has been, you know, brilliant in the work you all have done at Intersloff. But what are some of those great moments that you've seen that kind of come to mind when you think about the work and how that kind of translates into what you've added into the book? So many things. And I think that's the beauty of, as you said, like community management is like you get to be at the forefront of the joy of so many people. like so many people get excited about the games the developers are excited the players are excited like whether it's fan art whether it's like a really nice comment a wedding invite we've gotten several wedding invites from like people who've played among us and like met people because you know they were in the same groups playing together years ago um that's always very exciting i have not attended a wedding of people yet but i'm i'm looking at them um yeah i think it's honestly it's not even just being able to like receive and see these things, but it's also being able to like actively contribute and participate in them.

12:13It's like you, you're basically a fan of the studio of the game and you get to be paid to be a part of that and to help create content and help shape the culture around it. And I think now, especially because players are getting more and more used to community managers and the role that they play in, it's like they really do appreciate that. and they will, you know, it's always fun to see when someone's like, give this like, when you post like a stupid meme, and someone's like, give this person a raise, you're like, thank you. We did do that. Thank you. Yeah, I don't know. It's just, I think, at the end of the day, like, the reason I love this job so much is because like, people will create amazing games, thoughtful games weird games beautiful games horrifying games but you can never just defeat the randomness of the human mind on the internet like a commenter coming in and like making a joke or like creating something weird and wacky it's like you never know what they're going to do with it they're like a sense of random that you just can't find anywhere else and i think that's very exciting yeah i love that because i think i i am trying to figure that part out too of i think in my best days i'm like wow the internet is a beautiful place and on my worst days i'm like i just want everyone to go into the bunker and close the door like like close the vault like yeah like but i think what i love about what you shared is it is that randomness but it's also like i think you dig a little bit into this and again i haven't read the full book i'm poking through it while while uh getting ready for this and and and again this is going to be my my my bible for a lot of the things i do for a while but like the talk to me about the human psychology parts of it because i feel like there are layers of that that are fascinating because yes the randomness is there but also what i love about what you talk about is not only figuring out who your players are and what you want your community to be, but kind of taking audit and having space to figure out, like, who are the players that we actually want to play our games?

14:30How are we talking to them? Who are the personas that we wind up coming across during this work? Talk to me a little bit about what those layers look like for you at this point, not only from the work you're doing at InnerSloth, but kind of as a person who's giving advice to other folks who are doing this work. Yeah, at the end of the day, I think what makes a successful community manager, but also communicator in general, right, is just curiosity. Being able to see like, hey, if we're making this game in this genre, like, what are people in this genre already talking about? Like, what do they want?

15:07What are they confused about? What are they really excited about? How do they talk to each other, right? So I usually when I think about this, how I talked back in my previous job with Kit Fox Games about our game Boyfriend Dungeon, which was like a dating sim dungeon crawler versus how I had to talk to the Dwarf Fortress fans and players, which, you know, are like a whole other whole other group of people. and how I could kind of shift my communication and shift my wording and really figure out like, oh, like these are the things that excite them. These are the things that really connect them.

15:48But also like, how can I mesh them together? Because I'm working with the both of them, right? And I know not necessarily that they have to cross over and play like both games or whatever, but I'm still the person that's kind of trying to weave the thread between them. So when it comes to that, I just, I think whatever it is that we do, like curiosity at the core of it is how you figure out like all the personas, how you figure out the language, how you figure out, even if you're not a fan of the game that you're working on, which sometimes can happen, especially if you work in like a publishing space and you work with multiple different games.

16:26It makes sense if you don't love all the games you're working on. But how do you still find that joy? How do you still find that connection with people that you might not necessarily like play, like share the same interests with day to day? I like that because that's that's a thing that I've heard across a lot of folks who I know who are doing this work. Right. Like they are extremely passionate about the work. Like they love to have those moments where they can, again, surface fun and be good arbiters and good kind of vessels for those conversations for the company that they're working for or if they're doing it independently of doing that work.

17:03But it also is really cool to hear you talk about just like you don't necessarily have to be the kind of like super gamer for that genre, for that title, for those things to be able to do the work well. it sounds like there are some just underlying personality traits and ideas and philosophies that really lend to good community management what are some of the things that you think are kind of the most important kind of structures or or things to have in yourself to be able to go into a role like this to say maybe this is something that I would want to try out maybe this is something for me yeah i mean number one like i just said is like that curiosity i think that takes people so far and not just like curiosity of like how people talk or anything but again like when you get those angry comments or you get those kind of snide remarks sometimes you have to tackle it of an angle of like why are you like this and not in like a judgmental like not necessarily in a judgmental way right it's just like what's happening here like is it is it kind of valid and you're just you know communicating it in a really shitty way is it that maybe it's just a cultural thing and you don't actually realize like oh like this means sort of a certain tone is like implied with it um is it something else so i always say like curiosity number one like 100 um i talk i do talk a lot about writing in the book and like okay look i'm kind of biased because obviously i'd be writing a lot but if you're a community manager you also will be writing and it's not just like haha funny memes it's also devlogs it's reading like jira tickets and be like what does this mean and how do i translate this into like normal person speak so people understand what like you're trying to say um i think that is a really huge skill and there's so many okay there's so many other things but i think is this a personality trait we'll see uh a a desire not a desire a um you have to be okay with just failing sometimes i think a lot of people will like come to me and be like how did you how did you come to do like what you do And like, it looks like a lot of the time, like what I do is quite successful in their eyes.

19:36And this is me trying not to brag. And I'm like, oh, it hurts. You can brag. No, no. Brag!

19:46How do you bully someone into bragging about themselves? Brag about yourself. I'm sorry. You can't do it. You don't do. You do dumb stuff. God damn it. Anyway. Anyways, yes. Yes. Okay. Okay. I will. um but yeah they see my success and like you know they're they're curious about it and honestly a lot of it is just that i have tried a lot of things that have like been huge l's just totally it's terrible like it you know like no one saw it or like i tried it and it was like it flopped um and that's kind of how social media community management communication works like you're gonna fail quite a bit and especially if you're just starting out and you have that ability to fail because you know no one's like paying huge attention to it um that's great that's an amazing way to like just practice because there's no way to actually just get into this and be automatically perfect you have to make like some con you have to practice i'm sure like kind of like if you go back to like really old spawn on me episodes or something right you're just like oh why did i do that that's terrible but the beauty of it is that you improve and you have to in order to improve you have to do the work and you have to fail and stumble a bunch of times um and that's my that's how i feel anyway about getting improving in terms of community management i'm sure i mean i'll probably mess up during this episode and figure it out and figure it out and keep going but but what i love about what you just said because i think there's so many tidbits that i think just really hit for me right there is just like, I don't think a lot of folks who are on the outside understand the translation that you have to employ as a person.

21:29Cause it gets like the overarching umbrella too. And you can speak to this is our, our community managers, a part of the dev team, our community managers, part of the marketing team. Are you a hybrid of some of that stuff? Are you, are you familiar with developer speak in a way that you've been able to incorporate into your own language to understand what it is to give good feedback to the team how much have you had to learn in those respects because i think like the understanding from a person who's working in that space in your work if you're working at a studio or working remote doing that work often you're having a lot of conversations with that team to kind of figure that stuff out but fans and players don't necessarily know how to give good feedback that gets to translate directly to the team in an easy way.

22:15How has it been learning how to be the liaison in that way, being that translation layer between those two groups? It's interesting. So I think, like, I don't think you necessarily need to know, like, how to program in order to be able to talk to programmers, right? But you do need to have some sort of, again, there's where that curiosity, the kind of like communication part comes and you have to like listen in and be like okay what are the ways that you can talk to people that matters to them right so like the way i can describe this is like some people are very numbers oriented and that's just how their mind works so if i'm trying to like pitch an idea for a campaign i'm i'll try to like frame it in numbers or like uh maybe the severity of a bug i'll be like hey this is like roughly five percent of the players um or creating like a severity matrix where like s tier is like you got to drop everything and work on this right now in my in my opinion um or a is like uh maybe like really look into this etc etc um it's kind of creating those frameworks and taking charge of creating those frameworks because again like a lot of people they're focused on their own roles and stuff and you're kind of there as the communicator as the in-between to create something that people can more instantaneously like recognize and have it click in their head um i think i just forgot the original question no it's basically just like how to be that translator for between players and the dev team right because you're constantly getting feedback from players and some of that is good feedback some of it is not um and some of it is usable some of it is not or even actionable like some of you just can't like well that was great that you just said that there's nothing i can do about that how do you balance those things out uh in that work and what have you learned in that respect so that's that's that's the the main thrust of that question but and you answered it so you nailed it anyway but But the other layer of that is I'm curious to hear, and you touch on this in the book, about like the way social media is a moving target.

24:28And it's consistently and constantly changing and moving and morphing into various things that we've seen. How is it and how are you talking about that in the book for a very strategic way for folks to kind of learn where you should be, how you kind of manage those things? those platforms are vastly different in the ways the expectations are for the players or for the people who are there. Talk to me a little bit about the way and your kind of thoughts about where we currently are in the social media space and how is that either beneficial or detrimental to the work? Gosh, yeah. While I was writing this book, like Twitter became X or whatever, TikTok shut down in the US for like 24 hours.

25:11I remember distinctly at multiple periods of writing this book i was like okay i hope nothing happens by the time this comes out oh my god

25:26so it'd be it'd be a little wild it'd be a little chaotic right now in the social media space um and it always kind of is right and i think i'm a little bit you know it happens like i was there with like tumblr it was having it blew up and then kind of crashed and then myspace disappeared and other things happened but all that to say is that the interesting thing about all these things shutting down and changing and coming up um is that the core of it never quite changes in the sense like you know it has to be either text-based it has to be either video based it has to be either image based right and so there's some core aspects there that i talk about where it's like you know you still need to have a good hook you still need to have um some like quick and snappy text because you're not it's not usually a social media site where it's like now it's live journal and everyone wants to read essays no you still got to have your snappy text you still got to be able to write really well you need to know how to edit like an image so that it's funny or like relatable according to whatever is hot at the time but But other things that you can kind of sense, especially when it comes to algorithms, one is always like testing, right?

26:40You're always practicing the same thing of like you're taking an L because your video got 10 views, but maybe this other video got 20 views. And like, why did that one get 20 views? Or usually when it comes to social media platforms, they will often give you hints into what they are trying to push and what they are trying to do at the time. right so when instagram releases a new feature like i don't know instagram shop or i think they just released a repost feature you can probably bet that somewhere in the back end they're trying to like push that because they want to see that at work they want to see people using it and they're hyping it up um so there might be more uh incentive for you as a studio or as a brand to kind of play on that and to like try and test it out it's similar to when tick tock live became a thing, then they probably wanted more people to try out Tik TOK life.

27:30This doesn't mean that it's going to become successful and your thing, but it might be a really good way to be like, okay, I see the ways that these companies are trying to think and, you know, trying to take up more of people's time. How do I leverage that for my own strategy? That is, that is the biggest truth bomb of all, because it is so hard to figure out, I mean, the, the thing that I, that I also struggle with is, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts about this and i'm sure this has changed even in the times you've been doing this work is it feels like the attention span now is like bumblebee size now it's like the ability like we're all in a bowl full of goldfish now and i'm like yo how do you keep people engaged with what you want to do when we have more games than ever we have more things vying for your attention we have more things kind of pulling from that when you're kind of getting ready to put out a banger post you're like this joint is going to be good i know this one is going to be good are you bouncing that off other team members is that kind of just like in your purview and in your mind and be like let me let me let this cook and then you know give this some other people and let them see if they kind of get it and see if that fits or is it something where you're kind of like locked in the room and be like i know i got some goodies here and if they hit they hit And if they don't, they don't.

28:51Talk to me a little bit about your process now and how that kind of feeds through the thought process of making the book and being like, here's what I know. Here's what we don't know. And here's the maybe part that is kind of where everything winds up lying. Where do you kind of balance that out? Well, as any social media person knows, when you think of a really good concept and you work really hard on it and you post it, it'll get no views. and then you post something that you just thought of five seconds ago and it goes mega viral oh why is it like this i don't know i don't know it's like a mystery of the world or something it's the worst but it's also the best but i guess i guess once you yeah right like you're like that because then it makes you you're like i'm real smart like i know things yeah right you feel you feel yourself you're like yeah i did that but you talked a little bit about the testing layers and capturing what that data was.

29:47And I think data is a really important part, especially if you're a person doing this work and you're having to report up to a manager or someone else or another decision maker within the company to figure that stuff out. But often those folks are not the most internet savvy. Those folks don't, they're not in the meme space in the ways that we usually are. How are you translating what those wins are to those folks in good ways and how you then capturing that data for replication if you if you kind of want to want to call it that right it's like you never know if a thing is going to pop off in the way you want it to but there are some good nuggets there how are you tracking all of those parts and and what are some of the ways you're looking at how you convey those things to other people to say so remember that time that we did that thing it worked and we should probably to do it again?

30:39How are you doing that? Yeah, so now that some time has passed, I will I do want to give a little shout out to like my community team, which helped me gather all this data. It's like not just me anymore. Thank God. Thank God. So yeah, so what makes it easier is definitely like one we have sentiment reports. And I talk about this in the book, but that's basically a conglomeration of like the things people are talking about on social, on reviews, Discord, wherever that are, the bots can scrape that basically create like, okay, like depending on your parameters, like this is how people are feeling about the latest update.

31:25Here's a summary. Here's a percentage of like, if people are talking about like a cosmetic, like let's say it takes up 10 % of the chatter from this monthly time period. And that's really good for us because like, wow, it's up by, I don't know who knows, 2%. And here's all the quotes and comments about it. And here's the requests people have. Here's some of the negative things that people have. So having a really nice summary that isn't too bloated, I find is the best, especially when it comes to C-suite because they're so busy and, you know, they don't have much time to read through things. So you want to just give them a really quick glance of everything that has happened.

32:01And then within our community team ourselves, Like we do monthly social like KPI reviews basically. So it's like, okay, so what are our top performing posts? What's our least performing post? English, hard. What was the theme of it? What was the, like, was it funny? Was it just like a game update? What have we learned from this past month, considering like all of the posts that we've put out? What was the Discord saying? how are review numbers it's all just like stuff like that and paying attention to like okay like what actually did well and what didn't do well because that can teach you a lot too yeah i think those are the things that i am always trying to figure out like what's good data to roll up versus what's not um and trying to figure out like what does it mean in the grand scheme of where you are in the kind of timeline of the production of the game too which i think changes so many different ideas of of what that looks like um what's the what's the easiest way that you found to get really good buy-in from folks on on a team like i think when we are and especially when you're kind of working through the process of of figuring out what your campaign is going to be in that moment if initially you don't get that like yeah we should go and rock it and do that that thing how do you kind of work around the not necessarily negative feedback the kind of tweaking of a campaign before it goes live to make sure again like the folks who are you're reporting to like get what the the thrust of that thing is supposed to be how do you how do you work through that yeah this one is interesting because i've been in the pretty good um and privileged position of being on teams that really just don't care and do not want to think about this at all.

34:05So they're like, whatever you want to do, do it. Don't tell me. Just let me know how it goes. Just be free. And I'm very lucky to have that kind of trust for sure. But when I'm trying to build up that trust, I like to over communicate and basically give that information upfront as much as possible so when it comes to like a maybe a campaign or a post that's like you know a little bit more spicy or like weird i'll just be like hey like this is what i want to do this is why i think we should do it here are the potential pitfalls that i am like brainstorming from it but don't worry because i do have a plan for them and it's very much like volunteering that information and not trying to like hide anything because i think the more open and transparent you are about like, hey, I've like thought about this very thoroughly.

34:59And I really want to do this. And if they come back and say no, and they're like, no, still not still not the vibe, then sort of trying to reel it back and be like, okay, if you don't want to do that, exactly, can we do this and keeping like, basically just keeping inching backwards foot in the door sort of deal. And then eventually, like if it becomes kind of frustrating, because I can I totally get like some people fall into this where like I can't do anything um one of the things that I try to encourage people to do and that I have done myself it's like okay like give your like picture thing and then if they're if the studio person is like no don't like that then telling them okay like if you don't like that that's okay this is potentially what we are sacrificing and making sure you have it you have receipts you're like this is what might not happen for us and that doesn't align with the goal that you gave me before of wanting to do this and i will obviously try to sort out like a different way to go about it but this is just my recommendation um and because at the end of the day you know what it's their studio it's their game it can be really frustrating but as long as you communicate the consequences of their actions to them or like the suggestions that you have and they very explicitly say no it's out of your hands and you're like all right then then that's not me it's not me man you got a head let on you no i feel you though like the the ability to balance out idea ideation and ideas versus the kind of nuts and bolts of like what what needs to happen is really difficult sometimes we're trying to figure that out um so it's good to hear you talk about the the potentials of frustrations happening in that space um one thing i did love that that i that spoke to me in huge ways and was like thank god someone's talking about this is the balance between the public brand and your in your own kind of visibility as a community manager i've seen way too many cms and social media managers get just rocked online because they previously had an online persona or a more public persona and then you know luckily they've or you know not luckily most people are everybody's talented like it's not luck uh but like you found yourself in a role where you are now working for a studio and doing most of that work you've had a fair amount of that with the work that you've done of being more public in some of those spaces.

37:37And you talk about the balance of deciding to either really kind of be more public with your public base and online presence while also being able to do this work and not have to worry about the mobs coming after you or trying to keep the mobs away. How has it been kind of transitioning through that process, right? Where, you know, you've done that work, you've seen what it's like on both ends of it. Is there a, was there a moment or is there a moment that you can think of where you were like, all right, this is great. And I love the visibility, but I might need to take a step back if I want my, my brain to keep wanting to function and not having to deal with all the, the angry, angry mobs online.

38:21What was that process for you? Oh gosh. Yeah. This one was one that is actually quite. Yeah. I don't know. I'd say, I feel like not a lot of people do talk about. so thank you for giving me the platform to do so yes please um and i'm actually curious like also on your end how you handle it because i feel like you're even more online you have you have spawn on me for 10 years right and all that kind of separation but for me it always since i started was very much about boundaries and not really minding a certain viewpoint of me online right okay so the better way to probably explain that is when i when you see my social media um i talk about games i talk about work i talk about like a little relatable funny meme but i'm actually very explicit about never talking about my hobbies uh i don't yeah like i don't know maybe so i don't want someone to do this please don't do this don't like crawl through my history and see if i've ever posted about a hobby um but yeah but with luck it's like the most that someone technically will know about me is that I love bubble tea, right?

39:29It's like, you know, kind of pretty surface level things. And that's not to say that I'm like hiding an aspect of me. It's just like, this is my boundary. And I, in order for me to do my work and to continue being online, it's like, I am very explicit about not posting about certain aspects of my life, even though I get really tempted to like, oh, I like, I'll do a cool thing in my hobby. And obviously I'll talk to friends about it or like i all can talk to you about it right um but when it's just random posting online i'm like no resist posting the cool picture you cannot do that um and being very explicit about like look this isn't con this isn't content farming for me because when you're when you work in social right like everything can be content every aspect of your life can be monetized if you try hard enough um so i have to actively work against that and i think that separation is actually quite nice i think who is it was like some quote from like Hank Green where he was like, Oh, like not everything you see online is me but not everything about me is online.

40:33And that's basically how I try to handle it in like in a similar fashion. And I think that's been great for my mental health and everyone is different, obviously. And again, that's why I'm curious about like how you handle it. Because it can be really difficult. First shout out to Hank Green. I love Hank Green. Hank Green is awesome um how am i handling it badly okay yeah yeah well i think and this is this is where i get on the on the on the therapy couch i'm like all right victoria listen to me tell me tell me how you feel where where are you feeling this well i think i think it for for me it's been harder only because I started in one space and then transitioned into another.

41:21Like anyone who's ever asked me about my hopes and dreams and goals, I've always wanted to work in the video game industry. I've always wanted to make games or I wanted to be close to it or adjacent to it and found myself after Spawn of Me kind of started to pop off of being like, oh, there's an avenue here for me to be able to do that work. And I like to celebrate the fact that I've worked at different studios and have worked on some projects. Some of those projects have failed miserably, But like also some of those products have been great and I've learned a lot. And I think as an advocate for hoping that other folks who really want to do this work can find a place to be in it.