This year at Gamescom, I got the chance to talk to a bunch of developers in person and have a chat about their games. I had an absolute blast chatting with them but I learned a few hard lessons this time around:
- I need to inquire ahead of time if the interview is going to be in the business area.
- I need to make sure that I get everyone’s names in writing for the sake of avoiding typos.
- I need to make sure that I don’t do the interviews in the business area.
- I need to set a time limit and cut off people more aggressively.
Hence, today, I wanted to talk about what went well and what went wrong, starting with these four hard lessons I made.
The Business Area
The business area is essentially a separate part of Gamescom where the developers mingle with press, content creators, publishers, and other industry folks. They get to showcase their games to the world so that articles can be written and so that connections can be formed. Also, there are a lot of free refreshments and food in the area, something I didn’t really make much use of personally, especially since I didn’t belong there.
Look, I’m a private person running this blog all on my own, managing my ever-growing and always-flooded e-mail inbox all on my own, writing articles, editing them, formating them, promoting them, etc. I’m doing everything on my own, and to me at least – even if everything is going well and I get to spread the word about a lot of super cool indie games to a pretty large audience – this is a hobby first and foremost, and as such, I don’t wanna spend a lot of money on it to the point where it becomes my downfall possibly or where it takes away the enjoyment.
Funds are limited and I already am paying for my own domain and the personal WP plan so that there are no ads on this page.
So when I go to Gamescom, it’s an opportunity to hang out with devs, make connections, and do a bit of research, I guess. I don’t pay for the business ticket because I hang out in the Indie Village every single year and only really need to be there.
With that said, some of the PR folks and developers that reach out to me don’t know that. They just assume that I have a business ticket, meaning they assume they can just book the appointments to be in the business area. The business ticket, btw, costs a lot more money per day compared to the normal ticket (whose price has already increased a lot compared to last year).
As such, I had to sneak into the business area a fair bit and it has become pretty problematic at times since security was tighter this year and a lot of the security folks wouldn’t just let me in when I showed them that I had appointments with all these developers.
Now, I’m not upset at security for this. They’re, after all, only doing their job… but like… this was a huge pain in the arse and I gotta make sure I have some way into the area if I have to head into the area for appointments. It’s best to avoid it, though.
People have names
So, this year, I carried a little notebook with me that I wrote stuff into, including folks’ names. That was cool and really worked out well for me given that in the interview audio recordings, I couldn’t make out folks’ names. Getting their names right is pretty important, not just for SEO reasons but also because I don’t want to create confusion, like how people in Germany are not sure if the AfD’s Bernd Höcke’s name is actually Bernd or Björn. I believe it’s Björn, so I keep calling him Bernd. Dude’s a fascist. Anything to make his day worse, right?
Anyway, my struggle here this year was that I talked to some Japanese devs and I wasn’t sure how to write down their names. Did their name card already flip it to be the western way (first name followed by last name) or was it alright already? Do I need to do anything extra? When referring to them, which name do I use? It didn’t help that some of them had first names that also work as last names in Japanese. I’m trying to be culturally sensitive here!
I actually did ask them about that but the translator didn’t understand my question, I think, so my notes are like incomplete as a result. I also didn’t write down enough on that matter, so I don’t understand my notes right now. Oops.
That said, I took pictures of their name cards and will just use it the way it was on there once I’ve transcribed the whole interview.
The Business Area has a Background Noise Problem
The interviews I did in the business area are roughly 30 minutes in length each and barely usable. I don’t know how to write transcribe that stuff with all the background noise going on. It’s truly a shame.
Transcribing things takes ages anyway as I gotta write down the sentences as they are spoken, at times pause or go back by ten seconds, and then listen to it again. Sometimes I repeat that process multiple times.
The interviews I did in the Indie Village – which to me felt a lot louder in comparison – were much better in terms of quality. I don’t know what went wrong there. It’s wild.
So, as a result of this, I’ll probably ask next year if we can do interview outside of the Business Area as that would mean that I don’t have to “sneak in” and get security guards in trouble for not noticing the crawling box around the entry way. Similarly, the audio quality is gonna be better… and we might even be able to vibe better in a more lax setting.
Sounds like a plan to me!
30 minutes of Audio don’t mean 30 minutes of Transcription Work
Last but not least, some people ramble, I do, too, so I need to cut off people aggressively in the future.
This isn’t supposed to be an affront towards certain people or anything. No, not at all. It’s just that it took me two hours to get through the ten minutes of my UNBEATABLE interview over here… Now imagine a thirty-minute interview and the amount of work that might take.
30 minutes of chatting with a developer extensively about certain things is a bit much and very hard to get through for me personally, not because of the talking itself but mostly because I need to find the time in the day to actually transcribe that beast of a recording.
Again, this isn’t on the devs or anything of the sort but rather I’m at fault for not cutting them off, like, at all.
In the future, I’ll have to try and hurry the conversation along by making comments of my own, asking the next question at times, or getting a summary from them that I can use for the headline.
I’ve done that successfully in the past. It’s just a different setting with people in suits who are much older than me and whom I don’t dare to do that to as brazenly.
Hence, I’ll definitely communicate ahead of time that I’ll only do a certain number of minutes for the interview and that I will cut them off at times or hurry the interview along so that we can get to the juicier bits that will get people to check out the game.
I’ll have to communicate that that’s not meant to be rude or anything but just something to help me actually get the interview out since I’m solo and stuff. I hope I’ll manage that aspect of the interviews better in the future.
Another thing I obviously need to get better at is the transcription part. Currently, I have a 12:1 ratio where it takes me 12 minutes of work per 1 minute of recording. I can definitely cut that down some more if I work with programs and optimise the way I do things but for the time being it is what it is.
Once I’ve made improvements to my transcription method, I’m gonna write a post about the process so that others can maybe pick something up from it. I haven’t seen enough resources that were down-to-earth and actually useful to me.
Overall, Gamescom was great. The interviews, however, have been a huge pain in the arse for me, so I’m working on those!
This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.
If you see this article anywhere other than Indiecator.org then this article has been scraped. Please let me know about this via E-Mail.
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