As live game director, what is it like to be in that position, making critical decisions about what can and will not make it into a release? As part of the head of the organization, how does feedback from the community affect your day-to-day professional outlook or environment?

I guess for me, I have the title of the game director, but we've got multiple game directors within the company: Tony, myself, Rich, Nick, so on and so forth. Basically, I think every director is responsible for their teams and making sure that their teams are doing the job to the best of their ability, and basically that the features that come out are as good as they possibly can be. When we go into these go/no-gos, it's Tony or Aaron or myself. And if it's one of my teams, I have the meetings before and I make sure that it's ready to go. If it's not ready to go, then I tell Chris and Aaron why, and have those difficult discussions. But each team has a director associated with it, and so it's those teams doing that. So when we're going into go/no-gos and I'm going in for a lot of other teams, then I'm just looking at it and making sure it's hitting what I think it needs to hit from a player standpoint, the look and feel. Have any of these edge cases been thought about? Are there other features that need to be done associated with that? And how many bugs do we have left? What's the overall feel of it? Does it feel good, or is there a little bit of clunkiness to it? But a lot of times when we're going into those things, we expect the directors and we expect the leads and the POs that are working on it to be those initial people saying, yeah, we're happy with this. We're proud of putting this out. And then from there, it's a call that we make. So for Tony, if he's looking at something, I trust him to look at it and drive it home. And so when we're going into live meetings or live release meetings, he's there, he's present, he's looking at it and making sure that it's good. If we're talking about AC or Star Marine or Tau stuff, then that's Sean. He's there, he's in those live release meetings, making sure it looks good. And if there's any bugs that need to be chased up or anything like that, he's calling it out, and then I'm doing it for my features. So I am really kind of the point of contact if things aren't looking or feeling good, and then I chase up those teams and figure out what we can do with production. And then that's really kind of my live game director role. And then other times it's just game director. Basically, we didn't want to have two SC game director positions. So Tony's got the SC game director and I've got the SC live game director. There is that separation. But again, Tony is focused more on the tech, I'm focused more on the look and the feel, and that's kind of how we play off of our roles. And then, as far as working with the community and dealing with the community stuff, this to me is golden. A lot of times with other games, you only get that feedback at the very, very end. And you're hoping and you're praying that, yeah, we did this right and we hit it. And I can guarantee you that basically every game director or every lead, when their game goes gold and the reviews start coming out, they're sweating bullets. You never know. This, to me, allows us to try it out and see what works, what doesn't work. I work constantly with Bayer, the community team, Eric Green, basically our live production team, to look at the bugs that we have, to triage those, to go through what's working, what's not working, what did players really... That's the part that I like. In games, you'll be working on something and then you do a focus test. And a lot of times you're bringing in people from the outside and you're sitting there watching them play the game. I would view it as: that's kind of where dreams go to die. You have a dream of, hey, this is how this thing's going to play out and work. And then you watch people play it, and you're just like, oh, man. You're just pulling out your hair. Why don't you know this? Why can't you see this? And this is our way of focus testing. So this, to me, is good for us. It's true feedback and honest feedback. Sometimes it hurts, but sometimes you look at it and you're like, oh, yeah, how did we not see that? But it just goes into making the game better, and that to me is what it's all about: just making the game as good as it possibly can be.

How did we not know players were going to overdose other players in green zones? How did we possibly not know that was going to happen?

Exactly. But that to me is fun. It's interesting gameplay. We never knew Jumptown was going to be so interesting, but it's immersive. This to me is fun and interesting, at least from a career standpoint. This is so different from all the other stuff that I worked on in the past. So every day is a new, we call it a new fire to put out, but it's problem-solving, and that to me is the fun part. I love building and problem-solving with the team and going through that experience. It's new, it's fresh. It's not for everybody, but I love that challenge. I like it when people tell me, well, you can't do that. And we say, F you, we're going to do it anyways.