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We're seeing record-breaking anticipation for titles like GTA 6, but we're also seeing that safe triple A bets are no longer guaranteed.
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In the last year, we've seen games like Monster Hunter Wild achieve massive sales but struggle with community trust, while double A games and indie breakouts like Claire Obscure have completely flipped the script by leading with transparency.
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The lesson for 2026 is clear is you can't really fix a broken community after it's built.
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If you're not building the foundation from day zero, you're at risk.
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Moving the community strategy, marketing checklists to a competitive advantage.
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How are we going to get tactical is on that day zero mindset?
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Why community design needs to happen alongside game design, different launch traps to avoid.
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You know, Steam is often one of the ones that we hear a lot, but there's other silent launcher, immediate gotchas that hit you right when you go live.
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So how do you get ahead of that?
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And then how do you scale without burnout?
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So we're not just talking about moderation, we're talking about design.
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And to help navigate this, I'm excited to have two people who have spent years in the trenches.
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So first, we have Karen Johnson.
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She's a veteran from Magic Potion and Club Penguin, who understands the DNA of player loyalty better than anyone in the business.
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And we're also joined by Hega Tokarut from ABA, who is a leading charge of how we use technology and design to protect and scale communities safely in 2026.
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Thank you so much for joining us.
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Karen, you want to say a little bit about yourself and what you do and what you're building?
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Yeah, cool.
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Thanks, Greg.
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Um, super excited to be back on the podcast again.
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Thank you for having me.
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Uh, I started my career working at Club Penguin for Disney for I was there for about seven years, working on everything from the web team to the game team to the parties.
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Um, and then I did a short stint in movies for five years working at uh ILM.
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And then I moved to Raleigh, North Carolina to take a job at Fortnite, which was super fun.
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I was there for about five years when my old uh boss from my Disney days hit me up and said, Hey, the world needs a new club penguin.
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There isn't anything out there like that right now.
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The kids need a place that is designed for them, built for them, and we're the team that can do it.
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So I left my dream job at Epic and I I joined him for Magic Potion Games as his co-founder.
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And we have a ton of old penguins involved, including Lang Merrifield.
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He helps us out a lot.
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He's a strategic and creative advisor who originally built Club Penguins.
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So yeah, we've just launched Imagine Island a few months ago, and we're kind of trying to make that the next Club Penguin for Gen Alpha, a safe, age-appropriate place for kids to play and be social and have fun together and feel like a belonging uh in an online community.
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So that's me.
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Awesome.
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Thank you so much for that.
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And as a father of two young kids who want to play games, I appreciate you still building that on.
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I remember my brother-in-law playing community or Club Penguin over the years.
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In Fortnite, we're all playing as a community.
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So seeing that go on for these next generations to keep playing is awesome.
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So thank you so much for that.
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And Hega, you want to say a little bit about yourself?
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Yeah, sure.
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So um I'm originally from uh the technology and cybersecurse side.
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So um, and also from the investory side as well.
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So um, my first job was um making uh new businesses for bigger corporations before I deep dived into the VC industry.
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So I've been working as an investor for several years, um, and also taking uh um research into new uh companies.
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So IBA, uh we are protecting uh kids and teens and other people online, so we are detecting the bad stuff that's happening in the online space.
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Um, but we are uh IBA is the fifth company I took out from university research, and we've been around for several years now, and uh yeah.
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So what we do is to help uh all these great communities around all the great games to have a really good community out from Norway, Europe, now in Sweden, all over the place, and she's calling in live from the Stockholm Airport, so I appreciate Hega taking the time to be able to do this on her way home to then go to the GDC.
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The traveling never ends, does it?
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Seriously, no, it doesn't.
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But they have cheese doodles at the airport, it's free today, it's the cheese doodles.
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It's National Cheese Doodle Day in Sweden.
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We need that over here.
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I feel like this is something we need to learn more about because this is important.
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Um, let's jump into our topics.
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And as I'm talking again, feel free if you're in chat, drop some questions, let us know.
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We like to make this as interactive as possible.
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So I want to start with kind of the beginning.
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Community is the new meta.
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We're seeing AAA giants take massive community-driven swings that were once the secret sauce of indie successes.
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I look at games like Battlefield, who did a great community push prior to going live.
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I'm really curious from both of your perspectives, what did community look like 10 years ago versus what the landscape looks like today, right?
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Were there constraints that existed back then, or are there more constraints today just because of how technology works?
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And maybe again, this is kind of a big question.
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Start high level of uh Karen from your perspective, right?
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You were at Club Penguin.
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Did you know you were building a community game?
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And I know you did, but did it kind of take its own shape or how did that go down?
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Yeah, I think Club Penguin was a little bit unique because a lot of the games back then, you know, they just focused on good game mechanics, or how do we make a good multiplayer game?
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And that was kind of as far as they took the idea of kids playing together and then community naturally formed around it, often not probably in the way that they wanted.
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And then they immediately got into a reactive state where it's like, oh, how do we then mold this into what we want?
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Where Club Penguin uniquely was very much built on social.
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It launched as Penguin Chat originally, which was just one room with a bunch of little waddling derpy penguins walking around and chatting with bubbles above their head, right?
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And it was a huge hey, kids loved it, they loved just being able to walk around and talk.
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So obviously, social and community was very much at the core of Club Penguin.
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And then it was like, well, what if we let them put on hats?
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What if we let them waddle around more spaces?
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What if we let them go indoors?
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What if we let them play mini-games and all of those experiences just really layered on top of the social kind of foundation for the game?
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Where I think other games, like I said, they weren't, they weren't thinking about that from the outset.
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So then they kind of got into a bit of a reactive state.
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I think nowadays studios realize how important community is.
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Humans are social animals at their core, community and belonging and social feelings are, you know, very much part of our core DNA.
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We quite literally have to have to have it to survive.
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So I think people are realizing that they need to think about it from the outset.
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Like, what kind of community do we want to have in this world?
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And the more you think about that from the from the get-go and really build your systems and your gameplay and your you know guidelines around it so that people just kind of have it sink into their core from the get-go really helps enable um players to help each other understand how we act here, you know, and help police actually the rules themselves when they become really passionate about it and when it's really kind of inherent to them by joining the game.
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Really cool.
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I'm really curious, and maybe this is where Hega could also kind of jump in is, you know, back then you were doing penguin chat, right?
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And you were in Penguin Chat, right?
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These days communities are growing not just from within games, but from external channels as well, where things get a little both more accessible because everyone could join it, but at the same time, it becomes a bit more dangerous as well because you're enabling anyone to join it.
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So, from that perspective, and maybe Hega, you can talk about your experience as well.
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But I'm curious on how you take a look at kind of, and maybe we're jumping ahead of ourselves, but how has it changed on that perspective as well?
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How I see it is uh before you uh uh well, 10 years ago, uh you didn't think about what type of community you wanted to build.
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You just had a community, and then please uh do as you wish.
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And when something bad happened, you had to run after and try to fix it.
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Uh today you can do it different, and you also see it as a growth engine.
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So that has been a big ship, the way I've seen it.
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Are there any specific kinds of games or communities that that you've seen grow?
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And maybe Fortnite's an interesting example of that, because that has a good crossover from kids to adults as well, right?
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Whereas some of the other games are more focused on kids or or adults, right?
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And how do you see those spaces continuing to grow uh from where they are?
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Yeah, I think there's a couple of things.
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One is self-identity, and I think, you know, especially the younger audiences and especially since the pandemic, your online persona and kind of status and who you are is almost more important to you than who you are in real life.
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It also removes a whole bunch of boundaries and limitations for you.
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You know, it doesn't matter what you look like in real life or if you have any disabilities, or you look like this, or you look like that.
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You can be anyone you want online, right?
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So it kind of gives people this sense of empowerment that they can be who they want to be.
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And it also removes barriers to find people with common interests.
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So I think the games that really kind of lean into that are the ones that are succeeding.
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So giving people a bunch of like self-expression, a bunch of customization.
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And people are starting to not think just about how do we, you know, create good co-op quests or guilds or things like that.
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It's how do we create a space where people want to come and hang out and just be together, right?
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So you see people just hanging out in lobbies nowadays.
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They might not even jump into the game for a long time.
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They're hanging out, they're socializing, they're emoting, they're chatting, they're waiting for their friends, they're being goofy.
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Um, so I think games are starting to see this and they're like, how does that evolve from here?
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So things like concerts, right?
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Fortnite doing their concerts.
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I will say, Club Penguin did it first, penguin band, right?
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Everyone's like, Marshmallow was the first online concert of Fortnite.
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I I beg to differ.
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I think it was Club Penguin Band.
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But, anyways, that's neither here nor there.
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Uh, the Fortnite ones that were like, it's at a specific time, you know, be there, be square.
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People would cue up for an hour beforehand, you know, millions and millions of people would join in.
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So I think that's just gonna continue to grow.
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And the people that are trailblazers are like, what are other experiences in real life that humans like to experience together that they might not be able to?
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Live sporting events, right?
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Super expensive.
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I could have a friend on the other side of the country that I want to watch the game with, you know, Disney's thinking about this.
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How do we let people see movie premieres together online in an immersive game, you know, platform like Fortnite?
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How do we let them watch live gaming events?
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So I think just continuing to push the boundaries on that is where things are headed.
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But also following up on that, uh, Karen, uh, because uh what we also see is that when people are uh joining those social places, they want to have a good time, not a bad time.
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Uh so that's also uh why it's um important to also have some sort of um thinking about what type of community do you actually want, uh, and also have some guardrails as well, very early, so you don't stop them in the lobby before they actually enter your game, for example.
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I also, you know, you're you're talking about enabling it for more people and scaling it.
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And Hega, I kind of wanted to talk with you because by default, I think when you're younger, and probably older too, never mind, but people like to push the boundaries to the edges, right?
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And they really like to see how far can they go with something.
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And sometimes it's something funny, someone breaking the game, and sometimes it's nastiness.
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And I think maybe my personal observation is over time people online got nastier, maybe because they've more people got accessible to the internet, and maybe in the club penguin days, well, there's still probably nastiness out there, probably didn't scale or didn't scale like it did now.
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And I'm curious, like from a tool set perspective, uh, have you seen the tools evolved to help agents?
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Well, uh well, I I think it's um it's normal and it's also very healthy that the kids and the teens are trying to push those boundaries.
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Um, because um I did that when I was a kid, and everyone else has done it also.
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And we also see that uh when we are helping our clients with uh moderation, that's like playing around filters, playing around that's part of their lives.
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Uh so I don't think we're getting um worse, but we're getting smarter.
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Uh so I think that's it's a good way, but we have to you have to help them to um to also show where is the boundaries.
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Um so yeah.
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Yeah, I totally agree.
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I mean, kids are gonna push boundaries and they're good kids.
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If you know your kid goes in and says something, you know, it's curiosity.
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What if I say this?
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What's gonna happen, you know, and trying to outsmart the filter.
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A lot of kids do that, and it doesn't mean they're bad kids.
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It's totally just part of human nature.
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But for us to kind of be there and and help teach them in I think a more authentic and a more sophisticated way than just like mute, ban, you know, but also to my earlier point about kind of empowering your community to be the first line of defense on that as well, I think is really powerful.
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So in a Club Penguin, kids got really passionate about the Club Penguin rules.
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They knew what was cool and what was not in Club Penguin.
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So one of my favorite examples, actually, my co-founder Steven, the first time he ever played Club Penguin, he logged in and he's kind of like, okay, what's this game about?
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He sees some kids waddling around, sees someone throw a snowball.
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He's like, Oh, how do I throw a snowball?
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Throws it at another kid.
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The kid says, Stop that.
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He throws another one at him, real jerk.
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But uh, and all the other kids were like, Hey, he said, Stop that.
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That's bullying.
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We don't do that here.
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And he was like, Whoa, wow, okay, what is this world?
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And you know, all of a sudden, the the world and the other players telling you, like, that's not cool here, is actually quite a bit more powerful than like a big orange, you know, screen in your face being like, you've been muted or whatever.
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So getting the kids passionate about what is right and wrong and having them kind of police it was so, so powerful in Club Penguin.
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Another good example of that is the tour guide, is the tour guide experience in Club Penguin, which was very simple.
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You don't need to build these like big complicated systems or like progression, you know, and rewards that will take the dev team months to create.
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It was literally you took a quiz, you needed to know about the game, and you needed to know about online safety and how to be kind and how to be safe online.
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And if you, if you, you know, pass the quiz, congratulations, you're a tour guide.
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Here's your hat.
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And you get a hat and you got an emote or you could hold up a sign that says tours here.
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And that was it.
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And then it was up to the kids.
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We, it wasn't a big like, um, take Hege to the to the clothing shop and get her a hat, take her here, you know, check mark, check mark, which kind of creates, I would say, more inauthentic, you know, interactions between kids.
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That was it.
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They were empowered and they would go stand there in the plaza and they'd hold up their sign, tours here, and they'd wait for new kids to join.
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And instead of a stuffy fatouie, you know, click this, do that.
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A real kid would say, Hey, are you new here?
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Can I show you around?
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Well, first you should probably have a hat.
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You're a naked penguin.
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Why don't I take you over here and show you where to get something cool?
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You know, and then it's totally up to them.
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What a what a great way to low scope, enable your community to be your fatouie, immediately connect socially.
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You might show them around a little bit and send them on their way, or you might take them to show them pets, puffles, and you guys might realize you both love care and nurture, and then you found this new kind of forever friend in the game.
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So, just like one example of how giving the kids or players tools to promote positivity instead of just focusing on like how do we lay the hammer down on poor behavior?
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I think is really strong.
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I I love a lot of what you said there, if not everything.
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We'll say everything, right?
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I mean it sucked.
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You're basically talking about social loops from within the game that enable players that want to keep pushing themselves to play more.
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We always talk about it in trust and safety is like rather than getting mad at the bad people, how do you positively promote good behavior in your game?
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And always thinks about, oh, well, I don't want to, I don't have a budget for that, I don't have that.
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But to your point, like giving an item goes such a long way for these diehard fans that love your game.
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It's funny, I started my Discord a while ago, and someone's like, Can I have a title?
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Can I have a title?
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I'm just thinking to myself, like, why do people want to name it Discord?
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Like, I fine.
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And then I realized like some people thrive with this stuff, and it's really cool when you start to look at a community and audience, the different members that are part of your audience.
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There's gonna be a lot of lurkers that are just quiet people that don't even want to know there.
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Then you'll have shares, you'll have creators, you'll have all these different people in your thing.
00:17:18.799 --> 00:17:25.200
And some people, these littlest things, whether it be a name or a small item like a hat or a sign, will get super excited by that.
00:17:25.440 --> 00:17:29.680
And I think that's the best way to get people going because kids will protect kids.
00:17:29.920 --> 00:17:34.880
And uh when you started that, I also thought about real life and how important that is in like in your social settings.
00:17:35.119 --> 00:17:44.319
I think about kids at school when like if someone's being mean to someone, rather than a parent coming to yell at you, if you have your own friends protect you or stand up for you, it becomes so much more powerful.
00:17:44.559 --> 00:17:52.880
And it's funny as we are kind of creating this community where it's online and offline, you see the same type of bullying happen between both.
00:17:53.039 --> 00:17:58.720
And it's I don't know, it's scary and exciting to kind of see how these kind of merge and what people can do about it.
00:17:58.799 --> 00:18:09.680
And and I guess Hega, a question for you is kind of uh for any comments on that, but kind of how can you proactively put things in place that help protect communities and kind of give them those those roles?
00:18:10.319 --> 00:18:15.599
Yeah, well, I've uh uh what you uh just talked about, Karen.
00:18:15.839 --> 00:18:34.079
Uh it also shows that the kids uh they are in a safe place, so they feel safe and they also feel like they can be themselves and they can speak out uh without being hammered or without some someone calling them out because they're policing themselves.
00:18:34.400 --> 00:18:40.400
So uh, and that's also something which is super hard to build those communities.
00:18:40.559 --> 00:18:56.720
Um and the reason, one of the reasons I think because this this isn't easy, but uh but uh like always, if you have a plan from the beginning, from the start, then it's much more easier to follow up.
00:18:56.799 --> 00:19:09.039
So if you have community guidelines and you talk about this uh for your community, then it's much more easier to uh to understand uh how they should behave or not.
00:19:09.200 --> 00:19:29.599
Um so having uh those community guidelines, but also uh how do you eventually solve the problem if you have one bad player coming in being super toxic in this super nice penguin community where everyone is walking around this and suddenly you have this ice bear uh coming in.
00:19:30.640 --> 00:19:45.279
So we also see that removing those super toxic players, uh either telling them they should uh behave different or take them out is important, or else the rest of the community might be broken.
00:19:45.680 --> 00:19:58.720
Yeah, another really powerful thing too is taking away their platform in a sense, like bad actors or kids that are pushing the boundaries, they're doing it for the audience, they're doing it for the reactions, right?
00:19:58.880 --> 00:20:08.480
So whether it's if I'm saying something mean to someone, it's the reaction that I get out of them, or it's the reaction of other people that are like, yeah, you know, and gang up.
00:20:08.559 --> 00:20:13.920
So one of the things that Club Penguin did that was really, really smart was the gray filter.
00:20:14.079 --> 00:20:19.119
So when you said something in Club Penguin, your little speech bubble popped up and everyone saw you saw it and everyone saw it.
00:20:19.279 --> 00:20:25.039
If you said something egregiously bad, like a swear, you would get the immediate ban and it was very clear that no one saw it.
00:20:25.200 --> 00:20:37.839
But if you said something that was kind of in the gray zone, like you're ugly, you're stupid, um, you stink, things like that, um, we would make it look like to you that it was said.
00:20:38.000 --> 00:20:39.759
So it would pop above your head.
00:20:39.920 --> 00:20:45.599
You thought everyone said it, and you're waiting for the reaction, and no reaction comes.
00:20:45.759 --> 00:20:48.319
Crickets, you know, and no one else sees it.
00:20:48.400 --> 00:20:49.759
So no harm has been done.
00:20:49.920 --> 00:20:52.559
And you're kind of like, oh, that was awkward.
00:20:52.640 --> 00:20:55.119
I'm a little embarrassed, you know, maybe I'll try something different.
00:20:55.200 --> 00:21:05.200
So it was like, whether intentional or not, or just an amazing fluke, it was this really positive kind of social engineering that was just like, yeah, we're gonna let you think that other people saw that.
00:21:05.279 --> 00:21:07.680
You didn't, so no harm, no harm, no foul.
00:21:07.839 --> 00:21:14.079
But you feel a little silly and you're not getting that reinforcement to want to keep doing it, you'll eventually stop doing it.
00:21:14.160 --> 00:21:20.240
Or if you want to just say ugly things into the ether all day, go nuts, but the community is not gonna be impacted by it.
00:21:20.400 --> 00:21:24.240
So that was another kind of cool way, I think, that Club Penguin handled that.
00:21:24.559 --> 00:21:25.519
That's really cool.
00:21:25.680 --> 00:21:27.599
Yeah, like silent muting, right?
00:21:27.759 --> 00:21:29.759
So so they think they're they're talking, but they're not.
00:21:29.839 --> 00:21:34.400
And I'm curious, Hegel, from your perspective, like, do you have stacked ranks of what works and what doesn't work?
00:21:34.480 --> 00:21:36.319
And where would you normally rank that?
00:21:37.119 --> 00:21:39.279
Well, um, it depends.
00:21:39.440 --> 00:21:41.680
Uh I would say.
00:21:41.839 --> 00:21:55.599
And uh and also um when it comes to uh each community, it depends also uh what type of uh ages the uh the community the community is for.
00:21:55.759 --> 00:21:56.160
Totally.
00:21:56.400 --> 00:21:59.839
And and also what type of game it's about.
00:22:00.240 --> 00:22:03.359
If it's a shooter game or if it's a cool C game.
00:22:04.160 --> 00:22:06.480
So I would say it depends.
00:22:07.279 --> 00:22:09.839
And also context is everything.
00:22:10.319 --> 00:22:12.720
That's also my experience as well.
00:22:13.359 --> 00:22:16.480
A lot of studios forget these common one, two, threes, right?
00:22:16.559 --> 00:22:18.000
You get so comfortable in your workflows.
00:22:18.079 --> 00:22:25.119
And I'm curious, are there any common kind of missteps that you would recommend people keep an eye out on or kind of gotchas while going live?
00:22:25.279 --> 00:22:27.599
And Heg, I don't know if you have one for this one.
00:22:28.319 --> 00:22:31.440
Well, I have done so many mistakes.
00:22:31.519 --> 00:22:35.359
So uh we could have a hundred uh podcasts about this.
00:22:36.799 --> 00:22:43.440
But I think uh one of my biggest learning points has been don't build too much too early.
00:22:43.519 --> 00:23:03.519
Uh like um don't think that you should have this uh super impressive, super finished, super polished game or platform or product, whatever, but start building it uh step by step and test it with your uh players and customers as early as possible.
00:23:04.000 --> 00:23:05.200
I could not agree more.
00:23:05.440 --> 00:23:06.400
I could not agree more.
00:23:06.559 --> 00:23:07.599
Yeah, that's so true.
00:23:07.839 --> 00:23:23.119
I think one of my favorite stories that is like kind of related, but not, but but it is relevant to this discussion about community and people playing together and how powerful that is, was um when Fortnite accidentally enabled crossplay.
00:23:23.359 --> 00:23:30.400
And I think back in the day, people thought it was technically not possible for Xbox and PlayStation players to play together, which wasn't really true.
00:23:30.559 --> 00:23:32.079
It actually took logic.
00:23:32.240 --> 00:23:37.440
They had to code to disable those those players from playing together.
00:23:37.599 --> 00:23:47.440
Um, you know, more for like corporate politics, Xbox, you know, Microsoft and and PlayStation, they didn't want their audiences playing together because they thought it would be bad for business.
00:23:47.599 --> 00:23:54.160
So one day, from a configuration error, uh, Fortnite launched with crossplay enabled.
00:23:54.319 --> 00:23:57.119
And uh, I think it was actually a player that noticed it.
00:23:57.200 --> 00:24:05.039
They saw somebody in the lobby with a name that I don't guess it had like a special character or something that wasn't able to be used on Xbox.
00:24:05.119 --> 00:24:06.720
So they're like, how does this person have this name?
00:24:06.799 --> 00:24:10.160
And they dug into it, they're like, it's a PlayStation player.
00:24:10.400 --> 00:24:10.799
What?
00:24:10.960 --> 00:24:15.839
And then and then Epic was like, Oh, sorry, sorry, River, our bad guys, but don't worry about that.
00:24:16.079 --> 00:24:21.359
And everyone's like, wait a second, we can play together and we're just not.
00:24:21.839 --> 00:24:27.920
So, you know, after a lot of kind of negotiating and looking, figuring out how that would work, you know, crossplay play launched.
00:24:28.000 --> 00:24:28.880
And how great was that?
00:24:29.039 --> 00:24:33.599
I think that that would be a scenario of like all ships rise, right?
00:24:33.680 --> 00:24:37.839
Because instead of, well, I got a PlayStation for Christmas and my best friend got Xbox.
00:24:38.000 --> 00:24:39.680
Guess we can't play our favorite game together.
00:24:39.759 --> 00:24:41.200
Like that sucks, right?
00:24:41.519 --> 00:24:51.440
So the fact that, you know, lobbies got bigger, matchmaking lobbies got bigger, you had a bigger audience to connect with over shared interests and things like that.
00:24:51.519 --> 00:24:55.200
You could play with your best friends regardless of where they were playing from.
00:24:55.519 --> 00:25:02.799
Retention goes up, and I don't know, the I don't know the financial details, but I would assume that they all kind of you know benefited from that.
00:25:02.960 --> 00:25:22.799
So I thought that was a really cool, happy accident, if you will, where it's kind of like not only do we need to build features to promote social play, but we need to knock down barriers that make it hard for people to play with their friends because when they're playing with their friends, they're coming back, they're spending a longer time, and your game has more longevity.
00:25:23.839 --> 00:25:26.240
Yeah, you're talking about the community at the end of the day, right?
00:25:26.400 --> 00:25:34.079
It's the Fortnite community that came out and was just like, hey, we found this, and don't ever put it past Epic to piss off a platform, huh?
00:25:34.160 --> 00:25:36.400
They're just get everyone mad at them, huh?
00:25:36.720 --> 00:25:38.079
Very good at it, yes.
00:25:38.960 --> 00:25:42.319
How do you quantify community success beyond just kind of vibes?
00:25:42.400 --> 00:25:47.519
You know, sometimes you're in a community and it feels good, but like, how do you understand if your community is actually thriving?
00:25:47.680 --> 00:25:54.799
Uh, I in my mind, and I've been thinking about why aren't more studios taking a look at how to build out community rather than focusing on UA spend.
00:25:54.880 --> 00:26:01.119
There's so much UA spend on saying, hey, we want to get our eyes in front of people, but how do you start measuring success when you start building community?
00:26:01.279 --> 00:26:12.400
And what we see is that exactly this um community management and uh moderation of communities, that's really good for businesses.
00:26:12.640 --> 00:26:18.079
And we see that um that's the really core in uh in the revenue as well.
00:26:18.240 --> 00:26:32.559
So we see that as you mentioned, uh Karen, players in the safe environments they they play longer, they spend more time, they come back, they don't stop, and they also bring their friends, which is super great for the business.
00:26:32.720 --> 00:26:34.079
But how do you measure this?
00:26:34.319 --> 00:26:37.519
Um uh and this is something you could measure over time.
00:26:37.680 --> 00:26:41.119
For example, um, toxicity is one thing.
00:26:41.279 --> 00:26:43.279
How many reports do you get?
00:26:43.359 --> 00:26:47.680
Uh if you have a reporting system, that's something you could measure.
00:26:47.839 --> 00:26:52.640
This should go down, it shouldn't uh increase, in case you wondered.
00:26:52.880 --> 00:26:54.319
Uh, that's one thing.
00:26:54.400 --> 00:27:06.319
Uh flagged interactions, uh, and also you could also uh somehow uh try to uh see how long sessions are there, how long do they play?
00:27:06.559 --> 00:27:11.519
Do they play longer, longer, or uh do they stop after a couple of minutes?
00:27:11.680 --> 00:27:13.440
That's something you could measure.
00:27:13.599 --> 00:27:14.640
It's so much.
00:27:14.720 --> 00:27:33.599
Uh so uh but having keep the track of your own uh KPIs, uh it's super important because then you can also convince your um uh the person that has the budget in your game that this is actually good for your business.
00:27:33.920 --> 00:27:58.000
I think another way to measure not so much in the data side, but um on the engagement side is at least for us and for Club Penguin, I think one of Close Penguin's secret sauce was the fact that it was a world that had a continuing storyline and the kids got, and I mean, of course, games have lore and all this kind of good stuff, but the more players are really passionate and invested in this in the storyline, um, the better.
00:27:58.240 --> 00:28:00.880
So we are in the game with the kids all the time.
00:28:00.960 --> 00:28:02.559
We're in there and they know who we are.
00:28:02.720 --> 00:28:06.319
So, like when my co-founder drops in, his name's Blue Jay in the game.
00:28:06.400 --> 00:28:10.720
And when he drops in, he just gets swarmed, and people are like, Blue Jay, I have ideas, I have ideas.
00:28:10.960 --> 00:28:23.200
And uh, we have a newspaper in the game as well that launches every month and it tells, which also is from Club Penguin, and it tells the kids about like what's going on, and there's a lot of stories and mysteries that we're starting to kind of seed.
00:28:23.440 --> 00:28:29.440
And so we'll be like, hey, you know, there was a little donation station to um build the bridge.
00:28:29.599 --> 00:28:31.119
So there's a good community goal, right?
00:28:31.200 --> 00:28:36.640
Like everyone needs to kind of donate some candy to help build the bridge or unlock the pizza shop, right?
00:28:36.880 --> 00:28:43.200
Um, and they what we did was we in the in the newspaper, we were like, some candy went missing.
00:28:43.359 --> 00:28:44.480
What happened to the candy?
00:28:44.559 --> 00:28:45.839
Did you guys see anything?
00:28:46.079 --> 00:28:49.759
And the kids all started blaming our NPC uh flinch.
00:28:49.839 --> 00:28:53.839
He's the sweet little seal, the sweet little nervous seal who works in the fishing shop.
00:28:53.920 --> 00:28:55.200
We did not see that coming.
00:28:55.359 --> 00:28:59.519
And uh, they were like, That guy's sketchy, it's definitely him.
00:28:59.680 --> 00:29:01.440
And uh all of them kind of said that.
00:29:01.599 --> 00:29:02.559
We're like, that's funny.
00:29:02.799 --> 00:29:06.400
So one day we put a little like empty wrapper beside his feet.
00:29:06.640 --> 00:29:07.920
The kids lost their minds.
00:29:08.000 --> 00:29:12.559
They're like, I told you, I told you, the evidence is right there, straight to jail, you know.
00:29:12.799 --> 00:29:24.480
But creating little moments where the players feel like they are genuinely part of the story, where what they say um is is true or or becomes reality.
00:29:24.640 --> 00:29:26.640
That Club Penguin was so good at that.
00:29:26.720 --> 00:29:32.000
If you if you meet a Club Penguin player and you talk about the rainbow puffle, odds are they think it was their idea.
00:29:32.079 --> 00:29:33.680
They're like, that was my idea.
00:29:33.839 --> 00:29:37.759
I was the first person to think that there should be a rainbow puffle.
00:29:37.920 --> 00:29:41.039
And of course, we had to wait until the tech could do it.
00:29:41.200 --> 00:29:46.319
And the day that we launched a rainbow puffle, holy, that was a massive success.
00:29:46.400 --> 00:29:48.240
And everyone was like, that was me.
00:29:48.400 --> 00:29:49.200
You know what I mean?
00:29:49.359 --> 00:29:58.000
And um, so people or players like being really passionate, sending you fan art, sending you ideas, sending you theories.
00:29:58.160 --> 00:30:16.000
Um, and then I think to take it a step further, giving them space to come up with their theories and get passionate about something and then delivering on that for them like that's the secret sauce, you know, ninjas in Club Penguin, uh, a myth for years.
00:30:16.240 --> 00:30:22.720
And we would put little tiny things in the world just to like, just to put a little bit of gas on the fire.
00:30:22.880 --> 00:30:25.279
So they'd be like, Are there ninjas?
00:30:25.759 --> 00:30:27.759
And some people would be like, I am a ninja.
00:30:27.920 --> 00:30:30.319
And it wasn't true, but they would be like, I'm a ninja, yes.
00:30:30.480 --> 00:30:34.720
And and uh they would email us to support, are there really ninjas in the world?
00:30:34.880 --> 00:30:36.880
I love our support team was so magical.
00:30:37.039 --> 00:30:39.440
They would never just be like, hello, no, there are not.
00:30:39.599 --> 00:30:40.480
Have a nice day.
00:30:40.640 --> 00:30:42.720
They would be like, I don't know.
00:30:42.880 --> 00:30:44.160
I keep hearing that too.
00:30:44.240 --> 00:30:46.640
And I saw some weird shadows in the in the forest.
00:30:46.720 --> 00:30:47.279
What do you think?
00:30:47.440 --> 00:30:53.279
And they would have this huge back and forth, but like little things, you would click the N on the nightclub and a shadow would go by.
00:30:53.440 --> 00:30:56.079
And they're like, N, ninja, shadow, right?
00:30:56.240 --> 00:31:00.160
And then years later, we shipped like the ninja experience.
00:31:00.240 --> 00:31:04.960
And did that ever, you know, explode because they were so invested.
00:31:05.119 --> 00:31:20.559
So, like leaving space for your players to get really engaged and help shape where you go, and leaving your team a little bit of space for scope to pay off some of those kind of myths and mysteries and ideas they have, like it it just it's so magical.
00:31:20.720 --> 00:31:21.359
Yeah.
00:31:22.000 --> 00:31:25.759
You know, I feel like we've probably had those answers in the wrong order, right?
00:31:25.920 --> 00:31:31.039
I feel like Karen, you set the stage of what a good community kind of builds in the game, how you keep people engaged, how you keep them going.
00:31:31.119 --> 00:31:34.799
And Hega, you kind of talked about the KPIs that are measurable as they're going.
00:31:35.039 --> 00:31:43.279
And all I keep thinking about through my head is like people that are watching this type of content are working typically in studios and they want tools for moderation to help protect their players.
00:31:43.359 --> 00:31:48.559
And the tough thing is how do you convince a studio to do the budget and have the budget for it, right?
00:31:48.640 --> 00:31:58.480
I think over time we've kind of seen this uh bell curve on people who want to spend in moderation, but now with community trust being top of mind or community being top of mind, community trust needs to be the top of mind.
00:31:58.559 --> 00:32:08.240
And I love how you mentioned the KPIs that are measurable, but do you still see it being a tough conversation for people who want to champion tools like this to get the approval in the studio to move forward?
00:32:09.680 --> 00:32:11.680
I'll let I'll let Hega go first on this one.
00:32:12.400 --> 00:32:14.160
That was a Hega question, unless you want to jump in.
00:32:14.640 --> 00:32:15.680
We're all on the same page.
00:32:15.839 --> 00:32:19.359
We started this company being like these are table stakes.
00:32:19.519 --> 00:32:23.680
We need it to be positive, age appropriate, safe.
00:32:24.000 --> 00:32:25.759
Everything else gets added to that.
00:32:25.839 --> 00:32:28.000
So luckily, I don't have to fight that fight.
00:32:28.160 --> 00:32:32.720
We're all very much on the same page, but Hege might have some insight for her clients for sure.
00:32:33.039 --> 00:32:33.920
Yeah, yeah.
00:32:34.000 --> 00:32:41.920
But I I think it's uh um we shouldn't talk about safety as something very mystical.
00:32:42.000 --> 00:32:52.400
Uh we should be able to put numbers on it and also show that this is really good business, um, and also show that the opposite is is bad.
00:32:52.559 --> 00:33:05.440
Uh in a in a US study from 2023, I I think we saw that um the nice games uh they actually had 80% more revenue than than the toxic games.
00:33:05.599 --> 00:33:15.759
So it shows that um uh uh it's important to have, well, it's it's good for the business uh period.
00:33:16.000 --> 00:33:22.240
It's uh but also keeping track on how is your community evolving.
00:33:22.400 --> 00:33:24.880
Is it getting better or is it getting worse?
00:33:25.039 --> 00:33:26.799
That's uh that's important as well.
00:33:27.039 --> 00:33:33.119
Yeah, and I I think to tools like Hage's tool makes this easier and more cost effective for companies, right?
00:33:33.200 --> 00:33:40.559
I mean, back in the day we had over a hundred people um actively doing that for Club Penguin, right?
00:33:40.640 --> 00:33:58.559
And we were slowly building kind of the filter tech back then, but you know, with now decades ahead of time, you know, tools like Hage's tool, they you can only you can have a couple people to manage that, or you can outsource that, you know, or whatever, whatever you're comfortable with for your own kind of community guidelines.
00:33:58.720 --> 00:34:01.440
But yeah, I would say it's a lot more cost effective these days.
00:34:01.519 --> 00:34:10.719
And I think people, yeah, need to see that as table stakes to have a good long game that people want to return to, like Hague said, a positive space, right?
00:34:10.880 --> 00:34:13.119
Especially if it's kids, so important.
00:34:13.760 --> 00:34:15.280
I think it's a good question, right?
00:34:15.440 --> 00:34:19.440
At what point does a studio start looking for a paid solution to moderation, right?
00:34:19.519 --> 00:34:24.559
If you're a one-man indie shop that's building a game, I think it's unreasonable to think you have all the tools.
00:34:24.639 --> 00:34:28.079
You might want to start building with scale in mind, thinking how do I implement these, right?
00:34:28.159 --> 00:34:31.760
But I don't know, Hegel, do you have like a hey, if you want to get started, start here?
00:34:31.840 --> 00:34:35.840
And here's when you should start thinking about scaling and the tools you should stay start taking a look at.
00:34:36.159 --> 00:34:43.280
Yeah, so I would uh I would think about this uh at the beginning, either way, and and have a plan.
00:34:43.760 --> 00:34:52.079
Because if you don't have a plan and suddenly your game will turn into a big hit, then you have a big problem if you haven't thought about this.
00:34:52.480 --> 00:35:08.239
Um but there is a lot you can do with just one man or one woman game as well, uh, and especially using the technology to do it uh uh as you scale.
00:35:08.400 --> 00:35:17.119
In the beginning, you can do it, uh you can do it very manual, but it's very that's maybe what you shouldn't spend your time on.
00:35:17.280 --> 00:35:22.639
You should spend your time on building a great game, not doing the manual moderation.
00:35:22.800 --> 00:35:24.000
So yeah.
00:35:24.320 --> 00:35:29.599
If anyone wants to talk about this, happy to um talk about it afterwards.
00:35:30.000 --> 00:35:30.559
It's funny.
00:35:30.639 --> 00:35:36.000
I was having a conversation with someone yesterday, and we're talking about SaaS tools, and they're like, you don't need SaaS anymore.
00:35:36.079 --> 00:35:38.400
We have vibe coding, and vibe code can replace all that.
00:35:38.960 --> 00:35:41.360
But then we're vibe coding these tools that already exist.
00:35:41.440 --> 00:35:46.320
It's like we go in this circle, this build it or buy it methodology, and we're like talking to the studio.
00:35:46.400 --> 00:35:47.599
I'm like, you're five people.
00:35:47.679 --> 00:35:52.159
Like, why are you gonna try building a tool when this tool exists and you can focus on building your game?
00:35:52.239 --> 00:35:57.760
And I think people think they can do everything, and when you try and do everything, that's what's gonna start delaying games and slowing you down.
00:35:57.920 --> 00:36:03.920
So, so maybe in the beginning, again, you want to just set up a quick way to watch for cursing or for child grooming or for something.
00:36:04.239 --> 00:36:16.719
But at a certain point, when you hit a certain number of players, you want to focus on building this game, getting that feedback like you were talking about earlier, Karen, making sure you're iterating on the feedback of the community rather than trying to just protect the community when the tools are already there to help you do that.
00:36:16.960 --> 00:36:19.840
Are there any experiences from the community side that really stand out?
00:36:19.920 --> 00:36:21.760
Like, oh my god, I can't believe this happened.
00:36:21.840 --> 00:36:24.159
How cool is this from the Club Penguin days?
00:36:24.480 --> 00:36:31.119
One of my favorites, I think I told this at GDC last year, but was um Operation Blackout.
00:36:31.440 --> 00:36:48.800
So in our production floor in the studio, we had this big whiteboard and we had um big magnets that showed everything that was launching, everything from the parties to the new games to the new features, and also any like tech, you know, behind the scenes updates, anything company related, just a big calendar.
00:36:49.039 --> 00:36:58.239
And one day, a literal photo of that board leaked on one of our kind of fan blogs, and everyone was like, What?
00:36:58.400 --> 00:36:59.360
Who's the mole?
00:36:59.440 --> 00:37:00.800
It was it was pandemonium.
00:37:00.880 --> 00:37:03.199
We came into work that day, the whole floor was locked down.
00:37:03.360 --> 00:37:06.159
It was like, we need to figure out who leaked this thing.
00:37:06.400 --> 00:37:19.360
But the funny part was, even though it had it had every party that we hadn't announced, every mini-game coming out, the kids laser focused on this magnet that said blackout, and it was over Christmas break, and all it meant was no launches, right?
00:37:19.519 --> 00:37:20.960
Right before you go out on release.
00:37:21.119 --> 00:37:27.039
Very common for studios to stop releasing content to try not to have bug fixes and bug their team over the holidays.
00:37:27.119 --> 00:37:31.519
So it just said blackout, and they were like, What is the blackout?
00:37:31.679 --> 00:37:38.079
Oh my gosh, I bet Herbert, who was the bad polar bear um in the in the lore of Club Penguin.
00:37:38.239 --> 00:37:39.280
I bet Herbert's coming.
00:37:39.360 --> 00:37:41.039
I bet this happens, I bet that happens.
00:37:41.119 --> 00:37:45.280
Again, the kids went wild with this theory about what blackout was.
00:37:45.440 --> 00:37:50.559
And of course, we I don't think we shipped that for a year, maybe two.
00:37:50.719 --> 00:37:57.920
It was a while, but we built Operation Blackout, and it was the most successful party that ever happened in Club Penguin.
00:37:58.079 --> 00:38:01.920
And it was just kind of again, what a happy, weird mistake.
00:38:02.079 --> 00:38:11.760
But like give the audience just like a tiny little thread and see what they kind of untangle from it and uh and then go to that.
00:38:11.920 --> 00:38:21.920
I guarantee what your audience comes up with and what they get passionate about is gonna be better than what the best game designers and experts in the world can ever come up with in a room.
00:38:22.159 --> 00:38:32.000
So, like let them be the game designers, ship that, and then they think that they predicted the future, but really they just told us what they wanted and we heard them.
00:38:32.159 --> 00:38:34.639
So that was one of my that's one of my favorite stories too.
00:38:34.960 --> 00:38:35.519
I love that.
00:38:35.679 --> 00:38:39.679
And in the world of like trans media blowing up right now, people loving transmedia.
00:38:39.760 --> 00:38:47.679
I feel like when people start creating their own lore, their own like once you have people creating stuff, all of a sudden you got your little flywheel there and you're you're good to go, right?
00:38:47.760 --> 00:38:51.360
You have creators, shares, everything, and like that's so cool.
00:38:51.440 --> 00:38:55.920
And yeah, it's just fun to hear them kind of create their own tale, then you're probably like, oh well, we can do this.
00:38:56.000 --> 00:38:58.159
You did the same thing with the name of the other stuff, right?
00:38:58.559 --> 00:39:01.039
You find these threads and all of a sudden you got your new DLC.
00:39:01.360 --> 00:39:02.320
Exactly.
00:39:02.639 --> 00:39:04.400
Heg, I'm curious from your perspective.
00:39:04.480 --> 00:39:07.119
I I remember talking with your teammate at PGC London.
00:39:07.199 --> 00:39:11.440
Some of the technologies and tools you're creating are unlike anything I've seen in the in the space before.
00:39:11.519 --> 00:39:15.039
And I'm curious, like, how do you think of this stuff?
00:39:15.119 --> 00:39:16.800
Like you have some great minds here.
00:39:16.880 --> 00:39:19.039
You're like, how do you combat the latest?
00:39:19.360 --> 00:39:26.159
I go back to the spam filter days because I worked a lot in spam filtering, and you know, you create a great spam filter, then spammers find a way to get around it, right?
00:39:26.239 --> 00:39:27.760
Like, how are you staying ahead of the game?
00:39:28.000 --> 00:39:30.239
I mean, yeah, it's fascinating.
00:39:30.639 --> 00:39:44.159
Yeah, well, um, I think it's all about uh getting the right people to work together, and it's and it's somehow like uh the um uh how you did it with new features in the game, Karen.
00:39:44.800 --> 00:40:47.840
It's um so when you have um the best people uh and they discuss this and we are testing new features like every day, and what we also see every day is that uh the bad actress always gets through the filter, and then we have to figure out how did I do this, and then we improve, improve, improve like every single day, and that's also the reason why uh why coding uh a moderation platform might sound like a great idea uh at day one, but at day two it might be outdated, so uh, but I mean um yeah, uh, and also um like moderation is it's a little bit more complex than it seems like, uh, and it's not just one filter that can solve everything, or uh so it it's like trying to to fix the whole problem, um, trying to find the bad actors, not just the bad content.
00:40:48.000 --> 00:41:00.239
Um I think yeah, having the people that find the smart and good ideas is is the key to um move forward together with the best customers, of course.
00:41:00.639 --> 00:41:02.159
I think uh it's well said.
00:41:02.239 --> 00:41:04.719
I think often two people want to just control everything.
00:41:04.800 --> 00:41:10.400
And but if you find good people who are smart people that can take the ball and run with it, it's you hire people to trust them and run with it.
00:41:10.480 --> 00:41:13.360
So if you hire the best people, you you'll build the best product.
00:41:13.440 --> 00:41:16.320
And I think you're creating some really kind of cutting-edge tools at Ava.
00:41:16.639 --> 00:41:19.519
So I'm really excited to see as time goes on.
00:41:19.760 --> 00:41:23.039
Before we do wrap up, Karen, you want to talk to us a little bit about your game and pitch your game?
00:41:23.119 --> 00:41:25.920
And I'll put a little code up top if you guys want to scare.
00:41:26.159 --> 00:41:26.880
Oh, oh my god.
00:41:29.840 --> 00:41:31.920
You should put that to imagine island.game.
00:41:32.000 --> 00:41:34.639
Um that's our boring company site.
00:41:34.719 --> 00:41:35.440
Don't look at that one.
00:41:36.000 --> 00:41:38.079
So um, yeah, Imagine Island.
00:41:38.159 --> 00:41:39.760
Oh, I'm really put on the spot here.
00:41:39.920 --> 00:41:45.039
Uh, we shipped our game in the fall, and uh yeah, we have half a million players now.
00:41:45.119 --> 00:41:46.480
It's a super cute.
00:41:46.559 --> 00:41:48.000
Um, I love the art style.
00:41:48.079 --> 00:41:48.960
It's it's on web.
00:41:49.119 --> 00:41:54.960
You can go to imagine island.game, you can click play now and pretty much drop immediately into the world, which is great.
00:41:55.119 --> 00:41:58.719
We removed all of the kind of download and install friction.
00:41:59.039 --> 00:42:02.960
Um, so yeah, in the world you can do all kinds of things.
00:42:03.119 --> 00:42:07.440
You can fish, you can dress up and self-express, you can play mini games.
00:42:07.599 --> 00:42:16.079
We have a hobby that is uh called Sandwich Siege that you can try and get your best time jumping and racing up the food-related obstacle course.
00:42:16.320 --> 00:42:18.960
Like I said, there's all kinds of kind of stories being seated.
00:42:19.199 --> 00:42:20.639
We have monthly parties.
00:42:20.880 --> 00:42:31.280
We just opened the pizza shop with a new mini game in there, very club penguin-esque, where you can go and make pizzas, eat pizzas, be the manager of the pizza shop.
00:42:31.440 --> 00:42:33.119
The world is your oyster.
00:42:33.280 --> 00:42:36.079
Um, we also just launched home islands.
00:42:36.159 --> 00:42:44.559
So now every player has their own home island where they can drop a house, they can decorate the inside, they can build an amazing outdoor space.
00:42:44.719 --> 00:42:50.480
Uh, the builder is really fun, really easy to use, very low barrier, and you can create really cool stuff.
00:42:50.559 --> 00:42:54.480
And then you can go invite your friends over and they can come see your space and you can go see their space.
00:42:54.639 --> 00:43:01.039
We have a lot of very exciting plans for the builder experience over the next few months.
00:43:01.199 --> 00:43:06.239
Um, and there's, you know, some mysteries that there might be some other living creatures in the world.
00:43:06.400 --> 00:43:14.320
I don't know when we'll see them, but yeah, uh a lot of very club penguin-esque plans over the next, you know, year or so.
00:43:14.559 --> 00:43:17.599
And um also just monthly events and parties.
00:43:17.760 --> 00:43:29.280
We have probably over 500 virtual items, uh really fun items from head to toe where you can like mix and match and be everything from a hot dog to like a fashionista.
00:43:29.840 --> 00:43:31.360
Um, very, very fun.
00:43:31.440 --> 00:43:40.239
So yeah, if you have any kids between, I don't know, six and twelve, I would love to hear your feedback, get them in there, let me know what they wanna what they wanna see.
00:43:40.559 --> 00:43:44.400
And um yeah, we're we're here for hopefully a really fun ride.
00:43:44.719 --> 00:43:45.039
Awesome.
00:43:45.119 --> 00:43:52.719
We updated the QR code and we spent a lot of time over the uh over the Christmas break building gingerbread houses with the peppermints at me and my son.
00:43:52.880 --> 00:43:57.519
And he was also running the the wipeout type of course consistently and he was playing prop tag.
00:43:57.679 --> 00:43:59.519
He didn't even know what it was at first, and then he loved it.
00:43:59.599 --> 00:43:59.679
So
00:44:00.159 --> 00:44:01.119
That's a great one, yes.
00:44:01.360 --> 00:44:02.480
Fun stuff, cool stuff.
00:44:02.559 --> 00:44:03.679
And again, check out the game.
00:44:03.760 --> 00:44:05.280
It's it's QR code up there.
00:44:05.360 --> 00:44:08.480
And we'll have a link if you're uh listening afterwards, or you can click it in the beginning.
00:44:08.800 --> 00:44:09.199
Thanks, Greg.
00:44:09.360 --> 00:44:09.679
I appreciate it.
00:44:09.760 --> 00:44:11.280
Okay, you want to talk a little bit about Ava?
00:44:12.079 --> 00:44:12.800
Yeah, sure.
00:44:13.039 --> 00:44:26.000
What we are really great at is uh of course finding the bad content, but uh also finding the bad actors behind um uh what are being uh made in the communities.
00:44:26.159 --> 00:44:37.599
So, and I think um what is important to understand is that most people actually are very nice people, uh, and we have to keep it that way.
00:44:37.760 --> 00:44:40.079
Uh, and that's why we exist.
00:44:40.400 --> 00:44:58.320
That is for uh um the humanity to continue being nice, uh, and what we are helping online communities with is to find those bad apples in that community and hopefully also make them into the nice actors.
00:44:58.559 --> 00:45:10.079
Because what we also see is, for example, for for kids, they have no clue that they are toxic uh sometimes because there are no grown-ups in the room.
00:45:10.239 --> 00:45:20.079
So, in our system, it's also possible to have um these uh warnings inside uh inside our tool as well.
00:45:20.159 --> 00:45:24.960
So we can give them a warning and also give them an advice how they can change.
00:45:25.519 --> 00:45:26.079
That's great.
00:45:26.239 --> 00:45:30.800
You know, I think in order to kind of fix these behaviors, like you said, with a child, they need to understand what they did wrong.
00:45:30.880 --> 00:45:36.079
And I think that feedback loop is important, whether you're building a game, whether you're building a moderation platform or or whatever.
00:45:36.159 --> 00:45:37.199
So I think that's awesome.
00:45:37.599 --> 00:45:39.119
Can I add one little thing, Greg?
00:45:39.360 --> 00:45:41.920
I think what no, your mic is cut.
00:45:42.079 --> 00:45:57.119
Um just doubling on that, one thing we've seen a lot, and you know, at Club Penguin as well, is kids um not only, you know, on the on the side that they don't know that they're toxic, kids love to try and share their personally identifying information.
00:45:57.199 --> 00:45:59.119
Yeah, and they're just not doing it.
00:45:59.280 --> 00:46:00.719
They don't know that it's bad, right?
00:46:00.800 --> 00:46:02.960
They're like, hey, this is my real name.
00:46:03.039 --> 00:46:04.000
I just turned nine.
00:46:04.079 --> 00:46:04.800
That's my sister.
00:46:05.039 --> 00:46:07.199
We're like our mom drives this type of car.
00:46:07.280 --> 00:46:08.079
I live in this state.
00:46:08.239 --> 00:46:22.079
You're like, ah, you know, so using a tool like Hey Gaze to also compartmentalize that is sharing PII and teach them, give them like real feedback that's like, hey, you can't say that stuff, and this is why.
00:46:22.239 --> 00:46:23.840
Um, these are the types of things you can't say.
00:46:24.000 --> 00:46:29.760
Like, really take that time to explain to them because in those scenarios, they're not being mean, they just don't understand yet.
00:46:29.840 --> 00:46:36.800
And it's our responsibility, especially when dealing with young kids, to teach them how to be safe.
00:46:36.960 --> 00:46:42.800
Um, because I mean, a lot of parents aren't aren't even that kind of savvy in the online safety and stuff like that.
00:46:42.880 --> 00:46:57.119
So we take that really seriously as our own, as our own um responsibility, but specific feedback into Hege's point, teaching people and giving them positive loops as well as the feedback on the negative loops, I think all kind of works together to create a good community.
00:46:57.199 --> 00:47:00.000
So yeah, I completely agree.
00:47:00.159 --> 00:47:04.800
And also to add on that, um, I think we still need humans.
00:47:05.119 --> 00:47:09.199
Uh, I know we're all into tooling, technology, AI.
00:47:09.360 --> 00:47:14.639
I love that, but also I think we can't automate humans.
00:47:14.880 --> 00:47:20.480
So uh, and especially in the really bad cases, there has to be a human involved.
00:47:20.800 --> 00:47:33.039
Yeah, yeah, and they're always gonna stay like you need Hege and her team that's gonna stay one step ahead of the kids and the audience because they are always crafty and trying to find the next way around the tech.
00:47:33.119 --> 00:47:45.280
So, like have being able to set it and forget it with somebody like Hege's team and focus on making your product magical, I think is really important because it's never a end we're done here job.
00:47:45.599 --> 00:47:52.159
The the tech has to evolve with the audience all the time, or you're gonna be behind to Hege's point, maybe even the next day.
00:47:52.400 --> 00:47:54.000
So yeah.
00:47:54.320 --> 00:47:55.039
Well said.
00:47:55.199 --> 00:47:58.079
Well, both Hega and Karen are going to be at GDC.
00:47:58.159 --> 00:48:00.079
There'll be a community clubhouse on Tuesday.
00:48:00.480 --> 00:48:02.800
Tuesday, the what day is Tuesday, the 12th.
00:48:03.039 --> 00:48:07.760
Um so be sure to be at Community Clubhouse, check them out.
00:48:07.840 --> 00:48:10.079
They're gonna keep building on what we talked about here today.
00:48:10.320 --> 00:48:14.559
Both of you, thank you so much for the insights, both on the gaming side and the technology side.
00:48:14.639 --> 00:48:34.159
We got to talk about community growth, how we're seeing AAA's pivot, or other studios as well pivot to focusing on community first, how you design kind of a scale-proof framework, the hindsight of kind of what you would do differently, as well as kind of how do you nurture that community, how you build it up, how do you build value there, how do you prove that value to the person and the players as well.
00:48:34.320 --> 00:48:37.599
So, both of you, I appreciate all the knowledge you've shared today.
00:48:37.760 --> 00:48:41.920
We'll have more clips and all the stuff cut up into different social pieces here.
00:48:42.000 --> 00:48:45.199
So, thank you everyone for listening and see you next time.
00:00:00.080 --> 00:00:06.799
We're seeing record-breaking anticipation for titles like GTA 6, but we're also seeing that safe triple A bets are no longer guaranteed.
00:00:07.040 --> 00:00:18.719
In the last year, we've seen games like Monster Hunter Wild achieve massive sales but struggle with community trust, while double A games and indie breakouts like Claire Obscure have completely flipped the script by leading with transparency.
00:00:18.960 --> 00:00:23.280
The lesson for 2026 is clear is you can't really fix a broken community after it's built.
00:00:23.359 --> 00:00:27.039
If you're not building the foundation from day zero, you're at risk.
00:00:27.600 --> 00:00:31.760
Moving the community strategy, marketing checklists to a competitive advantage.
00:00:31.920 --> 00:00:34.719
How are we going to get tactical is on that day zero mindset?
00:00:34.880 --> 00:00:39.600
Why community design needs to happen alongside game design, different launch traps to avoid.
00:00:39.759 --> 00:00:46.159
You know, Steam is often one of the ones that we hear a lot, but there's other silent launcher, immediate gotchas that hit you right when you go live.
00:00:46.240 --> 00:00:47.280
So how do you get ahead of that?
00:00:47.359 --> 00:00:48.880
And then how do you scale without burnout?
00:00:49.039 --> 00:00:51.520
So we're not just talking about moderation, we're talking about design.
00:00:51.679 --> 00:00:55.920
And to help navigate this, I'm excited to have two people who have spent years in the trenches.
00:00:56.079 --> 00:00:57.840
So first, we have Karen Johnson.
00:00:57.920 --> 00:01:04.400
She's a veteran from Magic Potion and Club Penguin, who understands the DNA of player loyalty better than anyone in the business.
00:01:04.560 --> 00:01:13.599
And we're also joined by Hega Tokarut from ABA, who is a leading charge of how we use technology and design to protect and scale communities safely in 2026.
00:01:13.920 --> 00:01:15.519
Thank you so much for joining us.
00:01:15.680 --> 00:01:19.040
Karen, you want to say a little bit about yourself and what you do and what you're building?
00:01:19.359 --> 00:01:19.920
Yeah, cool.
00:01:20.000 --> 00:01:20.640
Thanks, Greg.
00:01:20.719 --> 00:01:23.120
Um, super excited to be back on the podcast again.
00:01:23.280 --> 00:01:24.319
Thank you for having me.
00:01:24.480 --> 00:01:33.599
Uh, I started my career working at Club Penguin for Disney for I was there for about seven years, working on everything from the web team to the game team to the parties.
00:01:33.840 --> 00:01:38.959
Um, and then I did a short stint in movies for five years working at uh ILM.
00:01:39.359 --> 00:01:45.120
And then I moved to Raleigh, North Carolina to take a job at Fortnite, which was super fun.
00:01:45.280 --> 00:01:53.439
I was there for about five years when my old uh boss from my Disney days hit me up and said, Hey, the world needs a new club penguin.
00:01:53.519 --> 00:01:55.599
There isn't anything out there like that right now.
00:01:55.840 --> 00:02:00.480
The kids need a place that is designed for them, built for them, and we're the team that can do it.
00:02:00.640 --> 00:02:06.719
So I left my dream job at Epic and I I joined him for Magic Potion Games as his co-founder.
00:02:06.879 --> 00:02:10.240
And we have a ton of old penguins involved, including Lang Merrifield.
00:02:10.319 --> 00:02:11.199
He helps us out a lot.
00:02:11.280 --> 00:02:15.199
He's a strategic and creative advisor who originally built Club Penguins.
00:02:15.360 --> 00:02:30.800
So yeah, we've just launched Imagine Island a few months ago, and we're kind of trying to make that the next Club Penguin for Gen Alpha, a safe, age-appropriate place for kids to play and be social and have fun together and feel like a belonging uh in an online community.
00:02:30.960 --> 00:02:31.759
So that's me.
00:02:32.240 --> 00:02:32.639
Awesome.
00:02:32.800 --> 00:02:33.840
Thank you so much for that.
00:02:34.000 --> 00:02:39.039
And as a father of two young kids who want to play games, I appreciate you still building that on.
00:02:39.120 --> 00:02:42.639
I remember my brother-in-law playing community or Club Penguin over the years.
00:02:42.719 --> 00:02:44.560
In Fortnite, we're all playing as a community.
00:02:44.639 --> 00:02:48.719
So seeing that go on for these next generations to keep playing is awesome.
00:02:48.800 --> 00:02:50.319
So thank you so much for that.
00:02:50.560 --> 00:02:52.960
And Hega, you want to say a little bit about yourself?
00:02:53.360 --> 00:02:54.159
Yeah, sure.
00:02:54.319 --> 00:03:01.280
So um I'm originally from uh the technology and cybersecurse side.
00:03:01.520 --> 00:03:05.439
So um, and also from the investory side as well.
00:03:05.599 --> 00:03:15.120
So um, my first job was um making uh new businesses for bigger corporations before I deep dived into the VC industry.
00:03:15.199 --> 00:03:27.439
So I've been working as an investor for several years, um, and also taking uh um research into new uh companies.
00:03:27.599 --> 00:03:38.080
So IBA, uh we are protecting uh kids and teens and other people online, so we are detecting the bad stuff that's happening in the online space.
00:03:38.159 --> 00:03:50.800
Um, but we are uh IBA is the fifth company I took out from university research, and we've been around for several years now, and uh yeah.
00:03:51.039 --> 00:04:13.759
So what we do is to help uh all these great communities around all the great games to have a really good community out from Norway, Europe, now in Sweden, all over the place, and she's calling in live from the Stockholm Airport, so I appreciate Hega taking the time to be able to do this on her way home to then go to the GDC.
00:04:13.840 --> 00:04:15.280
The traveling never ends, does it?
00:04:15.520 --> 00:04:17.360
Seriously, no, it doesn't.
00:04:17.680 --> 00:04:22.240
But they have cheese doodles at the airport, it's free today, it's the cheese doodles.
00:04:23.120 --> 00:04:25.439
It's National Cheese Doodle Day in Sweden.
00:04:25.519 --> 00:04:26.480
We need that over here.
00:04:26.639 --> 00:04:29.920
I feel like this is something we need to learn more about because this is important.
00:04:30.560 --> 00:04:32.079
Um, let's jump into our topics.
00:04:32.160 --> 00:04:35.839
And as I'm talking again, feel free if you're in chat, drop some questions, let us know.
00:04:36.000 --> 00:04:37.920
We like to make this as interactive as possible.
00:04:38.079 --> 00:04:40.160
So I want to start with kind of the beginning.
00:04:40.399 --> 00:04:41.680
Community is the new meta.
00:04:41.759 --> 00:04:47.680
We're seeing AAA giants take massive community-driven swings that were once the secret sauce of indie successes.
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I look at games like Battlefield, who did a great community push prior to going live.
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I'm really curious from both of your perspectives, what did community look like 10 years ago versus what the landscape looks like today, right?
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Were there constraints that existed back then, or are there more constraints today just because of how technology works?
00:05:06.480 --> 00:05:08.639
And maybe again, this is kind of a big question.
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Start high level of uh Karen from your perspective, right?
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You were at Club Penguin.
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Did you know you were building a community game?
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And I know you did, but did it kind of take its own shape or how did that go down?
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Yeah, I think Club Penguin was a little bit unique because a lot of the games back then, you know, they just focused on good game mechanics, or how do we make a good multiplayer game?
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And that was kind of as far as they took the idea of kids playing together and then community naturally formed around it, often not probably in the way that they wanted.
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And then they immediately got into a reactive state where it's like, oh, how do we then mold this into what we want?
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Where Club Penguin uniquely was very much built on social.
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It launched as Penguin Chat originally, which was just one room with a bunch of little waddling derpy penguins walking around and chatting with bubbles above their head, right?
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And it was a huge hey, kids loved it, they loved just being able to walk around and talk.
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So obviously, social and community was very much at the core of Club Penguin.
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And then it was like, well, what if we let them put on hats?
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What if we let them waddle around more spaces?
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What if we let them go indoors?
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What if we let them play mini-games and all of those experiences just really layered on top of the social kind of foundation for the game?
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Where I think other games, like I said, they weren't, they weren't thinking about that from the outset.
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So then they kind of got into a bit of a reactive state.
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I think nowadays studios realize how important community is.
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Humans are social animals at their core, community and belonging and social feelings are, you know, very much part of our core DNA.
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We quite literally have to have to have it to survive.
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So I think people are realizing that they need to think about it from the outset.
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Like, what kind of community do we want to have in this world?
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And the more you think about that from the from the get-go and really build your systems and your gameplay and your you know guidelines around it so that people just kind of have it sink into their core from the get-go really helps enable um players to help each other understand how we act here, you know, and help police actually the rules themselves when they become really passionate about it and when it's really kind of inherent to them by joining the game.
00:07:21.439 --> 00:07:22.000
Really cool.
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I'm really curious, and maybe this is where Hega could also kind of jump in is, you know, back then you were doing penguin chat, right?
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And you were in Penguin Chat, right?
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These days communities are growing not just from within games, but from external channels as well, where things get a little both more accessible because everyone could join it, but at the same time, it becomes a bit more dangerous as well because you're enabling anyone to join it.
00:07:43.360 --> 00:07:46.800
So, from that perspective, and maybe Hega, you can talk about your experience as well.
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But I'm curious on how you take a look at kind of, and maybe we're jumping ahead of ourselves, but how has it changed on that perspective as well?
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How I see it is uh before you uh uh well, 10 years ago, uh you didn't think about what type of community you wanted to build.
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You just had a community, and then please uh do as you wish.
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And when something bad happened, you had to run after and try to fix it.
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Uh today you can do it different, and you also see it as a growth engine.
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So that has been a big ship, the way I've seen it.
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Are there any specific kinds of games or communities that that you've seen grow?
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And maybe Fortnite's an interesting example of that, because that has a good crossover from kids to adults as well, right?
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Whereas some of the other games are more focused on kids or or adults, right?
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And how do you see those spaces continuing to grow uh from where they are?
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Yeah, I think there's a couple of things.
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One is self-identity, and I think, you know, especially the younger audiences and especially since the pandemic, your online persona and kind of status and who you are is almost more important to you than who you are in real life.
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It also removes a whole bunch of boundaries and limitations for you.
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You know, it doesn't matter what you look like in real life or if you have any disabilities, or you look like this, or you look like that.
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You can be anyone you want online, right?
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So it kind of gives people this sense of empowerment that they can be who they want to be.
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And it also removes barriers to find people with common interests.
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So I think the games that really kind of lean into that are the ones that are succeeding.
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So giving people a bunch of like self-expression, a bunch of customization.
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And people are starting to not think just about how do we, you know, create good co-op quests or guilds or things like that.
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It's how do we create a space where people want to come and hang out and just be together, right?
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So you see people just hanging out in lobbies nowadays.
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They might not even jump into the game for a long time.
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They're hanging out, they're socializing, they're emoting, they're chatting, they're waiting for their friends, they're being goofy.
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Um, so I think games are starting to see this and they're like, how does that evolve from here?
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So things like concerts, right?
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Fortnite doing their concerts.
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I will say, Club Penguin did it first, penguin band, right?
00:10:03.039 --> 00:10:07.440
Everyone's like, Marshmallow was the first online concert of Fortnite.
00:10:07.519 --> 00:10:08.559
I I beg to differ.
00:10:08.639 --> 00:10:10.240
I think it was Club Penguin Band.
00:10:10.320 --> 00:10:12.320
But, anyways, that's neither here nor there.
00:10:12.480 --> 00:10:17.360
Uh, the Fortnite ones that were like, it's at a specific time, you know, be there, be square.
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People would cue up for an hour beforehand, you know, millions and millions of people would join in.
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So I think that's just gonna continue to grow.
00:10:25.519 --> 00:10:33.519
And the people that are trailblazers are like, what are other experiences in real life that humans like to experience together that they might not be able to?
00:10:33.759 --> 00:10:35.519
Live sporting events, right?
00:10:35.759 --> 00:10:36.879
Super expensive.
00:10:37.039 --> 00:10:41.919
I could have a friend on the other side of the country that I want to watch the game with, you know, Disney's thinking about this.
00:10:42.080 --> 00:10:48.960
How do we let people see movie premieres together online in an immersive game, you know, platform like Fortnite?
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How do we let them watch live gaming events?
00:10:50.799 --> 00:10:55.440
So I think just continuing to push the boundaries on that is where things are headed.
00:10:55.759 --> 00:11:08.480
But also following up on that, uh, Karen, uh, because uh what we also see is that when people are uh joining those social places, they want to have a good time, not a bad time.
00:11:08.639 --> 00:11:30.399
Uh so that's also uh why it's um important to also have some sort of um thinking about what type of community do you actually want, uh, and also have some guardrails as well, very early, so you don't stop them in the lobby before they actually enter your game, for example.
00:11:30.799 --> 00:11:35.919
I also, you know, you're you're talking about enabling it for more people and scaling it.
00:11:36.000 --> 00:11:46.480
And Hega, I kind of wanted to talk with you because by default, I think when you're younger, and probably older too, never mind, but people like to push the boundaries to the edges, right?
00:11:46.559 --> 00:11:48.799
And they really like to see how far can they go with something.
00:11:48.879 --> 00:11:53.440
And sometimes it's something funny, someone breaking the game, and sometimes it's nastiness.
00:11:53.679 --> 00:12:07.759
And I think maybe my personal observation is over time people online got nastier, maybe because they've more people got accessible to the internet, and maybe in the club penguin days, well, there's still probably nastiness out there, probably didn't scale or didn't scale like it did now.
00:12:07.919 --> 00:12:14.320
And I'm curious, like from a tool set perspective, uh, have you seen the tools evolved to help agents?
00:12:14.879 --> 00:12:25.440
Well, uh well, I I think it's um it's normal and it's also very healthy that the kids and the teens are trying to push those boundaries.
00:12:25.600 --> 00:12:31.519
Um, because um I did that when I was a kid, and everyone else has done it also.
00:12:31.840 --> 00:12:44.480
And we also see that uh when we are helping our clients with uh moderation, that's like playing around filters, playing around that's part of their lives.
00:12:44.559 --> 00:12:50.559
Uh so I don't think we're getting um worse, but we're getting smarter.
00:12:50.639 --> 00:12:59.200
Uh so I think that's it's a good way, but we have to you have to help them to um to also show where is the boundaries.
00:12:59.440 --> 00:13:01.120
Um so yeah.
00:13:01.440 --> 00:13:02.799
Yeah, I totally agree.
00:13:02.960 --> 00:13:06.000
I mean, kids are gonna push boundaries and they're good kids.
00:13:06.159 --> 00:13:10.960
If you know your kid goes in and says something, you know, it's curiosity.
00:13:11.120 --> 00:13:11.919
What if I say this?
00:13:12.080 --> 00:13:14.960
What's gonna happen, you know, and trying to outsmart the filter.
00:13:15.039 --> 00:13:17.600
A lot of kids do that, and it doesn't mean they're bad kids.
00:13:17.840 --> 00:13:20.000
It's totally just part of human nature.
00:13:20.159 --> 00:13:36.480
But for us to kind of be there and and help teach them in I think a more authentic and a more sophisticated way than just like mute, ban, you know, but also to my earlier point about kind of empowering your community to be the first line of defense on that as well, I think is really powerful.
00:13:36.639 --> 00:13:40.240
So in a Club Penguin, kids got really passionate about the Club Penguin rules.
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They knew what was cool and what was not in Club Penguin.
00:13:42.799 --> 00:13:51.759
So one of my favorite examples, actually, my co-founder Steven, the first time he ever played Club Penguin, he logged in and he's kind of like, okay, what's this game about?
00:13:51.919 --> 00:13:54.399
He sees some kids waddling around, sees someone throw a snowball.
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He's like, Oh, how do I throw a snowball?
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Throws it at another kid.
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The kid says, Stop that.
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He throws another one at him, real jerk.
00:14:02.320 --> 00:14:07.039
But uh, and all the other kids were like, Hey, he said, Stop that.
00:14:07.279 --> 00:14:08.080
That's bullying.
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We don't do that here.
00:14:09.279 --> 00:14:13.039
And he was like, Whoa, wow, okay, what is this world?
00:14:13.200 --> 00:14:26.000
And you know, all of a sudden, the the world and the other players telling you, like, that's not cool here, is actually quite a bit more powerful than like a big orange, you know, screen in your face being like, you've been muted or whatever.
00:14:26.159 --> 00:14:32.799
So getting the kids passionate about what is right and wrong and having them kind of police it was so, so powerful in Club Penguin.
00:14:32.960 --> 00:14:40.159
Another good example of that is the tour guide, is the tour guide experience in Club Penguin, which was very simple.
00:14:40.320 --> 00:14:48.960
You don't need to build these like big complicated systems or like progression, you know, and rewards that will take the dev team months to create.
00:14:49.039 --> 00:14:58.559
It was literally you took a quiz, you needed to know about the game, and you needed to know about online safety and how to be kind and how to be safe online.
00:14:58.720 --> 00:15:03.120
And if you, if you, you know, pass the quiz, congratulations, you're a tour guide.
00:15:03.200 --> 00:15:03.759
Here's your hat.
00:15:03.919 --> 00:15:08.639
And you get a hat and you got an emote or you could hold up a sign that says tours here.
00:15:08.960 --> 00:15:09.759
And that was it.
00:15:09.840 --> 00:15:11.360
And then it was up to the kids.
00:15:11.600 --> 00:15:26.159
We, it wasn't a big like, um, take Hege to the to the clothing shop and get her a hat, take her here, you know, check mark, check mark, which kind of creates, I would say, more inauthentic, you know, interactions between kids.
00:15:26.399 --> 00:15:26.879
That was it.
00:15:26.960 --> 00:15:33.279
They were empowered and they would go stand there in the plaza and they'd hold up their sign, tours here, and they'd wait for new kids to join.
00:15:33.440 --> 00:15:37.519
And instead of a stuffy fatouie, you know, click this, do that.
00:15:37.600 --> 00:15:39.600
A real kid would say, Hey, are you new here?
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Can I show you around?
00:15:40.879 --> 00:15:42.159
Well, first you should probably have a hat.
00:15:42.240 --> 00:15:43.360
You're a naked penguin.
00:15:43.440 --> 00:15:45.919
Why don't I take you over here and show you where to get something cool?
00:15:46.080 --> 00:15:48.559
You know, and then it's totally up to them.
00:15:48.720 --> 00:15:58.159
What a what a great way to low scope, enable your community to be your fatouie, immediately connect socially.
00:15:58.399 --> 00:16:11.120
You might show them around a little bit and send them on their way, or you might take them to show them pets, puffles, and you guys might realize you both love care and nurture, and then you found this new kind of forever friend in the game.
00:16:11.440 --> 00:16:22.720
So, just like one example of how giving the kids or players tools to promote positivity instead of just focusing on like how do we lay the hammer down on poor behavior?
00:16:22.879 --> 00:16:25.279
I think is really strong.
00:16:25.840 --> 00:16:29.120
I I love a lot of what you said there, if not everything.
00:16:29.200 --> 00:16:30.159
We'll say everything, right?
00:16:30.240 --> 00:16:31.440
I mean it sucked.
00:16:31.600 --> 00:16:36.399
You're basically talking about social loops from within the game that enable players that want to keep pushing themselves to play more.
00:16:36.559 --> 00:16:44.320
We always talk about it in trust and safety is like rather than getting mad at the bad people, how do you positively promote good behavior in your game?
00:16:44.399 --> 00:16:47.840
And always thinks about, oh, well, I don't want to, I don't have a budget for that, I don't have that.
00:16:47.919 --> 00:16:53.360
But to your point, like giving an item goes such a long way for these diehard fans that love your game.
00:16:53.519 --> 00:16:57.440
It's funny, I started my Discord a while ago, and someone's like, Can I have a title?
00:16:57.600 --> 00:16:58.399
Can I have a title?
00:16:58.480 --> 00:17:01.279
I'm just thinking to myself, like, why do people want to name it Discord?
00:17:01.440 --> 00:17:02.320
Like, I fine.
00:17:02.399 --> 00:17:10.960
And then I realized like some people thrive with this stuff, and it's really cool when you start to look at a community and audience, the different members that are part of your audience.
00:17:11.039 --> 00:17:14.880
There's gonna be a lot of lurkers that are just quiet people that don't even want to know there.
00:17:15.119 --> 00:17:18.640
Then you'll have shares, you'll have creators, you'll have all these different people in your thing.
00:17:18.799 --> 00:17:25.200
And some people, these littlest things, whether it be a name or a small item like a hat or a sign, will get super excited by that.
00:17:25.440 --> 00:17:29.680
And I think that's the best way to get people going because kids will protect kids.
00:17:29.920 --> 00:17:34.880
And uh when you started that, I also thought about real life and how important that is in like in your social settings.
00:17:35.119 --> 00:17:44.319
I think about kids at school when like if someone's being mean to someone, rather than a parent coming to yell at you, if you have your own friends protect you or stand up for you, it becomes so much more powerful.
00:17:44.559 --> 00:17:52.880
And it's funny as we are kind of creating this community where it's online and offline, you see the same type of bullying happen between both.
00:17:53.039 --> 00:17:58.720
And it's I don't know, it's scary and exciting to kind of see how these kind of merge and what people can do about it.
00:17:58.799 --> 00:18:09.680
And and I guess Hega, a question for you is kind of uh for any comments on that, but kind of how can you proactively put things in place that help protect communities and kind of give them those those roles?
00:18:10.319 --> 00:18:15.599
Yeah, well, I've uh uh what you uh just talked about, Karen.
00:18:15.839 --> 00:18:34.079
Uh it also shows that the kids uh they are in a safe place, so they feel safe and they also feel like they can be themselves and they can speak out uh without being hammered or without some someone calling them out because they're policing themselves.
00:18:34.400 --> 00:18:40.400
So uh, and that's also something which is super hard to build those communities.
00:18:40.559 --> 00:18:56.720
Um and the reason, one of the reasons I think because this this isn't easy, but uh but uh like always, if you have a plan from the beginning, from the start, then it's much more easier to follow up.
00:18:56.799 --> 00:19:09.039
So if you have community guidelines and you talk about this uh for your community, then it's much more easier to uh to understand uh how they should behave or not.
00:19:09.200 --> 00:19:29.599
Um so having uh those community guidelines, but also uh how do you eventually solve the problem if you have one bad player coming in being super toxic in this super nice penguin community where everyone is walking around this and suddenly you have this ice bear uh coming in.
00:19:30.640 --> 00:19:45.279
So we also see that removing those super toxic players, uh either telling them they should uh behave different or take them out is important, or else the rest of the community might be broken.
00:19:45.680 --> 00:19:58.720
Yeah, another really powerful thing too is taking away their platform in a sense, like bad actors or kids that are pushing the boundaries, they're doing it for the audience, they're doing it for the reactions, right?
00:19:58.880 --> 00:20:08.480
So whether it's if I'm saying something mean to someone, it's the reaction that I get out of them, or it's the reaction of other people that are like, yeah, you know, and gang up.
00:20:08.559 --> 00:20:13.920
So one of the things that Club Penguin did that was really, really smart was the gray filter.
00:20:14.079 --> 00:20:19.119
So when you said something in Club Penguin, your little speech bubble popped up and everyone saw you saw it and everyone saw it.
00:20:19.279 --> 00:20:25.039
If you said something egregiously bad, like a swear, you would get the immediate ban and it was very clear that no one saw it.
00:20:25.200 --> 00:20:37.839
But if you said something that was kind of in the gray zone, like you're ugly, you're stupid, um, you stink, things like that, um, we would make it look like to you that it was said.
00:20:38.000 --> 00:20:39.759
So it would pop above your head.
00:20:39.920 --> 00:20:45.599
You thought everyone said it, and you're waiting for the reaction, and no reaction comes.
00:20:45.759 --> 00:20:48.319
Crickets, you know, and no one else sees it.
00:20:48.400 --> 00:20:49.759
So no harm has been done.
00:20:49.920 --> 00:20:52.559
And you're kind of like, oh, that was awkward.
00:20:52.640 --> 00:20:55.119
I'm a little embarrassed, you know, maybe I'll try something different.
00:20:55.200 --> 00:21:05.200
So it was like, whether intentional or not, or just an amazing fluke, it was this really positive kind of social engineering that was just like, yeah, we're gonna let you think that other people saw that.
00:21:05.279 --> 00:21:07.680
You didn't, so no harm, no harm, no foul.
00:21:07.839 --> 00:21:14.079
But you feel a little silly and you're not getting that reinforcement to want to keep doing it, you'll eventually stop doing it.
00:21:14.160 --> 00:21:20.240
Or if you want to just say ugly things into the ether all day, go nuts, but the community is not gonna be impacted by it.
00:21:20.400 --> 00:21:24.240
So that was another kind of cool way, I think, that Club Penguin handled that.
00:21:24.559 --> 00:21:25.519
That's really cool.
00:21:25.680 --> 00:21:27.599
Yeah, like silent muting, right?
00:21:27.759 --> 00:21:29.759
So so they think they're they're talking, but they're not.
00:21:29.839 --> 00:21:34.400
And I'm curious, Hegel, from your perspective, like, do you have stacked ranks of what works and what doesn't work?
00:21:34.480 --> 00:21:36.319
And where would you normally rank that?
00:21:37.119 --> 00:21:39.279
Well, um, it depends.
00:21:39.440 --> 00:21:41.680
Uh I would say.
00:21:41.839 --> 00:21:55.599
And uh and also um when it comes to uh each community, it depends also uh what type of uh ages the uh the community the community is for.
00:21:55.759 --> 00:21:56.160
Totally.
00:21:56.400 --> 00:21:59.839
And and also what type of game it's about.
00:22:00.240 --> 00:22:03.359
If it's a shooter game or if it's a cool C game.
00:22:04.160 --> 00:22:06.480
So I would say it depends.
00:22:07.279 --> 00:22:09.839
And also context is everything.
00:22:10.319 --> 00:22:12.720
That's also my experience as well.
00:22:13.359 --> 00:22:16.480
A lot of studios forget these common one, two, threes, right?
00:22:16.559 --> 00:22:18.000
You get so comfortable in your workflows.
00:22:18.079 --> 00:22:25.119
And I'm curious, are there any common kind of missteps that you would recommend people keep an eye out on or kind of gotchas while going live?
00:22:25.279 --> 00:22:27.599
And Heg, I don't know if you have one for this one.
00:22:28.319 --> 00:22:31.440
Well, I have done so many mistakes.
00:22:31.519 --> 00:22:35.359
So uh we could have a hundred uh podcasts about this.
00:22:36.799 --> 00:22:43.440
But I think uh one of my biggest learning points has been don't build too much too early.
00:22:43.519 --> 00:23:03.519
Uh like um don't think that you should have this uh super impressive, super finished, super polished game or platform or product, whatever, but start building it uh step by step and test it with your uh players and customers as early as possible.
00:23:04.000 --> 00:23:05.200
I could not agree more.
00:23:05.440 --> 00:23:06.400
I could not agree more.
00:23:06.559 --> 00:23:07.599
Yeah, that's so true.
00:23:07.839 --> 00:23:23.119
I think one of my favorite stories that is like kind of related, but not, but but it is relevant to this discussion about community and people playing together and how powerful that is, was um when Fortnite accidentally enabled crossplay.
00:23:23.359 --> 00:23:30.400
And I think back in the day, people thought it was technically not possible for Xbox and PlayStation players to play together, which wasn't really true.
00:23:30.559 --> 00:23:32.079
It actually took logic.
00:23:32.240 --> 00:23:37.440
They had to code to disable those those players from playing together.
00:23:37.599 --> 00:23:47.440
Um, you know, more for like corporate politics, Xbox, you know, Microsoft and and PlayStation, they didn't want their audiences playing together because they thought it would be bad for business.
00:23:47.599 --> 00:23:54.160
So one day, from a configuration error, uh, Fortnite launched with crossplay enabled.
00:23:54.319 --> 00:23:57.119
And uh, I think it was actually a player that noticed it.
00:23:57.200 --> 00:24:05.039
They saw somebody in the lobby with a name that I don't guess it had like a special character or something that wasn't able to be used on Xbox.
00:24:05.119 --> 00:24:06.720
So they're like, how does this person have this name?
00:24:06.799 --> 00:24:10.160
And they dug into it, they're like, it's a PlayStation player.
00:24:10.400 --> 00:24:10.799
What?
00:24:10.960 --> 00:24:15.839
And then and then Epic was like, Oh, sorry, sorry, River, our bad guys, but don't worry about that.
00:24:16.079 --> 00:24:21.359
And everyone's like, wait a second, we can play together and we're just not.
00:24:21.839 --> 00:24:27.920
So, you know, after a lot of kind of negotiating and looking, figuring out how that would work, you know, crossplay play launched.
00:24:28.000 --> 00:24:28.880
And how great was that?
00:24:29.039 --> 00:24:33.599
I think that that would be a scenario of like all ships rise, right?
00:24:33.680 --> 00:24:37.839
Because instead of, well, I got a PlayStation for Christmas and my best friend got Xbox.
00:24:38.000 --> 00:24:39.680
Guess we can't play our favorite game together.
00:24:39.759 --> 00:24:41.200
Like that sucks, right?
00:24:41.519 --> 00:24:51.440
So the fact that, you know, lobbies got bigger, matchmaking lobbies got bigger, you had a bigger audience to connect with over shared interests and things like that.
00:24:51.519 --> 00:24:55.200
You could play with your best friends regardless of where they were playing from.
00:24:55.519 --> 00:25:02.799
Retention goes up, and I don't know, the I don't know the financial details, but I would assume that they all kind of you know benefited from that.
00:25:02.960 --> 00:25:22.799
So I thought that was a really cool, happy accident, if you will, where it's kind of like not only do we need to build features to promote social play, but we need to knock down barriers that make it hard for people to play with their friends because when they're playing with their friends, they're coming back, they're spending a longer time, and your game has more longevity.
00:25:23.839 --> 00:25:26.240
Yeah, you're talking about the community at the end of the day, right?
00:25:26.400 --> 00:25:34.079
It's the Fortnite community that came out and was just like, hey, we found this, and don't ever put it past Epic to piss off a platform, huh?
00:25:34.160 --> 00:25:36.400
They're just get everyone mad at them, huh?
00:25:36.720 --> 00:25:38.079
Very good at it, yes.
00:25:38.960 --> 00:25:42.319
How do you quantify community success beyond just kind of vibes?
00:25:42.400 --> 00:25:47.519
You know, sometimes you're in a community and it feels good, but like, how do you understand if your community is actually thriving?
00:25:47.680 --> 00:25:54.799
Uh, I in my mind, and I've been thinking about why aren't more studios taking a look at how to build out community rather than focusing on UA spend.
00:25:54.880 --> 00:26:01.119
There's so much UA spend on saying, hey, we want to get our eyes in front of people, but how do you start measuring success when you start building community?
00:26:01.279 --> 00:26:12.400
And what we see is that exactly this um community management and uh moderation of communities, that's really good for businesses.
00:26:12.640 --> 00:26:18.079
And we see that um that's the really core in uh in the revenue as well.
00:26:18.240 --> 00:26:32.559
So we see that as you mentioned, uh Karen, players in the safe environments they they play longer, they spend more time, they come back, they don't stop, and they also bring their friends, which is super great for the business.
00:26:32.720 --> 00:26:34.079
But how do you measure this?
00:26:34.319 --> 00:26:37.519
Um uh and this is something you could measure over time.
00:26:37.680 --> 00:26:41.119
For example, um, toxicity is one thing.
00:26:41.279 --> 00:26:43.279
How many reports do you get?
00:26:43.359 --> 00:26:47.680
Uh if you have a reporting system, that's something you could measure.
00:26:47.839 --> 00:26:52.640
This should go down, it shouldn't uh increase, in case you wondered.
00:26:52.880 --> 00:26:54.319
Uh, that's one thing.
00:26:54.400 --> 00:27:06.319
Uh flagged interactions, uh, and also you could also uh somehow uh try to uh see how long sessions are there, how long do they play?
00:27:06.559 --> 00:27:11.519
Do they play longer, longer, or uh do they stop after a couple of minutes?
00:27:11.680 --> 00:27:13.440
That's something you could measure.
00:27:13.599 --> 00:27:14.640
It's so much.
00:27:14.720 --> 00:27:33.599
Uh so uh but having keep the track of your own uh KPIs, uh it's super important because then you can also convince your um uh the person that has the budget in your game that this is actually good for your business.
00:27:33.920 --> 00:27:58.000
I think another way to measure not so much in the data side, but um on the engagement side is at least for us and for Club Penguin, I think one of Close Penguin's secret sauce was the fact that it was a world that had a continuing storyline and the kids got, and I mean, of course, games have lore and all this kind of good stuff, but the more players are really passionate and invested in this in the storyline, um, the better.
00:27:58.240 --> 00:28:00.880
So we are in the game with the kids all the time.
00:28:00.960 --> 00:28:02.559
We're in there and they know who we are.
00:28:02.720 --> 00:28:06.319
So, like when my co-founder drops in, his name's Blue Jay in the game.
00:28:06.400 --> 00:28:10.720
And when he drops in, he just gets swarmed, and people are like, Blue Jay, I have ideas, I have ideas.
00:28:10.960 --> 00:28:23.200
And uh, we have a newspaper in the game as well that launches every month and it tells, which also is from Club Penguin, and it tells the kids about like what's going on, and there's a lot of stories and mysteries that we're starting to kind of seed.
00:28:23.440 --> 00:28:29.440
And so we'll be like, hey, you know, there was a little donation station to um build the bridge.
00:28:29.599 --> 00:28:31.119
So there's a good community goal, right?
00:28:31.200 --> 00:28:36.640
Like everyone needs to kind of donate some candy to help build the bridge or unlock the pizza shop, right?
00:28:36.880 --> 00:28:43.200
Um, and they what we did was we in the in the newspaper, we were like, some candy went missing.
00:28:43.359 --> 00:28:44.480
What happened to the candy?
00:28:44.559 --> 00:28:45.839
Did you guys see anything?
00:28:46.079 --> 00:28:49.759
And the kids all started blaming our NPC uh flinch.
00:28:49.839 --> 00:28:53.839
He's the sweet little seal, the sweet little nervous seal who works in the fishing shop.
00:28:53.920 --> 00:28:55.200
We did not see that coming.
00:28:55.359 --> 00:28:59.519
And uh, they were like, That guy's sketchy, it's definitely him.
00:28:59.680 --> 00:29:01.440
And uh all of them kind of said that.
00:29:01.599 --> 00:29:02.559
We're like, that's funny.
00:29:02.799 --> 00:29:06.400
So one day we put a little like empty wrapper beside his feet.
00:29:06.640 --> 00:29:07.920
The kids lost their minds.
00:29:08.000 --> 00:29:12.559
They're like, I told you, I told you, the evidence is right there, straight to jail, you know.
00:29:12.799 --> 00:29:24.480
But creating little moments where the players feel like they are genuinely part of the story, where what they say um is is true or or becomes reality.
00:29:24.640 --> 00:29:26.640
That Club Penguin was so good at that.
00:29:26.720 --> 00:29:32.000
If you if you meet a Club Penguin player and you talk about the rainbow puffle, odds are they think it was their idea.
00:29:32.079 --> 00:29:33.680
They're like, that was my idea.
00:29:33.839 --> 00:29:37.759
I was the first person to think that there should be a rainbow puffle.
00:29:37.920 --> 00:29:41.039
And of course, we had to wait until the tech could do it.
00:29:41.200 --> 00:29:46.319
And the day that we launched a rainbow puffle, holy, that was a massive success.
00:29:46.400 --> 00:29:48.240
And everyone was like, that was me.
00:29:48.400 --> 00:29:49.200
You know what I mean?
00:29:49.359 --> 00:29:58.000
And um, so people or players like being really passionate, sending you fan art, sending you ideas, sending you theories.
00:29:58.160 --> 00:30:16.000
Um, and then I think to take it a step further, giving them space to come up with their theories and get passionate about something and then delivering on that for them like that's the secret sauce, you know, ninjas in Club Penguin, uh, a myth for years.
00:30:16.240 --> 00:30:22.720
And we would put little tiny things in the world just to like, just to put a little bit of gas on the fire.
00:30:22.880 --> 00:30:25.279
So they'd be like, Are there ninjas?
00:30:25.759 --> 00:30:27.759
And some people would be like, I am a ninja.
00:30:27.920 --> 00:30:30.319
And it wasn't true, but they would be like, I'm a ninja, yes.
00:30:30.480 --> 00:30:34.720
And and uh they would email us to support, are there really ninjas in the world?
00:30:34.880 --> 00:30:36.880
I love our support team was so magical.
00:30:37.039 --> 00:30:39.440
They would never just be like, hello, no, there are not.
00:30:39.599 --> 00:30:40.480
Have a nice day.
00:30:40.640 --> 00:30:42.720
They would be like, I don't know.
00:30:42.880 --> 00:30:44.160
I keep hearing that too.
00:30:44.240 --> 00:30:46.640
And I saw some weird shadows in the in the forest.
00:30:46.720 --> 00:30:47.279
What do you think?
00:30:47.440 --> 00:30:53.279
And they would have this huge back and forth, but like little things, you would click the N on the nightclub and a shadow would go by.
00:30:53.440 --> 00:30:56.079
And they're like, N, ninja, shadow, right?
00:30:56.240 --> 00:31:00.160
And then years later, we shipped like the ninja experience.
00:31:00.240 --> 00:31:04.960
And did that ever, you know, explode because they were so invested.
00:31:05.119 --> 00:31:20.559
So, like leaving space for your players to get really engaged and help shape where you go, and leaving your team a little bit of space for scope to pay off some of those kind of myths and mysteries and ideas they have, like it it just it's so magical.
00:31:20.720 --> 00:31:21.359
Yeah.
00:31:22.000 --> 00:31:25.759
You know, I feel like we've probably had those answers in the wrong order, right?
00:31:25.920 --> 00:31:31.039
I feel like Karen, you set the stage of what a good community kind of builds in the game, how you keep people engaged, how you keep them going.
00:31:31.119 --> 00:31:34.799
And Hega, you kind of talked about the KPIs that are measurable as they're going.
00:31:35.039 --> 00:31:43.279
And all I keep thinking about through my head is like people that are watching this type of content are working typically in studios and they want tools for moderation to help protect their players.
00:31:43.359 --> 00:31:48.559
And the tough thing is how do you convince a studio to do the budget and have the budget for it, right?
00:31:48.640 --> 00:31:58.480
I think over time we've kind of seen this uh bell curve on people who want to spend in moderation, but now with community trust being top of mind or community being top of mind, community trust needs to be the top of mind.
00:31:58.559 --> 00:32:08.240
And I love how you mentioned the KPIs that are measurable, but do you still see it being a tough conversation for people who want to champion tools like this to get the approval in the studio to move forward?
00:32:09.680 --> 00:32:11.680
I'll let I'll let Hega go first on this one.
00:32:12.400 --> 00:32:14.160
That was a Hega question, unless you want to jump in.
00:32:14.640 --> 00:32:15.680
We're all on the same page.
00:32:15.839 --> 00:32:19.359
We started this company being like these are table stakes.
00:32:19.519 --> 00:32:23.680
We need it to be positive, age appropriate, safe.
00:32:24.000 --> 00:32:25.759
Everything else gets added to that.
00:32:25.839 --> 00:32:28.000
So luckily, I don't have to fight that fight.
00:32:28.160 --> 00:32:32.720
We're all very much on the same page, but Hege might have some insight for her clients for sure.
00:32:33.039 --> 00:32:33.920
Yeah, yeah.
00:32:34.000 --> 00:32:41.920
But I I think it's uh um we shouldn't talk about safety as something very mystical.
00:32:42.000 --> 00:32:52.400
Uh we should be able to put numbers on it and also show that this is really good business, um, and also show that the opposite is is bad.
00:32:52.559 --> 00:33:05.440
Uh in a in a US study from 2023, I I think we saw that um the nice games uh they actually had 80% more revenue than than the toxic games.
00:33:05.599 --> 00:33:15.759
So it shows that um uh uh it's important to have, well, it's it's good for the business uh period.
00:33:16.000 --> 00:33:22.240
It's uh but also keeping track on how is your community evolving.
00:33:22.400 --> 00:33:24.880
Is it getting better or is it getting worse?
00:33:25.039 --> 00:33:26.799
That's uh that's important as well.
00:33:27.039 --> 00:33:33.119
Yeah, and I I think to tools like Hage's tool makes this easier and more cost effective for companies, right?
00:33:33.200 --> 00:33:40.559
I mean, back in the day we had over a hundred people um actively doing that for Club Penguin, right?
00:33:40.640 --> 00:33:58.559
And we were slowly building kind of the filter tech back then, but you know, with now decades ahead of time, you know, tools like Hage's tool, they you can only you can have a couple people to manage that, or you can outsource that, you know, or whatever, whatever you're comfortable with for your own kind of community guidelines.
00:33:58.720 --> 00:34:01.440
But yeah, I would say it's a lot more cost effective these days.
00:34:01.519 --> 00:34:10.719
And I think people, yeah, need to see that as table stakes to have a good long game that people want to return to, like Hague said, a positive space, right?
00:34:10.880 --> 00:34:13.119
Especially if it's kids, so important.
00:34:13.760 --> 00:34:15.280
I think it's a good question, right?
00:34:15.440 --> 00:34:19.440
At what point does a studio start looking for a paid solution to moderation, right?
00:34:19.519 --> 00:34:24.559
If you're a one-man indie shop that's building a game, I think it's unreasonable to think you have all the tools.
00:34:24.639 --> 00:34:28.079
You might want to start building with scale in mind, thinking how do I implement these, right?
00:34:28.159 --> 00:34:31.760
But I don't know, Hegel, do you have like a hey, if you want to get started, start here?
00:34:31.840 --> 00:34:35.840
And here's when you should start thinking about scaling and the tools you should stay start taking a look at.
00:34:36.159 --> 00:34:43.280
Yeah, so I would uh I would think about this uh at the beginning, either way, and and have a plan.
00:34:43.760 --> 00:34:52.079
Because if you don't have a plan and suddenly your game will turn into a big hit, then you have a big problem if you haven't thought about this.
00:34:52.480 --> 00:35:08.239
Um but there is a lot you can do with just one man or one woman game as well, uh, and especially using the technology to do it uh uh as you scale.
00:35:08.400 --> 00:35:17.119
In the beginning, you can do it, uh you can do it very manual, but it's very that's maybe what you shouldn't spend your time on.
00:35:17.280 --> 00:35:22.639
You should spend your time on building a great game, not doing the manual moderation.
00:35:22.800 --> 00:35:24.000
So yeah.
00:35:24.320 --> 00:35:29.599
If anyone wants to talk about this, happy to um talk about it afterwards.
00:35:30.000 --> 00:35:30.559
It's funny.
00:35:30.639 --> 00:35:36.000
I was having a conversation with someone yesterday, and we're talking about SaaS tools, and they're like, you don't need SaaS anymore.
00:35:36.079 --> 00:35:38.400
We have vibe coding, and vibe code can replace all that.
00:35:38.960 --> 00:35:41.360
But then we're vibe coding these tools that already exist.
00:35:41.440 --> 00:35:46.320
It's like we go in this circle, this build it or buy it methodology, and we're like talking to the studio.
00:35:46.400 --> 00:35:47.599
I'm like, you're five people.
00:35:47.679 --> 00:35:52.159
Like, why are you gonna try building a tool when this tool exists and you can focus on building your game?
00:35:52.239 --> 00:35:57.760
And I think people think they can do everything, and when you try and do everything, that's what's gonna start delaying games and slowing you down.
00:35:57.920 --> 00:36:03.920
So, so maybe in the beginning, again, you want to just set up a quick way to watch for cursing or for child grooming or for something.
00:36:04.239 --> 00:36:16.719
But at a certain point, when you hit a certain number of players, you want to focus on building this game, getting that feedback like you were talking about earlier, Karen, making sure you're iterating on the feedback of the community rather than trying to just protect the community when the tools are already there to help you do that.
00:36:16.960 --> 00:36:19.840
Are there any experiences from the community side that really stand out?
00:36:19.920 --> 00:36:21.760
Like, oh my god, I can't believe this happened.
00:36:21.840 --> 00:36:24.159
How cool is this from the Club Penguin days?
00:36:24.480 --> 00:36:31.119
One of my favorites, I think I told this at GDC last year, but was um Operation Blackout.
00:36:31.440 --> 00:36:48.800
So in our production floor in the studio, we had this big whiteboard and we had um big magnets that showed everything that was launching, everything from the parties to the new games to the new features, and also any like tech, you know, behind the scenes updates, anything company related, just a big calendar.
00:36:49.039 --> 00:36:58.239
And one day, a literal photo of that board leaked on one of our kind of fan blogs, and everyone was like, What?
00:36:58.400 --> 00:36:59.360
Who's the mole?
00:36:59.440 --> 00:37:00.800
It was it was pandemonium.
00:37:00.880 --> 00:37:03.199
We came into work that day, the whole floor was locked down.
00:37:03.360 --> 00:37:06.159
It was like, we need to figure out who leaked this thing.
00:37:06.400 --> 00:37:19.360
But the funny part was, even though it had it had every party that we hadn't announced, every mini-game coming out, the kids laser focused on this magnet that said blackout, and it was over Christmas break, and all it meant was no launches, right?
00:37:19.519 --> 00:37:20.960
Right before you go out on release.
00:37:21.119 --> 00:37:27.039
Very common for studios to stop releasing content to try not to have bug fixes and bug their team over the holidays.
00:37:27.119 --> 00:37:31.519
So it just said blackout, and they were like, What is the blackout?
00:37:31.679 --> 00:37:38.079
Oh my gosh, I bet Herbert, who was the bad polar bear um in the in the lore of Club Penguin.
00:37:38.239 --> 00:37:39.280
I bet Herbert's coming.
00:37:39.360 --> 00:37:41.039
I bet this happens, I bet that happens.
00:37:41.119 --> 00:37:45.280
Again, the kids went wild with this theory about what blackout was.
00:37:45.440 --> 00:37:50.559
And of course, we I don't think we shipped that for a year, maybe two.
00:37:50.719 --> 00:37:57.920
It was a while, but we built Operation Blackout, and it was the most successful party that ever happened in Club Penguin.
00:37:58.079 --> 00:38:01.920
And it was just kind of again, what a happy, weird mistake.
00:38:02.079 --> 00:38:11.760
But like give the audience just like a tiny little thread and see what they kind of untangle from it and uh and then go to that.
00:38:11.920 --> 00:38:21.920
I guarantee what your audience comes up with and what they get passionate about is gonna be better than what the best game designers and experts in the world can ever come up with in a room.
00:38:22.159 --> 00:38:32.000
So, like let them be the game designers, ship that, and then they think that they predicted the future, but really they just told us what they wanted and we heard them.
00:38:32.159 --> 00:38:34.639
So that was one of my that's one of my favorite stories too.
00:38:34.960 --> 00:38:35.519
I love that.
00:38:35.679 --> 00:38:39.679
And in the world of like trans media blowing up right now, people loving transmedia.
00:38:39.760 --> 00:38:47.679
I feel like when people start creating their own lore, their own like once you have people creating stuff, all of a sudden you got your little flywheel there and you're you're good to go, right?
00:38:47.760 --> 00:38:51.360
You have creators, shares, everything, and like that's so cool.
00:38:51.440 --> 00:38:55.920
And yeah, it's just fun to hear them kind of create their own tale, then you're probably like, oh well, we can do this.
00:38:56.000 --> 00:38:58.159
You did the same thing with the name of the other stuff, right?
00:38:58.559 --> 00:39:01.039
You find these threads and all of a sudden you got your new DLC.
00:39:01.360 --> 00:39:02.320
Exactly.
00:39:02.639 --> 00:39:04.400
Heg, I'm curious from your perspective.
00:39:04.480 --> 00:39:07.119
I I remember talking with your teammate at PGC London.
00:39:07.199 --> 00:39:11.440
Some of the technologies and tools you're creating are unlike anything I've seen in the in the space before.
00:39:11.519 --> 00:39:15.039
And I'm curious, like, how do you think of this stuff?
00:39:15.119 --> 00:39:16.800
Like you have some great minds here.
00:39:16.880 --> 00:39:19.039
You're like, how do you combat the latest?
00:39:19.360 --> 00:39:26.159
I go back to the spam filter days because I worked a lot in spam filtering, and you know, you create a great spam filter, then spammers find a way to get around it, right?
00:39:26.239 --> 00:39:27.760
Like, how are you staying ahead of the game?
00:39:28.000 --> 00:39:30.239
I mean, yeah, it's fascinating.
00:39:30.639 --> 00:39:44.159
Yeah, well, um, I think it's all about uh getting the right people to work together, and it's and it's somehow like uh the um uh how you did it with new features in the game, Karen.
00:39:44.800 --> 00:40:47.840
It's um so when you have um the best people uh and they discuss this and we are testing new features like every day, and what we also see every day is that uh the bad actress always gets through the filter, and then we have to figure out how did I do this, and then we improve, improve, improve like every single day, and that's also the reason why uh why coding uh a moderation platform might sound like a great idea uh at day one, but at day two it might be outdated, so uh, but I mean um yeah, uh, and also um like moderation is it's a little bit more complex than it seems like, uh, and it's not just one filter that can solve everything, or uh so it it's like trying to to fix the whole problem, um, trying to find the bad actors, not just the bad content.
00:40:48.000 --> 00:41:00.239
Um I think yeah, having the people that find the smart and good ideas is is the key to um move forward together with the best customers, of course.
00:41:00.639 --> 00:41:02.159
I think uh it's well said.
00:41:02.239 --> 00:41:04.719
I think often two people want to just control everything.
00:41:04.800 --> 00:41:10.400
And but if you find good people who are smart people that can take the ball and run with it, it's you hire people to trust them and run with it.
00:41:10.480 --> 00:41:13.360
So if you hire the best people, you you'll build the best product.
00:41:13.440 --> 00:41:16.320
And I think you're creating some really kind of cutting-edge tools at Ava.
00:41:16.639 --> 00:41:19.519
So I'm really excited to see as time goes on.
00:41:19.760 --> 00:41:23.039
Before we do wrap up, Karen, you want to talk to us a little bit about your game and pitch your game?
00:41:23.119 --> 00:41:25.920
And I'll put a little code up top if you guys want to scare.
00:41:26.159 --> 00:41:26.880
Oh, oh my god.
00:41:29.840 --> 00:41:31.920
You should put that to imagine island.game.
00:41:32.000 --> 00:41:34.639
Um that's our boring company site.
00:41:34.719 --> 00:41:35.440
Don't look at that one.
00:41:36.000 --> 00:41:38.079
So um, yeah, Imagine Island.
00:41:38.159 --> 00:41:39.760
Oh, I'm really put on the spot here.
00:41:39.920 --> 00:41:45.039
Uh, we shipped our game in the fall, and uh yeah, we have half a million players now.
00:41:45.119 --> 00:41:46.480
It's a super cute.
00:41:46.559 --> 00:41:48.000
Um, I love the art style.
00:41:48.079 --> 00:41:48.960
It's it's on web.
00:41:49.119 --> 00:41:54.960
You can go to imagine island.game, you can click play now and pretty much drop immediately into the world, which is great.
00:41:55.119 --> 00:41:58.719
We removed all of the kind of download and install friction.
00:41:59.039 --> 00:42:02.960
Um, so yeah, in the world you can do all kinds of things.
00:42:03.119 --> 00:42:07.440
You can fish, you can dress up and self-express, you can play mini games.
00:42:07.599 --> 00:42:16.079
We have a hobby that is uh called Sandwich Siege that you can try and get your best time jumping and racing up the food-related obstacle course.
00:42:16.320 --> 00:42:18.960
Like I said, there's all kinds of kind of stories being seated.
00:42:19.199 --> 00:42:20.639
We have monthly parties.
00:42:20.880 --> 00:42:31.280
We just opened the pizza shop with a new mini game in there, very club penguin-esque, where you can go and make pizzas, eat pizzas, be the manager of the pizza shop.
00:42:31.440 --> 00:42:33.119
The world is your oyster.
00:42:33.280 --> 00:42:36.079
Um, we also just launched home islands.
00:42:36.159 --> 00:42:44.559
So now every player has their own home island where they can drop a house, they can decorate the inside, they can build an amazing outdoor space.
00:42:44.719 --> 00:42:50.480
Uh, the builder is really fun, really easy to use, very low barrier, and you can create really cool stuff.
00:42:50.559 --> 00:42:54.480
And then you can go invite your friends over and they can come see your space and you can go see their space.
00:42:54.639 --> 00:43:01.039
We have a lot of very exciting plans for the builder experience over the next few months.
00:43:01.199 --> 00:43:06.239
Um, and there's, you know, some mysteries that there might be some other living creatures in the world.
00:43:06.400 --> 00:43:14.320
I don't know when we'll see them, but yeah, uh a lot of very club penguin-esque plans over the next, you know, year or so.
00:43:14.559 --> 00:43:17.599
And um also just monthly events and parties.
00:43:17.760 --> 00:43:29.280
We have probably over 500 virtual items, uh really fun items from head to toe where you can like mix and match and be everything from a hot dog to like a fashionista.
00:43:29.840 --> 00:43:31.360
Um, very, very fun.
00:43:31.440 --> 00:43:40.239
So yeah, if you have any kids between, I don't know, six and twelve, I would love to hear your feedback, get them in there, let me know what they wanna what they wanna see.
00:43:40.559 --> 00:43:44.400
And um yeah, we're we're here for hopefully a really fun ride.
00:43:44.719 --> 00:43:45.039
Awesome.
00:43:45.119 --> 00:43:52.719
We updated the QR code and we spent a lot of time over the uh over the Christmas break building gingerbread houses with the peppermints at me and my son.
00:43:52.880 --> 00:43:57.519
And he was also running the the wipeout type of course consistently and he was playing prop tag.
00:43:57.679 --> 00:43:59.519
He didn't even know what it was at first, and then he loved it.
00:43:59.599 --> 00:43:59.679
So
00:44:00.159 --> 00:44:01.119
That's a great one, yes.
00:44:01.360 --> 00:44:02.480
Fun stuff, cool stuff.
00:44:02.559 --> 00:44:03.679
And again, check out the game.
00:44:03.760 --> 00:44:05.280
It's it's QR code up there.
00:44:05.360 --> 00:44:08.480
And we'll have a link if you're uh listening afterwards, or you can click it in the beginning.
00:44:08.800 --> 00:44:09.199
Thanks, Greg.
00:44:09.360 --> 00:44:09.679
I appreciate it.
00:44:09.760 --> 00:44:11.280
Okay, you want to talk a little bit about Ava?
00:44:12.079 --> 00:44:12.800
Yeah, sure.
00:44:13.039 --> 00:44:26.000
What we are really great at is uh of course finding the bad content, but uh also finding the bad actors behind um uh what are being uh made in the communities.
00:44:26.159 --> 00:44:37.599
So, and I think um what is important to understand is that most people actually are very nice people, uh, and we have to keep it that way.
00:44:37.760 --> 00:44:40.079
Uh, and that's why we exist.
00:44:40.400 --> 00:44:58.320
That is for uh um the humanity to continue being nice, uh, and what we are helping online communities with is to find those bad apples in that community and hopefully also make them into the nice actors.
00:44:58.559 --> 00:45:10.079
Because what we also see is, for example, for for kids, they have no clue that they are toxic uh sometimes because there are no grown-ups in the room.
00:45:10.239 --> 00:45:20.079
So, in our system, it's also possible to have um these uh warnings inside uh inside our tool as well.
00:45:20.159 --> 00:45:24.960
So we can give them a warning and also give them an advice how they can change.
00:45:25.519 --> 00:45:26.079
That's great.
00:45:26.239 --> 00:45:30.800
You know, I think in order to kind of fix these behaviors, like you said, with a child, they need to understand what they did wrong.
00:45:30.880 --> 00:45:36.079
And I think that feedback loop is important, whether you're building a game, whether you're building a moderation platform or or whatever.
00:45:36.159 --> 00:45:37.199
So I think that's awesome.
00:45:37.599 --> 00:45:39.119
Can I add one little thing, Greg?
00:45:39.360 --> 00:45:41.920
I think what no, your mic is cut.
00:45:42.079 --> 00:45:57.119
Um just doubling on that, one thing we've seen a lot, and you know, at Club Penguin as well, is kids um not only, you know, on the on the side that they don't know that they're toxic, kids love to try and share their personally identifying information.
00:45:57.199 --> 00:45:59.119
Yeah, and they're just not doing it.
00:45:59.280 --> 00:46:00.719
They don't know that it's bad, right?
00:46:00.800 --> 00:46:02.960
They're like, hey, this is my real name.
00:46:03.039 --> 00:46:04.000
I just turned nine.
00:46:04.079 --> 00:46:04.800
That's my sister.
00:46:05.039 --> 00:46:07.199
We're like our mom drives this type of car.
00:46:07.280 --> 00:46:08.079
I live in this state.
00:46:08.239 --> 00:46:22.079
You're like, ah, you know, so using a tool like Hey Gaze to also compartmentalize that is sharing PII and teach them, give them like real feedback that's like, hey, you can't say that stuff, and this is why.
00:46:22.239 --> 00:46:23.840
Um, these are the types of things you can't say.
00:46:24.000 --> 00:46:29.760
Like, really take that time to explain to them because in those scenarios, they're not being mean, they just don't understand yet.
00:46:29.840 --> 00:46:36.800
And it's our responsibility, especially when dealing with young kids, to teach them how to be safe.
00:46:36.960 --> 00:46:42.800
Um, because I mean, a lot of parents aren't aren't even that kind of savvy in the online safety and stuff like that.
00:46:42.880 --> 00:46:57.119
So we take that really seriously as our own, as our own um responsibility, but specific feedback into Hege's point, teaching people and giving them positive loops as well as the feedback on the negative loops, I think all kind of works together to create a good community.
00:46:57.199 --> 00:47:00.000
So yeah, I completely agree.
00:47:00.159 --> 00:47:04.800
And also to add on that, um, I think we still need humans.
00:47:05.119 --> 00:47:09.199
Uh, I know we're all into tooling, technology, AI.
00:47:09.360 --> 00:47:14.639
I love that, but also I think we can't automate humans.
00:47:14.880 --> 00:47:20.480
So uh, and especially in the really bad cases, there has to be a human involved.
00:47:20.800 --> 00:47:33.039
Yeah, yeah, and they're always gonna stay like you need Hege and her team that's gonna stay one step ahead of the kids and the audience because they are always crafty and trying to find the next way around the tech.
00:47:33.119 --> 00:47:45.280
So, like have being able to set it and forget it with somebody like Hege's team and focus on making your product magical, I think is really important because it's never a end we're done here job.
00:47:45.599 --> 00:47:52.159
The the tech has to evolve with the audience all the time, or you're gonna be behind to Hege's point, maybe even the next day.
00:47:52.400 --> 00:47:54.000
So yeah.
00:47:54.320 --> 00:47:55.039
Well said.
00:47:55.199 --> 00:47:58.079
Well, both Hega and Karen are going to be at GDC.
00:47:58.159 --> 00:48:00.079
There'll be a community clubhouse on Tuesday.
00:48:00.480 --> 00:48:02.800
Tuesday, the what day is Tuesday, the 12th.
00:48:03.039 --> 00:48:07.760
Um so be sure to be at Community Clubhouse, check them out.
00:48:07.840 --> 00:48:10.079
They're gonna keep building on what we talked about here today.
00:48:10.320 --> 00:48:14.559
Both of you, thank you so much for the insights, both on the gaming side and the technology side.
00:48:14.639 --> 00:48:34.159
We got to talk about community growth, how we're seeing AAA's pivot, or other studios as well pivot to focusing on community first, how you design kind of a scale-proof framework, the hindsight of kind of what you would do differently, as well as kind of how do you nurture that community, how you build it up, how do you build value there, how do you prove that value to the person and the players as well.
00:48:34.320 --> 00:48:37.599
So, both of you, I appreciate all the knowledge you've shared today.
00:48:37.760 --> 00:48:41.920
We'll have more clips and all the stuff cut up into different social pieces here.
00:48:42.000 --> 00:48:45.199
So, thank you everyone for listening and see you next time.
