Ex-Instagram designer on her upcoming video game, the taste gap and more
Welcome back to the Updater newsletter. Happy April. Thank you for supporting this business for over two years now. It’s been a helluva ride so far. I just got back from South Korea and northern China, and in a week I’ll be out at Coachella finally after all these years. In the meantime, I’m working on a story for the New York Times about gaming and legacy.
I’ve been reading Wolf Hall, the only book of human writing that humans preferred, in a New York Times survey. It’s historical fiction about Henry VIII and his infamous quest for a son. It is a pageturner.
Recently, I sat down with former Instagram designer turned Lily’s World game developer Emily Pitcher, aka Sondering Emily, to discuss her upcoming game and the role that “taste” has to play in a slop-saturated world. The designer launched features at Instagram like pinning posts and adding multiple links to a bio before she was laid off by Meta. Emily’s game, Lily’s World XD, investigates a young girl’s lost computer.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: How did you become a game developer, and how does your past experience in the tech industry inform your current outlook and taste?
Emily: The moment I started, I knew this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I made 13 games in those 2 years; I was hooked.
I notice that a lot of game developers focus too much on the creative side of development and neglect the business side. That’s fine for developers who aren’t looking to turn it into a career. Since I always aspired to leave my corporate job for independent development, I appreciated the business strategy I learned in tech, i.e. how to create a pitch deck, how to express myself professionally in a meeting, and how to run a competitor audit. These are all skills I now use as a full-time game developer.
As a woman, I sometimes feel like existing is violent. — Emily
Q: There is a lot of social media discussion lately about how “taste” is more important than ever now that we are facing an onslaught of AI. What is your take on that?
Emily: I find it amusing because I’ve always thought about the ‘taste gap.’ Taste is a given as a creative. I’m shocked at how easily people are impressed by ugly AI art. When I get a game that is obviously built with AI, it looks like it. For most creative people, taste is the prerequisite, not the skill itself.
