The fun issue
Updater will now cost $5 a month
When I graduated college, there was a possibility of me becoming an ad man. Don Draper-style, gin martinis and oysters, office building in midtown Manhattan, while I mulled over the copy for a soda or a pack of gum. Or maybe it would be a Korean skincare product.
Regardless of which product I was going to market, I quickly learned that in advertising, you can make some things up, as long as it’s factually within the realm of reason. I could suggest that consumers apply a toner before and after their moisturizer, prompting them to run out of product sooner. Sure, why not? In a marketing class, I developed a brief for chewing gum that would shine so bright, you could see your shiny teeth from outer space.
I explored this work because I love writing and wanted to make a living wage after a series of unpaid internships.1 On the flip side of journalism, reporting, and facts, there is marketing and advertising. Do you ever walk through life thinking about all the artists and writers out there, putting their minds to thinking up creative strategies to get you to buy things?
I say all this to ground you and this newsletter with a sense of my perspective. I come from a family of entrepreneurs, for whom my career path has been a strange aberrancy. My parents were tough Taiwanese immigrants who came to New York for their MBAs. Both of them became registered accountants on top of their day jobs managing an electronics store on Broadway. Both had stints selling life insurance, though my mom ultimately ran further with this career than my dad ever did while he was alive. Neither of them considered my love of storytelling to be a real calling, until a high school English teacher awarded me a $4,000 scholarship to help me pay for college. When I started working in digital media, my dad asked me repeatedly how the website was supposed to make any money. I explained that it relied on ad revenue. My dad remained skeptical, even as an ALS diagnosis meant he had bigger fish to fry.2
I’ll freely admit that I switched from being an English major to being a marketing major so my parents would have less to worry about. But throughout the years, something weird has happened: my degree and background has become invaluable for decoding the world around me. America, as it turns out, runs on marketing. In January of 2022, I wrote about the beauty brands trying to woo gamers for the Washington Post. Last November, I wrote about Elon Musk’s Twitter and how gamers might be the last on the platform.
It’s “the end of an era,” a former Twitter employee with knowledge of how Twitter Gaming worked told me at the time. “Bird ain’t gonna be the same.”
Now, over half a year later, Musk has indeed ditched the bird for his go-to marketing scheme: a schoolboy’s throwaway dirty joke; the letter X. More on that below.
And marketing, once just a means for me to appease my family, is embedded in the fabric of our country, in major companies, and explains so much about our world, once you start viewing it through this lens. Scroll down below. You’ll see it in everything.
Last month, I had the honor of meeting my favorite author, Min Jin Lee, who wrote Pachinko and Free Food for Millionaires. Lee is working on two more books, and I look forward to reading those, too. I have a special attachment to Free Food because I discovered this book in the basement of a Harvard bookstore, while I was visiting the campus during a Speech and Debate tournament in 2011. The character of Casey Han had just graduated college and was looking for work. She loved fashion but she also had her parents’ expectations to contend with.
Growing up as an only child, I did not have siblings who trail blazed before me to follow. Casey served as that older sister figure. She was tall, as Lee is, and as I am. She smoked cigarettes and haphazardly studied the Bible. Like myself, she grew up in Queens and had huge aspirations. Casey came into my life at the exact moment I needed her, guiding me to understand the pitfalls of pursuing a career I did not want and of pursuing one that would never love me back.
Because of its relevancy to my life, Free Food for Millionaires came to supplant my other favorite book, The Great Gatsby. Both books are quintessentially American. They speak to the power of grifting, and of believing in an unending dream. Now you may wonder, what does any of this have to do with video games?
The Great Gatsby is now an immersive show, along the lines of Secret Cinema’s League of Legends Arcane show. The cast is touring several cities, including New York.
Arcane was a weird point of reference with which to enter the Gatsby immersive. While Arcane played heavily into video games, with real-life quests, puzzles and strong incentives for following certain characters around, Gatsby offered something similar but in a much more veiled and subtle way. The audience Gatsby drew wore 1920s garb and were of all adult ages. If you blinked, you’d miss Gatsby’s character usher to several in the audience to follow him to a hidden door. There are pathways and storylines but they’re not made apparent. The New York Times estimates it would take about ten visits to see every story.
On outsiders making art
A few years ago, Richard Hofmeier was working the graveyard shift at a pill factory when he got a direct message from a former Telltale game developer Pierre Shorette who remembered Cart Life from 2013. Hofmeier, who is based in Montana, decided to return the call.
Cart Life is a black-and-white, pixelated, award-winning life simulator where you sell newspapers, coffee or bagels and try to survive. One of the characters is a Ukrainian immigrant, a background that has taken on more significance given recent geopolitical events. The title is set to be released later this year, though a specific date hasn’t been announced. One big thing that Hofmeier aimed to accomplish by working with former Telltale developers is to add consequences to the game that feel realistic and make player choices feel like they matter.
Hofmeier explained to me, during a March meeting in San Francisco, why he had retreated from the video game world after the initial success of Cart Life, which had been an indie darling. “I was worried about developing too much inertia in game development and becoming part of the machine,” he said. He paused, growing self-conscious. “Sounds like something a kid would say.”
“Too punk rock?” Nick Herman, formerly of Telltale and Shorette’s co-founder at AdHoc Studio, offered up.
Hofmeier replied, “Well, punk can be selfish, though. Being a punk too long into adulthood can be embarrassing, too. It seemed like what people valued about this game was that it was brought by an outsider, brought by somebody who didn’t have a background in games. It doesn’t do a lot of the same things that a lot of games do. New players can sometimes feel frustrated by this game because you can’t pause it. But that’s how we live. We’re all contending against the clock all the time. It felt like a worthwhile thing to make, but it’s also, I understand, it’s maybe a little bit too much to ask at the same time. Anyway, I was worried that by continuing to make games, I might be missing out on so much other stuff in life that’s more tangible. It feels frivolous sometimes, I guess. Even though, I believe in it. I think art is totally worthwhile.”
He ended this statement with nervous laughter.
*Updater gets updated pricing*
You’ve seen streaming platforms, restaurants, and companies in general raise prices. I’m dropping them. The newsletter now costs $5 a month to subscribe. This is to make it more affordable to the general public and to mirror prices across gaming subscription services.
And here’s a programming note: I’m sitting on tons of investigative reporting tips. I haven’t forgotten the mandate of this newsletter, but none of these meatier stories I’ve worked on have reached the point where they’re ready to be shared. In the meantime, essays like the one above still deliver valuable insights and every issue of Updater contains original, exclusive reporting.
Here’s something else I will say. I’ve been consuming legacy media for my whole life, and now I’m delivering upon it. When you subscribe to Updater, you are getting the quality of a hefty newspaper on your doorstep. How am I doing this? In life, there are many trade-offs, and I find that I can deliver this kind of quality only if I slow the pace of writing to a standstill and become very deliberate with my publishing schedule. In this way, I can edit myself, mull over words, and share only the very best with you.
Newsletters are different than old media, too. This email is from me to you, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. This is why I shared my perspective at the start of this email, in the spirit of openness and transparency. You deserve to know where your news is coming from, who is curating it, and why.
Bonus links
Twitch streamer Kai Cenat is facing a felony charge of inciting a riot, after a crowd of thousands packed Union Square in Manhattan for a giveaway that resulted in hurled chairs and punches, ABC reports.3
In late July, Twitter got rebranded to X. University of Oregon game studies professor Maxwell Foxman told me that the branding is part of the ‘Discordification’ of social media platforms: “The people that are going to gravitate towards X are probably going to be one group of people, whereas those people that love Twitter for Twitter are going to be now moving themselves to these other platforms for different purposes, whether it’s Threads or Blue Sky or Mastodon.”
Updater’s view: Musk renaming Twitter to X reflects one of the basic tenets of advertising: sex sells. In practice, the removal of the Twitter sign has drawn scrutiny from San Francisco government. It’s also led to issues such as Twitter Japan being unable to use ‘X Japan’ as that’s the name of a popular rock band. On a big picture level, Musk has achieved the goal of getting everybody to talk about Twitter, though, and for some to mourn the old branding.
Fun fact: Twitter was almost called Twitch, Jack Dorsey said in a 2011 interview, and if that had happened, Twitch would have called itself Xarth, as pointed out by former Twitch public relations director Chase.
Did you know Barbie was based on a sex doll for men, but marketed as a children’s toy? This and other insights in this story from The New York Times. This at least partially explains why the film, which is not for children, contains innuendos. These inappropriate jokes have been one of Ben Shapiro’s chief complaints about the film, which has in turn been a source of amusement to Twitch streamer Hasan Piker.
Ultimately, I decided that if I was going to carefully craft copy for anyone, it would be better in a newsroom, as long as they’d have me.
Luckily, I was able to persuade him that I was doing meaningful work by the time he passed away. Rest in peace, Dad.
I’m currently on a work trip visiting Bethesda Game Studios, or I would have tried to do some scene reporting from New York.