GamesBeat: Are the interviews all anonymous as well, or anonymized?
Jones: No, none of the interviews are anonymous. I’m very open with everybody. When I got sick, I just thought, “I don’t want any secrets. I don’t want hidden agendas.” I want people to be open and honest about who they are, what they want, where they’ve been, what they’ve done. I want them to own it. I don’t explicitly spell out, “Oh, this is someone’s phone number, you can reach them here.” But I don’t obscure any biographical information. I’ll share a Twitter handle or gamertag or whatever they want to share with the world.
GamesBeat: I just wonder if some people consider these stories so personal that maybe they would share them if they were anonymous, but not if it’s on the record.
Jones: I don’t know. That takes on a bit more of a sleazier air? I don’t want people saying, “You can tell this story, but I’ll have to use a pseudonym.” So far I haven’t had to do that. Maybe at some point, someone will bring me a terrific story, but they’re just not comfortable being out there. That’s something we’ll talk about then. But right now it’s people saying, “I’ve always wanted to tell this story, and I want to share it with you.” I’ll believe in them and trust them, and so far they haven’t let me down.
GamesBeat: What have been some of the interesting stories so far?
Jones: We’re up to the third episode right now. We launched a couple of weeks ago. The first episode was a guy named Graham who lives in Vancouver. He was going through a particularly painful divorce. Another guy had cancer. I mentioned him. This week, coming up, it’s the most incredible story — there’s this guy I became friends with when I first moved to Toronto. He was a filmmaker. We started becoming friends. We went to see Star Wars together and so on. Then randomly, one day, he came out as transgender.
Honestly, I’d never understood that. I don’t understand it. I don’t know what that experience is like. But in this particular case it was someone I was becoming friends with. We started talking about Mass Effect, where she’d played as femShep throughout this whole inversion of herself, and gotten to run her through the gauntlet of the first trilogy of Mass Effect games. I feel like that gave her — she could test drive who she wanted to be, before she had to literally, physically step out into the world. You have to have guts to do something like that. You have to be in pain to go through something like that. I feel like Mass Effect gave her some of the intuition and the bravery she needed to reveal who she really was. I have a couple of interviews with her – first as her former self, and she comes back as her true self in the second half of the episode. That was really the eye-opener for me. That was the moment when I thought, “Wow, this is a great story.”
The other great thing about making something like this podcast, everybody has so much information about themselves online. I was able to find the moment when Graham got engaged to his now-ex-wife. I took the audio from that video, which was from PAX a couple of years ago. It really grounds the listener. You’re literally there as — she proposed to him, and they used some kind of Doctor Who thing. It was super nerdy, super PAX-ey, all of it. Those authentic moments — everybody leaves so much of themselves on the internet that they don’t even remember leaving there. Making the podcast has been a little bit easier because there’s this treasure trove out there for me to take advantage of.
GamesBeat: There’s a lot of empathy and positivity that you’re finding here. It’s funny how the game industry, through Gamergate and after, has seemed to go in the opposite direction in the last few years. The internet has made it so much easier to hate other people.
Jones: That’s right. I agree with that. Full disclosure, I had a stroke in 2014, and I was kind of away from the games industry, away from the medium completely, so I wasn’t around when the Gamergate stuff was really at its peak. I just missed it. Honestly, it’s almost as if I have amnesia or something. I’ve heard people refer to it and talk about. Victor certainly talked about it when we used to do the show together. But I somehow wasn’t here for it.
I don’t know if there’s a huge gap in my knowledge. I know that people are hating other people. Women are unfairly treated far too often in this industry and this medium. But I don’t know a lot of the other details, if you can forgive me for that.
GamesBeat: I think it’s more to be applauded that you’re going in the right direction, or at least taking people in a different direction than what they may have been used to lately.
Jones: I don’t know how — you’ve been in this business a long time. You know twice as many people as I know, on the business side and the media side. But I just don’t know how to sell something like this. I love making the show. I’ll probably make a couple of seasons of it. But right now it’s just a labor of love. I don’t know who I need to talk to in this industry to put together a living for myself. I sold my apartment in Vancouver, so I had a bit of money from that, and I do some consulting now and then, working for some companies looking at products. But for the most part I’ve just been making this show.
I do wish that I had 100,000 subscribers and a million downloads. But I don’t know how to get there. I’m just trying to make a good show, hoping and crossing my fingers that people find it and feel the same way that I do about it.
GamesBeat: It’s definitely worthwhile. Hopefully it’ll be something that resonates with different kinds of people in the industry who can support you. The people at Microsoft, with the Inclusive Technologies Lab, they went through some years of very challenging design to come up with that Xbox Adaptive Controller. That product is entirely about being empathic toward people who have accessibility challenges. The notion that there can be an appreciation for empathy in the games business, it’s definitely there. Hopefully you can connect with that. In some ways what you’re trying to do is improve the mental health of people in the industry, I think.
Jones: That’s exactly right, yeah.
GamesBeat: When you think of it that way, why wouldn’t people support this? It’s a laudable goal you have here.
Jones: I just don’t know how practical it is. I’m 49 now. I’ll be 50 in March next year. I’m just trying to figure out how I want to spend the rest of my life. Not to make this overly melodramatic, but what am I going to do with my days? I learned from getting sick that we don’t have a bottomless well of days. We only get a little window of time. How do I make the most of that?
I had a lot of fun for a long time. The industry was great. It kept me fed and clothed for a long time. [laughs] I have so many great memories. But what can I do now, in the position I’m in, as a man entering the next phase of his life? What can I do that really means something to me and means something for gamers? What can I say that nobody else is saying?
I’m trying this. I believe in it. I’ll see how far it goes. But I have no idea. I’ve had to learn how to edit audio. I’ve had to learn how to use my voice, how to write these things to make them sound organic. I’ve learned so much and I love it. It’s just a question of trying to sustain it. We’re off to a good start, but I don’t know what the rest of it will be like.
GamesBeat: You can definitely have deeper conversations with people than 90 percent of the interviewers out there. One thing I always like about doing longer interviews is that you get a chance to learn some things that you didn’t know, to be surprised about people.
Jones: I totally agree. The model of the industry, or maybe the way it was 10 or 15 years ago—I don’t know what they give you now as far as interview time, but even the times I talked to Miyamoto, I had 30 minutes if I was lucky. Now some of these interviews I do with people—these stories take a long time. It takes a long time for me to sit down with them before they feel comfortable enough to open up. The best part is revisiting with them again, a week or two later, and seeing them share more of their stories. That’s usually the best part, that second interview. But doing that takes a lot of time and energy and effort and trust. I don’t know how you do a 10-minute interview with somebody and get anything more than a sound bite or two.