Just a Lark

My official job title at work is Associate Producer, but I can’t really say that I’ve ever felt like I’ve been much of a producer. This is because there’s quite a disconnect between my title and what I do.

My job is basically one half project manager and one half air-traffic controller. I am primarily responsible for site-wide promotion of our content, which entails everything from making sure that the topslot carousel has the biggest and best stories in it to keeping the various “picks” lists up-to-date. Outside of that, I map out and project manage our game launch centers and some editorial events and features. That all together is a full-time job, and one that essentially makes me on-call for important things, but on top of that I find the time to volunteer myself for previews, reviews, and the occasional feature. What can I say; I love to write and I love games. But with all of that, I’ve never really produced something all the way that had a full video component and I could really take charge of every aspect on. Today that changed.

Tonight we aired a three-hour live gameplay marathon of Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, and I’m quite proud to say that it was my baby. In fact, as I type this out on my phone while waiting for the train home, I have only just been able to remove my makeup. Wait, what? Yeah, I had to wear makeup for the camera, as I was basically the host.

The idea came up around Monday. Kevin VanOrd, the reviews editor put in charge of Conan, had briefly mentioned the possibility of a marathon, and I was all for it–our viewers love them, they pull in huge traffic, and they can be a lot of fun. Once he received a cursory approval, I went full steam ahead with it, marshaled the resources, and made it happen.

I’ll admit that producing it wasn’t as particularly massive undertaking as you might expect that sort of thing to be. We’ve pretty much got the art of creating this sort of thing down to a fine science, and I work with some of the most creative and talented people in the industry. So it’s not like I had to rig cameras and figure out how live streaming works or anything like that–mostly it was an issue of finding and committing the resources. That’s not to say it was an easy thing to do either though. This week was already crazy enough (I had a preview to write and two other live video appearances) and it made it that much more stressful, but in the end I managed to keep it together and get it done on time.

Hosting the event was kind of a surprise to me, as I hadn’t originally planned on it–it just sort of happened that way. The plan was to have Kevin on, but I felt like we needed someone to be up there with him and ask user questions, and he didn’t really want to be alone on stage. In a meeting with Ryan MacDonald, the man in charge of all video-related things on the site, he just sort of threw out there that I should do it, and though I wasn’t necessarily sure I had the chops to do it, I was totally down.

I’ve only had a few on-camera experiences, and I know that I say “umm” and “you know” and “good times” way too often, but overall I don’t think I did too bad of a job. Going into it, my plan was to be very conversational, very much the smartass, and know nothing about the game–the last one because I wanted an outsider’s perspective on it. I think I stuck to my guns on that pretty well, and anyone who knows me should be able to vouch for that as that’s how I really behave. I mean, I asked a teabagging question and rambled on about riding sweet mammoth mounts!

Anyway, I wish that we could have answered everyone’s questions or shown off some endgame content, but Kevin had only played for about 3 days and was only level 19. Overall though, I’m quite proud right now that I was able to take a casual comment and run with it like I was, producing a full blown (albeit a one-off) video feature like that in less than a week.

I think now I’ve finally earned the right to call myself a producer.