Front Lines, pt. III: I Got Kids to Feed Too

The customer service department isn’t the most glamorous part of the video game business. For one thing, it’s the same at any consumer products company. Calls and e-mails filter in and are gently deflected; on rare occasions, action is taken.

At one publisher, the department manager would frequently requisition dozens of copies of the latest titles— it was a big company and they sold a lot of games, so surely there was a lot of customer servicing to do. People would bring home their new games from Best Buy or Wal-Mart and find the discs scratched or broken inside the box. The customer service department would take care of them. Nobody really bothered to check in on it very closely. It was just boring old customer service after all.

One day, though, someone was at the fax machine and noticed what looked like an eBay receipt, and it turned out the department head hardly needed as many games as he was requesting. Instead, he was selling them online to supplement his income.

After firing the manager, the company instituted much tighter controls and greater scrutiny on those parts of its operations. The department had earned a little notoriety.

Comments

[Red Peter]

The trilogy of anecdotes here remind me alot of "and then we came to an end" by Joshua Ferris (great book)... apparently working in games and copyrighting have a few things in common.

[Matthew]

Thanks for the recommendation, I'll have to give that a try. A long time ago someone mentioned Microserfs, too, which I've meant to read for a long time but never did.

Maybe someone will write a novel specifically about a game company soon. Hmm...

[gatmog]

Microserfs remains essential reading for anyone considering themselves part of "geek" culture (and it was written before it was fashionable!). I also admire Coupland's early thoughts on game design, which are suprisingly applicable today.

http://toase.net/2006/05/01/exploring-couplands-views-on-gaming/

Note that Coupland wrote JPod a few years ago in a desperate attempt to cash in on what he did with Microserfs, and sloppily adapting it to modern digital culture. It was about a game company, but lacked the sincerity of Microserfs in the way he tried to integrate gaming and game culture. The short lived Canadian TV series was pretty awful, too.

http://toase.net/2006/08/19/jpod-the-review/

Links included for relevance, I promise.