Podcast Transcript VO — 0:16 If these sounds are familiar to you, you've probably already played the popular murder mystery game Among Us. The game takes place on a spaceship where the crewmembers have to ferret out the imposter from among the ranks before they're all killed. My name is Coby Zucker. And what you're about to hear is my friends avenging my murder. Unknown Speaker — 0:39 Is Coby dead? Unknown Speaker — 0:40 You hate to see it. Unknown Speaker — 0:44 I watched you walk in and then you killed him. You walked out and he didn't. Unknown Speaker — 0:49 Yeah, I saw Aaron running down away from the body. I was the one to report it. Unknown Speaker — 0:51 Yeah, and Aaron also faked his download. He did it in half the time Coby did his Unknown Speaker — 0:57 I’m still figuring out this mobile thing. Unknown Speaker — 1:08 Wait, it said reactor and it was this one with a bunch of numbers on like two rows. What was I meant to do? Unknown Speaker — 1:16 You count from 1 to 10. Unknown Speaker — 1:18 Oh, that's so oh my god. I was like wait, was I supposed to notice the number or memorize the code? VO — 1:32 I've been playing video games since I was old enough to pester my brother as he played Super Mario Bros on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Since then, I've become a self styled gaming advocate, conniving and peer pressuring to get as many of my friends hooked on video games as possible. VO — 2:15 Although Among Us was initially released in 2018, the game saw a surge in popularity in the middle of 2020. At its peak, the game was accruing billions of views on YouTube and streaming websites like twitch.tv. You can argue that a number of factors led to the explosion but one thing is certain. The global COVID-19 lockdowns played a massive role. Nicole Lorencez — 2:38 My brother always played video games and love playing video games. And so for like all of my childhood, I just watched him play games like Ocarina of Time and like The Last of Us and like all those things, I watched him play them so I never really interacted with it or like played it myself. And I don't really have the— I never thought I had the skills enough to do it. VO — 2:59 That's my friend Nicole Lorencez. Nicole Lorencez — 3:02 So the maximum I've done on my own is like the Sims or something like that, like back in elementary school, right. So yeah, very little experience with any kind of video game especially on like a phone or like the PC games or anything like that. VO — 3:19 She's part of a group I've been organizing that gets together to play video games on Friday nights for the past few months. Mostly we play Among Us. We occasionally miss a week or two because, even at the height of COVID-19 lockdowns, people are busy. But we've been generally consistent about getting together for a couple of hours. I first started playing online games with friends around the age of 10. When I moved to Hamilton for my undergraduate degree, online games, like League of Legends became integral for staying connected with my brothers and friends and other cities. But for Nicole, her first experienced online gaming came at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nicole Lorencez — 3:56 Like my brother moved home, I moved home and my cousin Clara and her like, boyfriend Tim, came back to Canada from Kenya, right when lockdown happened and so we were all like the four of us were kind of living like with my parents under the same roof. And my other cousin Liam was in the city as well. And so Daniel was talking about how like look there's Among Us and we should play it. And so he made us all download it and we would play in different rooms in the house and then like when we have to come together to do the discussion on who we think was the imposter, we'd all like run back to the kitchen and talk about it together. So that was fun. That was funny. It's the first time I've done like a real group social games, but so I was I was only doing it with the people in my house for the most part at the beginning. VO — 4:50 Nicole is not alone. Around the globe, millions of people are dipping their toes into the waters of gaming. Why? Well because zoom calls aren't cutting it anymore. Nicole Lorencez — 5:00 Everyone I know plays some sort of board game online with their friends these days because it's more fun than just saying, hey, like what happened this week, nothing what happened for you this week, nothing and then there's nothing else to talk about. Everyone’s in the same boat. Everyone's in school and no one's doing anything. So it's nice to have like, something different to bond everyone together. VO — 5:26 While other industries have been suffering in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The video games industry has…well not exactly been thriving, but they certainly haven't been hit as hard. Games like Animal Crossing New Horizons, which released for the Nintendo Switch on March 20. At the height of the first wave of COVID in North America, saw unprecedented sales. The game sold 5 million copies in a month and has since sold over 31 million copies. In a way gaming became a rallying cry for the stay at home order. Don't go out, just kick back, relax and play some animal crossing. VO — 6:03 And while that was all well and good in March, a year later, and our attitudes have changed, we miss our friends we miss social interaction. And once again, video games are there to help. Jackbox Commercial — 6:41 Welcome back. We just sold out of our last item there but next we're looking at the Jackbox party pack for five and a half incredible party games at one low low price now you're saying, Conny, what are these games? Well, we've got Fibbage 3. Hours bluffing trivia fun plus the all new game mode, Enough About You, at no additional cost. Survive the Internet. My son loves this. You twist your friends’ comments in hilarious ways. Monster Seeking Monster. Now this is so fun. It's a dating game where everyone's a monster with sacred powers. There’s Bracketeering. The game about making smart bets on stupid arguments. And finally for our button artists, a head to head drawing games Civic Doodle. Five and a half outstanding games one great price. It’s the Jackbox party pack. These are gonna sell out fast. VO — 7:24 One of the quintessential social video games was already a smash hit before the pandemic. Jackbox party packs are made to be fun, easy to play video games. They feature a wide variety of mini games, ranging from Pictionary-esque drawing games to intense trivia showdowns, all online. I spoke to Bella Portillo, a marketing manager at Jackpot games, the developers behind the successful party packs, about how their games have changed during COVID-19. Belia Portillo — 7:52 You know, we've had people have wedding proposals over Whiplash. And, you know, it's definitely been instrumental in helping people connect in these unprecedented times. It's, you know, it's interesting to see exactly how, you know, popular Jackbox got and demonstrates that people are always going to find a way to connect online, and they're going to find really creative ways to do that. Belia Portillo — 8:18 You know, again, anecdotally, but a lot of my friends started playing more diverse array of video games because of games like Animal Crossing, which again, you know, gained a lot of its success from the pandemic, just because everyone's kind of playing this game in that moment. Animal Crossing led to Stardew Valley, which led to, you know, other games and I think that people's exposure in general is definitely on the rise. If you look around, you know, the market landscape, a lot of people are investing in gaming right now, I think that it's something that a lot more people are being exposed to. It's far less taboo. It's becoming, you know, on par with people's enthusiasm for sports. It's an exciting time to be in the video game industry I think. VO — 9:00 Jackbox party packs are made to be intuitive so that someone who's never played a video game in their life can easily make sense of the controls. Part of what makes games like Jackbox and Among Us the optimal choice for beginners, new to gaming is the low cost and ease of use. With the advent of mobile gaming, it's no longer necessary to have a PC and keyboard, or an expensive console to play online games with friends. Belia Portillo — 9:25 I think that to someone who's a non-gamer, a controller is sort of—like a traditional like Xbox or Playstation controller—it's kind of an alien device, you know, you've got 10 fingers, and this thing's got like 16 buttons on it. It can be very intimidating. But what's not intimidating is the phone in your hand. You use that every single day and you know how to text more or less, you know, these things are pretty much second nature to most people at this point. So the barrier to entry is reduced greatly just because you don't have to familiarize yourself with the landscape of a new type of controller. You can just use the phone that's in your hand. And that's really relieving to a lot of players. And I think that's what makes it so easy to just kind of pick up and play. And obviously, there's some knowledge needed just to get the game started and running. But if you're just playing along, it's fairly straightforward. We've seen a lot of like companies especially have their corporate events or virtual happy hours using our games, and it allows for sort of a mixed audience or mixed group of people who either do play video games often or just have never in their lives been interested in a video game, and they still have fun with it. So it's been nice to see. VO — 10:33 It's hard to understate what video games can do for a person socially. Everyone knows that Zoom fatigue is real, and games like Jackbox provide a totally different avenue to interact with your friends. After all, you can only commiserate about your boring live so much before you start to lose your mind. But don't just take it from me. The BBC posted an article as early as March 2020, outlining the dangers of Zoom fatigue. It cited a number of studies and experts all suggesting what we already know: video conferencing is brain meltingly stressful, But the value of gaming goes further than just escaping Zoom. Katy Bugarch is a 20 year old Twitch streamer who goes by the name mushtomb. She built a community on Tik Tok, where she has over 33,000 followers. Since then, she began a Twitch stream based around her gameplay of games like Among Us, Stardew Valley and Minecraft, where she runs a server with her friends devoted to role playing as the characters. Katy Bugarch — 11:28 So I started on Tick Tock in April of 2020. No, yeah, April of 2020. And then I kept just snow piling, growing, growing, growing until I'm at where I am now, which is just a hair short of 30k followers on Tik Tok. Yeah, and so I moved over to Twitch, because I was like, You know what, I have this whole group of people that are interested in what I'm doing, I have a supportive group of friends. And you know what, I've always wanted to do Minecraft role play, which is a little funny to me. But I decided it was time to go for it. Twitch Stream Excerpt — 12:09 So I did think memory book pog, oh, boy, oh, boy, chat. Chat, you can't do that. You can't do that. What are the voices in your head saying Katherine? They're calling your book a memory book. Katy Bugarch — 12:20 I feel like when it comes to games like Minecraft and Stardew Valley, it's a good beginner game because at heart they are very simple. Like if we are talking about Minecraft, you don't need to go run off and make a role play with your friends. You don't need to be the best gamer and defeat the Ender Dragon every Tuesday. It's the kind of thing where if you wanted to, you could just get in the game, pick some flowers, maybe make a dirt house and be content. And then as time goes on, you're building and building and building. And as for games like Stardew Valley and Among Us, they kind of hold your hand through it, which is a different kind of approach where instead of letting you free and roaming in this open world. It has, with Stardew Valley, there are quests, there are like tutorials. Same with Among Us, you can do it on your own. And also with Among Us, you can have some friends to help you there on the way so it's a really good way of beginning instead of jumping right into something really action packed and complicated. VO — 13:22 Video Game streamers have become a bellwether for the popularity of particular games. It was Twitch streamers that helped inject new life into Among Us, causing a surge in popularity. Katy Bugarch — 13:32 When it comes to streaming, I mostly stick to Minecraft, Among Us because that's what people want to see right now. Especially like a time like this, everyone wants to light-hearted just fun. VO — 13:45 Interconnectedness during COVID-19 doesn't just stem from playing with friends in various social video games. For streamers like Katie, and her hundreds of followers, those connections can form with people they've never met before. Katy Bugarch — 13:59 I was actually recently diagnosed with autism. And you know what one thing that is really difficult with autism is social interaction. And so the easiest way to do that for me is video games. It is a safe place to connect with people who typically are understanding and are just as socially awkward as you are at times. My brother is the same way. He has autism and he's been gaming all of his life. And so video gaming, streaming, connecting with people is absolutely fantastic for people like us who struggle with socializing. It's a safe space to be who we are, to communicate openly, and just vibe. VO — 14:41 Humans yearn for social interaction. When we're told that we can't meet our friends face to face, we have to find other ways of scratching that social itch. Video games are that means. There's never been a better time to dive into the world of video games. But don't just take it from me, take it from Nicole who played her first online game during COVID. Nicole Lorencez — 15:02 After COVID is kind of over, you still have friends that are in different cities and you still have people that you don't see all the time. And that's just the nature of, you know, growing up and having people living in different areas that you're never gonna be around all your friends all the time. So I think I'm definitely more likely to not only just like video call my friends, but also play a game with them. Before it wasn't even a thought. I didn't even know that these websites existed. And now that they do and now that I see how fun it is, and how easy it is and how nice it is to bond over a shared experience like that, rather than just talking about how dreary your lives are, I'm a lot more likely to do it in the future for sure. VO — 15:45 Take it from Belia, who hears stories about people's first gaming experiences every day. Belia Portillo — 15:50 Yeah, what else you gonna do? Another zoom call? VO — 15:53 Or take it from Katy, who's building a community of gamers from around the world. Katy Bugarch — 15:57 I think they're gonna find it is a good way of escaping even in normal life. Because even without a scary pandemic, we've got bosses, we have bills to pay. And sometimes to escape that scary reality it is nice to skip to gaming and maybe, maybe these people who have found it through the pandemic will stick with it and understand that it can be something so positive and impactful in their lives. VO — 16:25 As a lover of gaming, COVID-19 has had one big silver lining. It's been a dream to see people's willingness to try video games. So ask yourself, why not me? My name is Coby Zucker, and you should be gaming.