Developing a great gaming community through player engagement
What do you do at Wargaming?
I am the Social Media Content Manager for World of Tanks Console. I manage the communications between the development team, publishing team, and our player base on our official social media channels.
My goal is to create a positive experience with our players and build a great community that wants to support one another by providing players with opportunities to engage with each other via social media. So, whether it's creative copywriting or impactful visual content related to our game, I want the players to be excited to be members of our community.
How did you become the Social Media Content Manager for World of Tanks Console?
I formerly worked in social media marketing before Wargaming as a freelancer for a social media content agency. I got to work on really interesting marketing projects for brands like Miller Lite and GrubHub, but I decided that I absolutely had to work in the video game industry. So, I left my social media marketing job to pursue a career in games by going to game development meet-up nights in the city of Chicago.
Through that experience, I met a handful of people who were able to share their experience working at various developers and found out about the opportunity to work in Quality Assurance (QA). I learned that it was a great starting point for people in games to understand all aspects of the industry. I eventually interviewed for a QA position at Wargaming and landed the opportunity to work on that team.
Luckily, I had some great leadership in QA that knew I had an interest in social media marketing and helped connect me to the right people at Wargaming for career development.
Do you think your experience in QA helps you as a Social Media Content Manager?
I think QA is a great intermediary between development and publishing because you get to see how players are reacting to development choices. Since QA takes part in reading forum reports and also dealing with live bugs, you get to understand how the development of in-game features affects the players. Then you can help the development team fix those issues and make suggestions based on what’s happening in both testing and live game environments.
So taking that knowledge into Publishing, I'm able to understand both sides. As a player, I understand player interests and what they want to see out of the game, including how it functions, and as a social media manager, I can advocate for the development side. Having an understanding of how things work together for players and developers is very beneficial to crafting and sharing appropriate messaging between these two groups.
What’s your favorite thing about Wargaming?
I really like working on a team of incredibly creative professionals. We have a great team culture. I like that we have fun goals to “earn tacos”. For example, if we work hard on certain initiatives, which we always do, we have this extra incentive to go out and get tacos together as a team. Wargaming has an excellent company culture, and we’re able to facilitate a very positive work environment. And we certainly see this in our team in Chicago, which is extremely close and has a great dynamic. We have knowledgeable people in publishing who have been in the industry for a long time, and they know a lot about gaming. It’s a great chance for me to learn from experienced gaming professionals.
Overall, I think Wargaming is special. There’s a lot of opportunities for growth within the company- that’s definitely been my experience. I think the leadership team genuinely takes a personal interest in your development.
Do you have any initiatives for the players in the future?
We’re in the very early stages, but we are doing something that we think the players will appreciate. We understand that our players want to take an active role in helping to determine the direction of our game. So, we’re putting together a program where we are bridging the gap between development and player feedback by facilitating more frequent and transparent communication from the player base to the development team. Now, we’re already sharing the feedback from our players with the developers, but we’re trying to create something more comprehensive.
We plan to further structure how we advocate for our players’ feedback. We will be gathering suggestions in one cohesive place to pass on to development so that there's a bigger overall picture of what our different players want. There’s a lot of differences of opinion in World of Tanks Console’s sub-communities, so having a view of what different groups would like to see in the game will be beneficial for the game’s development in the future. It’s interesting to compile feedback from all different types of players. We combine feedback and sentiment reports [compilation of player feedback from various Wargaming channels that gauge player sentiment about in-game features and how new updates were communicated to them] with customer service reports which provide an in-depth look into how some of our communication decisions also affect customer experience.
Video game development is quite complex and fast-moving, we are excited to see how in-game experiences will be enhanced by player insights!
Learn more about Careers at Wargaming and World of Tanks Console