Hanzo had heard of the term ‘Alpha Male’, and it just seemed like some American nonsense. Men were men, there was a hierarchy, you listened to your superiors, you did what you were assigned to do. Some men were handsome, some were funny, but it was the work that was most important. You would always work your way up.
“Well,” said Charles, using the common Japanese way of speaking, “the alphas of social media are the ones with the most followers, the influencers. They follow the trends and keep their followers up to date. They require a fee, but it’s much cheaper than traditional media advertising. We have identified eight good suitable influencers so far.”
“Oh right, makes sense.” But Hanzo never hesitated to ask when there was a doubt, which often infuriated his superiors, but the precision made sure the product was in line. He remembered a chat he had with a group of loyal players and now the maths didn’t add up. “But we will only have ten beta game codes to give out. What about our community players? There’s not enough to go around.”
It seemed that Hanzo was the only one who didn’t see this coming, and various eyes looked to the floor.
“Well” said Charles nonchalantly, as he thought of the players who often were as fickle as the influencers. “The bottom line is that the hardcore fans are going to buy the game anyway, and their followers already know everything about the game, right? They’ve probably seen leaks and discu-”
“Leaks?” Interjected a suddenly sweating Hanzo, “what leaks?”
“There are no leaks.” There was a slight tremble in his voice as Charles remembered the last game launch and how he had nearly lost his job. He pressed onward: “Thing is, the Sword Man series is not new to our community, we are not really exposing it to new potential customers. That is why I’m proposing completely new media sources. We need to reach new audiences, we need the alpha influencers.”
Hanzo could picture the hurt on the players’ faces. He could picture them disappointed, with tears of betrayal in their eyes. He didn’t need this emotional situation. His instinct was to put his head in his hands but he was in front of his team. He tried to remain stoic. “Ok, sounds good. However, how will our players react when this happens? What can we say to them? Could this have an impact on our community relations?” Hanzo took a sip of the now lukewarm green tea, as he tried to think of a quick way around this.
“Check this, bro,” said Charles, unwittingly using an inappropriate expression he had picked up from a highschool fighting anime, “we could invite some of them to the private press stream. It would make the room look really full, right? Either way they won’t stay mad for long, they’ve been fans for years, I don’t think they will turn their backs on us now, I think they will understand.”
Hanzo was still blinking from being addressed as ‘bro’.
“I’ve sent a list of potential streamers to you all by email.”
One of his colleagues clicked his tongue as he had already deleted it. One other had to go rifling through her spam box. After a few minutes, they were all ready, or at least, pretended to be.
Charles went through the list.
The first one was a young woman who acted like a cat while playing various games. This seemed fairly wholesome and they had a look at her video channel. As they watched her on stream, fully clothed (to Hanzo’s disappointment) with her rather cute black cat ears, she chatted to her followers, making catisms such as “how you like me mieow”, “this is nya~t very good” and “can’t get no catisfaction” as she played a game destroying cities as a very familiar gargantuan reptile. Hanzo didn’t have time to think about copyright issues, that wasn’t his job, but these gaijins sure were carefree about these things. He glanced over to notice that Charles had turned red. Hanzo found this amusing but had to ask the cause. “Ah, actually, we can’t use her, sh-she, er, just announced she is opening a Skinchat channel.” Hanzo could only guess from the word Skin that it would be liked but perhaps not appropriate material for good girls and boys.
They moved onto the next, a large bespectacled bearded man with puffy cheeks and long hair, who had a collection of lightsabers in the background to illuminate the room. He was quite pleasant and relaxing to listen to, and had a million followers, as his character on screen sat in a toilet and shot people in the head as they visited the bathroom, over and over again. The people in chat were commenting how nobody would win the game as the treasure was in the bathroom, much to their glee. As it struck Charles that infinite ammunition was a ridiculous game design choice, the atmosphere in the room dropped a good few degrees. Charles was now even more embarrassed as he heard the streamer caricaturing Japanese people, and for some reason, in a high-pitched and sexually aroused voice, as he shot his opponents, and the chat exploded with laughter, echoing “fucking kimochi” over and over. Oh dear, Hanzo thought to himself, what language, what a shame for their parents. “My god,” said Charles to himself in French, as he tried to revert from full screen and close the tab without quitting the whole browser. “This whore guy just totally fucked me up the ass.” His face red, Charles explained that this was totally new behaviour, which was of course, unacceptable, so he apologised and quickly moved on.
The next streamer was a skinny young man with a high forehead of pink hair and some large pulsating veins, who randomly screamed some sort of catchphrase as he switched between various games as soon as he felt bored, which could take anything from five seconds to five minutes. He was very very annoying but his chat was overflowing with reactions and comments plus bots that advertised thinly veiled adult content. “How is this supposed to work?” asked Hanzo, utterly confused. “He doesn’t actually quit the game, you see” said Charles as he pointed to the screen for no real reason at all, ”he will go back to it, and I don’t think he is really random, he is paying attention to the chat, if the activity slows down, he switches game.” Hanzo looked at Charles: “Are you confident this sort of chat can stay interested in a fighting game?” Charles seemed confident, as he was used to presenting bullshit that he didn’t really believe in but had no alternative: “I believe he’ll feature our game for us, in return for getting the beta, it will be ok, and it will be new content, so how can anyone get bored, right?” Hanzo shivered. Still, he had to concede that the number of viewers was a great guarantee of reach.
Putting ads in magazines and getting coverage in the media was expensive and becoming increasingly pointless. Putting the game on the front cover didn’t guarantee anything these days, people simply could skip everything. He remembered gathering round a magazine at school and talking to his classmates excitedly about the new games. What were the kids doing now? They just posted images in chat rooms, even as they sat next to each other. He guessed it was the same for people and families. Gaming magazines were almost dead now. It was really sad, but at the same time, at least that meant he didn’t have to sit at another annoying lunch with that annoying journalist who was clearly disinterested and only perked up when he mentioned waifu-big-tiddy role playing games.
They continued through the selection of streamers: this one was a young man, who seemed to be making references to all the current memes and getting very excited over video game news. He seemed nice, even as he heard something about a new character, jumped up, threw everything off his desk and ran out into the street, into the darkness of the middle of the night and sat there, barking at the moon. It was almost obviously orchestrated but the chat was going absolutely bonkers.
Hanzo felt more and more concerned. These streamers spent their time mostly complaining or hating on things, were too loyal to one game or predictably disloyal or simply just absolutely mad. GAFY needed someone truly professional, someone who could present their product respectfully, just for a bit, at an affordable price.