Interview: Victor Wachter, Community Manager at Cryptic

Victor Wachter knows his RPGs, but more importantly he knows how people tick. The mass communications graduate’s official title is “Online Community Relations Manager”, but he’s far from a mere forum admin. He represents a good chunk of Cryptic’s vision to a very wide array of punters – from the visitors to the site through to making panel appearances on the game and community.

His excitement about the game and anticipation of a torrent of traffic as the game nears completion is evident – but first and foremost this guy is a pro with a long background in gaming. Naturally we wanted to have a word.

BigPond Games: So tell us about your background.

Victor Wachter, Online Community Relations Manager, Cryptic Studios: I grew up in the 80’s, so you know, had the Atari, had AD&D (Advanced Dungeons and Dragons), I actually played a bit of Champions when I was in high school, and then in college.

I was in college in 1993, you know, when people were just starting to get online. I was out one night and I hear these guys and they’re obviously talking about Champions. I hadn’t played for two or three years, so I approached these guys and I’m like “Hey, I overhead you, I’m looking for a group”. And they asked if I was on the school BBS (Bulletin Board System), which was a pretty large BBS, an early bulletin board service on the internet. I said yeah I don’t even know what that is and they said “just got to telnet dot blah blah blah”.

So I’m repeating all this to myself over and over to connect to this thing. I finally connected and hooked up into a pretty good campaign … and that’s what grew my interest in the internet. I was a mass communications major studying media and film but that was when the whole communications revolution started. So I started getting more interested in online communications, so I decided to go to grad school to study a little bit more about consumers and technology and online communities, as I was just starting to form this concept.

During that time I started playing Ultima Online. Raph Koster the lead designer started getting me into the news forums. So he posing a lot of social theory and I’m playing the game thinking “Wow I could have job where I use this” which is kind of cool as I like playing games. So I dropped out of grad school and moved to San Diego, eventually got a job at Sony. Started working on EverQuest very briefly, then went to work on Planetside, where I stayed for about three years, moved over to Turbine and worked on D&D Online, and finally when Cryptic got Marvel, I was a long time comics geek so I was all over that.

I was so in Cryptic’s face trying to get this job. The fact that we have Champions gives that much ability to do what we want, to do what we think is the best thing to do with a superhero.

BG:Do you think the attention span has increased or decreased over time – from pen and paper gamers to online gamers?

VW: I recently played my first pen and paper in … seven to eight years… because I’ve been working on online games since then. I don’t think that pen and paper games have changed in terms of their players, I think I’ve changed.

The pen and paper game you get maybe two or three combats – two usually – in a session. It’s unfortunate you know, I have my character on my spreadsheet on my laptop and I’m waiting for everyone else to get through and I’m like “God”, and I start surfing the web and going to MMORPG.com or something … you know what I mean?

BG: Yep

VW: My attention span has definitely changed; it took quite a while for me to adjust back into the pen and paper mindset.

BG: Do you think the spread of online games has affected the old-school role players?

VW: It’s difficult for a lot of people especially around my age who have these old favourites like Champions or Star Frontiers or Gamma World or D&D…to go back to and play a more updated version just because of the [lack of] availability these days. I know from moving so many times and having various events – had a flood, had a fire, so y’know, you don’t have all that stuff from back in the day and finding it again is probably the biggest barrier.

BG: Do you think you bring to your job a sense of community from back in those days?

VW: I think I see the value of connecting people. Steve (Long, most recent owner of the Champions franchise) were just talking about this. I grew up in a small town in Iowa. My only form of access to the outside world of gamers was Dragon magazine. It came in to my bookstore and that was how I knew about conventions and what other people were doing.

The only people that played games in my town were my group of friends. I would think that it should be easier now to get people into pen and paper because of the fact we can actually connect, which was so difficult back then. Particularly as the kids who played games were typically nerdy and you didn’t want to tell everybody “Heyyyyy”.

I think the appreciation I bring is the ability for people to find people’s like interests.

BG: In your presentation before you used the word “fans” to describe your future customers. Is that the right word to describe the dynamic between Cryptic and customers?

VW: I don’t know if it’s the wrong word. A lot of words get used interchangeably but um, we want people to like us, we want people to be enthusiastic about us. I’m a fan of the Rolling Stones…actually it’s true, there are companies I’m a fan of. I’m a fan of Rockstar, I’m a fan of BioWare and I think that Cryptic being a newer place than those companies still has a pretty good place in the gaming world in terms of reputation. We have a pretty stable design team, a pretty stable development team – the kind of things people can become accustomed to the way they become accustomed to a band.


Thanks to Victor Wachter (aka Sporkfire) and Cryptic for the interview