Meet Your New Community Coordinator

By Jay Watamaniuk

Along BioWare's 10 year+ history, the decision was made to build a community of like-minded gamers who enjoyed good stories and great characters. This community flourished and grew over the years with each new game release, and is now one of most recognized and active communities in the world of gaming. To help BioWare move into exciting new spaces of community, we have hired a Community Coordinator whose name (if you have spent any time on our official forums, it will be familiar) is Chris Priestly.

Chris has proven himself throughout the years as a passionate spokesman for BioWare. He has invested a huge amount of personal time and effort into making sure BioWare's community is a great place to discuss, debate, and ask questions of BioWare's developers. He will make an excellent addition to BioWare's next step in our evolving community. He is also crazier than a bucket of jam-covered monkeys. That helps too.

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How long have you been at BioWare and what was your job before this position came along?

I was hired by BioWare back in April of 2001. My "official" job here at BioWare was that of QA design tester. I have worked on Baldur's Gate: Throne of Bhaal, Neverwinter Nights, Shadows of Undrentide, Hordes of the Underdark, many of the Neverwinter Premium modules, Knights of the Old Republic for both PC and Xbox, and Jade Empire for both the Xbox and now the PC.

My "unofficial" job is that I'm one of BioWare's more prolific staff posters on our forums, and I frequently help enforce forum rules. This rules enforcement, along with my frequent use of a certain evil smiley face signature, has earned me the reputation as "Evil" Chris Priestly (a nickname I have grown to be known by and cherish).

What made you want to try out community management?

Well, BioWare has a great relationship with its fans, which can be seen on our forums. We have over 3 million registered users who come to our boards seeking help or wanting to learn more about our current and upcoming games. We also have a top notch web team, many staff members who post, and great volunteer moderators - all of whom do their best to help our visitors. However, BioWare just keeps on growing with games like Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and our MMO already announced. The demands of our community were starting to outweigh the resources we had available.

I have always enjoyed posting on our boards, whether it was helping someone stuck in Jade Empire or KotOR, giving my opinion on a newly released movie in Off Topic, or just ridiculing fellow staffer Stan Woo. That enjoyment from interacting with our community coupled with my knowledge of our games both past and present, made me a natural for the position. Plus, they needed someone who didn't scare easily at the sight of endless legions of super-fans, and I have the strongest (and possibly largest) stomach on staff.

Can you give us an idea of what the Community Coordinator position is all about?

The Community Coordinator is really a two part job. The first part is acting as a go-between between our already existing community and the different production teams making our games. Basically, the community wants to know everything about our games now, and the teams are reluctant to tell the community anything until later. It's going to be my job to help the community learn about our games (things like the release of new information, screenshots, interviews, and that sort of thing) while helping our teams by generating hype for their games and doing some of the marketing work for them (taking the screenshots, conducting the interviews, and interacting with the community).

Unlike QA, where I generally played one game at a time, I will have to play all of our games in development and stay abreast of developments on each them as they near completion by playing them at every opportunity. It's a hard job having to play these games, but 5 years of QA has given me the strength and the strong gluteus muscles required for such a task.

The second part of the job is to increase the presence of BioWare and the knowledge of our games beyond our own message boards. There are many other communities out there on the intarweb that have similar interests as us, such as other gaming sites, sci-fi sites, fantasy sites, and other communities where there are lots of people who would likely be interested in our games if we can get the word out to them. We are currently working on a game for the Xbox 360, and there is a huge Xbox Live community that we're looking forward to being a part of. It's going to my job, along with Jay Watamaniuk, to take our message out to the people instead of waiting for the people to come to us.

What is your opinion on blogging, podcasts, and all these crazy ways of communicating? Can we expect something like that from BioWare in the future?

Oh absolutely. Mediums like blogs, podcasts, and other "new" communication means are the way of the future. The Community Coordinator job is all about getting word out to the different communities out there about our great games. Sure, I could just stand around like some sort of used car salesman waiting for people to express interest in what I can offer and then reciting some sort of pre-written marketing speak answer, but that's not what the job is about.

The community isn't going to accept me if I am just some sort of corporate shill. I'll need to prove to them that I'm listening to what they want to know and that I can help them get what they need. This doesn't mean that I'm going to blab all the secrets I know on a project (I've been fighting to be Community Coordinator for too long to lose my job by blabbing all the secrets I know), but it does mean that blogs, podcasts, interviews, and updates will be key parts of communicating effectively with our fans. Plus, I might slip in the occasional secret just to stir up trouble. I'm Evil that way.

I understand you and that slacker Community Manager Jay Watasomethingheimer will be working together. Does that thought fill you with terror?

Terror? Jay? Naaah. One of the jobs I had before coming to BioWare was as a private investigator and bodyguard. I had to arrest or restrain people much crazier than Jay (although most of them were wearing pants, something Jay shuns unfortunately). What does scare me is that we're going to be office mates together. For the first time in my going-on-6-years here, I'm moving from an Asylum full of QA goons to a singular room with one, lone lunatic. The hard part will be trying to find someone to blame after one of my frequent chili and hot wing nights. I may have to buy a dog.