[applause]

INTERVIEWER: Åsa, thanks for making the time to speak with us. I hope we haven’t dragged you away from some tournament or another?

ÅSA: Oh, no. I was never that sort of gamer, and I’m still not.

INTERVIEWER: But that was part of your public image for a while, wasn’t it?

ÅSA: I suppose it was, but we never claimed I was some sort of hardcore player! Then again, we never exactly denied it either, so I suppose I must take some responsibility for that.

INTERVIEWER: I notice you’re using the plural there, Åsa. Perhaps you’d like to explain how it all started?

ÅSA: Of course! Well, it’s all down to my grandson Emil, in a way. He lives up in Dalarna with his mother, my daughter, and it’s a long way from Hässleholm, which means I don’t get to see him as often as I’d like. So we keep in touch by sending video messages back and forth, you know, like lots of people do nowadays.

Now, I like to think that Emil loves his grandmother because she’s nice and kind— INTERVIEWER: And are you nice and kind, Åsa?

ÅSA: I certainly hope so!

[audience laughter]

ÅSA: But I think we have a special connection due to games. Emil plays a lot of games, like many youngsters nowadays, but my daughter Linn, Emil’s mother, neither she or her partner are into that sort of thing. And that might be my fault! I have always played video games, ever since my father brought a Commodore back from England in the 1980s, and I used to spend a lot of time on the Playstation when Linn was little. I’m a librarian, you see—have been since I left school in ‘95. And I’ve always loved my work, but I also enjoy being able to do something that involves a bit more energy and drama and noise in my time off.

INTERVIEWER: That does sound like a contrast— mild-mannered librarian by day, but by night, ruthless competitive gamer!

ÅSA: Oh, no, not competitive at all. Not with other people, anyway.

INTERVIEWER: And your favourite games, what were they? [looks at notes] Uh, Zelda? Things like that?

ÅSA: I’d play anything, really, because there wasn’t so much choice back then. Adventures like Zelda were OK, but I really liked racing games—things where you had to react fast and beat the clock.

INTERVIEWER: Quite the contrast to sorting through piles of books, I imagine!

ÅSA: Well, yes, exactly. And very much the tomboy’s choice, as we’d have said back then. I remember my father taking me to the store to buy WipEout, and when I handed the box to the man behind the counter, he asked if I was buying it for my brother!

[audience laughter]

ÅSA: So I would play all sorts, really. And when she was young I always invited Linn to join in, but she wasn’t really interested. It’s never cool, is it, to do what your parents do? She was more of a reader, and that was just fine. But it meant that when her own son Emil was old enough to be getting into games, well, they didn’t really have that in common, you know.

INTERVIEWER: So—gamer granny takes the stage!

ÅSA: That’s a little reductive, isn’t it?

INTERVIEWER: It is reductive, Åsa, and I apologise. Won’t you continue?

ÅSA: Of course. So, Emil and I started playing co-op stuff sometimes, because that meant Linn didn’t have to worry about who he was spending time with online, you know. My husband had passed away some years previous, so I had a lot of time to myself… and it’s just nice to have something in common with your grandchild, isn’t it? Something other than the simple fact of the family connection.

INTERVIEWER: I can only imagine it is, Åsa. But what happened next?

ÅSA: Well, this was back in the spring of this year. Emil and I had been playing together for many years, but as he grew up he was developing other interests—he likes soccer, and they have to do such a lot of training now, don’t they? Even when they’re still only on the school team. But anyway, he didn’t have so much time for games, but we still liked to keep in touch, so we’d send video messages back and forth, mostly talking about games.

INTERVIEWER: But one of those videos went a little further than usual, didn’t it?

ÅSA: It did, yes. I’d just bought the latest PlayBox console, which we were both very excited about, so I thought I’d do an unboxing and reaction video for him, so he could decide whether to save up for one himself. Now, what you need to understand is that I’m quite an old woman, now— INTERVIEWER: Oh no, Åsa, come on!

ÅSA: No, I am—not that there’s anything wrong with that! But as you get older, you can’t do quite all the things you used to. My fingers are very stiff nowadays— INTERVIEWER: From all that button-mashing in your youth, maybe?

ÅSA: Well, perhaps. Or all the typing at the library. Arthritis is just a thing that happens to people, you know. You don’t have to earn it with years, or with bad habits.

INTERVIEWER: Uh, of course! Carry on.

ÅSA: Right. Well, I’d unpacked the PlayBox and got it all set up, recording all the way for Emil, of course. And I started to play one of the games that came with the console, but the controller was just incredibly awkward in my hands. I guess it’s fine for young folk with all the motion still in their knuckles, but I could barely reach some of the buttons, let alone hit them fast enough.

It was very frustrating—but it wasn’t the first time I’d had problems with a new game. Sometimes they use colours or graphical choices that aren’t so easy to see for older eyes, or sounds that play havoc with your hearing aids. And of course, games are mostly made by young people, for other young people… but sometimes it feels like they’ve forgotten that anyone older than them is playing at all!

INTERVIEWER: Ah, the invisibility of the elderly!

ÅSA: Well, in some domains, yes. But what you don’t understand, perhaps—as a younger man yourself—is that the elderly, as you put it, don’t think of themselves as “the elderly”. We just think of ourselves as people.

INTERVIEWER: Uh, right, yes, of course. And why shouldn’t you?

ÅSA: Anyway, I was just chattering away about all these issues to the camera, because it was just the sort of thing I’d always talk about with Emil, you know. And I finished playing for the day, and stopped recording, and sent the video to Emil as usual. I gave it no more thought than I’d have given a phonecall back in the Nineties.

INTERVIEWER: Until the next morning…?

ÅSA: Well, next afternoon, really—I don’t spend a lot of time online apart from when I’m playing games. So I had no idea what had happened until my nephew—Linn’s partner’s sister’s boy, he’s a good lad—called to ask whether I knew I was “blowing up on the socials”, as he put it.

INTERVIEWER: Emil had uploaded your video message, hadn’t he?

ÅSA: He had indeed. He’d shown it to friends at his school, as he often did—I was fine with that—and they found it hilarious. So they encouraged him to upload it to one of the big video sites, which he did.

INTERVIEWER: And then you blew up on the socials, didn’t you Åsa?

ÅSA: Yes, though I still have no idea why. Who knows how the algorithms work? But the video got tens of thousands of views in the first 24 hours, and it just snowballed from there.

INTERVIEWER: How did that feel?

ÅSA: At first, I was amused, but also quite cross. Emil should have understood that it’s not right to share personal communications without people’s permission!

INTERVIEWER: [aside to audience] Boys will be boys, eh, folks?

ÅSA: For as long as we continue to indulge or even celebrate them when they behave badly, yes, I suppose they will.

INTERVIEWER. Um, yes! Uh. Hmm. But, uh… you were amused as well, you said?

ÅSA: Well, of course. It was all so unlikely, you know? Åsa Lindkvist, sixty-year-old librarian from Hässleholm, a viral sensation—and without even trying.

INTERVIEWER: What happened next?

ÅSA: I called Emil and his mother, obviously! Not to get him in trouble, you understand, but to explain why what he’d done wasn’t really on. Linn’s a good mother, I knew she’d handle it right, but I wanted to talk to them both directly. That’s how this family has always worked.

During that call, I told Emil he’d need to pass over the login details for the account he’d set up to upload the video, which he did. Later that afternoon I logged in, planning to delete the video or just set it to private. But that’s when I saw all the comments.

INTERVIEWER: Oh no—the dreaded comments!

ÅSA: They actually weren’t bad—at least not at first! Well, there were a few nasty ones, obviously, but you get a thick skin if you spend any time playing co-op online. But the majority were from other older people like me, or people with disabilities, saying how glad they were that someone had expressed their own frustrations, and how hard it was to know in advance whether a game or console was going to work for bodies that aren’t quite perfect.

Lots of them were asking for advice and suggestions, too. There are so many games now—the changes in the industry have made it so easy to release something, and there’s such a wide range of quality and genre and style, that it’s hard to know where to start! I think I’ve done fairly well at keeping on top of it, but I’ve been playing games for nearly half a century, and you build up a lot of knowledge and instinct that you don’t realise you’ve got. Not everyone has that advantage, that experience.

So instead of deleting the account, I recorded another video sharing my top five all-time classic games for older players, taking into account not just my own infirmities, but also those of my long-term player friends around the world.

INTERVIEWER: And that one did even better than the first one, didn’t it?

ÅSA: Actually, it took a long time to overtake the first one—probably because I seemed so awkward in it. That first one, I wasn’t trying to perform to the internet, you know? I was just calling my grandson, so I guess it just came across much more natural. But to do it knowing there’d be an audience, that was very difficult.

INTERVIEWER: Quite a new experience for a librarian, Åsa!

ÅSA: I suppose so, but I expect it would be the same for most people my age. We didn’t grow up in a world where there was a video camera in every pocket.

INTERVIEWER: Hmm, hmm. But the second video did well, didn’t it?

ÅSA: Eventually, yes. And after the first day, the videos reacting to the first one were starting to come out, which drove even more traffic. Some of those were other gamers reviewing my selection, or making their own recommendations—or, of course, explaining how totally wrong I was about everything!

But there were also videos from studios large and small, talking about the accessibility features of their games, and quite a few of them were inviting me to review their releases on my channel. And I thought, well, I’ve been complaining about this for years, but now people are listening—it would be a shame to waste the opportunity to change things.

INTERVIEWER: And to miss out on the earning potential, amirite?

ÅSA: You may not believe me, but that wasn’t a concern, at least not at first. Honestly, I don’t think I understood how much money an influencer could make! I just liked the idea of making it easier for people like me to find games that would suit their preferences and abilities.

So I started saying yes to invitations to review, which meant all of a sudden I had piles of games to try out—and I wanted to be as fair as possible, so I tried going through them in the order that I received the invitations, and only saying no when it was obvious that it wasn’t the right sort of thing at all.

But it takes time to try out a game properly, and all the while yet more invitations were coming in. After about a month, I’d done eight or nine reviews, but had a queue of titles hundreds long, from solo-dev sloppers to big-studio masterpieces, and everything in between, from all over the world.

INTERVIEWER: Wow! And how many views were you getting by then?

ÅSA: Close to a million on each video within twenty-four hours of release.

INTERVIEWER: [whistles] What we wouldn’t give for numbers like that here at Fifteen Minutes!

ÅSA: Well, be careful what you wish for. But you have the infrastructure to handle it, at least.

INTERVIEWER: What do you mean?

ÅSA: Well, you’ve had the training in front of the camera, for a start! I think I’d gotten the hang of coming across as myself after a month, but it was still just me and an old webcam, and a basic editing suite that Emil had recommended. I hadn’t appreciated how much work it was to produce something of even the most basic quality. And all the while, my poor inbox was just flooded. For every one I answered, ten, twenty, fifty more would arrive, and I was missing messages from friends and family in the chaos.

INTERVIEWER: By this point, though, all those views were starting to mean real money, right? This is when you quit your job?

ÅSA: I never quit, actually. I just took a sabbatical. By that point the whole neighbourhood knew what I was up to— Hässleholm is not that big a town!—and my supervisor at the library told me to take six months and see what happened.

INTERVIEWER: And what happened?

ÅSA: Honestly, it’s all a bit of a blur. The river of submissions for review was by this point absolutely ridiculous– it’s hard to believe that so many games get made, really, but I’m told that a lot of them may never have more than a handful of players, if that. But in hope of getting those players, they either make promises that aren’t kept, or use nasty assets or stolen IP just to get attention—you know the sort of stuff I mean. [makes a face] Nasty. And I wasn’t going to play any of that rubbish, let alone review it!

It all seemed kind of sad, in a way—a waste, you know. It’s not like there weren’t bad games when I was young. Of course there were! And if you ended up with one, sometimes you’d do your best to find something good about it, because that was what you had available. You couldn’t just click up whatever you wanted. So I decided I had to focus on quality as well as accessibility, and that instantly offended hundreds of thousands of people, because apparently having standards is “nostalgic” and therefore bad. But as we all know, offending hundreds of thousands of people on the internet sometimes means simultaneously making hundreds of thousands of other people on the internet think you’re some sort of hero… and so the numbers just kept growing.

By that point a number of freelance channel managers had made themselves know to me, so I interviewed a handful and eventually went with Fanaka, a young woman from Kenya. She’d done an MBA before spending four years in content strategy, and within a week she’d set up a company for me, set some bots to work on my inbox and the comment threads on the videos, and hired a couple of other people to do customer relations stuff.

I said from the outset that I wouldn’t take payment for reviews, but by this time offers of sponsorship and product endorsement were also coming in thick and fast—and once I’d committed to giving it a proper go, it seemed crazy to pass up the opportunities, especially as I was now employing other people. Plus it meant I had more time to focus on the games, especially once we had a good editing team to deal with making the videos… but with hindsight I was happy to hand the business side of things over to someone else, which is maybe why it got so out of control.

INTERVIEWER: Let’s just remind ourselves, folks, what “out of control” looks like! We’re talking interviews and guest articles with some of the biggest tech-focussed news sites in the world; we’re talking smash-hit collaboration videos with scene veterans such as… [checks notes] uh, Marky Pliers and Dunkey? Plus, uh… plus [frowns at notes]… um, a long list of young folk I’m probably not cool enough to have heard of!

She made official cameo appearances in seven major international game franchises, including Fortnite Reloaded and SkyKraft, plus unofficial and unlicensed cameos in dozens more. And if that were not enough, the red carpet was rolled out for Åsa at major industry showcase events on all five continents, and at peak she was doing a dozen public appearances a week, online and off, while running a post-geographical production company with thirty-six employees in seventeen different countries and ten time-zones… Åsa, have I missed anything?

ÅSA: Oh, almost certainly.

[audience laughter]

ÅSA: I don’t mean to boast—I just mean it was all so much, so fast, and you don’t have time to really take it all in when it’s happening. Just two months after the first video I was being led on and off airplanes by my PA—lovely Zeynab, hi Zeynab if you’re watching!—who was in complete control of my calendar and schedule, making sure I was where I had to be for whatever was coming next, lining up my meals and cabs and flights, handling all the arrangements. The whole point was to maximise the time I had to try out games, and to talk about games, whether to camera or to other people, which at that point I was doing for about twelve hours a day, seven days a week.

INTERVIEWER: Sounds like a nightmare!

ÅSA: Oh, I loved it to bits! I’d always loved being a librarian, too—and both jobs are about helping people find what they’re looking for—but this was a very different experience. It’s quite addictive, isn’t it, to be the focus of attention, the heart of a well-oiled machine?

INTERVIEWER: I’m sure I wouldn’t know…

ÅSA: Oh, nonsense. But yes, it was a lot—and I don’t think it would have done me any good if it had gone on much longer.

INTERVIEWER: Tell us what happened, Åsa.

ÅSA: Oh, the usual. First came the backlash, though that had been there from the beginning; it just took a while for them all to find each other and start coordinating. The nasty little basement-dwellers never bothered me much, though they could say truly awful things. What really hurt were the other older gamers and people with disabilities who accused me of misrepresentation and privilege and all the usual stuff.

I know I wasn’t perfect, but I’d provided visibility to an issue, and built a vertical around it that was helping people who wanted to play to find games that would fit with their lives and bodies. In some cases I’m sure it was just jealousy, but in others it seemed to be genuine hurt and anger—and much as I wanted to, I just couldn’t talk it out with these people in private, because once you’re out there as a curator there’s no such thing as “private” any more.

Then there were the copycats, who came quickly enough but were little more than an annoyance, and the serious competitors, who came later, but who came hard. I succeeded quickly because I stumbled into a niche that no one had really paid any attention to before… but success draws attention, and eventually there’ll be someone who wants it more than you do.

There’s now five or six really good channels devoted to curating games for older players and players with disabilities. I see that as mission accomplished, really. I don’t care if it’s not me.

And besides, I had become overloaded and exhausted. So when Fanaka defected from my company and took the whole editing team with her to join one of my competitors… well. I was on a flight back from Tokyo when Zeynab came to me with the news, crying her eyes out, bless her. And I thought to myself “you know what, Åsa—this just isn’t fun any more”.

INTERVIEWER: And you just gave it up like that, in mid-air, after… what, four months?

ÅSA: Closer to five months, counting from the first video that Emil uploaded. And I didn’t just, you know, jump out of the plane! But yes, I wrapped it up pretty quickly, within a couple of days.

INTERVIEWER: They say the way to win at gambling is to quit while you’re ahead…

ÅSA: I’m sure I wouldn’t know. But look, like I said— there’s a lot of money in curation, because people desperately need the guidance, but it takes a lot of money to run an operation that can move fast enough to capture that income. I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t doing quite nicely out of it, but the running costs were crazy.

They ate up most of what was left in the company when I closed it up, and I used the rest to pay off my people to the end of the year—the ones that didn’t run out on me, anyway!

So yes: I was earning the sort of monthly salary that only usually goes to international footballers and hedge-fund traders. But I earned it for two whole months! I’m not going to be retiring to Bostad any time soon.

INTERVIEWER: Haha, well, you don’t seem the type for tennis, Åsa! But the story doesn’t end there, does it?

ÅSA: It does, really. I’m back at the library again, and I’m back to playing co-op with Emil in the evenings, as well as with some of the wonderful gaming friends I made during my adventures.

But yes, the rights to my story have been optioned by a studio down here in Skåne, who have been trying to combine games with biography. Whether there’ll be anyone left who even remembers my story by the time it gets released, I have no idea! But they’re lovely people, and they’ve promised it will be fully accessible, so I wish them the best of luck.

INTERVIEWER: Principled to the last! Well, there we have it, folks. Åsa, thanks for being with us on Fifteen Minutes—can we get a round of applause for Åsa?

[applause begins]

Thank you, thank you! Do join us next week, when we’ll be talking to none other than Max Sottergren, and asking, among other things: what was he really doing with that guinea pig?

[credits roll]

SOURCE SCENARIO: THE VIRTUOUS CIRCLE (ALL HOLD HANDS)

The digital gaming industry is now driven by human experience rather than technological advancement. The barriers to playing and creating games are far lower than they were, especially with regard to access to resources: you can get involved regardless of your socio-economic background, age, gender, education or country of origin, and so there are vastly more developers than ever before. Sustainable, subsidised and distributed data-centers support developers of all kinds with access to powerful, sustainable tools.

As a result, the number of games being made available to the public has increased vastly. Because developers and audiences alike have become more diverse, games are more diverse, too, and reflect a greater range of viewpoints and cultural perspectives.

However, the increased volume of games being made is also more diverse in terms of quality. A lot of these fall into a genre that has no shame in calling itself “slop gaming”, but new heights are also being reached in so-called “masterpiece” games, as the pressure increases on professional developers to increase their expertise and raise the bar for quality.

There are audiences for both of these ends of the quality bellcurve, as well as a much larger audience for material that sits somewhere in the middle. (A growing number of people are dropping out of digital gaming entirely, but there are plenty of analog entertainments if they want them.) Revenue streams have diversified, much as they did in other entertainment industries: merchandising, live events, and other fandom-based models of support are increasingly important for many developers. The crowded market for games is a noisy environment for consumers, and this has enabled the emergence of professional curators, who gather influence through their ability to select and recommend games that their audiences will appreciate.

Game mechanics have reached beyond the entertainment sphere, and are now increasingly found in healthcare, education and the workplace. With digital games reaching a much wider audience, they are a more prominent part of the cultural zeitgeist, discussed and debated in the same way books and movies were discussed in previous eras. This is partly because even the oldest generations have grown up as gamers, with their expectations helping to shape the culture—and studios now pay much more attention to accessibility in order to reach this important market sector, among others.