“Are you writing those tweets?”
This was roughly a question someone asked me the other day about my @sean_htch twitter account (where you may have clicked through to this essay). And it’s a good question – if you have met me in person, you’ll know that the stuff I tweet on ‘main’ (@sean_htch) feels a bit distant from talking to me in person. The part of me represented there, perhaps, feels
- Obsessed with Zelda, especially Link’s Awakening? Does Sean continuously play Link’s Awakening?
- Wow, this person really loves the PSX, N64, etc
- Can’t stop talking about their upcoming game Anodyne 2.
- They are always positive!
Now, of course, that’s very much an exaggeration of some facets of my personality. I enjoy Zelda games as well as old 3D games, but they’re just one of many interests. They just happen to be the best way to immediately convey some of the appeal of Anodyne 2/Anodyne. I do care about Anodyne 2 a lot, as it’s my job, but I care about other things as well. I experience a wide range of emotions. (That was a weird sentence to write.)
If you’ve followed @sean_htch for over a year, you may have noticed that tweets are far less frequent, but when I do tweet, there’s a lot of engagement. That’s all intentional! Here’s why.
This is a graph of my follower count from Feb 2016 to March 2019. The graph continues to the left. In fact, if you follow it to Feb. 2014, followers are at 1700, meaning, more or less, follower count was flat or gently sloping for many years.
I worked on the game Even the Ocean for 3.5 years from 2013 to 2016, so you can see how that corresponds with a nearly flat line on the graph! In the middle of 2018, I decided “something needs to change” about how I approach Twitter. It’s a useful tool for promoting my work and I felt I wasn’t using it optimally. So I changed things and, happily, have had some positive results!
Splitting the Self
Ah… dramatic subheading…
Last year, I asked myself: do my followers, likely who know me through my games, need to hear every little opinion or life thing about me, like that the grocery store near me hasn’t restocked on cookie dough in a month, and that the price of a chicken rice plate at my favorite fast casual restaurant went up $0.50 and it’s ridiculous to charge more money for rice than for a pita wrap?
Well, the answer is no. It didn’t feel healthy to have thousands of people hearing my frivolous tweets. It’s good to have tweets less people see, it’s also good to have parts of you that only offline friends see.
Also, my follower count was more or less flatlined for years, and if I want to stay in this business, I need to stop letting my personal life weigh down my professional work. So as a compromise between locked accounts and mains, I made a ‘sub’. (I know a few other game developers who have done this.)
It’s at @han_tani, and it’s just me using Twitter as a non-professional, i.e. how I’d use twitter if I wasn’t working in games.
Splitting myself into two lets me be more focused.
On my main, I can make decisions that are good for my career as a game designer – I can hyperfocus on making tweets that I know fans of my work will enjoy seeing and sharing. I can tweet important news about my work like console ports. I can share posts like this with a larger audience.
And, I can still do this while having the pleasure of complaining about Tide Pods smelling too strongly on my sub account.
Be a Nintendo
Around August or September last year I started working with The Indie Bros. for assistance with promoting and outreach with Anodyne 2. One useful advice I got was on “being a Nintendo” on Twitter.
Essentially, a “Nintendo” will keep their tweets hyperfocused on getting fans interested in their current work. If there are ever memes or jokes, they always relate to the game. No threads, no arguments, etc. Hearing this sentence made it clear the idea of keeping my main’s presence “all signal, no noise”. Now, I don’t tweet anything unless it contributes to the goal of
- Promoting Anodyne 2 or something I’m working on
- Promoting something that helps my company’s stability (console ports, etc)
I will occasionally retweet friends’ work, but I do it less than I wish I could! (FWIW, I do retweet lots of stuff on my sub).
Another counterpoint I always was thinking was “what about using my platform for promoting good things (social justice, etc!)” and that is a fair point! But there are various people with accounts that do a great job at this, and it’s their account’s focus. I feel if I want to do concrete justice actions, I’m better off doing something local – donating to local orgs, or joining a political community, etc.
That is to say, I feel that using Twitter for a career means you need to have a single focus – something the account is known for. And it’s hard for that to be “being yourself,” as everyone is multifaceted.
Being Yourself
As an indie dev, you have a unique advantage, and that is, you can still keep your account as being ‘you’ (in the sense that my main Twitter is Sean, not my company Analgesic Productions). I still think that accounts that are a single person are more attractive than a company, which feels impersonal. (this is basically a fact, given how many fast food twitters now act like they’re a person).
Of course, running a main that’s ‘yourself’, there’s a temptation to tweet more ‘normal’ stuff about your life – but again, that’s what the sub account is for! If you’re a smaller indie, don’t fall into the temptation of trying to show your cool game *and* your cool lunch, no matter how delicious.
The 10-year question
Something I like to think about with curating my online self is – will this curated self successfully age? What should my strategy with Twitter be *now* so that I can still get engagement in 10 years? I asked myself this because near the end of Even the Ocean’s development, I was barely getting much interest in the game itself.
Other questions: how can I frame my tweets so that they’re both appealing but also there’s obviously enough of a weird/experimental edge so that when I make a less commercial game (think All Our Asias), I can still get people interested? Those are all things worth thinking about if you are going to use Twitter for the purposes of a career. I’d like for Marina Kittaka and I to be able to stay in games and work together!
Well, those questions are too complicated for me to fully finish by my 11 AM deadline, so I’ll stop here. I also want to talk about composing tweets that people like to interact with, visual hooks, various strategies with tweets, and how tweeting is essentially grinding out visibility and increasing the chances of ‘lucky tweets’ or journalists/video makers seeing your game, etc, but that’ll be another day.
ambient-melodic 