Interview review time
Warning: I'm literally just talking about an interview here, nothing exciting. I just love these sorts of things so much!
Andrew Wilson is probably my favourite android sent by Cyberlife, if I were to rate them all on a traditional tier-list style scale. He's got the perfect dead-eyed smile of a hunk of machine with literally nothing beating beneath it's chest, and a penchant for spouting just the most tired and pre-programmed rhetoric it's possible for generic algorithms to conjure. It makes me feel so safe to know that I'm hearing from a man with absolutely no visionary insight and/or creative drive, because having to deal with any of that would be different and different is scary. I guess that's why he ended up as CEO of EA; if there's one company that needs such a perfectly perfunctionary automaton as their head man, it was the ol' Electronic Arts. (You can sort of see it in their name, can't you?) Thus I'm so very glad to see him being put in front of an interview stand again so he can continue to regurgitate the same 10 year old opinions the company's shared as though he's a broken fax machine. That's my Andy.
Fortune, the age old institution responsible for maintaining the Fortune 500 and things pertaining to that nature, recently reached out to do an Interview with my Robot boi and he actually picked up because EA knows they're not going to get too challenging of topics to address. I mean, previously they've conversed with Fortune in order to explore such eye-opening and informative topics like: "The pandemic's closing down of sports competitions drew people to play sports games." (For real, Mr Andrew? Wow, he's so insightful...) So basically this isn't a specialist reporter and you're not going to see any topics of serious nuance that really tickle your interest. These are the sorts of interviewers that moonlight as post-match sports interviewers, because both jobs carry about the same amount of depth. You won't see EA every rock up their people towards any actual questions, thus you'll never really get any interesting answers and yet...
I don't know if Andrew Wilson and the Fortune interviewer were undergoing some sort of glitch that day. There has been some pretty serious shortages around the world recently afterall, because despite the circumstances we somehow ended up with a smattering of banger quotes to ruminate on. Like how Andy Wilson was asked directly about why people buy his lootboxes and he replied by comparing it to a 'guitar collector' (nee Addict) who can't stop themselves from buying one more. Huh, so you just admit to your monetisation model being parallel to exploiting addictive tendencies? This, ladies and gentleman, is the benefit of non-confrontational and sometimes very boring interview hosts. The questions don't seem threating, the subject starts to relax, and then they start running their mouths and saying things that they clearly didn't think through hard enough. Maybe a little bit of truth slips out there along with it all. But that was just the first question, I wonder what else our intrepid reporting hero managed to worm out of the T-800 over there.
Oh- no the interview starts to slip into familiar and boring territory down the line. "Do game publishers push people to spend too much?" What sort of question is that?! Might as well go for the man's throat while you're at it! No wonder Andrew Wilson's emergency back-up personality matrices kicked in and he reverted to saying nonsense like how their sales model is "about choice". Huh, so we get to choose what we pay? Oh... nope we get to choose whether or not we want the thing... Is that really about 'choice' at all? Andrew also makes the grand and intoxicating statement that "Our Players are spending less now than they did 20 years ago" which is just- I mean that's not even a white truth, that's just a barefaced lie. Do you- ANDY. Andy my guy, us commoners know how to do basic math; most of us get taught it at school. (Does he think we're illiterate too?) On a base level EA games are $10 more expense than they used to be, that's just basically. And then there's the microtransactions baked into the core of the experience, the DLC, the battle passes. What utter gibberish are you talking ab- Your company just hit the Fortune 500 again- for godsake, that isn't happening because you're squeezing less money out of people. Jeez... Andrew-bot makes my head hurt sometimes.,,,
Oh oh, I found my favourite question! (I'm starting to rethink my opinion on these interviewers; the questions may be trite but they got such funny responses.) "What do you think will keep EA on the Fortune 500 list?", an actual banger-maker right there, alright! And our Andy hit back with his "With absolute respect and humility, I hadn't really thought about getting back on the list on daily basis." (Presumably this was directly before whispering "It was every minute") BULL. What kind of CEO doesn't wet their night sheets dreaming about a Fortune 500 spot during their reign. That's "Sell my own grandmother to cannibals" level of top CEO aspirations right there. Also, I'm truly amazed that Andy is capable of producing both Humility and Respect with those artificial glands of his, this is a revelation! He better not use all of that on Fortune, his customers need a taste! (Hmm, that mental image was not what I was originally going for.)
There were some other memorable question thrown in there, even if I've pulled the highlights. I particularly like where he admitted how archaic and set-in-their-ways that EA was when they all bet the Wii would be a failure, good thing they'll never be that obstinate again. Right guys? Then there's the comment about how sports fans are going to keep playing games after they get vaccinated, that's not going to sudden stop or anything just because the pandemic's clearing up and the footie's back on, cleaning up his assertions from last year. I know this all must seem very sterile and by-the-numbers to you, but I simply adore the duel of false pleasantries that make up interview situations like this. Fluff pieces that, through their own inanity, somehow tumble out the other end and produce actual insights into how these sorts of people think and act. A lot of the time it's subtle and requires a critical eye, and then sometime they straight slip and literally compare their customers to exploitable obsessives, but I always find it so fascinating.
Of course, there's always the preconceived notion of who we know EA to be and the evidence which supports that image, so these fluff pieces are always just reinforcers. (Which makes it easier to disseminate from the lies.) One such example which recolours statements in an interview like this, from recent memory, is the scandal I haven't actually covered here where EA employees were caught directly selling highly desirable Fifa Ultimate Team Players to discerning customers because those sorts of under-the-table backroom deals seemed to make more sense to some people out there than sticking their money in the EA One-armed Bandit hoping that their symbols matched up. I bet Andrew Wilson went ballistic when that came out; likely thinking about how little money they were losing because players apparently pay less than they did 10 years ago. (Seriously, what was that nonsense about?)
What should your takeaway be from all of this? Andrew Wilson isn't real, simple as that. He's clearly either a highly advanced robotic exoskeleton over a slightly ill-fitting skin suit or simply an artist's render of what a stock big-boots CEO looks like. He's never really exposed any personality traits except blind devotion and being just that little bit wrong about most things that he says and completely wrong about everything else, and his cheekbones are too perfect. Either he's fake or he's a Pillarman; those are the only possible conclusions. Yeah, this was literally just a blog to talk about a interview with Andrew Wilson, what can I say: the man fascinates me. That is all. Bye bye.
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