GS: What kind of numbers are you expecting?
HH:
So far we've been seeing one per hour which, when I talk to my
advertising brethren, they say it's a pretty good rate. So…I don't
know. It's sort of the 100 million dollar question for us internally as
we try to plan both financially as well as in terms of
organizationally. We're trying to figure out, because there's nothing
similar to this, again, anywhere else in the entertainment industry,
where…where do we go? How quick is this growth going to happen? What I
can tell you is that a lot of the marketing that we're doing will be in
Q1, so we'll probably have a much better idea in Q2 – March, April, May
– about how well we're penetrating into our market.
GS:
How are you going to make sure that you're actually advocating what
your members are wanting? Like, are you going to be able to support
specific initiatives that will be voted on, or…?
HH:
It may end up getting that specific. I'm not sure that we'll be there
for a while, mainly because we're going so broad that pretty much any
anti-gamer or anti-games legislation, we're going to be out in front
of. And hopefully before our members know about it we'll be out there
already fighting against it. But certainly there could be issues that
crop up in the future that they either bring to our attention or we
realize is sort of a parallel issue that we wouldn't have thought was
inside of our scope.
GS: And are you
thinking at all of partnering, or have you partnered with the ESA or
ESRB-type people to present some kind of unified front of game-related
organizations?
HH: Absolutely. In my
last role at the IEMA I worked very closely with the ESA, with the ESRB
and with IGDA, and I think we work most effectively when we work
together. The ECA isn't really "industry" anymore, but going forward
with sort of common goals and common initiatives is really
impactful. I can see it work at the state level, I've seen it work in
the media, where a journalist – in the mass media, especially – will
call up and say "Oh, I'm just following up on a story on how you people
try to murder everyone, and you make this insane stuff that influences
our children." And they spend time on the phone with me, and Jason
[Della Rocca, IGDA] and Pat [Patricia Vance, ESRB], and when they're
done with the story it isn't as sensational. We probably didn't turn
them around 100 percent, but the story wasn't anymore about the
sensationalism. That coalition building is really important for us
throughout.
GS: And how are you
anticipating teaming with the parent side of things, because it seems
that with a consumer organization, you might be in a better position to
inform parents. That seems like a big deal, parents versus evil video
games. What are your thoughts about how to deal with that?
HH: Funny that you mention that! We have a press release that we're dropping Wednesday.
We got called early on when we were deciding to the sort of initial
building of the ECA, and publishers in general were trying to find out
how they could be helpful, because they were excited about the fact
that consumers were in power to get in the fight. And my response to
them generally was, I'm not sure how we can receive any of your
funding. All of our funding comes 100% from our members. But what I did
say with them is that we'd love to partner with you in ways that we're
working together, in ways that you can communicate to your consumers
who are our prospective members that we're here and what we're about,
and one of the really good feedbacks I got was from NCSoft, who said
they had just launched this initiative called PlaySmart.
PlaySmart
was this two-sided card. On one side it had information about kids and
how they could be safe online and how they could share and what
information to share, and on the other side was information
for parents about how to be careful with what their kids are playing,
what they should and shouldn't be sharing in terms of information
online. And I looked at that and said, this is the most responsible
piece of literature I've ever seen a company create, inside our
industry anyway, and they were doing it purely on their own. And it
wasn't like they were out there seeking the PR or for any other reason.
And so we partnered with them. There's going to be one card inside
every retail NCSoft game, so that every piece that goes out will have
the card in it, and the ECA will be distributing it at every conference
that we go to.
So hopefully we'll get some
attraction with parents that way. The other way is I want to try to
embrace parents that are casual gamers. There are a tremendous amount
of casual gamers that are from the top end of our demographic that we
inside the industry debate whether or not they should be included,
whether we skew the demographics or not, and to me those are all
prospective ECA members or parents of ECA members.