Welcome to the latest instalment of our feature series 'What I Do', where individuals in and around the video game industry tell us what, exactly, they do for a living.
The purpose of this feature is two-fold. First, as we saw with Pokémon's former chief lawyer and a F2P "economy lead", individuals have interesting stories to tell! And secondly, it's my hope that by showing this business is made up of specific people with specific (and often wildly different) jobs, it can help dispel the idea that everyone is just a "dev". Video games are more complicated (and interesting) than that!
This week's interview is with Spencer Campbell, who amidst various other jobs in the video game industry--he's currently at Theorycraft working on Project Loki--has spent six years writing social media content for some of the biggest companies and franchises on the planet.
Luke Plunkett: Hey Spencer! Can you tell us a bit about yourself?
Spencer Campbell: I've worked in games for about 10 years, the last six as a creative on video games' social media accounts at ad agencies. Essentially, I'm part of the marketing team that thinks of and executes posts for video games' social media accounts. Over the years I've worked on accounts for Xbox and a bunch of its games, helped launch Valorant and a few Call of Duty games, led social creative on League of Legends, along with a handful of others. I'm currently working as Director of Social at Theorycraft Games for their upcoming multiplayer game Project Loki.
In the past, I was working at advertising agencies that mostly specialized in gaming social media accounts. I've done a lot of jumping around in my career, which is pretty common for the field, but right now I'm solely working on Theorycraft's social channels. After working at big companies on big IPs for so long, I really wanted to go somewhere to build something from scratch.
LP: What's your average day look like?
SC: In my current role, my day starts with playtesting. Theorycraft is the first place I've worked that schedules time for us to play our game during work hours. I was really shocked when I saw an hour-and-a-half block of my calendar set aside every day to play with the team. After the playtest, I usually go into production. I'm either writing, filming, recording VO, making a clay figure for a shoot… whatever the day calls for. Since we generally don't have actors, when you write an idea you kind of have to be ready to make it. That means if you write a video that has a person cracking eggs on their head, then you'd better hit the grocery store and get ready to be on camera.
In previous jobs I've worked on accounts where you're putting out 60+ posts a month across five channels–some with video (which require editing), others with images (which need to be written and designed), and some are just text (these are the ones people like to argue over the most). Coming up with and producing that many posts every month gets pretty challenging.
And throughout the week I'll have development syncs where I talk to producers working with the development team. I'm sure you've seen stuff leak because a tweet went up when it wasn't supposed to. Part of my job is making sure that doesn't happen.
LP: How much freedom do you have to just write? I imagine that working for bigger companies involved a lot of supervision, pushback and micromanagement over everything that was communicated over social media?
SC: I'm really lucky at Theorycraft, where I have a great deal of autonomy, because many other devs and publishers have very dense processes to go through when creating anything that goes out on social. Even the most seemingly across-the-plate posts are planned a month in advance because when you propose work to publishers and devs, it usually gets vetted VERY heavily. Designers weigh in on font and color, writers weigh in on the script every step of the way, strategists weigh in on when to post, brand managers will weigh in on the way that a character is represented… it's very cumbersome. It's not uncommon that a post has to get vetted by my team, then the internal team at the publisher I'm working with, then by a developer in another country. Even getting an email back from these teams could take weeks, and usually that email is some version of "no we don't wanna do that." I've seen a lot of arguments break out because of this process.
LP: What's the landscape right now in terms of how many places you have to post? Used to be you could just toss up some tweets and a Facebook post, but now there's TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Bluesky...
SC: Yeah, figuring out WHERE to post is a headache. When you're talking about spinning up a new channel, there's a lot of nuances you have to understand so that you don't embarrass yourself. Like, did you know that Twitter supports video up to a 1x1 aspect ratio but images up to a 4x5 aspect ratio (but when you post two images it becomes 8x9), while Instagram supports 9x16 video, but the video gets collapsed to 4x5 when it's shown in the feed? Even functionally, there's a lot to understand about a platform before you hit post. Then you've gotta understand the culture of the people who post on the platform, and what constitutes a "good" vs "bad" post. And then there's another legal component of launching a new platform. That's why it took so long for brands to show up on TikTok. Their terms of service are pretty aggressive, and we spent a long time proving that the value of being on TikTok outweighed the legal concerns.
Platforms are also constantly introducing new features, and discerning the ones worth doing (Reels, IG Live, etc.) from the ones that aren't (remember Fleets? Cotweets? IGTV? Instagram Guides?) is a constant source of discussion.
LP: I have to ask, since making the content is literally your job, but: do you ever read the comments?
Ha, I swim in the comments. I was associate creative director on League of Legends and Valorant, served as a copywriter on Xbox and on Call of Duty for three game cycles, and was a community manager on Destiny 2. Some people would say those are the toughest communities in gaming, but I honestly love the comment section. When you get past the bad stuff, the comments are where the most impassioned members of a game's community are all talking not only to you, but also with each other. Games can create their own online ecosystems with rich lore, in-jokes, and superstar community members. The best posts that I've worked on are the ones that create a space for those people to express themselves underneath it.
But I wanna stress this for all the commenters out there; I don't make the game. Don't come into the replies and tell me to buff your favorite character. I don't know how to do that.
To see more of Spencer's social media work, you can check out his personal site here.
