Alanah Pearce is a writer for Sony Santa Monica, YouTuber, host of multiple podcasts, and prominent games media personality. Pearce began her writing career in Australia, working for a variety of different outlets, eventually moving to the United States to finish out her degree in San Diego, and then began working at IGN before moving on to Rooster Teeth. Since 2020 she has also co-hosted the Video Game Accessibility Awards with AbleGamers COO Steve Spohn. Pearce talked with Minus World about being a prominent female face in a male dominated industry, what keeps her motivated, some of her favorite writing in games, and more.
Minus World: What has been your favorite game you played this year so far?
Pearce: I am really enjoying Dragon’s Dogma II. I love the first game, and it’s been very interesting to see the conversation around the second game, because it really is just the first game. Obviously I actively dislike microtransactions and it sucks that Capcom keeps doing that, but I’m really enjoying the game right now outside of the microtransactions. It’s quirky. It’s weird. I love the chaos, and the storytelling that comes from the emergent gameplay and the adventure. You could be out doing something very minor, then you encounter a giant Cyclops that’s way over your level, and you have to scramble to figure it out. I find that so fun. So that is probably my favorite this year. I also played through Cocoon in one sitting earlier this year and really, really enjoyed that because January was just dog shit weather in LA. February was pretty bad too, but January was terrible. So I replayed through Inscryption and played through Cocoon. And then I did all of Kaycee’s Mod in Inscryption. Kaycee’s Mod is basically a roguelike version of that first act in the game. It has these skulls that you activate as modifiers, and Skull Storm is when you have all of the difficulty modifiers activated. And it was so hard. I was pretty sure I would never do it. I thought it was going to take me six months at least, because a lot of it’s just luck, but I did manage to do it. I think it probably took me 12 hours just for Skull Storm, which if you were to play it from top to bottom, would probably take like 20 minutes. I think it probably took me 12 hours total.
MW: It’s sicko mode.
Pearce: It is sicko mode. I love it. So I’ve been playing weird little games because I was waiting for Dragon’s Dogma II, and as such have also delayed getting into Final Fantasy VII Rebirth because I’ve been so excited about Dragon’s Dogma II that everything else has to get pushed out of the way before I could finish that.
MW: What is the most glamorous part about being a prominent female gamer on the internet?
Pearce: Many answers I could give that question. You know, I’m gonna give you an actual answer. I just this year started getting fashion designers sending me clothing, which is very cool. Because, yes, I’m a woman involved in a very male dominated hobby, and I’ve always been at least a little bit of a tomboy. I don’t know if that term is outdated. But I still like girly stuff and people sending me clothing, and I get perfumes as well. It’s been really cool. I feel like it’s an industry that’s very separate from video games, finally acknowledging the amount of women, like grown-ass-women, who are into video games. And I’m sure I have probably more female followers than the average male gamer does at the very least. So that’s actually been very cool. It feels very glamorous. There are many unglamorous things, but that actually feels pretty glamorous.
MW: That leads to my secondary question: How close have you come to just saying “fuck it” and not having any sort of online presence at all?
Pearce: I will do that eventually. Really everything I do right now is for my family. I have a family member who has terminal cancer, and that shapes a lot of what I do and a lot of the money that I make is in the interest of supporting my family. I think after that stops being what I spend my money on I will need to spend more time saving for my own life. Then as soon as I can I think I will disappear from the internet, do the writer thing, and disappear into the woods, and just never talk to anyone ever again.
MW: Sounds like the dream.
Pearce: It’s tough, though, because I have friends who are like famous, famous YouTubers, the top ten types, right? And they’ll always be like, “Yeah, I’m going to quit this forever one day, you know, as soon as I can afford to.” And I’m like, “If you can’t afford it, then I never can afford it. Like, how can you not afford to do this?” I just feel like we get tricked. I think there’s this lie, especially in America, of, “Oh, well, you’ll just have to earn this amount of money for this amount of time, and then you can go and have fun.” But it never ends. You never actually get to stop working hard. There is no fun at the end of the tunnel. You just have to keep working until you’re seventy. I think everyone thinks it’ll happen and it never, ever does. There’s always some push for you to have to keep doing something just forever. And I think, especially the reason I say America, is that it’s really tied to value here. How valuable you are as a person is tied to your professional output. That definitely has had an impact on me in the last ten years. I have fallen for that mindset. Whereas in Australia your value is how much time you spent at the beach that day.
MW: We say “grindset” here in America.
Pearce: You’re right, sorry. It’s all about that stigma “grindset,” bro.
MW: What expectations did you have for yourself when you were first beginning to write about games? Because that was in Australia, right? Was there this vision in your head? “I’m going to move to America and I’m going to work for a game studio”, or was it just “I want to write about games?”
Pearce: I started with, “I want to write about games.” It actually started while I was working at a call center, and I was pretty depressed, like diagnosed depression. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew that I didn’t want to work there. I actually studied psychology at university for six months just to find something interesting to study, which I actually think was really helpful when it comes to my job now, because there’s so many psychology related things that can make developing characters easier, I think. But I was always looking for jobs, and then I found a listing on an Australian website that’s called pedestrian.tv, which has a lot of creative job listings. It’s a really handy resource for creatives. There was just a job listing for a freelance volunteer video game writer. And I was like, wait, “I could do that?” Because at that point in time, I had already been writing game reviews on just a blog just for fun and talking about games all over the internet, probably since I was 13 or so. I applied for that and started doing it, and was like,“Oh my God, I love this.” Because the two things that I cared about the most in life had always been video games and writing, and even though it was for free, I was like, “Oh, I need to do everything I possibly can to make this my career.” So that’s why I pivoted to studying journalism and entertainment writing. That’s what I studied at university. And, you know, I took a photography class in case any of my journalism would need photography. I started working on radio in Australia for one of our community radio stations. So at first the goal was to make this a thing I can do full time, and then my goal was to work at IGN. That’s why the last six months of my degree I transferred to San Jose, because I intended to meet people in San Francisco, and I did that. And then I got a job there. Just to be clear, it makes it sound really easy. I applied like six or seven times, and they declined me, like, didn’t even hear back. It wasn’t that easy, and the job that I did get was really perfect for me. It was the choice and culture editor, which required cosplay. And I was cosplaying at the time, and had a lot of knowledge. And I have a ton of collectibles and have been collecting for a really long time as well. They also wanted science writing, and I was already doing that at university. I really got very lucky that that exact job was the one that I got, because I don’t know that there were that many people on the planet who had just studied journalism, had experiences as games writers who also cosplayed and were huge into collectibles. I got so lucky with that particular listing.
MW: Sounds like you fit that niche.
Pearce: It was like it was written for me. I had written articles about space just because I’ve always really liked space for my university. When I got the job at IGN I already knew that I wanted my next job to be Rooster Teeth. Literally when I started writing, I was like, “I’m gonna work at Rooster Teeth next.” That was because I’ve always loved fictional writing, and that seemed like a cool way to bridge the gap, and that they had both games media and they had animation and video games and movies, and I was like, “I think that’s how I want to go.” When I was working at IGN my favorite things to do were developer interviews, like the IGN First stuff where you visited Game Dev Studio and you got to talk to people. And that was the point where I was like, “I want to make video games. I really want to do this particular thing.” So Rooster Teeth still worked in that, I got to work on a bunch of their projects, things like Ruby or things like Arizona Circle. That again bridged the gap for the fiction stuff. I did a bunch of Game Jams while I was there, to get more game experience, and then again, got really lucky with Sony Santa Monica studio having a junior writer listing which nobody ever has. So both of them just feel like very good timing. That was a very detailed answer to your question.
Did I have a plan? Yes. It was work full-time, and then it was to do the things at IGN then Rooster Teeth.
MW: Do you have a favorite book about writing? I’m partial to Stephen King’s On Writing.
Pearce: King’s On Writing kind of pisses me off because it’s, “Just write, bro.” It’s not always that easy.
MW: No, it’s not.
Pearce: That is the biggest one that comes to mind. Though, I do really like Save the Cat.
MW: I don’t know that one.
Pearce: Save the Cat is more about screenplays, but it is more from a business perspective as well. It’s very much if you’re not just writing for fun, which I can do at any time anyway. And I write plenty of stuff that I don’t care about anybody reading. I’m writing something right now that I’m just solely sending chapters to my sister, because it’s the kind of thing she would like. And no one else ever has to read it, and that’s fine. Save the Cat is really about if you want to write something commercially, what is your intent? And I feel like it’s really helpful in a lot of ways for framing why you’re writing the thing you’re writing. It definitely applies to game design in some ways. Save the Cat is the principle of: you have a character, they save a cat out of a tree immediately, you are immediately endeared to that character. It’s something that just happens really fast, and I think that things like that apply to game dev writing very well because you can’t–you can–but shouldn’t just trap people in cutscenes. I’d by choice have games be entirely gameplay, but it’s very complicated for storytelling purposes. The ways that you can make sure that players attach some sort of character descriptor to an action rather than a word somebody is saying. So I think Save the Cat is pretty helpful in a bunch of ways. I like Hero’s Journey and Heroine’s Journey as well. Both are very helpful.
MW: How did you become involved with AbleGamers?
Pearce: I’m technically not, but Steve Spohn is my best friend. Huge fan of Steve Spohn. I love Steve and I wanted to start an accessibility award show. So I asked if we could use the AbleGamers jury, and actually have access to disabled gamers. Which obviously they know a lot of and we also used the AbleGamers criteria of different kinds of disability and different kinds of accessibility needs. So I am involved in AbleGamers insofar as Steve gets to ask me to do anything, and I will always say yes. They also help a ton with the Video Game Accessibility Awards, just as a fantastic resource. So technically, I get something for my relationship with Steve too, not just the charm and the insults.
MW: What positive changes have you seen in the industry since places like AbleGamers and people like Steve became more prominent?
Pearce: I think it’s made a huge difference. I feel like we’re actually talking about accessibility more often now. There is a department of PlayStation called Able at PlayStation. We have regular meetings about accessibility. I think it’s brought the conversation to the forefront where previously there wasn’t really any conversation about it. There’s obviously still a lot of detractors and a lot of toxicity surrounding it, but I feel like it’s now something people actually think about or know what it means. And I very much think AbleGamers has had a huge hand in that.
MW: Look at The Last of Us Part II, you can play that completely blind.
Pearce: It’s the most accessible game ever made that I’m aware of, and they still don’t have a bunch of stuff that would be useful. It’s limitless. And it’s such a weird thing for people to get frustrated about. I don’t understand why you would ever argue against games having more options. You can play it however you want to play it. That’s cool as hell.
MW: Those people annoy me to the end of the earth. It’s not affecting you in any way, shape or form.
Pearce: 100% Which is most things, right? But even with FromSoft games, they’re like, “No, it’s not the way that the person intended.” A) I doubt that Miyazaki is out there being like, “I don’t want any disabled people to play my game.” B) There are so many things gamers will get mad about that are against what the dev intended. Say the dev wants the female character to look the way the one in Fable does. They’re very upset about that. But accessibility is just good for everybody. And I always feel like people who argue against it have never considered that something could happen to them. What happens if you break your wrist? There’s a lot of games you can’t play anymore. What happens if you have kids and you can’t pause? There are a lot of games that you can’t play anymore. There are different kinds of disabilities, like situational disabilities like somebody having a toddler running around now, and there are a lot of games you can’t play because you can’t pause or you can’t rewind or whatever. There’s just so many things that as you get older, I got tendonitis, you might get tendonitis, I can’t rapidly button press. Any accessibility that comes now means that any of those games you want to replay in ten years, when you also have shitty wrists, you’ll actually be able to. It’s people arguing against their own futures. It’s just so stupid.
MW: It’s yeah, it’s a bunch of online chuds with too much time on their hands.
Pearce: Yup, which is always the way. But you know, one thing I always feel like would help is if at the end of a game you got this end game screen that had statistics on the exact settings that you used. Because I think a lot of these people are really caught up in, “But they need to know that I finished Dark Souls the really cool way!” I finished Tunic, a game that’s really fucking hard. and I didn’t finish it with any of their accessibility options. One of which allows you to take no damage. And I would have loved a screen that said that I did that all by myself. That’s part of where the argument comes from is people just needing to validate their own achievements. So if we just get our end screen to say, “And here are your exact settings,” I feel like it would help a lot.
MW: You need it to be like the HR training you take every year at work, like the little certificate they let you print out.
Pearce: Yeah. Here’s exactly how you did it. Good job buddy. Now stop yelling at people on the internet. I just feel like they would pipe down a little bit if they at least felt like they had a certificate saying “You were a big tough boy!”
MW: Are you ready to finally apologize for causing the delay of God of War Ragnarok?
Pearce: You know, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and I don’t even know what the public story is. That Chris Judge was sick or something. I don’t even remember.
MW: Something stupid like that, yes.
Pearce: No, it was me being hired specifically that delayed the game, of course, which makes sense somehow. Not really sure how a junior writer being hired would delay a video game, but yes, I’m very sorry if you think I did that. I apologize.
MW: Thank you. I can tell you really meant that.
Pearce: Thank you. It’s about time somebody called me out.
MW: That’s why I scheduled this interview. That was my gotcha question. So you’re a very busy person: you’re involved in several podcasts, you write for Sony Santa Monica, and you have a YouTube channel. So what drives you? I know you mentioned helping take care of your family back home, but what do you feel propels you forward?
Pearce: The sense of value is totally one of them. I have been sucked into the American system of my happiness is tied to how much I make. Not money, literally just output of things. Also, like I said, I had depression when I was 19 or something, and I’ve never had it since. The way that I feel like I avoid it is by staying extremely busy, and exercise is also important. But I just really like working. I never want to recommend that anybody tackles the workload that I do because it is like 9am to 1am most days. I still make sure that I schedule days where I don’t do any work. I usually get one every few weeks, and I will take two weeks off a year where I don’t work at all. I just feel shitty about myself when I’m not constantly doing things. I have trouble watching TV. So now, usually if I’m trying to watch a TV show I’m weightlifting during, so I at least feel like I’m doing something, and I don’t think it’s healthy. I wouldn’t recommend it, but it’s definitely that I’m just uncomfortable not being productive.
MW: You always have to be in motion.
Pearce: Yeah. Doing something, creating something.
MW: I get that. So you’ve you’ve talked before about having CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome), and I was curious about living with that and managing that, or being someone who stays as busy as you do. Are there days where you just can’t do anything?
Pearce: Yeah. CFS for me at least, this doesn’t happen for everybody, has periods of flare ups. For the whole of February, it was really bad. Which means if you looked at my stream stats, I streamed like 15 hours less than I normally would. I upload less videos. You can see the output very clearly drop whenever I have to deal with that. So it also stopped me from working out that whole month. I can usually just manage to do my job. I think I can really only manage to do it because I’m doing it from home. The last time that I had CFS really badly and I worked in an office, it was not good at all. I had a lot of trouble doing that because I would just get home and sleep from 6pm to 9am the next morning, and it was just a shitty way to live. It’s a lot easier when you work from home, and you can manage it a bit better. But yes, there are times where that is extremely difficult, and my body forces me to chill. It’s a tough one because you never really know when it’s going to go away. I usually know when it’s going to show up, but not when it’s going to go away. But there are some people who have CFS so bad they can’t leave their bed for years. It’s rough. I feel very lucky, considering. And what I have, this is getting in the weeds, is not technically CFS because we figured out what causes it. Which is why I say I know when it’s going to happen, and CFS is considered something that has no diagnosis for what causes it. I’ll make a video about that eventually, but it’s easier for me to say it’s CFS than anything else because that is effectively what it is. But yeah, it just means sometimes I can’t do stuff and it definitely sucks.
MW: What’s a piece of game writing that has stuck with you?
Pearce: The entirety of Disco Elysium, like the whole fucking game. I think this is like a really obviously cliche answer, but the first Last of Us. I was very annoyed with Joel at the end for lying to Ellie. The fact that he didn’t at least tell her the truth and is lying to her really pissed me off. I like that the game made me play through something as a protagonist, and feel very protective of this girl as well. The gameplay is actually perfectly hand-in-hand with the way that the protagonist is feeling. And that’s such a strength. But then I ended up frustrated or mad, and that doesn’t make it a bad game. The fact that it was so conflicting and it was technically actions that I was complicit in. I just think it’s very complicated, and it’s something that’s very unique to video games. And I really, really like that about it. I also love Spec Ops. Again, another big cliche, but I think about Spec Ops a lot.
MW: I need to play that game at some point. I own it. I just never have.
Pearce: They took it down. I think that’s one of those ones where the license is gone. It’s permanently removed from Steam and other digital stores. This happened on January 30th. Delisted from Steam and other PC storefronts, and it won’t be coming back. That’s so fucking devastating because it’s such a good game. I think I have it on Xbox, so thankfully I still have it. That game is so unique and it’s, it’s funny, whenever that gets brought up in game dev circles, everyone feels like they can’t do anything like that because Spec Ops already did it perfectly. Everyone’s like, ‘Why aren’t there more games like that?”
MW: Is The Last of Us your favorite game narrative?
Pearce: That would be Disco Elysium. I also think that Outer Wilds has a really incredible narrative. Red Dead Redemption II is also incredible. I love God of War 2018. Probably Nier: Automata would be really high up on my list. The Last of Us is a really easy one to talk about, but Nier: Automata would be higher on the list for me for that. Just how strongly I feel about that extremely complex story. It would be difficult for me to say my favorite, if not Disco Elysium, which is obviously super, super high up there. I am a real big fan of emergent gameplay like in Helldivers II and Elden Ring, and players creating their own stories. I think that stuff’s really powerful. That’s what I love about Dragon’s Dogma II. Anything that you can use gameplay to tell a story without locking a player into a cutscene is something that I think is a lot harder, and that I think I always really appreciate more, which is why I’d say Outer Wilds does such a good job of giving you a brilliant story without locking you into cutscenes.
MW: Is there anything that you would like to plug before we wrap up?
Pearce: If I have anything to plug, it would be Rooster Teeth shutting down, which means that a bunch of my friends who work at Funhaus have all lost their jobs. I’m just about to start a podcast with Rahul Kohli and Jacob Fullerton, and we’ll also be streaming the entirety of Deadly Premonition 2 on streams with some of the Funhaus people and all of the money any of those streams make will go to those people. If you don’t know them, they are a big funny comedy bunch. So you can check out my Twitch for those streams to support them. And the podcast will probably be on my personal YouTube channel, which is youtube.com/alanahirl.
