Alyssa Mercante is the current Senior Editor of Kotaku, former Editor and Features Writer at GamesRadar, and is, as she put it on her Twitter bio, a “puck slut for NYR.” Mercante sat down with Minus World to discuss the #FreeStellarBlade “movement,” the harassment campaign directed at her, falling asleep to weird ASMR videos, and comment on the recent attempted mandate Kotaku ownership tried enforcing that would have turned Kotaku into an SEO-fueled guides site.
Minus World: What’s the game you’ve enjoyed the most this year so far?
Alyssa Mercante: I played the Hades II technical test, and it being their first sequel, I think a lot of people were like, “How can you expand?”
MW: How Can you make Hades better?
Mercante: Exactly. And it really is cool to see immediately when jumping into that tech test that they figured out exactly how to do it in a way that feels iterative and natural and not forced. And adding new gameplay elements like crafting and shit that I never would have thought they should put in there. And I was like,“Wait, this actually does work because she’s a witch.” It all feels organic and really good. That got me really excited for early access, and is probably what I’ve loved the most recently. But I also am going through and playing my first ever Final Fantasy game. I’m playing Remake right now. It should come out at some point, but we shot a really funny video where everyone on the team who was invested in it gave me a PowerPoint presentation on which Final Fantasy game I should play first, and why. And they were all obviously very pissed, everyone who didn’t get their game picked, when I chose Remake. But then I can play Rebirth, and now I’m folded into everything. So I’m enjoying that quite a bit. I’ve only played Kingdom Hearts stuff in that realm of games. It feels pretty naturally connected, but it is very funny too, I was not brought up as a gamer naturally, my parents were not gamers. I didn’t have brothers, so anything that I happened upon, I fell into on accident. And by chance, it was shooters, very bro-y dude games. JRPGs and anything like traditional games-games were things that I did not get exposed to until I started doing it for work. So it’s really interesting to play it in my 30s for the first time and be like, “Okay, wow, this looks beautiful”. The characterizations are really interesting. It’s not something I’m used to at all. So that’s been really fun. And then because I have a disorder, I play a lot of Fortnite and I’m really enjoying it lately.
MW: When I think of evil companies, there are a few that come to mind: Halliburton, Raytheon, and Kotaku. So I just need to know, as the senior editor of Kotaku, how do you sleep at night knowing that you work for one of the worst companies in the world?
Mercante: I sleep in my billion dollar mansion. No. I take a muscle relaxer and I smoke a joint, and I go to bed.
MW: We have the same sleep routine.
Mercante: Number one thing I’ve learned is to put my phone on sleep mode. I’m an ASMR girlie. I like to watch relaxing videos to shut my brain off at night. If I don’t have notifications on mute I’ll be trying to watch some really weird whisper ASMR video, and then get a “I hope you die whore!” notification. Which turns out, will wake you right up.
MW: Don’t want to cross those streams.
Mercante: No, you really don’t.
MW: My wife watches ASMR videos. There’s one of someone using a wooden rake, going through sand that she watches a lot.
Mercante: It’s so interesting. And I keep wanting to pitch this to, I don’t know, maybe Gizmodo or something. It doesn’t feel like a Kotaku story flat out, but there are different genres of ASMR, which I find really fascinating. And then people are triggered in a good way or relaxed by different kinds.
Like that kind doesn’t relax me, but fake doctor exams? That makes me sleepy. Because it reminds me of when you were a kid and you would play doctor or something, and your friend would be touching your head or pretending to take your heart rate. And that would always relax me when I was a kid, which is really weird. But yeah, fake doctor exams, turns out, are very, very relaxing. There’s a couple called Chili b ASMR, and they do incredible roleplay ASMR that are all doctors, chiropractors or fake healing, and it just knocks me out.
MW: It’s manifested into its own little subculture.
Mercante: They make bank doing it. They have merch and they all visit each other and different ASMR people do videos with each other. They fly to each other’s places, and it’s fascinating.
MW: I have seen firsthand the harassment campaigns some of these brave gamers lob against you. How do you deal with concentrated harassment like that? I feel like just by virtue of being the senior editor of Kotaku, there’s a target on your back already, and then once you speak or say anything, then there’s going to be people coming at you. So how do you deal with that?
Mercante: Different people will tell you different things that they believe you should do or that they do. There’s a lot of people who believe in gray rocking, which is just being completely innocuous and boring on social media so that they have nothing to capitalize on or get pissed about. I found that doesn’t necessarily work for someone who’s still actively writing articles that get published on the internet, because then they just find my articles and start getting pissed about those. So for me, gray rocking has not been an option. Also because I believed that if I was going to put myself out there and write that article in the first place, disappearing after that, I did not want any of them to take it as a dub as like, “Oh, we scared her off the internet.” And I think 99% of this campaign, this “movement” or whatever you want to call it, is literally to scare people out of these spaces.
MW: I think calling it a “movement” is a little too generous.
Mercante: You have to have a goal as a movement and the goals change every day. So, I think this group is just the way it was the last time. The goal is to make people who they deem as “other” uncomfortable in the space and hopefully uncomfortable enough that they don’t stay in this space anymore. And then they can repopulate it with their fucking jizz sock group of men. And that’s cool, but I’m not going to let that happen. I’ve always been someone who has courted attention. I’m an Aries, and we love it. So I’m very comfortable. I am also very thick skinned. My parents, for lack of a better term, did not raise a bitch. They were very hard on me. They were very intense in their criticism of me. They did not tell me that I was the best just because I was theirs. And whether or not that’s a good way to raise a kid is not really the discussion, but it did make me very capable of dealing with criticism and listening to criticism. And also now at this point, now that I’m in my 30s, and knowing how much of it is just bullshit, no, you’re not going to get on the internet and tell me I have a flat ass. That is a lie.
MW: “The evidence is right here!”
Mercante: Hello! My friends who exist in real life have been like, “Stop reading things that you think are funny off of Twitter to me because I don’t care.” And I’ve been in that Mean Girls meme where it’s like, “I could hear myself talking and I just couldn’t stop.” Even though no one cared, like everyone wanted me to stop talking. So finding that balance is important too. Remembering sometimes when I’ve had like six beers at a Rangers game to maybe not open up Twitter and tweet the first thing that comes into my head, even though sometimes it’s funny, has been interesting. I think just making sure that I have protections in place, like things that my company has offered me just to kind of keep some of my more private information offline. That’s been important, and also being really liberal with the block and mute button. And remembering that, I think I said this like the first day that this started kicking off, none of these people would say this to me in person. None of these people would be in the spaces I would be in person. They wouldn’t be at my local bar, coffee shop, hanging out. And, if they were by chance, they would certainly not come up to me and be like, “Hey, you slur, slur, slur, slur,” or whatever, you know? I think just remembering that it’s the internet and that emboldens people to be like that.
MW: There’s an old Penny Arcade strip about this very thing: John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory: Normal person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad.
Mercante: I grew up on Long Island, altercations, verbal or otherwise, were part of my childhood.
MW: I was bullied very heavily as a child. I got in fistfights in the playground. Nothing you’re saying to me–I just think it’s funny.
Mercante: 100%. It’s hard for a lot of people after the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th fucking comment about, you know, my nose or how I look a certain way or my whatever. That could rightfully affect some people. It’s a lot, and I think anybody who feels like they don’t want to deal with that and they want to log off or they want to take time away like that’s completely valid. Protect yourself. Some people like me, you know, I love The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. I’m just the bitch who kicked the hornet’s nest, and I’m going to keep doing it. And that’s how I was even before I randomly doubled my Twitter followers within two weeks. I’ve always been like this. Whether you like it or not. This is just how I’ve always been.
MW: You have also been labeled public enemy number one by the #FreeStellarBlade crowd. How do you respond to these accusations, and have you no shame?
Mercante: I actually don’t give a fuck about Stellar Blade. I haven’t bought the game yet. It’s not really something I would play normally. It’s not really my genre of choice.
MW: I’m having a good time with it.
Mercante: People seem to really like it.
MW: It has that blend of Souls and Devil May Cry combat, and it’s actually pretty fun.
Mercante: The Souls aspect is what would probably pull me in, because I’m not really a DMC person. I’m a Souls person though, so I feel like it’d be something I’d check out. I think it becoming the bastion of the culture war is the stupidest thing in the world. Because again, you can just see from the way that the narrative has shifted. They’re attributing things to me, and I haven’t covered the game. I mentioned it briefly when I was talking about Hades because I don’t have a problem with people being sexy in games. I just think it’s boring to have a chick be sexy in games who’s just bland.
MW: She’s just a doll.
Mercante: Yeah. It’s just giving nothing. We had a feeling either way: If the game was released and people liked it, then it would be, “Win against woke!”, and then if the game was released and people didn’t like it, it would be, “The journos are whining!” It was guaranteed to do this. I don’t think any of us realized that it would release and then they would be angry.
MW: Even more angry.
Continue reading “Kotaku’s Alyssa Mercante Will Not be Scared Off The Internet”
