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.
Mercante: Yeah, that it was somehow censored, which I think has been disproven already. The goalposts are shifting so fucking much, I don’t even know how you guys keep track of anything.
MW: First it was that the woke media won’t give this game fair scores. Reviews came out, and even Kotaku was largely positive, and they somehow said they gave good reviews because they saw other non-woke outlets giving it positive reviews, and that’s a win for gamers. Now we’re in this current arc where Mark Kern created this Change.org petition to “Free Stellar Blade”, and we have all of these horny, desperate men giving testimonials from their goon caves.
Mercante: It’s terrifying, truly.
MW: I have a quote I pulled from the game’s director because he was asked about this. “The final costume that we wanted to show you is indeed the costume in version 1.0.0.2. I want to clarify that this is our final product.” So why are these assholes so upset? And if you put this out to them they say, “They’re being pressured by Sony!”
Mercante: But they don’t have an issue with Sony censoring gay shit in Japan. That’s not a problem. It’s titties. This is why and I’ve said this in interviews before, this is why Steve Bannon employed this behavior and this M.O. for the Trump White House. He was like, “These guys are pissed. We can get them pissed about something every other day, and it could be different. And we could constantly keep them in a cycle of being angry about something and upset about something, even if it’s not a real thing, or even if it’s a solvable thing, or even if we solve it, we’ll just move on to the next thing, and that we have to keep reminding them that in order to stop the thing that they’re angry about this week, whether it’s gender neutral bathrooms or drag queen story hour, that the only way to stop that is if we are in office.” But then the bad scary things keep happening while they’re in office. So there’s nothing to actually do here. And that’s exactly what someone like Mark Kern’s doing. He has shifted what he’s angry about every few days. One of his steps for “freeing Stellar Blade”, is to subscribe to him on Twitter/X which is giving him money. It’s obvious.
MW: It’s so fucking obvious that this guy just wants money. He’s going to say whatever he needs to say to get people all riled up and frothing at the mouth, and it’s like, “Bro, you’re 56 years old and you’re leading a crusade that’s focused entirely around ‘censorship’ of a sexy anime lady in a video game.”
Mercante: This is the crusade of the week. Two weeks ago, it was Warhammer. It was community managers before that, and before that it was Sweet Baby. And it’s just like, pick a grift.
MW: There are so many to choose from.
Mercante: So many to choose from, and it’s also just that the internet gets tired quick. And the attention spans of everyone we all know they’re waning because of screens. And I think that’s just what’s happening. They’re realizing that, oh, you know, the Warhammer things are dying out because they’ve come out and said, “This is just what we do.” Stellar Blade will end in a couple of days too, once the director has to give yet another quote and say, “No, guys, this was intentional.” It’s just exhausting.
Don’t you have kids? Don’t you have a wife? Don’t you have a life? Don’t you have something to do? This is my job, reporting on culture, especially in video games, in pop culture. This is my job. I specialize in looking at the cultural aspect of this. And so, me commenting on this stuff is part of what I do for a living. You’re (Kern) supposed to be developing a game. Why are you spending all day on Twitter demanding people sign a petition that you’ve gotten translated into multiple languages?
MW: I think I know. It’s because the game doesn’t exist. He’s just trying to get people to give him money. Allegedly. Allegedly it doesn’t exist.
Mercante: It’s transparent. I think you can see the people who are making videos on that petition page and it’s easy to immediately laugh at it like I have, but also you take a second to think about it and go, this is sad. These are people who are malleable, and who might not be incredibly social so they might not have had a lot of experience with friendships or relationships. It’s easy to convince them that this is the most important thing for them to be worried about. I think if anything, those people should be angry that they’re getting taken advantage of, and I wish that there was a little bit more self-awareness there so that they could know that these people don’t care about you and they’re never going to care about you. They want your money.
MW: I wonder what percentage of these dudes would suddenly have a moment of clarity if someone just touched their weiner one time.
Mercante: Literally. Literally. It sucks because you are essentially making fun of–and I’m doing it myself all the time–who you should have, and I would like to be able to have more empathy for, but when you’re sending me slurs, I kind of lose the need to be empathetic towards your plight.
MW: The onus is not on you to try and rejigger their way of thinking.
Mercante: I used to be a substitute teacher. I dealt with a lot of kids. I also ran an afterschool program. I know how to deal with kids having trouble in social settings or lashing out, and I was never a bully when I was younger. I think despite being, you know, a soccer team girl, I was in all nerdy classes and I wasn’t allowed to have a social life because my parents were so strict. So some of my closest friends were the weirdo nerdy people. It’s frustrating because I can see the kinds of people that are lacking this the most. And I think it’s a 50/50 split between people who just don’t know better and then just actual virulent racist, transphobic, horrible people, and when that’s your community it’s going to stink for a lot of reasons.
MW: Recently there’s been a lot of noise about Kotaku’s ownership trying to mandate that site basically become an SEO machine, with an absurd number of guides. What, if anything, can you say about that and where things are at now?
Mercante: I can say we’re not going to become a guide site. We’re still going to do and we still have been doing since that all kicked off, important, original reporting and, and community conversations and cultural critiques. That’s something that, you know, for as long as I’m here and Carolyn our managing editor is here, that’s what we’ll keep doing. We can only hope that it’s clear down the line or immediately that Kotaku exists for a reason, and the people who read Kotaku read it because of our unique voice and our cultural critiques, and that we don’t pull punches on important things. And we are not a site that’s just here to churn out guides, and we won’t ever be, so I think striking that balance is important. There are constant comments on any of my tweets of, “Where’s your guides?” Or “Shouldn’t you be writing a guide?”
MW: Well you don’t understand, they’re the first person that’s ever thought of that joke.
Mercante: Oh, clearly. Clearly. “Where’s your guides? Chop chop!” They hold on to something for as long as they can and just beat it to death.
MW: Did you have anything else that you wanted to talk about or promote or or let the Hard Drive audience know about?
Mercante: I said this a while ago. I mean, this has been going on for over a month, it’ll be two months soon. I think we have to remember as an industry that we don’t necessarily need to platform bigots, but I also think that we don’t need to ignore them completely either. Especially when the people getting harassed the hardest are marginalized. Finding that sweet spot of saying, “This sucks. Please stop doing this, and we don’t want you anywhere near our shit if you behave like this,” is important. I would love to see some sort of joint statement from all the big studios that’s just like, “Hey, we don’t like this. We don’t believe in this. Diversity is happening on its own. This is just what it’s like now. Sorry that other people play games. Suck it the fuck up. Please don’t bring your horrible shit to me. Signed, Phil, Spencer, Todd, Howard, and everybody else.” I would love to see something like that. I know that it is scary for companies to stick their neck out like that because of how intense these people can get, but I think remembering that this is still a vocal minority, however many hundreds of thousands of followers they have on Steam, there’s a lot more gamers than that.
MW: And come June, don’t worry, they’ll change their profile pictures to a rainbow flag.
Mercante: Yeah, exactly. They’re allies, right? Of course they are. I’d love to see a little bit more of a full throated, “Hey, fucking stop,” but a girl can dream. I don’t want to make it my entire personality and the only thing that I’m known for. But if that’s my entire personality and the only thing that I’m known for, then fucking so be it. At least it was for a good thing, you know? At least I’m not going to go down in history as somebody who could be my father (Kern), upset that there is not a pubic bone visible in a game. I’d much rather go down in history as the woman who wrote an article that pissed off a bunch of people like that. So if that is my legacy, then so be it. And also, everyone else can kiss my ass.
