Player Data: It’s in the Game

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Jodie Antypas (MBA 2005) didn’t grow up playing video games. They weren’t expressly forbidden in her house, but they also weren’t encouraged. So, how does a non-gamer end up leading large teams at Nintendo and Electronic Arts (EA) in the consumer marketing space? Antypas isn’t quite sure, but she’s quickly become an expert in the field, using player data and consumer opinions to drive the past, present and future of the video game industry. Now, Antypas is walking down a new path that she couldn’t predict. She’s a newly published children’s book author, taking an adapted bedtime story she told her daughters and repackaging it for the world to enjoy. The Daniels alumna joined the Voices of Experience podcast to share how she ended up leading 100-person teams in the video game industry, what drove her to write her new book and why she’s taking a leave from her current role.

Show Notes

Jodie Antypas is a consumer marketing expert currently on leave from her role as VP of consumer marketing at Electronic Arts. She’s a recently published children’s book author with her debut story “Just Like an Astronaut.” Prior to her time at EA, Antypas was an assistant manager of research at Nintendo and graduated from Daniels in 2005 with an MBA.

Table of Contents

1:10 A non-gamers journey to gaming
3:16 Deciding against law school for an MBA
8:03 “Games are constantly evolving”
12:54 From Pong to the modern era
15:06 Key management skills for large teams
17:35 Leveraging your objective mindset to lead
18:52 “I finally gave myself permission that I could take a break”
21:44 Pivoting to children’s books
25:29 Be open to twists and turns
26:47 Show notes and credits

In this episode:

• Jodie’s New Book: Just Like an Astronaut
• Los Altos Town Crier: High-tech VP from Los Altos releases first children’s book
• Daniels College of Business: A Weekend to Lead
• NME: ‘Battlefield 2042’ maps and vehicles are getting big changes

Related articles and information:

• Bain & Company: Level Up: The Future of Video Games Is Bright
• VentureBeat: Electronic Arts’ Jeff Gamon on the evolution of EA Originals
• The Guardian: TechScape: How Nintendo’s stayed the most innovative tech company of our time
• Jodie Antypas on LinkedIn

Online extra: What does the future of gaming look like?

Transcript

Nick Greenhalgh:
This month on the Voices of Experience podcast. How does a marketing and analytics expert in the video game industry end up publishing a children’s book?

Jodie Antypas:
And other people are probably wondering how did you go from the forefront of interactive digital entertainment to the most analog version of entertainment?

Nick Greenhalgh:
That’s Jodie Antypas, a Daniels MBA alumna and Vice President of Consumer Marketing at Electronic Arts. Much like her unconventional entry into the video game industry, Antypas never thought she’d become a published author. Instead, she’s kept an open mind in her career, following passions as they present themselves and never shying from a challenge. Now, she’s embarking on a novel journey, taking some time away from her career to prioritize something new… herself.

Jodie Antypas:
“I’m in my forties, and I finally gave myself permission that I could take a break and I didn’t have to be 65 when I did that.”

Nick Greenhalgh:
Antypas joined to discuss the winding path that led her to the video game industry, her thoughts on what the next frontier of gaming holds, and why she’s stepping back from her career, all on the Voices of Experience Podcast, an extension of the Signature Speaker Series at the Daniels College of Business. Jodie, welcome to the show.

Jodie Antypas:
Thanks for having me.

Nick Greenhalgh:
I want to jump right in here and talk about your career and sort of what led you to it. You have an unorthodox journey into the video game industry. Is it true that you weren’t allowed to play video games when you were younger?

Jodie Antypas:
Well, I wouldn’t say it was totally forbidden, but it only took me a couple of times asking my parents if I could have a Nintendo or a Super Nintendo back in the 1980s to realize that that was never going to happen, so I just stopped asking pretty quickly. But I would summarize my gameplay experience as a kid, as watching a lot of Super Mario Brothers, watching my friends play. And then I would get my turn, play for maybe 30 to 45 seconds before I died, and then would hand the controller back to them. So, I will say, as an adult, I have a deep appreciation for how the multiplayer game experience has evolved and has really supported players like me who didn’t have a great experience or didn’t have a lot of great skills to do single player gaming when they were growing up. So, I think that’s a really great innovation for kids.

Nick Greenhalgh:
Great. And was that part of the reason you were drawn to this for your career?

Jodie Antypas:
I think, like you said, my path to gaming was pretty unorthodox. I joined Nintendo back in 2007, shortly after Nintendo launched the Wii. For anyone who remembers the Wii, it was a really interactive gameplay gaming experience, a lot of effort to target moms and kids and families. And so that felt really approachable to me. I will say at the time I remember picking up a copy of Nintendo Power Magazine before my interview and thinking to myself, “I’ve really got to pretend like I know what I’m talking about here.” So, skimming that, trying to learn some of the characters, but that’s when I joined Nintendo and was really my first foray into the gaming industry. Really as a player, I started playing a lot more games at that point, and as an employee.

Nick Greenhalgh:
Great. And we’ll dive deeper into that as we go here, but I wanted to take a step back and talk a little bit more about your journey and specifically how Daniels helped shape it. While you left DU with an MBA, I understand you had been pondering law school first. What changed on your end?

Jodie Antypas:
I got my undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania, which is a great school and was a very pre-professional environment, in my opinion, really academically focused. A lot of my peers at school knew what they wanted to do from a really young age, and I didn’t. At least that was my perception, is that they knew what they wanted to do. Lots of kids going to med school, law school, wanting to work on Wall Street. I don’t think I even knew what Wall Street careers were until I got to Penn and lots of kids enrolled in The Wharton School.

So, for me, trying to figure out what I wanted to do, it was a little bit of an intimidating environment. And I loved reading, I liked history, I liked writing, I liked political science classes, and all of that really led me to the, “Oh, my next step should be law school.,” without a lot of really deep thinking about what that meant, what my career was going to be like, what work I was going to be doing, and how I would be spending my time in my career for the next 20, 30, 40 years. And so I always, when I mentor younger students and college students and people trying to figure out what they want to do, I always tell them, “It’s okay to not know what you want to do when you’re 22 to 23.” And so I took the LSAT and was starting to apply to law schools and just really couldn’t answer the question they asked, which was, “Why do you want to be an attorney?” Or “What work do you want to do?” And I would say I had a crisis of confidence at age 23, because I had no idea what I wanted to do. And I had spent most of my college career thinking I was going to take the path and follow the path into law school. So, I ended up at an open house. I had moved to Denver and was living with a friend.

I was working as an intern at the Colorado Golf Association in Denver. And I ended up in an open house for DU’s MBA program, and they had a concentration in sports management. And I thought, “I’ll go check that out.” And shortly thereafter I enrolled and was accepted and started my path down getting an MBA with a concentration in sports management, thinking I might want to work in professional sports or working as an athletic director at a university. I had been a college athlete at Penn. I was a volleyball player through college, Division I volleyball player.

So, that was something that was familiar to me, and I thought where I could contribute and really was passionate about that space. So, it was a pretty big pivot from thinking I was going to law school, to interning at a golf association, to applying and enrolling and getting into an MBA program all within the span of about 10 months. But it was a great decision for me, and I think it opened a lot of doors and led me down a career path that I otherwise might not have considered.

Nick Greenhalgh:
I understand that you also left Daniels with a little more than your degree. You shared with me that you found someone important to you while you were here. As this episode debuts around Valentine’s Day, could you share more about the Daniels matchmaking experience as well?

Jodie Antypas:
Sure. So yes, I left Daniels with… I met my husband. So, my husband, for many years we had a debate about what class we actually met in, but after about 10 years of marriage we found a notebook, one of our course notebooks that had the date and time of the class that we actually met in. So, we met in Stats 3900 in 2005, so it was great. We did a lot of classes together and some members of our class had gone to the Outdoor Leadership Experience together, and I don’t know if that’s a class that’s still offered at DU.
But we were doing ropes courses and while a bunch of us were there, we all agreed to sign up to run a half marathon together. And pretty quickly my husband and I were the only two that actually kept up the commitment of training for the half marathon. So, we went from classmates and training buddies, and then started dating from there. So, a great way to get to know people. You can see if someone’s really boring or if you have a lot to talk about with them over a 13-mile run.

Nick Greenhalgh:
Great. That’s not something we put in the Daniels curriculum, but a lovely outcome of your time here.

Jodie Antypas:
Yeah, it worked out.

Nick Greenhalgh:
Let’s talk about your career. Across your time at Nintendo and EA, you worked on teams in research, analytics, consumer marketing, and more. What can companies glean from player data, and how does that inform their decisions?

Jodie Antypas:
Well, there’s really has been so much change in the data space since the time that I started in the industry. When I think back to 2007 at Nintendo, in my earliest days, I don’t even think there was a data science team. And if you think about how important data science is to most technology and internet companies today, it’s pretty amazing how much evolution has happened in that space.

Back then we were asking players a lot of behavioral questions. So, what mode did you play? When did you play? Who were you playing with? And all of that data, all of those behavioral type questions now we can capture from, obviously players opt into it, but we can capture from the gaming system. And so we spend a lot more of our time on the data side now and on the consumer research side, asking players for questions around their motivations, or why they play a particular game, or why they love games and not just what they’re doing.

And then looking at marrying that motivational data with the behavioral data that we get from player games. So, there’s a lot of really powerful data and really interesting data sets that we get from players. And I think this goes back to one of the first questions that you asked me is how does a non-gamer end up working in the gaming industry for 15 plus years? And it’s really one of the main reasons for me is really interesting data sets that you can work on real time with player feedback and work creatively with developers and artists and designers to solve player problems.

So, I think one really good example of that is looking at a map in the Battlefield game several years ago and recognizing that it was completely unbalanced, which means to a non-gamer that you’re playing two multi-player teams against each other. And in this particular map setting, one team would win. It didn’t matter how good the players were, it was just that the game set-up and the structure was really unbalanced. And so we took a look at that, and particularly we compared it to the other eight maps of this particular game. And all of the other maps had normal distributions, like a normal bell curve of win/loss records for each team.

And this particular map was just, there was no correlation, a lot of noise in the data. And so we knew that there was actually something wrong with the structure. It wasn’t just who was playing or how they were playing. So, we took a step back and met with the design team and recognized that it was imbalanced and what could we do about that? So, we added armored vehicles. We added a new capture point in the map. So, it’s a really interesting example. And we redeployed some of these changes to the map and changes to the game and a patch, which is something that you can do in a video game that you can’t do in a lot of other products.

And we saw almost immediate improvement. So, it’s one example of some of the many things that you can do with players and their data and really trying to figure out how to improve the player experience and making it more enjoyable for them.

Nick Greenhalgh:
And I think the point on patches is a really interesting one. There’s a whole generation of games that if the game came out and it was broken, there was no fixing it. That was the game. That’s not the case anymore. These games are constantly evolving based on player feedback, data. I think that’s a really interesting point we reach now versus where we were, I don’t know how many years ago, but years ago.

Jodie Antypas:
Yeah, games are constantly evolving. We talk a lot about games today as live services. So, we’re constantly working with teams to deploy new content, to keep the experience fresh and exciting, but also to fix problems and fix bugs. And so the launch of a game is really just the start of its journey with consumers. And so it’s a very different experience, especially as games are becoming more free to play, where they’ll join a game and anyone can join for free. And the experience or the monetization is supported by the content that players buy for other activities that they want to do in the game.

Nick Greenhalgh:
I think something else I’m interested in hearing your perspective on is the fact that this technology is clearly evolving and games now are almost lifelike, depending on what the focus is. Is there a connecting thread from the Atari Pong days to the games of today? Is there something that carries over?

Jodie Antypas:
I think a great player experience is something that has carried through from the beginning, the earliest days of gaming until now. I think what that means and how that has evolved because the technology that is supported today has really changed. There’s a really fine balance in games between being fun and being difficult, which is different. I talk to a lot of friends in the software industry or friends who do use their experience design, and you tell them it doesn’t really have to be fun for someone to figure out how to deposit money into their bank.

They functionally need to know how to do that and have to be able to do that in a reasonable amount of time and not get frustrated with it. But it doesn’t necessarily need to be fun. And when you think about a game experience needing to be difficult enough that people want to continue playing it, but easy enough that they’re not going to give up. Fun enough that they’re getting some enjoyment out of it, but hard enough that there’s a little bit of frustration to keep you going for it.

Because if it’s too easy, we know that people are going to quit. Just like nobody wants to watch a blowout football game on TV, you want to watch that close game. You want to watch the team struggle and the team like, “Oh, that was such a great game to watch.” Nobody wants to watch a blowout basketball game or blowout football game. It’s the same with games. And so finding that point is really difficult, but it’s something that I think is really important and how that has evolved. Probably it’s the same concept, but because of the different features and functionality that technology has enabled, it becomes more and more complex to be able to do that and do that well today I think.

Nick Greenhalgh:
At the height of your time at EA, you managed a team of over 110. What are the most important leadership qualities to have when you oversee a team that large?

Jodie Antypas:
I think one of the reasons I stayed at EA for 12 years, which is a really long time in today’s day and age, particularly in marketing and analytics and insights, you don’t see people stay at one job for that long. But I’ve really appreciated being at EA where there’s a lot of leadership opportunities, the art and investment in leadership is something that is appreciated, and EA is a company where leadership is appreciated and it’s something that is invested in, and that’s something that I have really enjoyed over the course of my career. A couple of things stand out to me when it comes to managing large scale teams, and I didn’t actually have a lot of management experience when I got my MBA. I was definitely one of the younger students in some of these management leadership courses, but I like to think I learned a lot over the years and I’m able to draw on my DU coursework.

Nick Greenhalgh:
Great.

Jodie Antypas:
But when you have a large team, you really can’t do it all on your own. And so you have to rely on great talent and build a set of leaders around you to support you and to really lead the work. So, I spent a lot of my time investing in finding the right talents, recruiting and putting the right talent in the right role. And in many cases, removing the wrong talent from the wrong role and helping find the right career paths for people to be successful and for teams to be successful. I think another thing that great leaders do is acknowledge that when you start leading larger teams, and with that leading multiple functions in different functions, that you’re far outside of your own area of expertise. So, in my case, my expertise is in consumer insights and research and analytics and have expanded my career over time to include marketing technology and lifecycle marketing and media strategy and media planning. And at that point, your job is not being the expert in those functions. It’s really leading and listening and supporting and figuring out how you use the right resources that you have at your disposal, and how can you help those experts in those roles make the right decisions and support them to solve problems that need to be solved. And so it’s much less about the functional area and more about what leadership skills are you flexing to be able to help your team succeed, and using objectivity to make some really difficult decisions at times.

Nick Greenhalgh:
And has that experience led you to additional coaching and career development opportunities?

Jodie Antypas:
So, at one point in my career, I was leading user experience research, which might not sound like a stretch for someone who led consumer insights and analytics. But a big part of the role was overseeing the teams that were giving feedback to the development teams on gameplay quality and game design. And that was a huge stretch for me personally and a really vulnerable space for me, as I talked about earlier in the podcast, not having a huge gaming background. And so giving feedback to some renowned developers within EA about what players were telling us about their game really had to leverage my objective mindset. It didn’t really matter what I thought of the game, but this is what players were telling us. This is what we were seeing in our labs. And so I think that was an opportunity for me to see how I was really relying on my leadership skills, not my game design skills or my user research or game developer skills. It was really what leadership and how could I take that feedback and share that in the most effective manner with some of our teams internally.

Nick Greenhalgh:
Great. You recently went on leave from EA in a move that you described as an opportunity to recharge and focus on some other projects, one of which we’ll get to shortly, so hang on. What motivated that decision and was it challenging to ultimately take the plunge into leave?

Jodie Antypas:
I would say it was a big challenge for me to come to terms with the fact that I think I needed to take some time off. It’s probably not a wholly unique answer for someone like me who’s had a pretty intense job and two kids and lived through the last couple of pandemic years and spent some time thinking about what I really want and starting to get a little bit burned out. So, I took a lot of time and was thinking about what do I want from my next chapter? And what I ultimately decided is I wanted to give myself some time, and it took me a little while to wrap my head around that. It might have been an obvious decision to a lot of people, but it’s something that I really had to wrestle with. I’m in my forties, and I finally gave myself permission that I could take a break and I didn’t have to be 65 when I did that. So, I am spending some time recharging and reading, which is something that I love to do, and doing yoga and exercising and cooking and making jam, and just things that I didn’t have the time or mental energy to do when I was working more than full-time and had two kids and spending a lot more time with my family. So, it’s only been a couple of weeks, so I would say I’m still in the decompression phase of taking a leave of absence, but it’s been really refreshing to have some kind of time and mind space back.

Nick Greenhalgh:
Great. I think there’s a really important lesson there for our listeners. It doesn’t matter how old you are or how long you’ve been in your career, if you need time for yourself, I think you just shared that you need to take it. And I think I just wanted to call that out again, because I think that’s an important lesson for our listeners.

Jodie Antypas:
I totally agree, and I think it’s a lot more common now, particularly after the pandemic. I think as a woman, I was really hesitant to… I even said to my boss at the time, “I just don’t want to be mommy tracked.” And he said to me, he’s like, “I don’t know what that means.” And I said, “Well, of course you don’t know what that means because you’re a man.” But I didn’t want to feel like I’d put 20 years into my career and that I was just throwing it all away. And that was something that I really had to wrestle with. How was I going to emotionally handle taking this time off?

Nick Greenhalgh:
As I mentioned, you have one big project that you recently revealed, a children’s book. How does a marketing and analytics expert land on a children’s book? I understand your family had some influence on the topic?

Jodie Antypas:
And other people are probably wondering how did you go from the forefront of interactive digital entertainment to the most analog version of entertainment? But I think I’ve mentioned a couple of times that I love books. I’ve always been a big reader. My mom was an English teacher, so whenever I asked for that Nintendo, they would tell me to go climb a tree or read a book. And I think over the years I’ve always wanted to be a writer. If you asked me what I wanted to be when I was in elementary school, I would’ve said an author or a writer. I’ve taken some creative writing courses. When I lived in Denver, I took a creative writing course at DU one point after I had received my MBA.

So, it’s something I’ve dabbled in over time, but never really seriously put a lot of effort behind. And about four years ago, someone told my then six-year-old that she was too curious and she came home from school one day and she said, “I’m too curious and I ask too many questions.” And I thought to myself, “What are you talking about? You’re six. You’re supposed to be curious, and I love your curiosity.” And she’s such a great critical thinker and loved the questions that she asked. And it crushed her. And then it crushed me because I thought, how can one person have this much of an impact on you? So, that night I made up a bedtime story for her, and then the next night she asked me to tell her the same bedtime story.

And probably, like many parents, I thought to myself, “What story did I tell you last night?” And had to rethink that. And so for several years, this was just a story that existed in the notes section of my phone, and I would occasionally tell it. And then a year or two later, my then four-year-old said, “Mommy, I love this book, but it needs pictures.” And so I thought, “Okay, maybe I’ll give this a shot.” And I shared the story with a couple of early childhood educators and teachers that I knew, and they said, “I need this book in my classroom.” I remember one of them just saying, “I need this book. There’s nothing like this that really hits on curiosity and a little bit of shame and embarrassment.”

There’s books about making mistakes and lots of books about girls and STEM, but there’s nothing really around that intersection of embarrassment and shame and overcoming that. And so I decided to go for it.

Nick Greenhalgh:
Are you planning on writing another one? Is that something that’s on your agenda? Do your daughters have ideas for follow-ups or anything like that?

Jodie Antypas:
I am not sure if I’m going to go for a second book or not yet at this point. What’s so interesting about books these days is that so many of them are written in series. So, if you think about Cat Kid Comic Club and Bad Kitty, there’s so many of them. And I was just happy getting my one book out into the world. And so I’m not sure if I’m going to do series yet, but whenever I read to classes and kids, they do ask, “Where’s the next book?” And, “What’s the theme of the next story?” So, I’m not sure. I do love Grace, the main character of my book. I think she’s done a really great job of bringing a needed lesson to kids. So, we’ll see if there’s something else in the works for her and for me.

Nick Greenhalgh:
Great. And for our listeners, the title of Jodie’s book is Just Like an Astronaut. We’ll link that in our show notes, so feel free to pop on over there after this if you want to take a peek at it. Our last question here, Jodie, is themed around the book again. While Just Like an Astronaut is primarily focused on children and encouraging them to follow their curiosity, the message, I’m sure, extends to an older audience as well. As a voice of experience and a guest on this podcast, what is something else you’d like to share with our listeners?

Jodie Antypas:
I think my advice for listeners would be, be open to the twists and turns that might come in your career. I think I never would’ve expected to spend 15 years working in the gaming industry and then publishing a book. So, be open to opportunities that come your way that you might not expect, things that you might not plan for can open some really amazing doors for you.

Nick Greenhalgh:
Fantastic. Well, thank you, Jodie. We really appreciate you joining us on the Voices of Experience Podcast, and thank you for sharing that wisdom.

Jodie Antypas:
Thanks so much for having me.

Nick Greenhalgh:
For more on this episode, including a link to Just Like an Astronaut, be sure to check out our show notes. You can find those and more at daniels dot du dot edu slash voe dash podcast. The VOE Podcast is an extension of Voices of Experience, the signature speaker series at the Daniels College of Business, sponsored by US Bank. Patrick Orr and Chloe Smith are our sound engineers, alumnus Joshua Muetzel wrote our theme and I’m Nick Greenhalgh. Until next time, be sure to subscribe and leave us a rating and review.