The Community Lounge — on writing the Pocket Mentor and breaking into community

The Community Lounge is Feature Upvote's podcast about the people who hold games together after launch — the community managers, moderators, and support leads who usually don't get a chapter of their own. I was very glad to be asked.

In this episode Steve McLeod and I spent most of our time on two things. The first was the book — why I wrote The Pocket Mentor for Game Community Management, who I wrote it for, and what I wish had existed on my own shelf when I started. It began as the pocket-sized handbook I kept looking for and never finding: not a theory book, not a memoir, but the honest working manual for a job that is still, somehow, mostly learned by falling into it.

The second was the advice — the actual, useful kind. How to get into community management when nobody in your life can quite explain what it is. Which parts of the job you can practise before anyone hires you. What a good day looks like on Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher, or GWENT, and what a hard one looks like. Where the work quietly overlaps with games I love from the other side of the fence, like The Plucky Squire and Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

It's audio-only, and it's a friendly one. If you're thinking about this career, or hiring someone into it, the listen link is below.

Source: featureupvote.com/thecommunitylounge/podcasts/s01e08-carolin-wendt/

— Carolin