What I Learned During Summer Break
The Player Support Newsletter - 3 AUG 2025
Introduction: Loving the Human Element
What we do at work is primarily about human beings and, therefore, relationships. There is no company without its people, no game without the team, no deep sense of relationship with our players without good customer support. Much of this is obvious, but it common to see top executives make decisions in a way that destroys long-term relationships both with their employees and customers. The short-term profit game is a popular one with arguably the strongest incentives on the planet. You could go on forever about all the evil this has wrought, but the one overarching consequence I’d like to focus on today is the destruction of our relationships with each other, with nature, and thefore, our humanity.
A big reason I chose to start Player Support was to have a front seat during an important time of industry transition. GenAI, LLMs, super intelligence, and all the rest of it is threatening to wipe out many jobs, and the customer service industry is near the top of the list. Why wait for others to figure it out when I can run towards the fire? It has been my nature. I have come to understand that I really enjoy big, complex challenges, especially involving people.
Before you classify me a luddite, know that I am supportive of some uses of AI, and that I appreciate technological advances. We must, however, be allowed to make observations and ask questions along the road of so-called eternal progress and continuous improvement. No matter what the most greedy, persuasive, and powerful among us say, there are always tradeoffs. Much has been lost for recent generations due to our collective use of social media, but we have not slowed anything down nor truly been able to change a lot about the unintended consequences. Some good comes from it, but it is not all good. If the promises of this AI wave come true, what is to stop bad actors from using it against us? Against you and your loved ones?
Whatever is coming, I am putting my energy into trying to figure out how we can maintain our love for the human element in everything we do. I often tell my friends working on the tech/AI side that I’ll focus on the human being stuff, while they work on the technical problems. Hopefully, we will find somewhere to meet in the middle when all is said and done. Early in my career, a gentleman pitched chatbots to me as a full replacement for human agents. My reply then is the same one I will share with you now. I corrected my salesman friend, saying, “Augmentation. What we are doing is augmenting our agents, not replacing all of them.” I still stand by that. Even if larger portions of work are being automated, this is the same direction we’ve always been headed in anyway. As long as automation can be done well, I’ve always been in favor of it. There is, however, an unintended consequence we’re already seeing in brain scans for heavy AI users - and it’s literally dark. Brains aren’t lighting up the way they should be, yet the show must go on. Few really care that much about it and certainly no one at the top of any AI company can afford to slow down.
I believe to cede all realms of problem solving and creation is to surrender thinking, purpose, and the human soul to the machine.
Today, I write a little about how I have tried to put people first in how we do things at Player Support.
1. We Have Tried to Make Our Hiring Process More Human, Not Less
Effort has been made since day one to make the interviews and the recruiting processes make more common sense than the average experience. We are slower than others because our HR team carefully reviews CVs/resumes, looking for signs of individuality and thoughtfulness. Once we decide we’d like to start the process, however, we try to move quickly through the various stages, getting a person a clear answer within a week or two. Our assessment tests have a mixture of individual and team based exercises, which we insist are done in-person unless the candidate lives very far away from one of our offices.
We accept the reality that our process is and will always be flawed. I tell my staff to trust their vibes and gut-feelings, to have a clear opinion one way or another on each candidate. Good practice dictates that we try our best not to influence each other’s opinions when we have panel interviews. My personal rejection template has a message that emphasizes the fact that every company makes mistakes in selection, and that the candidate is a valuable person no matter the outcome of any job interview. When candidates ask me for feedback, I write them a personal reply, though, admittedly, a few times my response time has lagged too far behind. While it may take us longer to get to all of our applicants, we believe those who decide to go through it all will appreciate the effort if they’re the kind of person we’re looking to have join the team.
Do I see a use-case for AI in sourcing and recruiting? Yeah, sure, there are obvious tasks that AI can do better than humans today. What I’m seeing now, however, is pretty risky to employer brands though. Some of it is downright awful. Problems always come with the false promises of the salesperson to “automate everything away today.” (Again, augmentation, not full replacement). I’m looking to try a few different kinds of experiments in the coming year and I’ll be sure to share what we do, our mistakes, and what we’ve learned.
2. The Performance Improvement Plan Will Always Suck, but We’re Trying Our Best to Make it a Genuine Effort to Help Employees
Well, it does suck.
I don’t see a way around that sentiment and I don’t believe in corporate gaslighting. Nothing is worse than being lied to about your performance and competencies because it throws off your entire perception of reality. Emotional rollercoaster rides of believing you’re doing great one day, and then being told you have performance issues the next week is shocking. Almost everyone prefers being told in advance so that they can work on the issues and have job security.
We try to have performance related conversations at least once a month, and our management framework requires that our managers share with their employees exactly how they’re doing on a regular basis. Even with these regular practices, being put on a PIP is hard. I liken it to having an explosion go off nearby, like in those military movies. All you hear after the blast is a loud ringing, while everything else becomes muted background noise for a bit.
A friend once said to me, “if you had performance issues, wouldn’t you want more help and attention from management?”
”Yes”, I said, “but it’s extremely difficult to get that message across after the immediate shellshock of announcing to someone that they’re on a PIP.”
So, we are trying to reimagine every step along the way of a PIP to be focused on getting the employee the specific help they need to learn and grow out of their performance challenges. No one is going to believe anything we say about how we want the PIP to go, so we have to constantly work at getting really good at helping people improve their performance and to maintain those new levels. You can’t tell people to come to you whenever they need help, we have to come to them. If an explosion has left you friend disoriented, you’ve got to pull them out of danger immediately. I’m not ready to share any numbers just yet, but even with our early efforts we are seeing promising true pass rates. People are recovering and making it back to service safely.