Inner Worlds VII: Anna Pickard, the voice of Slack
On games, brands, and freedom to play
I first met Anna Pickard at a workshop session she was running for new hires at Slack, Silicon Valley’s headliner building a communication tool for teams. Even though I didn’t know Anna personally, I knew about her: a writer who’d never had a marketing job before was now one of the most recognizable and admired voices in the tech industry. Slack’s brand has been its weapon in the world of bland enterprise software, and Anna was the one who made that brand speak like a human. A couple days after the workshop, I ran into her in an elevator. I was with a colleague that I’d become good friends with during my early days at the company, and she thought it too good an opportunity to pass up. She said:
‘Hey Anna, meet Wojo. He’s a fan of yours!’
‘Oh, really?’ asked Anna.
Scrambling to retain some dignity I called upon all my wit and came back with this gem:
‘Uh… yeah, I read your tweets.’
But it wasn’t Anna’s tweeting skills that made me ask her for an interview, rather the journey she’s been on. Years before she became the Creative Director at Slack, she was a video game writer. At the time, the team that would later create Slack was building an online multiplayer game called Glitch. But unlike most multiplayer titles, Glitch had no combat or violence. It was all about exploring and interacting with the virtual world. Anna was responsible for the backstory of that world and I was curious to learn how one transitions from spinning a modern fairytale to building a brand for enterprise software.
Apparently, it’s more similar than you’d think.
Wojtek Borowicz: Glitch, the game you worked on as a writer, gave players freedom in reshaping the virtual world. What do you think draws people to that?
Anna Pickard: Freedom to shape the world around us is a fundamental desire. It’s not because we want to build and destroy and have ultimate power, but just because we want to control what is happening to us. Or at least play a part in it, because we often seem so powerless.
There wasn’t much violence to be found in Glitch — a rarity in multiplayer games. Why is it so common for other games to rely on combat and violence?
I don’t know, I don’t play any other massive multiplayer games. There was one text-based game I played: Kingdom of Loathing. There was a multiplayer element to it and it had combat but the violence was purely comedic. I don’t watch violent films, I don’t play violent games, and I have no idea what people enjoy about that. Coming to Glitch, I wasn’t trying to create something different from everything else because even though I knew about Warcraft and all these other games, I wasn’t remotely interested in them.
What was your favorite thing about writing for Glitch?
The freedom to play. The fact that it was this sandbox, a place to play not only for players, but also for the game designers, illustrators, writers. A lot of what I was doing was building the backstory, which was unimportant for the playing of the game, but informed all the elements of the world. It was amazing and very collaborative, just having such a blank slate to write on and all of it feeding into what everyone else was doing.
Do you see yourself coming back to video game writing in the future?
I really enjoyed it. After Glitch I went on to work with a few more studios. We created a maths game called Twelve A Dozen and built that world from scratch, with only the brief of there is a plucky young character and they have to fight against some kind of baddie and they’re going to use math — what’s the story? It’s a huge challenge, but I loved it and I’d love to do that again at some point.
I like the idea of a kind of Choose Your Own Adventure style fairytale, where the princess can rescue the prince, or become a scientist, or take over the world. Something that takes a familiar tale and makes it empowering and different.
So world-building is the part of video game writing that appeals to you the most?
Yeah, absolutely! The stretch of the imagination, the ability to not have any limits, to come from nothing and create everything. It’s amazing.
The unfortunate thing about online multiplayer games is that when they are closed, the whole universe created within vanishes. That’s what happened to Glitch and it must be painful for you, as an author. Knowing that pain, would you do Glitch again if you could go back in time?
Absolutely. With Glitch, we’ve made all the assets copyright-free and you see them popping up all over the place, so it lives on in some way. The whole Glitch Encyclopedia is online and I have this dream that one day, when I have time, I will just take, typeset, and put out this encyclopedia of things in a world that no one will ever see… and which no one will ever buy. I put a lot of work into it and the stuff is pretty well written. I’m really proud of it, but I’m not sad that it’s gone. It served its purpose and its time was done. Glitch was very powerful for the people who were in it at the time and now have this shared memory.
I was a journalist before, so I learned not be precious about my words and about what I do. Today’s newspapers are tomorrow’s fish and chips paper. Even earlier I was an actress, working mainly in theater. And a theater performance just happens and then it’s gone. You can’t be precious about things.
How do you transition from game writing to branding?
I would never have done this for anyone but this team. At first I didn’t really understand what the product was, but I knew that if the same team behind Glitch were working on it, it was something good. Not in the sense of not bad, but something intended to help people and make life better in some way. I have great faith in these people.
Once I truly got what Slack was, I realised it would have made life so much easier. I spent many years working remotely between London, New York, and San Francisco. Many times I would write a whole set of levels for a game, and then wake up in the morning only to find a Google Doc covered in notes, saying we’ve decided to scrap this, can you rewrite it? with no context of how they decided that. A tool like this would have changed that fundamentally.
Are there any similarities between writing for games and writing for a brand?
Oh God, yes! It’s creating a voice in the mind of the user that they appreciate, understand and, fundamentally, that they recognize wherever they come across it. Giving voice to anything is fundamentally the same job. Giving voice to something that is perceived as so dry was just more of a challenge.
Slack’s brand is rooted in language. It’s interesting, because language is the ultimate world-building tool for writers. So, is building a brand also world-building?
For me it is, but you need to take anything I say with a pinch of salt. I’ve never worked on a game before Glitch, and I’ve never worked on a brand before Slack. It really helps coming from a theatrical background, because it’s all about thinking about everything as storytelling. Thinking about the power of where stories come from and how you tell them. Anything you put out, you need to ask yourself: what story am I trying to tell and what story are the users going to tell themselves when they encounter this feature? When a user goes into Slack’s All Unreads view and reads everything there is to be read, what is the story they’re going to tell themselves? Is it going to be Ugh, that’s another inbox I’ve cleared or Yay! Now I can do something else? How do you shape the story users tell themselves through the way you tell your story?
For people using Slack, it should be a complete 360 experience. If they interact with us on Twitter, or through a customer support ticket, or they see an advert in the wild, or they’re in the product and we tell them something has gone wrong, they should recognize us. They should feel like it’s a voice they know, although I don’t want to say a friend because software being overly friendly or too matey is difficult and awful. And just unrealistic, let’s face it.
Do you believe interacting with a brand can be a form of escapism, like reading a novel or playing a video game?
Not to the same extent. I certainly wouldn’t want it to be. We invite conversation on Twitter and people quite often talk to Slack as if it’s one person, even though we’re firing out 10 responses a minute and it’s clearly 20 people behind that. We made a decision to take on this single persona and people buy into that. But I wouldn’t say it’s escapism, it’s playing along. When someone tweets marry me Slack, they know it’s not a single person. It’s the personality in the lot of us they’re interacting with.
We work very hard on interpreting our culture and turning that into our brand. And that’s really all I’m doing, acting as a conduit through which we take the working culture we have and flip it externally to welcome people to the product and to the brand.
I’m wondering if someone might see Slack itself as a form of escapism. Slack has excellent publicity, but in the past year people also started calling it out as a possible distraction in the workplace. Do you think the friendly language, colorful interface, and welcoming design offer some people an escape from the bleak corporate reality?
Wait, so you’re saying that to offer them an escape from a bleak, corporate reality is… bad?
It makes me curious. There are people who literally liked Slack so much that they decided they cannot use it productively.
Those kind of stories are inevitable. If you worked in journalism, you’ll know that after a wave of people going oh my goodness, this is amazing! some editor will always start thinking about a counterpoint. We’ve all heard Slack is awesome — now, what is the new view? Which is not to say people don’t get distracted, but we’ve purposefully added ways to shut the noise off. And when people talk about how distracting Slack can be, I understand it, but we can only work with the culture people have in their own work. At Slack, we’ve worked out our own ways of dealing with that. I’m in no more channels than I need to be, I mute channels I don’t want to read until lunchtime, and I use Do not Disturb when I’m writing for a couple of hours.
I don’t think offering people a way of work different to the bleak corporate reality is a bad thing. I don’t think feeling more comfortable to bring more elements of yourself to work is a bad thing. Working in a tool like Slack allows you to be more transparent and to better understand what people are saying. To have more tools to give tone and personality to the work you’re doing and things you’re saying, whether these are words, or emoji, or GIFs, or whatever. Through this we build a different way of working and we bring more of ourselves to work. That feels like a good thing to me.
Liked that? Read other conversations about imagined universes at Inner Worlds.
