Before joining the LiveOps team at Multiplay, James Vials worked in broadband support, helping customers get their Wi-Fi, routers and home devices working again. It was useful experience, but the work rarely changed from one day to the next, and it made very little use of his games design degree. Moving to Multiplay has given him the variety he was missing and a job in the industry he always wanted to be part of. We asked him to write about how the move has gone so far, how LiveOps compares to his previous support roles, and why he thinks good support still needs people at a time when more of it is being handed over to AI. Here’s what he had to say.
Compared to my previous support roles this role has been a role of variety, which is something my previous roles lacked. My brain works best when it does different things and in my old job there was very little variety in day to day tasks. Broadband support consisted of the same type of issues of “My Wi-Fi won’t work” or “My phone won’t connect” etc. Within Liveops there has been so much to look through and work on already. From the day to day customer support, which is already much more varied in comparison, to the operations and process management which has been incredibly freeing to design alongside the rest of the team. Joining this role at the beginning of migration meant that we had the freedom to develop and modify workflows within our team. This helped make life more comfortable and led to a smoother service overall.
My past roles were focussed primarily around hardware and networking, which is something I had experience in from personal use and previous education in school and college. The role consisted of fixing network issues involving Wi-FI and general home networking devices remotely. This often involved routers, printers, smart devices and any other device you would connect to a Wi-Fi router. The one area of my technical skills and knowledge that went underutilized was my experience gained from my Games Design degree, that being knowledge and understanding of both theory and practical elements of technical games design and games in a general sense.
Working at Multiplay has already begun using these skills much more. THe knowledge I have has acted as a bridge between what developers do and what they want from the service we provide. Having the prior knowledge of game design terminology, practices and procedures for more typical games design structures has helped me with daily problem solving for customers as I have an easier time understanding the way a game project can incorporate Multiplay. Knowing this has let me focus more attention on learning the Multiplay environment and piecing together the unfamiliar territory.
Compared to my previous job, Multiplay offers more variety and challenge which is something that I love in a job as a challenge helps me learn best. Each ticket that comes through is never identical so there is always a nuance to a problem and each problem solved broadens my understanding for the next. No more simply turning on and off the Wi-Fi router to fix issues!
Short answer, I love games. Coming from a background of tech and growing up playing just about everything that had a button and joystick I couldn’t think of any other profession I would be in other than the Games Industry.
Many of my recent years have been about exploring and creating games. While I have yet to do it within official employment all the projects I have worked on have been some of the best and most enlightening experiences. Sinking my brain into creating game systems and working with other brilliant people to bring a shared vision to life.
Joining Multiplay was great as instead of getting to work on one single game I get to assist loads of talented developers bring their games to life, a long sought after job. I get to help give players the ability to connect with each other and enjoy games. It’s a role that before joining I hadn’t actively thought about when playing games,
AI are not people. A machine can not think. It can not feel and it can not relate. This is why good support is needed and why it should be strived for. Machines can learn but can not experience. With a little persistence you can convince an AI that 1+1=4, you can not convince me of the same.
Good support requires aspects that an AI is not capable of, empathy, understanding and a style of thinking that is malleable and adaptable. If you are having a problem and a human apologises, customers can find comfort in this. Humans can find empathy in other human experiences because it is likely they may have experienced similar frustrations. When an AI apologises it doesn’t have the same effect, an AI doesn’t know how to be sad after failing a test or when their Wi-Fi goes down, they just know how humans can feel because of it.
AI can follow instructions to its own detriment, getting stuck in endless cycles. Human support will try something else, they will think outside the box, go out of process. If you tell an AI to enter a house but the door is locked an AI won’t think to look under the doormat for a key, they just simply won’t because the door is locked. Humans work within parameters but these parameters are not fixed.