Editing The Pen Addict 570/transcript (section)

== IGN Entertainment and Miranda's Role ==


'''Miranda Sanchez:''' Okay. So for my job, I am the executive editor of guides at IGN Entertainment. We are a media outlet, specifically online. So we primarily cover video games. We also get into movies, TV, of course, big into like comic book movies, superhero stuff. But video games are my main beat. I had like a stint with anime for a while, but now I lead our guides team. And so that means basically, if you need a walkthrough, if you need some cheats, if you need some secrets, if you need tips, I've got you. We have so many of them. And let me tell you guys, covering the latest big Nintendo game, Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom has been a lot of work, but it's been a lot of fun work.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I have so many questions.

'''Miranda Sanchez:''' Yeah, please. Yeah, please go ahead.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It sounds so intense. It's like, this sounds like insanely difficult, like just a crazy intense time specific job, right? To be accurate as well, right? So there's a lot of due diligence on your part before games even launch, right? So I'm assuming you're getting plenty of early access, and you just have to kind of like crush to get these done? Or you're laughing, you're like, no, we just we're just up for like three weeks in a row trying to get it done.

'''Miranda Sanchez:''' You know, if we had three weeks of early access for everything, that would be incredible. That's so rare. So yeah, a lot of my job is coordinating at this point as the executive editor. I started at IGN, if you don't mind me getting into the background real quick. Yeah, so I started IGN as a freelancer, actually, graduated college, got hired full time and started as an associate. And so I've kind of worked my way up to leading this team. And I kind of make all the big editorial decisions on like what we cover, how we cover things, getting new writers, you know, training writers, all that kind of stuff. And so much of it is planning, because we never actually know how much time we're going to get with the game ahead of launch, until we get it basically, like sometimes PR will give us a heads up and be like, yeah, you'll get, yeah, we're expecting codes, maybe like two weeks ahead of time. And sometimes it's like, well, here's day of, and here's two codes. And I'm like, you know what, thankfully, like we can we can deal with that. But also, it's so cruel, because like, all right, guys, time to go. So, but but on that note, too, like, I'm very cognizant of like crunch and crunch work in my industry is ridiculous. Like it is a very big problem. And especially with guides work. I don't think a lot of people know too much about guide writing and the work that goes and you kind of touched on to like accuracy is such a big thing. And basically, what this job entails is playing through a game so much that you know, like the back of your hand, like how can you have to become an expert in every part of your assignment. To make sure that you're an authority on it that you can tell people what to do and how to get through without being frustrated. And make sure that you're writing it clearly. And that you're also not talking down to people because people are usually coming to us like frustrated with the boss fight, or they can't find that one beeping collectible somewhere around them. And it's like pinging like their radar is going off, but they can't find it. And we got it for them. But we want to make sure it's done in a way that's, you know, pleasant and not frustrating also. So yeah, it's it's intense. I was gonna say there's hardly been a bigger

'''Brad Dowdy:''' release for y'all than Zelda. Actually, you're probably in the midst of a lot of releases right now video games or seem to be just like at the like peaking right now. But like that for the Zelda release, for example, what is what was your role? What was your how many people did you have working on this? And how soon do y'all strive to get like information out there for people who are starting on the game?

'''Miranda Sanchez:''' I can't talk too much about like the early access, nor do I want to talk too much about how many people we have. It's like the secret sauce. Like we have like nice, you can kind of if you do your own investigation, you could probably figure it out. But our industry is just really competitive. And the way we run a lot of stuff, I try to keep it a secret as much as I can. People know. But anyway, I appreciate that. No, that's good. Yeah, it's like, no, I'm like, Brad, I'm at the top of my game here. I love it. I love it. Yeah, thank you. But yeah, so with that, it is a lot of planning. And that's really what it came down to is ahead of time before we even got the game in months and months and months before we even knew the release date, I was already planning this guide. So what my primary role was ahead of launch was making sure that I had my internal team kind of ready to go on their assignments. One way we cover guides is because they're so huge, like one or two people cannot cover this one game like it is way too big, you'd probably just have to work on it for like two years straight. So we split up our guides into a bunch of roles. So like we have our walkthrough writer, we have a collectibles writer, we have other roles. And so basically, my job was setting those up and setting up expectations based on research and things that we already know that have happened in previous games. So a lot of note taking a lot of like analyzing of what worked for us last time, and of course, implementing like new things that we want to do new feature ideas and things that we think can be even more helpful this time around. So when we actually got the game, we started working on it, my job was writing these little puzzle walkthroughs called shrines. So there are 152 throughout the world, and you have to find them. Some of them are just like in plain sight, some of them are hidden, and some of them are not even on the map. And you have to do like a side quest to like unlock them in the world. So I teamed up with my boss, we wrote all of those. And then I also wrote our cookbook, which is what I call it, because there's like this big recipe list. There's I think like 227 recipes. And I made all of them, and made our big sheet on it's like this big, beautiful checklist of like, here, cook this to make pizza. Here's how you make fried chicken. And it's just really cute and a fun project. So I did a lot of fun stuff. And then honestly, I'm actually still working. It's been like well over a month, since I've been working on this, but that, of course, and in addition to the rest of my job, which is, you know, managing people, getting people paid and everything else.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It's unbelievably impressive. And I think our listeners are going or are starting to figure out as like, hey, I may not be into video games, but I see where this is going with how this ties into stationery, right? Like you've hit all the words, which is why I wanted to do some of the work stuff up front, because I think it's really going to set into like some of the questions we're going to have later. You're a prolific journaler. You started using fountain pens, you're into streaming, like we have like all this huge, like crossover, stuff that we're both into very, very much, but I wanted to get this groundwork in. So thank you for explaining this. And I'll probably have some more questions later. I'll try not to get you in trouble, though.

'''Miranda Sanchez:''' Oh, no, no, don't worry. I'm the boss. I get to say we're the one. No, I'm just kidding. Just kidding. I mean, I still have my boss.