Hello, and welcome to the latest installment of The Future In Five Questions. This week I spoke with Johanna Faries, the general manager of gaming company Activision Blizzard's long-running Call of Duty series, the highest-selling American-developed video game franchise. After spending a decade with the National Football League, Faries brought her competitive knowledge to the video game world by serving as the Call of Duty esports commissioner, helping transition the franchise into a new era where games serve less as at-home recreation and more as global media brands and platforms for new online worlds in their own right. We talked about gaming as a driving force for the evolution of the tech landscape, the value in keeping a wide range of interests, and her focus on STEM education in driving the digital future. An edited and condensed version of our conversation follows: What’s one underrated big idea? Gaming as a platform. This informs how we think about the franchise and unified content experiences across different platforms; you see it even in our earnings discussions about the role of mobile in our portfolio and how connected gaming is to mobile growth for the entire industry and the world at large. Call of Duty stands apart in many ways as more than a game, you see it filtering into all parts of culture and the casual cultural conversation. This is just one example of us continuing to think, how do we future-proof ourselves? How do we build for the future gamers and generations of gamers to come, while also building on the strength of the IP and the bigger universe that we've curated over the last few decades? What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? The notion that if you just pay to show up to promote your product on the right digital platforms, that you’ve captured an audience. It’s less about having the right digital media strategy, or even influencer partnerships, and more about how so much of the health of our intellectual property is about this much more holistic, and much more nuanced partnership with our community. What book most shaped your conception of the future? David Epstein’s “Range.” It’s sort of undoing the prioritization of specialization at a very early age, and the focus on this idea that you will be great if you spend all of your time only focused on one thing. I think we’re going to see it trending that yes, you need functional expertise, 100 percent, but there's also merit in cross-pollinating that with people who bring a diverse background, or background from an outside industry, that you wouldn't necessarily factor into your thinking. They can really differentiate how we frame a problem, how we think about solving a problem, by drawing from different experiences or different disciplines. What could government be doing regarding technology that it isn’t? More of a focus on STEM education, and funding and investments around access to STEM programming and skill development. Coming from gaming and tech, we want as many people around the world, and in the United States in particular, to have the ability, and capacity, and access to develop real skills and become leaders in the space. There's just such a hunger across all industries to continue to think about how we train our future workforce, and make sure that they have a wide and expansive litany of options to think through. STEM is one way, and that’s at the top of mind for all of us — [Activision Blizzard] announced earlier this year that we're now a partner in the Reboot Representation Tech Coalition. What surprised you most this year? This is a less tech-specific answer, but seeing airports filled up again, and people going back to the movie theater — it's been really cool to see the resilience of the human spirit, just from a societal perspective. You think about where we were two years ago, how empty a lot of those gathering wells were all over the world, and it's been such an awesome and kind of inspiring surprise that in 2023, despite being changed forever in many ways our communities are back and we're gathering again in droves.
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