Exit Interview: Ryan Fairchild

Working in the video game industry — in whatever capacity — has always been seen as a dream job. So why do people leave? That’s a question I’d like to chip away at in this new series, Exit Interview, of which this is the inaugural issue.

These conversations will probably feel a bit shaggy. They will not always focus on video games — and that’s by design. I’ve pitched these interviews to a few people as an opportunity to talk about expectations and next steps. “I'm interested in the books you're hoping to get to,” I told one person.

To wit, a few weeks ago I discussed books (and other things) with Ryan Fairchild, a lawyer representing esports athletes and content creators, who announced recently that he would be “stepping away from work generally and the law specifically.” I first encountered Fairchild when I was at Launcher; I wanted to write a story about what a “good” esports contract might look like. (I never got around to it. Maybe someday!) In this conversation, we get into contracts and the law — but also paperwork, learning languages, and whether the future is in front of you or behind you.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.¹

ReaderGrev: Tell me about what you've been doing in esports for the past however many years.

Fairchild: My first job in high school was at Sunnyvale Golfland back in the Bay Area, and I helped run esports tournaments there, among the usual things you did of checking out clubs to golfers. I used to play against these people — a few people who are still competitive, actually, in the fighting game community — back in the late ‘90s. I started watching a lot of Dota 2 and playing a lot of Dota 2 and watching a lot of StarCraft during law school and realized there was a whole industry that had come up around video games. So when I got to the first law firm I was at and I interviewed with them, they said, If you could do anything, what would you do? And I said, I'd probably figure out how to work in esports.

I was particularly interested in helping players consolidate labor power. I saw teams as middlemen, and publishers obviously have the dominant power, but the product is actually players, top level players playing a game. My personal affinities have always lain more with labor. So after I got the job, and had some time in the summer of 2017, I started reaching out to a few people and started working with players on player contracts.

What have I done in those seven years? I started by just working with players. And then I did work with a few teams — specifically a handful of teams that understood that we were going to do things right by players. I started working with content creators as well, gaming content creators in particular. Generally, I focused on trying to find people who were interested in helping players to advance their interests overall. Being on the LCSPA [ed. note: this is the players association for North American professional League of Legends players] board was honestly kind of the pinnacle of my career, because that was the closest that I think we've come to really seeing players exert their will in a more unified front. One of the things I realized over the course of my time working in esports is that I can be very interested in trying to organize players and trying to help them to push on certain issues, but the players are ultimately going to have to take the lead. Until the players are willing to stick their necks out and advocate for meaningful change, I don't think we're going to see real change. I can't do that for them.

Is there something notable that you’ve worked on that people would recognize if you told them?

Fairchild: There was one year that I worked on nearly half of LCS player contracts.

I've worked with some of the biggest names in the LCS. I don't know that I can say who, directly. I don't remember who's given me authorization to disclose. But I got what I think is the best player contract that’s ever been written done for one of those top players. And when they went to 100 Thieves, that was fantastic. I basically got carte blanche to draft a player contract.

What goes into the player representative wish list contract?

Fairchild: It's more what isn’t in there. It's more just getting rid of the kitchen sink approach wherein teams control your sponsors, teams control everything you can do and use, and all of the legal liability is going to be just totally lumped on you. And of course teams would come back and say: Well, we're taking all the monetary risk. And, you know, that's your choice, dude! [laughs]

So I think that's a lot of it. Players get more freedom, and they have their commitments to the team, but the team can't come and just turn the screws on every little thing that they want.

Now some teams out there, not only do they have their contracts, but they'll ignore the contract if it's to their advantage. There are some relatively well-regarded teams in the public sphere who will throw a player under the bus, no matter what's in their contract. So trying to get a good contract is sort of the start of trying to help a player. It is nowhere near the end.

Wait. Why can the person on the other side just decide: we're going to ignore this for our own benefit? How does that happen?

Fairchild: There's a term for it. It's called efficient breach. And what it basically is, is like, we think that the consequences of breaching this contract are going to be less than the consequences of staying in this contract. A really good example of this is companies that contaminate the environment. They'll say — let's say we're making talcum powder or something, or we’re some big chemical company — Yeah, we've realized in some of our studies that this stuff is probably going to kill a certain number of people, and we're going to get sued for it. Well, how much are we going to sell on this thing? We'll still take that expected cost of getting sued if we're still going to make money in the long run.

It's a terrible practice! But I think companies do this analysis all the time. I think a lot of teams will just ask: Do we actually think we're going to get sued? If we do get sued, how much are we going to end up paying? A lot of teams just haven't been sued for so long that they'll take the risk on breaching a contract if they think they can get away with it.

Why don’t players sue?

Fairchild: Lawsuits are really expensive. If you take “What's the likelihood of winning the lawsuit?” times “What's my expected payout?” a lot of times the math doesn’t make sense. I also think, for a player, do you want a reputation of somebody who's going to go sue a team? I think there's a lot of calculation that goes into it. It's also just a hassle. Like even if it does make monetary sense, do I want to be embroiled in litigation for the next six months to three years or however long it takes?

From the 20 or so minutes that we've been talking, it seems like you like this work. Do you? And if you do, why are you stepping back? 

Fairchild: I do not like the paper part of it. I think the helping players part of it is the part I still am passionate about. But I don't like the day to day, like, here, look at some paper part of it at all.

I also think that over the years I’ve come to realize that there's only so much I can do, and I think I've done a lot of it. I think the LCSPA and players kind of need to carry things forward. And there are enough lawyers in the scene at this point that there is good representation for players who want it. Our firm, even after I leave, will continue to do this work. There are others who are out there, too, who I think are mindful of players and trying to do their best by them. I've also kind of been burnt out on law for several years, not just because of esports.

And it's not just push factors, it's a lot of pull factors. My wife just got a professor job. I've got young kids and I want to spend more time with them. They're at this age, you know — my oldest is only 4 or 5 years from leaving the house. So I'd like to get some more time with him before he leaves.

I'm not super familiar with the legal profession. Is there a rarefied layer of legal work in which it's just meeting with people? No paperwork?

Fairchild: Theoretically, you'd have to have really good people under you willing to do the paperwork, and then you could just do the talking. But you’d need to make sure you had somebody you completely and implicitly trusted, and then you'd also need them to brief you, or send you a memo that you’d still read so that you could then have the conversations, and that's a lot of extra overhead, right? We're not at that place. If this were professional sports you could probably do that, but we're not at that place. And that’s fine.

Are you looking at other industries at this point, or are you going the stay-at-home dad route?

Fairchild: What I told my wife is that I'm not going to allow myself to think about what might be next for at least three months, and take at least a full year off, just to see how things go. I've got a lot of personal interest stuff that I'm digging into. I’ve been reading and writing more, starting to study Mandarin again, learning to knit. [laughs] Little things like that. My second son wants to learn to code. He has actually been learning to code, but he wants to get a lot better at it. So, you know, it's like: All right, I'll just learn this stuff with him.

Do you keep a to-do list of stuff you'd like to get to? I am a list person; just looking at my notebook right now, I wrote down “music” as a to-do list item.

Fairchild: I'm going to show you something. [He begins screen-sharing a spreadsheet.]

Just to read out some of these: Mandarin; Runa simi, which is more colloquially known as Quechua, which is a Peruvian indigenous language; I'm actually fluent in Spanish, but I want to improve my Spanish; you know, “linguistics and philology.” Some of these have more concrete things to do. There's “more writing” type stuff, and just general stuff like mushroom foraging, swimming, just getting into better shape.

I've got knitting sweaters. The impetus for that was I saw The Banshees of Inisherin, and I was like: Man, those guys have some killer sweaters, how much do those things cost? Those cost a lot! And, you know, it's probably going to take me more in input to learn how to do it, but then I'll know how to do it. And that's kind of fun.

It looks like a lot of language stuff was top of mind for you as you made this list. Can you tell me where that comes from?

Fairchild: I've lived in a number of places. I lived in Shanghai, China for about four months. I lived in Uganda for four months. I've lived in South America in several places. I’ve traveled through Europe. I've done a lot of traveling and I'm always interested in local languages. I find that learning a language helps you associate with people much, much better. Even if like, for example, in Uganda, English is still the primary language, if you can speak some Luganda, it would just instantly help you relate to people and better connect with them.

I remember one time in Wilmington, North Carolina, a Ugandan children's choir came through the Children's Museum, and I was on the board of the museum at that time. They were about to go out and perform and I went down and said: Muli mutya, bassebo ne ba nnyabo? [ed. note: How are you, ladies and gentlemen?] And they just exploded. They were so happy that somebody knew their language. And it was a way to build an instant rapport.

You also see a lot of different ways of thinking [stemming from language]. Just to drive this principle home, there's another indigenous language in Peru, Bolivia, that region, called Aymara. When Western people think of time, we usually think of the future as being in front of us because it's coming towards us, right? And the past is behind us because we've left it behind. For the Aymara, it's reversed. The future is behind you because you can't see it. You don't know what's going to happen. And the past is in front of you because you can already see what's happened. Culturally, that changes things. People who come up in Aymara culture tend not to worry as much about this idea of like, this person is running late. Well, no. Who knows what happened to them?

Or in Mandarin, I know their jokes and their puns are supposed to be next level because of the amount of playing they're doing between characters and tones and other things. It’s supposed to be really, really complex. And so the jokes don't translate well into English.

That idea of how language impacts our ways of thinking and our cultures is really fascinating. And I think especially seeing a lot of languages start to die out or to become kind of less pure, I worry about how much we're losing in terms of implicit philosophy and thinking and other ways of viewing the world.

What's on your reading list these days?

Fairchild: Yesterday I actually finished two books: One called James, by Percival Everett, which is a retelling of Huck Finn from the perspective of Jim, or James² ; I also finished a brief theological introduction to Helaman, which is LDS theology. I read a bunch of different things. I’m working my way through Flannery O'Connor short stories and a book of philosophy called The Transfiguration of the Commonplace that’s about a theory of art. I have a ton of books I haven’t read!

I've also been really curious about the history of homelessness and how it's emerged in different cultural and national instances. I don't know how much I want to go on about this, but one of the most impactful books I've read in the last ten years was The Gift by Lewis Hyde, which basically looks at the differences between gift economies and commodity economies. We live in a commodity economy. A lot of indigenous communities were gift communities. My suspicion is that you see a lot less homelessness in gift economies and also in smaller scale communities. I think homelessness probably endemically arises with urbanization, capitalism and other systems that kind of go along with those.

How did that interest come up? Is there something you're seeing out in the world that's prompted it?

Fairchild: Yeah, I lived in Peru for two years as a missionary, from 2004 to 2006. I went back in 2016 and then again this year. And I just noticed how — I don't know what the right word is — how homelessness now looks different, especially in Cusco, which is one of my favorite cities on the planet. It seems noticeable that as things become more commoditized and as there's more growth, homelessness becomes more prevalent, and it also changes in type.³

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1. For transparency’s sake, this means I’ve cleaned up the “ums,” “likes” and “ahs,” whittled down my questions to let you get to the answers faster, and cut certain parts of the answers (or entire exchanges) here and there that are redundant or irrelevant or which make sense over audio but not over text. Some of the questions and answers have also been reordered slightly to make more sense in sequence. In this particular case I also cropped out some real dud questions I asked. Please regard all transcription errors or typos in the text as my errors — not Ryan’s.

2. I finished James earlier this week and I really liked it! There you have it: the highly-coveted ReaderGrev endorsement.

3. If this conversation feels like it ended a bit abruptly, that’s mostly because I was asking really big questions (“tell me about homelessness in Cusco”) as we approached the time limit on our conversation. If you have any follow-ups or want to hear more from Ryan, leave a comment!