At Anime North (AN), there is a very successful gameshow that has been a staple at the convention for over 10 years. This gameshow is Family Feud. At AN23, a particular incident happened which sparked a discussion thread in the official AN Facebook group with over 100 comments. Two weeks later, AN, despite claims by their staff in their own words to want a thoughtful and open conversation about this, has deleted the discussion thread. They want this incident to be forgotten forever. This article goes over what happened, why it happened, and what should be done prevent it from happening again.
The origins of modern AN Family Feud
But first, we have to go way all the way back to 2013 (AN13). This was the 4th year of Family Feud at AN. There were two AN staffers running it: the host Ken, and the producer Andrew. (I have identified them because they have been publicly shown multiple times in my videos. Everyone else’s identities will be obfuscated.) My role was to simply film the event. To fully understand everything, I recommend you watch it in its entirety:
Andrew had delegated the survey questions over to two of his friends, who were not particularly knowledgeable in anime culture. This led to a number of survey questions that were questionable in design. I’ll get to question design later, but what’s important was that the game self-destructed on a question where people had to name Internet memes. This question was awful because there are too many possible answers. And so, after this absolute trainwreck of an event, I became the producer.
In the following years, the game transformed into something special. Under my guidance, Family Feud was successfully hosted 9 times: 6 at AN (2014–18; AN18 had 2 games) and 3 at Unplugged Expo (2013, 2014, 2016). All of them except AN18 and UX16 are on my YouTube channel.
I wasn’t doing anything groundbreaking. But I knew exactly which questions were good for the game, and which were not. I wrote a guest article in 2015 on Greggo’s Game Shows explaining convention Family Feud design. At the time, Greggo was the most recognized convention gameshow producer, having done many conventions in the United States. To have earned his respect meant that our team was doing something right.
Due to various disagreements, I left AN staff after AN18. My reasons aren’t relevant to this article. However, that year, Andrew told me to my face that he didn’t like anime. He went to AN for other things, such as socializing and tabletop gaming. This is a very important point that will matter later. Though I had left AN in favor of other conventions, I thought Family Feud would continue to be a success.
The downfall of AN Family Feud
Andrew once again became the producer of Family Feud. I was curious as to how AN19’s Feud would turn out. One of the most important aspects of designing Feud was to ask the public various questions in a survey, then take the best question/answer pairings for the game. I had not seen any sort of survey leading up to the convention.
It turned out that AN stole my work. They reused the survey questions from UX16. Why isn’t the UX16 game on my YouTube channel, you may ask? It’s because Andrew had failed to properly screen record the board on his laptop. This wasn’t the first time it had happened, so I became upset and told him I wasn’t going to do the extra work in recreating the board. And so UX16 Family Feud was never released.
However, I still have the raw camcorder footage. The second question in the UX16 game was to name an anime with a very violent first episode. Here’s the entire board revealed:
You can guess where this is headed. I didn’t go to AN19, but a source was able to film Family Feud for me. This is what happened:
You see, the poor player guessed Goblin Slayer. Goblin Slayer the anime didn’t exist in 2016, and so it wasn’t on the board. Because Andrew hates anime, and doesn’t watch anime, he lacked the knowledge to update the board with newer shows. Another way this could’ve been avoided is if the public had been surveyed again, thus producing updated answers.
At this moment in the clip, had Andrew and Ken come clean that they reused an old survey, I may have reconciled with them, and perhaps we could’ve been a wonderful team again in the future. But because they did this and screwed over the fans, the bridges were burned. I knew that in my heart, I could never work with them again. All the work I did to make Family Feud one of the best gameshows at AN vanished in an instant.
The AN23 incident
AN didn’t happen in 2020 or 2021 due to COVID-19. Family Feud for whatever reason was a no-show in 2022. So this brings us to the present, AN23. Family Feud finally returned to AN. Once again, I didn’t go. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to obtain footage of AN23’s Feud. But perhaps I didn’t need to, as the official AN Facebook Group was buzzing with this:
Before I go to my analysis, let’s hear the various responses from the ringleader himself, Andrew:
Alright, that’s enough. We already know the “thoughtful, open discussion” was a sham, as this thread no longer exists. There’s a lot to unpack here. Let’s go over the claims:
- The 2nd question was “We asked 100 men: name a female anime character who would most likely have an OnlyFans”
- The poster was upset that a survey question asked only men.
- The audience became uncomfortable and there were boos.
- The poster believed that the #8 answer, Nezuko from Demon Slayer, was an example of an issue in the anime community: platforming of unacceptable content at anime conventions.
- Andrew apologized, claimed poor research on his part, and vowed to do better.
For the first point, let’s analyze this question. This is a question that I would’ve never used. But it’s not for the reason you might think. It’s not because the word “OnlyFans” was in it. It’s because the question has too many possible answers. As stated in my design article, the best questions have several reasonable answers, but not too many. The problem with a question like this is that there are literally thousands of anime characters who could be a “good answer” for this question. I typically avoided designing questions starting with “name an anime character” because of this pitfall. To me, this question is worse than something like “name a good starter anime” because there are far more anime characters than anime shows.
For the second point, it’s clear that the poster hasn’t really watched modern Steve Harvey’s Family Feud on TV. Targeted questions happen all the time. When I was producer, I never asked targeted questions, as I felt getting enough people to voluntarily answer a survey was difficult enough as it is.
For the third point, I got word that the boos were present but were not very significant in number. But I can’t prove this, so I won’t dig deeper into it.
And now we get to the last two points. This thread was a dumpster fire and had a bunch of people soapboxing about various political and social issues. For the purposes of this analysis, all of that was noise and rubbish. They all missed the forest for the trees. This has nothing to do with “eww anime attracts creeps and encourages creepy behavior” nonsense. Instead, there is one very simple reason why this incident happened. It’s why I needed to write about Andrew’s past history with me. And here it is:
ANDREW DOES NOT LIKE ANIME, AND HAS NEVER WATCHED AN EPISODE OF DEMON SLAYER.
That’s it. You may be wondering, how does someone who dislikes anime come to be the producer of one of the most popular gameshows of AN? Well, Andrew has always wanted to be the leader of the gameshow department, and with the most senior gameshow staffer retiring, Andrew was promoted to the leader this year. Many people who volunteer at anime conventions do so for the power.
If Andrew had watched even one episode of Demon Slayer, he would’ve been able to realize that Nezuko was an underage character when reviewing the responses. But he doesn’t watch anime. And so when he deployed a survey, and a few people put down Nezuko as a troll answer, Andrew failed to pick up on this and got humiliated as a result.
I believe Andrew’s response is inadequate. When I produce gameshows or panels for anime conventions, I can prove my credibility and competence. My entire anime viewing history is public on MyAnimeList. This is proof that I am capable of producing such events. I have finished enough anime and have enough knowledge to design anime gameshows and panels for public consumption. Andrew, on the other hand, has not disclosed this information. He only cited “a little bit of poor research on [his] part.”
Andrew will never relinquish his gameshow leader position at AN. But after stealing my work in 2019, and causing a ruckus this year, he should do the right thing and resign from producing Family Feud. Let someone else who actually watches and enjoys anime produce it. But what about Ken? He produces Jeopardy and does watch enough anime. However, he can’t produce Family Feud because he’s the host, and he can’t know any of the questions and answers in order to react genuinely.
So what will happen in the future? Who knows. I’m not part of AN anymore, and so what they do is their business. My current team and I have moved on to other conventions that value what we offer, and the feelings are mutual. But I’m saddened that the gameshow that Andrew, Ken, and I worked so hard to make successful has become so sour. This article is here so that AN can look themselves in the eye and perhaps consider improving, rather than deleting everything and sweeping it all under the rug.
Thanks for reading. An active Reddit thread discussing this article is here.