Matt Grandstaff

Matt "Gstaff" Grandstaff is the Community Manager at Bethesda Softworks.

Matt Grandstaff's role at Bethesda includes acting as a point of liaison between fans and developers. He contributes regularly to forum discussion and feeds back main points of interest to other staff within the company. Conversely, he takes information back from the developers to the fans, in the form of answers to questions and clarifications. He answers queries, complaints and comments sent to the organization, and as part of the marketing department working with Pete Hines, Matt co-ordinates information for Bethesda's websites, updates the media on new developments, and manages Bethesda's forum as an administrator.

One of Matt's main contributions is the development of the Bethesda Blog, which regularly features interviews with both developers and fans, as well as updates and news on Bethesda's roster of games.

Biography
Matt lived in Des Moines, Iowa until he was 10 years old and then moved to Michigan. He attended the University of Michigan with a major in "watching football and playing video games". He moved to Washington DC in 2003.

After leaving education, he briefly taught as a substitute teacher before finding a job with the National Park Foundation promoting their National Park Pass. Following that, he worked for an agency that helped market movies, TV shows, and video games.

Matt joined Bethesda Softworks as Community Manager in April 2007.

Quotes
“I’m actually pretty busy most of the time. With the forums, I try to stay on top of what’s going on and participate in discussion. If there’s a way for me to “clear the air” on something, I try to do that when possible. I also work with the moderators and other admin of the forums to make sure everyone plays by the rules in the forums … you actually wouldn’t believe how much spam we get in the boards. On top of that, I try to keep folks in the office looped in with relevant information in the community."

“I guess I can also plug the blog that I’ve helped start up, Bethesda Blog. It’s always pretty fun to find interesting stuff that the community will hopefully enjoy. When I’m not doing that stuff, I’m also lending a helping hand to our marketing department. Next year sounds like it’ll probably be pretty busy with Fallout 3 being released. There should be some fun community-related stuff to look forward to. I imagine that my job will evolve into doing other new stuff over time.”

“It depends day to day, but generally I try to get at least 2-3 hours of forum time in – which includes checking in on any issues that the moderators might have. If we’ve made a big announcement that’ll stir up the forums, I’ll try to commit more time to being in the forums that day."

Source: | ORE Newsletter Nov 2007