Osric Chau on risk and the importance of representation – and why gaming is a skill

By Jude Ower

Actor, producer and entrepreneur Osric Chau believes entertainment has a risk problem. The entertainment industry’s increasing reliance on expensive, risk-averse productions, and the pursuit of mass appeal, is making creative output more predictable and leaving less room for distinctive voices. 

Speaking on the latest episode of the Good Game Club podcast, released on October 8, Osric draws parallels between film and games, arguing that concentrating investment in established franchises and proven formats can squeeze out the experimentation that creates lasting cultural impact. “When you’re trying to mitigate risk at every decision, you end up making very similar things every time,” he says. 

For Osric, best known for playing Kevin Tran in Supernatural, the issue is personal. Growing up, he rarely saw Asian actors as protagonists and says that absence shaped even the stories he imagined as a child. Games, he believes, have the potential to change that equation: players do not simply watch a character who represents them; they can become them.

In conversation with my co-host Mathias Gredal Nørvig and I, Osric discusses why gaming is a skill, how games can connect people across languages, the importance of representation and the pressures facing independent creators.

This interview with Osric Chau – hosted by Jude Ower and Mathias Gredal Nørvig - has been edited and condensed from the original Good Game Club podcast for length and clarity.

Mathias Gredal Nørvig: What is gaming to you?

To me, gaming is a skill, right? It is a skill that is developed. It's kind of how I look at life, honestly, it is playing with a rule set. And what is playing? Playing is just actions driven by curiosity.

So, when you're a kid, you're just trying things, you're exploring. You're trying to see if something will break, like you're playing. When you add rules and an objective, all of a sudden that's a game. And now there's strategy that could be involved to get things, you know, more efficiently. And to me, that's pretty much everything.

And then in life, I've kind of taken the lessons that I've learned to games and I've applied it there. It’s the same mechanism for games that I apply to life.  To me, life is a game. Like, literally everything is a game. Business, understanding finances, all of these things, there are rules in place, there are objectives. You can be better at it.  We have expressions for this – you’re ‘gaming the system.’  That is one way of putting it. The other way of putting it is that you just understand the rules in place that most people might not.  Gaming is a skill that can be learned, that can be transferred over to so many things, especially if a game is designed well.

Jude Ower: You’ve come from a broader entertainment space.  When did you realise games could have a powerful impact on people’s lives?

I think there's a couple things. In representation, when you see someone that represents you on screen, someone that you might be able to put yourself in. Right? You see yourself on screen. That's a very powerful thing that kind of unlocks the imagination.

When you're playing a game and you're playing a character that could look like you, that could represent you, you're now becoming that character, so it's way more intimate. It gives you some sense of agency, and that's also a very powerful tool.

You'll notice that the shows that do the best worldwide are the ones that are easiest to translate, are the ones that don't even need language. Right? Because images, you don't need subtitles to translate that. And I think for games it's the same thing.

I've played with people speaking I don't know how many languages, and you only find that out when they start typing in caps locks, you know, in the chat and you don't understand what they're saying, but you know their intentions. But it doesn't matter because the language is now through the game.

And you can develop communities through this system, through these rules that everyone understands regardless of what language you speak. And to me, that's such a powerful thing. It's such a beautiful thing to see people being able to connect from all sorts of backgrounds.

Jude Ower: Gaming still has a stigma of being a negative perception, of being isolating and bad for us; how do we knock that challenge on its head?

Well, I think a lot of that conversation is very defensive. Like, you know, of course, like there are games that I truly believe are bad. And, you know, they definitely exist, but there's a lot of games that are good.

I think rather than defending all these outliers, it's probably better to just highlight and celebrate the games that are actually doing something positive.  I’m such a sucker for these gotcha  games that are essentially like gambling proxies and, you know, it does prey on those dopamine loops. And so, at a certain point, I [think], that's not a great game. I recognize that I'm stuck in the loop, but it's so hard for me to pry myself away.

I think it's hard because most game studios now are incentivized to do, you know, like to catch the low hanging fruit, which is like, let's just get people addicted to this thing. They can't help it. And then they're going to do this.  And, you know, there's a lot of those games. And again, like, we can just like put those on blast. But I think the better strategy is like when you find a game that is truly doing something really nice and positive, like those are the ones that we should uplift.

Games are a great equaliser, too.  To me, life isn't fair. And in games, that's the one thing you should expect them to be.  It is fair. And so all of a sudden, it feels okay, like you can struggle because it's earned and everyone's on the same playing field.  I think kids really understand this, right? Like kids have a really good gauge of justice, right? Kids don't like rules because they feel arbitrary. They feel like it's made up and they don't apply the same to everyone. But in a game, they like the rules because it means it's fair. Everyone is on the same place, right? And if they learn to struggle, if they learn to fail properly, they learn that they can push those barriers.  They can learn those lessons from their failures. And to me, that's such a great skill set to learn.

Mathias Gredal Nørvig: You’ve worked a lot with diversity and representation; can you tell us a bit more about that work?

It's something that affected me greatly growing up. And I think at a certain point, you know, it was one of my life's missions because I just didn't want the next generation who grew up with the same chip on their shoulder as I did.

Like when you grow up, one of my earliest memories from grade school was us playing pretend as we do. And when you're the Power Rangers, like, I'm always the Yellow Ranger. Of course, you don't even think about these things.  But like, when we had created narratives, I was never the main character because none of us saw Asian people as the main characters. And it was something I accepted.

And I didn't even think about how weird that was until I'm like, oh yeah, I was always like the weird sidekick. Even when we were playing pretend because I didn't know how to dream any other way.  I often tell people if I were smarter as a kid, I would never become an actor, because at the beginning, there were no actors that looked like me that had careers, right? I couldn't name one.

And when I told my family that I wanted to pursue this thing, they told me to move to Asia where they hired Asian people, and I didn't even think about what that meant. I just got lucky on so many things that I, you know, I just came in at the right time and there wasn't anyone available except for me. For the writers and directors, even if they wanted to push for a representation, they can't.  If there's no talent pool to draw from, if they only have one choice, they only got this guy, like what if he's not good enough? They can't create roles or stories around that. And sometimes they don't even know how to tell those stories.

Why can't they write better stories? Why can't they create better characters? Why can't I audition for better roles?  And then I realized I was just waiting for writers to write Chinese stories, and that didn't make sense. I'm like, ‘Oh, actually, we have to develop our own talent to tell our own stories, right?’

And they can only do that if they see that it's possible, that the opportunities are there, and there's enough money to essentially prop up people to do this as a living. Like that's the only way. And that comes from abundance.

But the cool thing about gaming with all this new technology coming in, I feel like there's an opportunity now. You don't have to create infinite assets now. You can have AI create any character to be the main character. Anyone can have a representation of themselves, depending on the game. But like there's so much that you can do with this technology that just unlocks so many things that was just too cost-prohibitive before.

Jude Ower: Because the future really is around fandom and participation, do you think we’re going to see much more diversity and inclusion with the rise of community-led entertainment?

With all of the technology that's coming into the marketplace right now, I think it lowers the barrier of entry for anyone and everyone.  So those that are able to recognize like, oh, here's some new tools and I can, you know, maybe objectives that were previously unattainable. Like I can now actually find a way to navigate this thing and create it.

Me personally - that is one thing that I am working on, actually, is creating a game that is also a tool that allows as many creatives or community people to create their own system.  It's still early. I don't want to talk too much about it, but yeah, I'm building in that world. So, my answer is I certainly hope so. Otherwise, I got my thesis wrong.

Mathias Gredal Nørvig: What games or what movies are doing something that we should encourage more people or more studios to do?

One of my favourite games is Stardew Valley. And, you know, Eric Barone has, in my opinion, I wish more people can do what he does in the way that he does, right?  He didn't do it for the money. He's fabulously wealthy now, but there are so many instances where he could have squeezed so much more out of his fans and his audience and they would have happily given it to him.

He has enough for the rest of his life and his family, and he just loves the game. He does it for the craft. He does it for the art.  He created something that just resonated with so many people.

I think it's a really hard time because it seems like most of the money in the industry goes to like these massive, massive companies and games that already exist.  I wish there were more support on the indie side. And it's the same with film, right? Like, I think the business model has gone to the point where you put all your money into these big bets and unfortunately, like the wins for those aren't that big anymore.

And so the risks that they're able to take or that they feel comfortable taking is lower and lower. And when you're trying to mitigate risk at every decision, you end up making very similar things every time. And it trains the audience to expect kind of the same thing.

For me, like especially in film, film used to be like a time capsule of an era, of a society. It reflected culture and where we're at, and I feel like doing that is too risky now that we don't have films that kind of capture the moment in a way that it used to.

I wish we got to the place of trying to make someone's favourite ‘blank,’ as opposed to like, how many people can we get to like this thing? So, let's just try to make it as general as possible.

Like, that's the shift I would like to see. I would like for people to find their favourite whatever, because there's an indie developer or creator out there trying to make it, and they need your support.

Jude Ower: Games are one of the biggest mega-trends of our time; do you think that there’s enough games that have contained and captured that culture?

There are games that certainly capture a generation.  It is that touchpoint that everyone knows.  For me, when I meet someone that played the original Dota, right? You know, like the thing that spawned League of Legends and all this stuff, to me, there's an immediate connection because that is the touch point of our lives.

I think it comes back to what I was saying about, like, waiting for someone to write your story. Like at the end of the day, yes, there's a chance that someone will do it, but likely if it doesn't exist and you want it to exist, you should just do it. Like don't wait for someone to do it. The barrier to entry is getting lower and there's more tools now available to anyone to create their own games.

And, you know, I would encourage anyone to do it because if you're waiting for someone to do it, you're probably going to be waiting around a long time.

Stereotypes perpetuate other stereotypes. But I think if you really want something that is true, that resonates with a whole region of people that haven't seen themselves portrayed in a proper way, and you do it properly, usually that's kind of a nice thing, because when people discover it, they'll be like, ‘Oh my goodness, I feel seen. I feel heard in a way that hasn't happened.’  So, if you haven't seen a game that does that for you, maybe you'll be the first to do it and then you'll inspire the next generation and so on.

Mathias Gredal Nørvig: Discoverability is everything – and because sometimes the indie studios don't have the budgets to acquire users, how do we amplify them?

To me, creating the game, the perfect game is one thing, right? Very difficult. But if you can do it, amazing getting your game out into the market. To me that is another game altogether, right? That's the game of life. The game of business. How do you do this? How do you implement a go-to-market strategy that you know your constraints are?  You don't have a big budget for it. You don't know that many people, you know, in the industry that that could platform you. How do you do it? You know, I think this is where like creative thinking happens.

Usually what ends up happening is you brainstorm and you come up with a very clever solution.  Because you're smart and clever and your parents raised you right, and you innovate and you create something that didn't exist before, and all of a sudden magic happens. And that is a game in itself, that exploration, that innovation. And sometimes that becomes such a cool and powerful thing that now it’s part of your toolkit.

If you're a developer, and you got the game side figured out and you want to figure out how to push your games out there, you either learn how to do it yourself or you find someone who believes in your game as much as you do, who plays it, who resonates with it, who's really good at that stuff. And then you get it out there. And honestly, it comes down to, how clever can you be? How do you get this to the one person that will unlock the next door and that's all you want to focus on? 

That is the game that you have to play as an entrepreneur, as an indie developer. And if you get really good at that, then you have everything.

Having not enough, being forced to be creative, to be innovative, to me - you never want to be in that position. But if you accept it and you meet the challenge, I think there's so much cool stuff that you can do with that.

Watch or listen to the full conversation with Osric Chau on the Good Game Club podcast here Good Game Club Podcast - YouTube.