Mari Takahashi is new to the game of Survivor, but she’s more than seasoned when it comes to games, straight-up.
Mari, the Level 30 Fire Mage of Survivor: Millennials vs Gen X (or at least of the Survivor: Millennials vs Gen X pre-game), is a professional gamer, through and through. She’s one of the founding members of Smosh Games, and makes her living by playing video games and posting videos about it on the Internet. Her current career follows an earlier life as a professional ballerina, not to mention her enthusiasm for outdoor adventures. Mari knows her way around a console, but she extends her gaming mentality to other walks of life, too… and now, that includes Survivor.
But how much will Mari’s experience as a gamer come into play? There’s no pause, no reset button, when it comes to Survivor. Sometimes, button-mashing wins the day over carefully timed moves. There’s no right or wrong way forward — only forward.
Click here to read Mari’s bio, then read on for our conversation from before the game started.
Wigler: How’re you feeling, Mari?
Mari: It hasn’t quite hit. I imagine it’s going to hit me once I land. I’m not sure yet. I’ll let you know!
Wigler: How did you get involved with Survivor in the first place? Are you a fan of the show?
Mari: I have friends who were just on The Amazing Race this past season, Joslyn and Erin. I work with them, and they came back and asked how I’d feel about Survivor. This entire past year, all I did was complain about not being able to get off the grid. It’s been six years since I’ve basically been on the Internet. The last time I was able to go off the grid for a couple of months and travel around and backpack by myself was six years ago. So I kept wondering how I could get off the grid and unplug, and Survivor just fell on my lap. It feels like someone’s looking out for me: “Hey, you asked for it! Now take it.”
Wigler: What was your adventure six years ago?
Mari: I was in Peru and Bolivia, where I went ice climbing. That was for two months.
Wigler: Sounds intense.
Mari: Yeah! I had summited Mount Kilimanjaro, which is pretty much a hike, and I said, “Alright, what’s next on the list?” That’s when I started rock climbing outdoors to train for ice climbing that summer.
Wigler: How does one become a professional video gamer?
Mari: By accident! It happened by accident. I had played video games my whole life, but I never thought it was going to be a career. You get together with a bunch of your friends and you say, hey, what do we want to do? What do we want a bunch of free stuff of? The common denominator was video games. We were already making videos online and we would play video games anyway, so we were like, “Why aren’t we doing something with this?” So we created our channel, and it blew up.
Wigler: I can think of one other professional video gamer who has played Survivor before: Ken Hoang from Survivor Gabon. Have you consulted with him at all?
Mari: No, I haven’t.
Wigler: He’s someone you can compare notes with when this is all done.
Mari: Well, it’s interesting. I’m going into this like it’s an RPG. I’m playing this character on the island that I’m controlling from the outside, and that character’s going to do what she needs to do when she needs to do it.
Wigler: And who’s the character? Who are you playing?
Mari: Oh, you know, some kind of Level 30 Fire Mage. (Laughs.)
Wigler: So you’re going to set the place on fire?
Mari: Red is my power color!
Wigler: What kind of games do you play?
Mari: I like action-adventure games, and open-world games that I can get lost in. But I’ll play anything from an FPS to a MMO.
Wigler: You found out about the opportunity to play Survivor through Erin and Joslyn. Were you a fan beforehand?
Mari: I have always known that Survivor existed, but I am a very new fan. The good thing for me is that I’m very good at binge-watching shows.
Wigler: How many seasons have you seen now?
Mari: Close to ten. I started with the most recent episodes, and then I started jumping around.
Wigler: And you reference some of the older seasons in your bio, citing Yul Kwon, who played 20 seasons ago…
Mari: Yul Kwon is definitely an old-schooler, but his gameplay was ridiculous. It was to the point that nobody could catch up with that guy.
Wigler: As a professional gamer, what are your takeaways from studying the game of Survivor in the amount of time you’ve had to look at it?
Mari: I think me playing video games all of the time makes me, in some ways, emotionally detached from what gameplay is. So often, I’ve seen people getting too emotional or too attached to people, or too attached to what you would see in real life, and what would or wouldn’t be appropriate in real life. What I can bring — what I absolutely bring — is detaching myself from what real life is and what gameplay is. There’s one reason you go into this game, and that’s to win. What you need to do to win is play as hard as you possibly can, without emotion, going into it. Now, we’re all human, and that’s very difficult, especially because you’re spending so much time with these people we’ve never met. By no means am I not compassionate, or sociopathic in any way, but I understand that there’s a fine line between true friendship and gameplay. And gameplay is fun. There’s no part of me when I’m playing games with friends where I’m like, “Oh, maybe I shouldn’t shoot this guy in the head. I might feel bad ten minutes from now.” No. The object is to win. That’s the objective.
Wigler: Who is the worst possible person you could see out there? What’s the worst possible type of player for you to go against?
Mari: Worst type of player or worst type of person? Because I absolutely understand that I’m going to encounter people that I don’t like. I’m selective with people I associate myself with in real life. I know there are going to be alphas. I’m very, very much excited to play a beta that baits an alpha into reacting. I’m trying to figure out how to word it. It’s a brilliant thing that Brooklyn 99 did in a recent episode. One of the characters, Boyle, is a beta, but he makes an alpha do work for him. I’m going to try to play that going into it. By no means do I want to play an alpha.
Wigler: I think you might be the first person in Survivor history to implement “The Boyle Strategy.”
Mari: It’s brilliant! (Laughs.) As soon as he laid it out, I was like, “That’s brilliant.” It’s an excellent way to play as a snake in the grass.
Wigler: How do you think people are going to view you? When you get out there, what kind of impression do you think people will have of you, and how accurate will it be?
Mari: I think the first impression they’ll get of me is tough and aggressive, and I can be, so I’m going to have to be very careful not to be. I think I’m going to play up being a helpful ditz to the people I’ll be playing with — but again, it’s an RPG character. I’ll have to have two faces.
Check back every day for another Survivor 33 pre-game interview.
PREVIOUSLY: Lucy Huang
Josh Wigler is a writer, editor and podcaster who has been published by MTV News, New York Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, Comic Book Resources and more. He is the co-author of The Evolution of Strategy: 30 Seasons of Survivor, an audiobook chronicling the reality TV show’s transformation, and one of the hosts of Post Show Recaps, a podcast about film and television. Follow Josh on Twitter @roundhoward.
Survivor: Millennials vs Gen X premieres on September 21.
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