When I started this series I did not know that one day I eventually would be part of the Kickstarter campaign scene. Well, I’m really excited about this article, because I finally have some stake in a campaign. Before I talk about the campaign and introduce the guest which you already know from the title, I want to provide you with some history behind it all. Please click here to see latest Kickstarter Campaign for the latest Psychology of Series…  I had the privilege of being the first backer for the campaign.

Also here are my past articles so please feel free to catch up to this point.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 |  Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20

Through my gaming journey, I joined Another Zelda Podcast in 2018 writing editorials for the website close to where season 2 started for David Geisler and Kate (Fischer) May, the hosts of the podcast at the time. I met on Twitter(X) Stephanie Klimov who also became a writer for AZP as well as being currently part of Boss Rush Network. Season 4 episode 5 of AZP Stephanie and David had a podcast episode titled, “How Majora’s Mask Deals with Greif.” This episode was the first time I had heard of both the book entitled, “The Psychology of Zelda: Linking Our World to the Legend of Zelda Series,” and the first mention of Dr. Anthony M. Bean personally. Fast forward to five years later a new set of books has emerged from the minds of creatives like me.

In April of 2024, in our Boss Rush Network Writers Discord chat Stephanie posted something that piqued my interest. It was a call for writers to create a topic for the upcoming The Psychology of series… and I didn’t put two and two together at first that this company called Geek Therapeutics was connected to Dr. Bean. One of the topics was Bluey and I absolutely love that series which provides value for so many viewers as well as important message driven topics that appeal to all ages. I wrote about one of my favorite episodes called Stick Bird. The lesson that Bluey teaches both Bingo and Bandit really stuck with me, and I knew that it would make for a great topic. After writing and submitting it. Dr. Bean replied that he loved my topic, but he had too many applicants submitted to it already and this is where he asked me how about one of these other IPs instead?

He had a few IP’s that he shared including Demon Slayer, Baldur’s Gate, and Villians, but ultimately one had stuck out, the world of Fallout. I replied with Fallout and I didn’t know the task I was about to peruse or the satisfaction I would feel when writing about it. It began with the idea of stability, familiarity, and how people would move forward in a society left in shambles and ruin. I also thought about some of my favorite moments in the games and it always centered on the company Nuka-Cola; this is where my chapter formed along with consuming about six months of my life. With multiple revisions, spell checking, rephrasing, fleshing out subtopics, and research, this one chapter made me feel closer to the game and devoted to the message I wanted to convey. From May to November of 2024, I don’t remember much and it was probably the closest thing to the feeling of living in a vault, but I know I had a great time unearthing my potential and the chapter that emerged entitled, “Rebuilding Shattered Societies in Fallout: The Rise of Bottle Caps as Currency,” surfaced.

Now almost 2 years after approval we arrive on this day when something I helped create will launch on Kickstarter. Something I spent a lot of time and effort incubating has emerged and the campaign portion will start and so will my dreams of being part of a Kickstarter. It has been a long journey of 5 years writing this series and I would love it if you would look at my journey thus far. Please take the time if you are able.

Now without further ado I am excited to present the creator behind The Psychology of Series… and CEO of Geek Therapeutics, Dr. Anthony M. Bean. He has generously answered fifteen questions I sent him and has answered them with robust and meaningful answers. I hope you will enjoy his answers to the questions and take some knowledge with you as you journey through life. 

Interview:

Who are you and what role do you play in your company?

I’m Dr. Anthony Bean. I’m a clinical psychologist, author, researcher, lifelong geek, and the CEO and founder of Geek Therapeutics. I usually joke that CEO means I get to do a little bit of everything depending on what is happening that day, and that is probably more accurate than any formal job description I could give you.

A lot of my role is figuring out where Geek Therapeutics goes next while still making sure we stay connected to why I started it in the first place. We have clinical services, psychological testing, continuing education, publishing, research, training, conventions, and a number of other projects that all sort of live under the same umbrella.

For me, the common thread is always geek culture. I think video games, anime, comics, tabletop games, fantasy, science fiction, and fandom in general tell us a lot about people. They tell us how people see themselves, what they connect with, what they value, and sometimes what they are struggling with. My job is really to keep finding ways to bring that into the work we do in a meaningful way.

Tell us about Geek Therapeutics and its history.

Geek Therapeutics came out of something I kept seeing over and over again clinically. A client would start talking about a game, a character, an anime, Dungeons & Dragons, Pokémon, or whatever they were into, and suddenly they were talking about themselves in a way that was a lot easier and a lot more honest.

That always stood out to me.

For a long time, a lot of mental health professionals were taught to look at gaming or geek culture from a deficit perspective. If someone played a lot of games, the first question was often whether they were playing too much. If someone was really invested in a fandom, it could be dismissed as escapism or something childish. I never thought that was a very useful way of looking at it.

If somebody tells me Zelda changed their life, I want to know why. If someone identifies strongly with a character in Final Fantasy, Pokémon, Batman, or Dungeons & Dragons, there is usually a reason for that. That reason can tell you quite a bit about the person sitting in front of you.

Geek Therapeutics grew from that idea. We started with training clinicians to better understand geek culture, and it has grown into therapy, testing, continuing education, publishing, research, therapeutic gaming, and a lot of other things.

The overall idea really has not changed much, though. Meet people where they are and do not make them leave an important part of themselves outside the therapy room.

How many Kickstarter campaigns have you had and what were your favorite projects?

We have used Kickstarter for several of our larger publishing projects, including the original Geek Psychology Series and now Volume II.

The first Geek Psychology Series campaign was a big moment for us. We had 280 backers and raised more than $20,000 on a $5,000 goal. I think that was when we really saw that there was an audience for this kind of work outside of just the clinicians and academics we were already talking to.

One of my favorite parts of that first campaign was honestly just seeing the books show up. You work on these things forever. You are dealing with manuscripts, editing, covers, layouts, emails, corrections, and all these pieces that do not really feel like a finished product. Then one day you are holding the actual book, and it becomes real.

Volume II has been fun because I think we are pushing the idea a little further. We have The Psychology of Villains, The Psychology of Demon Slayer, The Psychology of Fallout, and The Psychology of Baldur’s Gate, and every one of them approaches psychology from a very different direction.

If I had to pick favorites, Fallout is probably one of the ones I am most excited about because there is just so much to work with psychologically. You have people trying to survive after everything they knew has fallen apart, and then you have all of these different groups trying to decide what society should become afterward.

Baldur’s Gate is another one I really like because so much of that game is about relationships, choice, identity, and figuring out who you want your character to become.

I probably should not pick favorites, though, because then I have to hear about it from everybody who worked on the other books.

What do you like about Kickstarter?

I like the community part of it probably more than anything else.

With traditional publishing, you can spend a year or two working on something, put it out into the world, and then hope people find it. Kickstarter is different because people are part of the project while you are still building it.

You put an idea out there and basically say, “We think this is worth making. Do you agree?”

Then people start backing it, commenting, sharing it, telling you which book they are excited about, asking questions, and suggesting things. It becomes less like you are just selling something and more like people are helping you make it happen.

That was especially meaningful with the first Geek Psychology Series. We set a $5,000 goal and ended up raising more than $20,000 with 280 backers. To me, that showed that people were interested in having serious conversations about psychology and geek culture without taking the fun out of either one.

I also like that Kickstarter gives us room to do weird things that might not make sense in traditional publishing. When your audience is geeks, you can have some fun with the rewards and the way the campaign is built.

What do you not like about Kickstarter?

There is a lot of stress involved in it that people do not necessarily see from the outside.

The numbers are right there the entire time. You know exactly how much you have raised, how many days you have left, how many people backed it that day, and whether things are moving. So naturally you end up checking it way more often than you probably should.

The other thing is that getting funded is actually the easy part compared with everything that happens afterward.

Then you have printing, freight, shipping, damaged books, address changes, international orders, reward combinations, packaging, surveys, delays, and a whole bunch of things you probably did not think about when you were excitedly designing the campaign.

You also learn very quickly that selling a few hundred books and shipping a few hundred books are completely different jobs.

We have gotten a lot better at it, but every campaign still finds a new way to teach you something.

How was The Geek Psychology Series conceptualized and what inspired it?

It really came from a question I have asked throughout most of my career, which is why these stories matter so much to people.

You can play four notes from a Zelda game and somebody immediately knows where they were in their life when they first heard them. People can have very real emotional reactions to fictional characters. They can identify with a Pokémon for twenty years. Someone can tell you more about themselves by explaining their Dungeons & Dragons character than they might if you simply ask them, “Who are you?”

Those things are interesting to me because they are not really about the game or character by itself. They are about the meaning people attach to them.

That is what I wanted the Geek Psychology Series to explore.

I did not want it to be a series where psychologists came in and overanalyzed everything until nobody enjoyed the fandom anymore. That would completely defeat the purpose.

I wanted somebody to read one of these books and come away thinking, “That makes sense. I never thought about why that character or story meant so much to me.”

The books give psychologists, therapists, researchers, educators, writers, and fans a place to have that conversation together.

Who or what drives your motivation behind these projects?

A lot of it comes from the people we work with and the people who have supported Geek Therapeutics over the years.

I have had clients talk about things they were embarrassed to admit they liked because somebody had made fun of them for it. I have had clinicians tell me they were taught to treat gaming as a problem before they were ever taught how to actually understand gaming culture.

Then you have adults who grew up hearing that video games were a waste of time, anime was weird, Dungeons & Dragons was something you were supposed to grow out of, or comics were for kids.

But those same people made lifelong friendships through games. They learned things about themselves through characters. They found communities when they did not feel like they fit anywhere else. Some of them got through extremely difficult periods in their lives because they had a game, story, character, or group of people that helped them keep going.

That matters to me.

I think geek culture deserves to be treated as a real part of culture rather than something that needs to be justified before we are allowed to take it seriously.

What inspires you in your career and personal life within the gaming industry?

Games are fascinating to me because they ask something different of us than most other types of media.

You are not just watching somebody make a decision. You have to make it.

Sometimes it is a huge moral decision. Sometimes it is picking a dialogue option. Sometimes you are trying to save everybody and somehow manage to destroy an entire town because you clicked the wrong thing.

That participation changes the experience.

You fail, reload, try something different, build relationships with characters, explore places you were not supposed to go yet, and sometimes spend an embarrassing amount of time organizing an inventory.

I think there is still so much we do not completely understand about what happens psychologically when people interact with games in that way.

I also just love gaming culture itself. I like seeing what players do with these worlds after developers release them. You have streamers, cosplayers, modders, tabletop players, fan artists, speedrunners, writers, and whole communities that take a game and turn it into something even larger.

Professionally, that gives me a lot to think about.

Personally, sometimes I also just want to play the game.

Not every inventory screen needs a psychological interpretation.

If someone wanted to be in your role, what types of education should they be looking for or would benefit them and what advice would you offer?

My background is in clinical psychology, so obviously that is the foundation of a lot of what I do. If somebody wants to actually practice in mental health, they need the appropriate graduate education, supervised experience, and licensure for whatever profession they choose.

But I would tell people not to stop there.

I have had to learn a lot of things that nobody taught me in graduate school. Business is one of them. Publishing is another. Research, technology, marketing, continuing education, leadership, and how to actually turn an idea into something people can use are all things I had to learn as I went.

If somebody is interested specifically in geek culture and psychology, I would tell them to actually spend time understanding the culture too.

You do not have to know every Pokémon or be able to explain the entire Zelda timeline from memory. I cannot imagine anyone expecting that.

What matters more is curiosity.

If your client tells you that a character matters to them, do not immediately assume you understand why. Ask them.

“Tell me why that matters to you” is probably one of the most useful questions somebody can learn to ask.

Any advice for people thinking about starting a Kickstarter campaign?

Have more done before you launch than you think you need.

There are so many little things that can go wrong between someone backing a project and that project actually showing up at their house.

Know how much manufacturing is going to cost. Know how much shipping is going to cost. Then check the shipping cost again because it is probably worse than you thought.

I would also tell people not to make the rewards overly complicated.

At midnight, when you are building the campaign, fifteen reward combinations can sound like a really fun idea.

Several months later, when you are looking at hundreds of orders and trying to figure out who gets which combination of books, cards, add-ons, and extras, you are going to wonder why past-you hated future-you so much.

The other thing is that you really should have a community before you launch. Kickstarter is not magic. You cannot put something online and assume people are going to find it.

And make something you actually care about.

I think people can tell when the person behind a project genuinely wants that thing to exist.

What other series would you like to have featured in the future of the Psychology of… series?

This is probably a dangerous question to ask because I have enough ideas to keep our publishing team busy for a very long time.

BioShock is one I would really like to do more with because there is so much going on psychologically and philosophically in that series. The whole idea of choice in BioShock alone could probably fill a book.

There are a lot of other franchises I would love to get into as well, especially ones where the story gives us something interesting to talk about beyond simply whether the game is good.

That is really the test for me.

I do not want to make a Psychology of something just because it is popular.

I want there to be a reason for it.

If there is something psychologically interesting happening with the characters, the world, the choices players make, or the way fans connect with it, then I am probably going to want to talk about it.

Where can people reach out to you?

The easiest place is GeekTherapeutics.com.

People can find information there about our clinical work, psychological testing, trainings, continuing education, publishing, and the other projects we are working on.

They can also reach us at Hello@GeekTherapeutics.com or find Geek Therapeutics on social media.

And if someone sees me at a convention, they should absolutely come say hello.

I really enjoy hearing from people who have read one of the books, taken one of our trainings, used something we created with a client, or just want to argue with me about Zelda for fifteen minutes.

Where is/are your current location(s) for Geek Therapeutics?

Geek Therapeutics currently has physical locations in Fort Worth, Texas; Aurora, Colorado; Fairfax, Virginia; and Warminster, Pennsylvania. We also provide telehealth services in the places where our clinicians are appropriately licensed.

That growth has been really important to me because it means we are taking the ideas we have talked about for years and actually putting them into practice.

Someone can come into one of our offices and talk about gaming, anime, Dungeons & Dragons, superheroes, or whatever else is part of their life without first having to convince their therapist that it matters.

That is really what I want the clinical side of Geek Therapeutics to feel like.

So, I write and podcast for both Boss Rush Network and Another Zelda Podcast, have you heard of either before this interview?

I was familiar with some of the Zelda podcast space, but I will admit I had not spent a lot of time with Boss Rush Network before this interview.

I did look into what you all were doing, though, and I like seeing independent gaming communities continue to grow.

Some of the best conversations around games happen outside traditional gaming journalism.

I am much more interested in hearing somebody explain why a Zelda dungeon stuck with them for twenty years than arguing over whether a game should have gotten an 8.5 or a 9.

That is the part of gaming culture that interests me. People build memories around these games. They make friends because of them. They associate certain games with very specific periods of their lives.

Those conversations are worth having.

Bonus question: What are your favorite video game franchises? Also, what is your favorite Fallout game if you have played one?

Zelda is number one for me. That one is easy.

Pokémon has obviously been a huge part of both my personal interests and my professional work as well.

I tend to like games where I feel like I can actually live in the world for a while. I want to explore, find things I probably was not supposed to find yet, get attached to characters, and then spend way too much time thinking about whatever happened after I turn the game off.

That is probably why Fallout and Baldur’s Gate appeal to me as much as they do.

With Fallout, I would probably go with Fallout: New Vegas.

There is just so much going on in that game. Every group thinks they have the answer, everybody has a different idea about what the world should look like, and eventually the game forces you to decide which version of a bad situation you are willing to live with.

Give me a game that is fun while I am playing it and then annoys me psychologically for the next three days because I am still thinking about one of my decisions.

That is usually a pretty good sign that I enjoyed it.

Thank You

I want to thank so many people revolving around my many little projects. First to Dr. Anthony M. Bean, for creating this valuable series, Geek Therapeutics, and helping so many people through your network. Also, I want to thank you for the opportunity to allow me to write for this series as well as granting me the gift of being part of a Kickstarter. Next, I want to thank Stephanie Klimov, Celeste Roberts, David Geisler, David Lasby, Ed Varnell, and Corey Dirrig. All of you played instrumental roles in my development as a writer, as a podcaster, and gave me opportunities to showcase my work and my worth. I truly believe that you all transformed me into a better person and writer. I hope to eventually meet all of you in person one day! I want to thank my family, especially my wife Aaren, for always supporting my personal endeavors, I truly appreciate everything you do for us. I hope I can always make you proud. Lastly, I want to thank the readers and everyone who has encouraged me to keep going and striving to learn and grow. I always appreciate feedback no matter if it is good or bad.

Normally I finish the article off by saying, “I personally want to one day take part in a Kickstarter campaign to see for myself the challenging work that goes into the whole ordeal,” I can now safely check that off my list, and I can’t wait to see what comes next.  I will continue my Kickstarter journey, so please check out my past series and if you have a campaign that you would like me to interview you on or check out, please let me know. Contact and reach out to (Stillsaneshane) on X or Bluesky.  I would love to hear from you. Also, you can now go to my website at Stillsaneshane.com.  Remember to keep making and backing those amazing projects! The Journey continues for all of us.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 |  Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20

Featured Image: Kickstarter.com

Additional Images: Geek Therapeutics Kickstarter Campaign