KEY
Bold:	Interviewer
Regular:	Respondent
[ ]:	Uncertain word(s)

Okay, that is recording now.  It's picking up the volume okay.  So could you please state your name and spell it for us, please?
My name is [anon]. 
Cool.  Thank you very much.  And could you also confirm that you've signed the consent form, please?
I confirm that I have signed the consent form.
Thank you very much.  Right, so just to start us off, what do you do within games development?
I'm a game designer.
Okay, cool.  And I also assume you play games as well?
Yeah.  Also, yeah.
Yeah, cool.  So what is it that a game designer does?
Oh god.  I make the experience.  I shape the experience for the player.
Okay, cool.  Is that a very common job within the games industry?
I'm pretty sure it has come up in the past couple of years.  Twenty years ago, it wasn't a separate function within game development, but lately it's been getting more and more attention because, yeah, we want to improve the games always, and shaping the game experience is a big part of game development.
Cool.  So the focus on the player experience is something which you think has become increasingly important in the last twenty years or so?
I think so, yeah.
Yeah, okay.  Cool.  Do you think that you are a common representative of people in the games industry?  I mean, who makes games?
Yeah, I can't really speak because I haven't really been in the industry that much, but I do think I'm pretty common.  My complexion and my sexual orientation are pretty common in the game industry, really.
Yes.  So I'm going to presume here that it's white and gender is male.
Yes.
Yes, okay (laughs).  
Also heavy boned, which is the other very common—
(Laughs) Okay.  Do you think that's reflected a lot in the player base?
Yeah, I'm not really sure, to be honest, because I don't have any data about people who are actually playing.  I hear a lot that the player base is actually 52/48 in favour of women playing games.  I think there are a lot of groups unrepresented in the development of video games and, yeah, I'm not really sure why or how, and I would like that to change.
Yeah, okay.  That's the ESA statistics from 2014, I believe you're quoting there.
Oh, I think so, yeah.
Yeah (laughs).  How do you think games are affecting how people spend their leisure time?  Do you think it's changed much in the last ten years, or anything like that?
Yeah, I'm not really sure.  I think it has changed for a certain type of people.  So, people who, like me, are more socially awkward and would rather stay in and be in a safe zone rather than going outside and talking to a lot of people.  But with multiplayer games which feature more social features, I think even those people are getting more and more social.  
I wouldn't consider myself a social person, but if I look at the amount of friends I've made through games, it's quite a bit and I would consider that they're at least acquaintances.  Maybe not the closest of friends, but I know what's going on in their lives and I still can talk to them at any time.  So I think it's a very positive change.
Yeah, okay.  Yeah, that was actually one of the questions here as well, thinking about how it's changed the way you socialise.
Oh right.
Do you think it's common that a lot of gamers these days are treating it as a social activity?
Yeah, I think so.  I mean, it's also talked about a lot more.  I can talk to people, like, "Oh, have you played this game?"  Almost like talking about sports, like, "Did you see the match?"  "Did you play this section of the game yet?"  So I think it's becoming a very important social tool.
Do you think that that might be partly to do with your particular group of people that you know, or do you think there's still a wider society—?  If you were to walk into a pub, for example, and said, "Hey, has anybody here played Resident Evil 5?" you'd probably get a different response from, "Hey, has anybody here seen the latest football match?" or something (laughs).
Right.  Yeah, I think it's always about groups.  If you walk in to [0:05:27] and say, "Hey, did anyone see the football game yesterday?" I'm pretty sure no one would respond.  But I think with Pokémon GO, for example, last year, it's a great example of just how big gaming has become.  Suddenly everyone was outside, everyone was playing this game with people who—  You used to make fun of people for playing games, and now suddenly you're chasing these imaginary characters around.  I thought it was really amazing.
(Laughs) Yeah.  When you were at school, were games ever part of a curriculum or anything that was used to try and teach you anything?
No, they weren't really.  We had some basic games in elementary school, the first one, but they were terrible.  Yeah, they were only meant as an educational tool, which is replacing a booklet.  Just, "Oh, here's the text on a screen," and then you can click next.  It wasn't really a game.
Yeah, my next question was actually about what do you think of serious and applied games.  So, games for education or training.
I think serious and applied games can be very good and can be very helpful if done right.  If it doesn't just replace books, if it doesn't just digitalise them, but instead tries to catch the essence of what you're trying to teach and then put that in a game.
For example, historical games, I think are already pretty serious games.  They're still made for entertainment, but you can make the argument that, when you look at history, it's about how did people in that period feel or how did they react, how did they respond to things.  So in some historical games – not all, but in some historical games – you do kind of get that feeling, and I think if you had games that focused a bit more on that, I think it would make a really good historical—
Hmm.  So there you're kind of giving an example – well, perhaps not the same sort of thing you're thinking of – of Rome Total War.
Yeah, exactly.
Very historically researched, sometimes more accurate than people expect it to be (laughs).
Yeah.
But that is a game that is for the entertainment market.
Yeah, and it wasn't meant to teach people about Roman history and stuff, but I learnt a lot from that game.  I still play it to this day and I'm still so fascinated by it.  
I think that's what historical games can do best, to get an appetite for history started, because yeah, when they announced the second part of that, I just delved into Roman history and I started researching everything and was just so much—  And that was because of an entertainment game, something that shouldn't… you know.  When I see a movie, I usually don't go, "Oh, what's that?  What was all that?"  But this game was really a lot of fun and kind of weird.
Did you ever get the same sort of feeling perhaps with the Assassin's Creed games or anything like that?
Yeah.  Oh yeah, I love the Assassin's Creed games.  It got to the point where I was playing, I think the second one, and I was actually starting to research 'did that actually happen?'.  And then they showed, okay, so there are a couple of characters which could have had—  And I just started researching more and I started researching about Leonardo da Vinci.  It was just—  Yeah, I think entertainment games can, at the very least, release an appetite in people for, hey, here's a thing, maybe you want to know about it.
Yeah, I actually had the same thing with the Assassin's Creed games.  I went on holiday across Italy, a walking holiday through that region, and I went to Monteriggioni, the place where it's—
Oh yes.
Yeah.  It looks nothing like it (laughs).
(Laughs) I went to Rome and I was walking round and I was like, "I climbed that building and I climbed that building."
Yeah, it's so—
It was just so much fun.
(Laughs) It's very uncanny to go to a place that's been so well recreated in a game.  It's like I know I've never physically been here before, but I've been here before.
I know exactly where I am and I know—
Yeah (laughs) very, very weird.  I had that with a few of the towns and that.  Are you kind of familiar with the term 'gamification'?
Yeah.
Yeah.  So it's using game-based techniques in non-game contexts.  Have you got any experience with that, either developing it or using gamified things?
I don't really have any experience with it and I'm not sure how effective they are because I think it might be a bit too obvious at times.  You have these apps where you can collect points to do basic things – and I'm not trying to be mean to anyone who uses that and it actually helps them – but I'm questioning how really effective is that?  You're not hiding anything in it.  You're just basically saying to the player, "Here are these points.  There you go," instead of trying to trigger it, almost unconsciously.
So that kind of leads quite nicely to the next one, which is a statement here, which is: Games are powerful tools to change behaviours and attitudes for the better.  Do you agree with that statement?
I mean, I think they are, but I think almost everything in life is in some way changing your behaviour.  If you were to replace games with movies, I think you could still make the same quote.  So I think it's really in the hands of the developers to make sure that that change, that what people are investing their time in, is something positive.
Yeah.  So would you say that games at the moment are, overall, positive in the way they affect people, or negative, or neutral?  You don't have to (laughs)—
Yeah, it's difficult because there are a lot of different games out there.  Obviously you have some games which are controversial, are bound to be controversial to get more attention, and those games, generally, I don't really like.  But I think there are a lot of good games which are trying to create a more positive mindset, basically.  Like Overwatch, for example, I really like how they emphasise the team play in that.
But yeah, to say, overall, games are going—  I think games are going in the right direction, but we're not there yet.  It's still pretty far off.  Like if EA releases a trailer for Battlefront which happens to feature a female character and half the internet cries about it, that's still a sign that something is still—  It's not quite there yet.
(Laughs) Yeah, we've probably got some areas to progress there.
Yeah (laughs).
Do you think – and you've mentioned it a few times that you're not really sure if applied and serious games are really having the impact that they desire – do you think that the interest, for example, in history that you felt from some of the games you've played, that that's something which applied and serious games are regularly managing to stimulate in people, or not?
No, I don't think so, because I've always had the philosophy of you can force a kid to learn, but it doesn't mean it will learn.  I didn't learn anything in high school – I'm not going to lie – but then I got the opportunity of, okay, learn how to make a game, and I was interested in that.  So that's why I suddenly started learning a lot about that.  But all the physics, I don't remember it because I was forced to learn it.  
I think serious games are almost also forcing it too much at times.  There are definitely serious games which have very entertaining qualities, which I think is—  Yeah, I mean, it's what makes a game a game.  So it needs to have some kind of entertainment to it, it needs to engage me in some way, otherwise it's just another book I'm reading.
Can you think of any serious games as examples of that?
I actually don't remember the name of it but it was at an indie gathering convention last year, in Utrecht, and it was a game for – if I recall correctly – asthma patients.  There was a character running and you had to blow into the microphone or something like that to make the character move up.  I think that, especially for young kids, it's still stimulating enough.  You're impacting the environment and it's teaching you how to breathe correctly.
I think games like that are very helpful, but to teach me about Henry VIII, I wouldn't play a game about it.  That's just 'here's the information about it'.
Yeah, it needs to be good.
Yeah, it needs to have—  Yeah.
Okay.  Looking back at the last, maybe, ten years of games, what do you think are some of the key innovations or the key trends, perhaps, you see in games development?
Yeah, I think the multiplayer increase in social features is a big change.  Ten years ago, I don't think there were many.  When was Warcraft released?
I think that was about 2003 or something.
Oh really?
Yeah.
Oh okay.  So I'm way off.  Oh okay.
It's been going for quite a long time now.
Right (laughs).  But yeah, I think it set something off in people creating more online focused games.
(Whispers)
(Laughs)  Yeah, I think over the past couple of years it's been increasing.  Not just from a developer point of view—
2004.
Oh okay, so it's—  All right.  Not just from a development point of view, but also from a player point of view.  
I used to play this game, which was primarily a single player game.  It had some multiplayer in it, but that wasn't the main focus of it.  But then people started making a mod for it, which was entirely multiplayer focused, and suddenly I was just playing that and I forgot all about the single player.  It was because there was this community around it and because I could interact with people which, yeah, I needed that at the time because I was incredibly (laughs) socially awkward.
Yeah, I think we see that trend more and more.  There are now games which are only multiplayer, which is questionable if that's good or not, but—
Yeah.  Is there anything you see happening in the single player games world in the last ten years?
Yeah, I feel like they're trying to tell more of a story, or at least trying to direct the experience more.  Yeah, I feel like there's a lot more scripted events, a lot more of, hey, we want you to look at this, we want you to feel like this right now.  
I think the story writing has gone up a lot because now you have a lot of these moments where it's really just like, oh god.  These really heavy moments which really hit you, instead of your Mario and your Save the Princess.  Oh, the Princess is not a [0:17:41]; what a plot twist!  You're a military guy and you've just bombed a couple of people who you thought were enemies, and it turned out they were civilians.
Yeah, yeah, um—
Spec Ops: The Line.
Spec Ops: The Line, of course.
I quit after that.
Oh really?
I haven't played the game since.
Oh, wow.
I felt so guilty.
(Laughs) You see, that's emotional impact.  Yeah, I mean, that's—
It's a really heavy impact.
Yeah.  You should play to the end; it gets even better.  I mean, that was very deliberately designed in there.  There's a great talk by the writers of that from 2013 at GDC.
Really?
Talking about the decision making processes and how they deliberately made different moments feel different ways.  So there were some things which were very explicitly pointed out by the game, but there were others which were implicit or the things that only you would know about that the game system allowed you to do, but you were just kind of, "Wow, that was invisible to anybody else.  My squad mates aren't with me.  The game's not judging me.  I've just done a terrible thing.  Oh!"  Really interesting stuff, and that was deliberately designed into the system.  Yeah, it's very cool stuff.
Do you think there are distinctive features or distinctive game play mechanics from the entertainment side that wouldn't easily or naturally translate across to serious and applied games?  There are a couple of examples here of combat mechanics or open world scenarios, but—
Yeah, I think open world would be very difficult to—  Well actually, no.  I'm thinking that it could be difficult because, with serious games, you try to sell something, you try to teach something, so it's a very constructed experience that you want the player to have.  In an open world game, it would be definitely be more difficult to do it, but I think you could still craft the experience in such a way that the player still picks up something from it.
But to actually answer your question (pause), yeah, I think combat systems would be more difficult to justify the serious aspect of that, especially with modern day life.  I haven't actually been in a fight ever, but in a game, I've killed hundreds of [MBCs 0:20:17].  So it's this very weird—  It almost doesn't feel real to me, which is, I think, the opposite of a serious game.  You want it to become more and more real and more personal to me.  But violence is just like something that—  No.  So that's—  Yeah.
So that's an interesting thing.  Obviously you're a non-violent person, but you've played a lot of violent games.
I love violent games (laughs).
I suppose the classic psychologist question would be, why do you play violent games, or I suppose we could also say, why do you think that you're not a violent person?  Even though you have played a lot of violent games, why do you think that that doesn't manifest in the real world, or the physical world, should I say?
I'm not a violent person because I used to be very frustrated growing up.  There were some issues in family life which made me go off into a rage a lot.  Three or four years ago, I was looking back at that and I was just horrified by the person that violence almost made me.  I would punch.  Not people.  I've never punched anyone, I think, but objects, and threaten, and I didn't want to be that person any more.  So at that point I was like, okay, I'm just going to mellow, just cool.
But then in video games (sighs), it's really weird because I'm a vegetarian as well and I think any abuse against animals is absolutely horribly wrong.  I've felt this since I was eight years old.  But at twelve, my friend had a game in which you throw a grenade at a sheep and it would explode.  The first thing I did when I got the game was I threw a grenade at the sheep and it exploded, and I was laughing.  Then I thought, I would never even wish that in real life.
But I think because games—  It's still an escapism.  I always have in mind that it's not real, it's not me, I'm not really doing this.  It's just pixels.  Except for Spec Ops: The Line, because then I really [thought], why did I do that?  I was deconstructing myself and I was like, okay, it's because I saw all those dots and I thought I could get a lot of kills and then feel really good.  Then afterwards, it just completely destroyed me (laughs).
So I'm going to skip ahead slightly in my questions here because I think it's important to, and it's something you mentioned earlier, the representation of genders, minorities, political culture and socially relevant topics.  Obviously this has been part of the content of some of the games that you've talked about here.  Spec Ops: The Line in particular is a great example of this.  Would you characterise video games as typically addressing these in a respectful manner at this time?
I think there are some games which definitely do, but I think there's also a lot of games, or at least the community of those games, that still don't really respect it and still treat it like it's not important.  But I do think it's getting better.  It just needs to get there a bit quicker, maybe.
So the thing you mentioned earlier about you're a vegetarian but you'll throw a grenade at a sheep in a game, do you think that sense of disassociation of it's just pixels is also part of the reason that maybe it takes a long time for representation of people and minorities, for example, to change in games because people kind of go, "What does it matter whether this is sexist?  It's just pixels"?
I think it depends on the realism of the game, of how it's portraying the problems.  A grenade and a sheep, that would never happen in my real life, so there was no association with me.  I've never thrown a grenade.  I've never hurt a sheep.  But if you take all these issues, all the gender issues and sexuality issues and try and make it more personal, try and shrink it, I think you would hit a lot more people with that than having one gay character in a game, because I don't think that solves anything because it's still—  Yeah, I think it's very difficult, but if you were to keep it realistic, I think that's the most important.
When you say realism, you mean almost emotionally real?
Yeah.
Yeah.  So it's not just about graphics?
No, no, no.  No, definitely not.  I don't think graphics matter that much, as long as the feeling you're giving the player, the experience you're giving the player is realistic, that it could happen to them in real life.
Okay.  Have you ever intentionally addressed these topics in any of the games that you've worked on?
No, but that's mainly because we haven't really had the time for it yet.  I would love to address these issues, but the problem is I'm definitely not an expert on the problem of gender issues.  I don't know how other people experience it, so I'd need to do a lot of research to make sure it gets done properly, rather than me just saying, "This is how I think it is."  It's probably completely wrong.  I haven't had the resources yet, but I'm definitely interested in making games about it.  
I will say I've been trying to, at least for me, internally, incorporate more genders, more races into the games that I'm making.  So I've been consciously aware of, okay, so what is this character going to be exactly, which is not represented in the game yet because it would require a lot more resources.  But for me, internally, it is there.  So yeah, if we had more resources, more time, then I would definitely love to.
So you're kind of at the start of your career as a developer, but it's something that you're already embedding as part of your practice?
Yeah.
Okay, that's cool.  Have you noticed these themes being directly addressed in big mainstream games mostly, or in smaller indie games, or anything like that?
Yeah, I think the smaller indie games are making more of an effort to really address the issues, and I think the bigger games are hinting at it, almost.  So like Blaze [0:27:23] Overwatch, [Tracer] turned out [to be] a lesbian, which is just completely fine and they didn't make a big show out of it, which is, yeah, how it should be.  Again, the internet's going crazy about it, just another topic.
But I think the bigger games (sighs) almost don't have that responsibility.  I think they should be the gateway to the issues and not the solutions.  So I think the indie games, the smaller games that are actually addressing it, I think those are really important and, hopefully, the bigger games can lead people towards them.
Hmm.  Yeah, there's something underlying what you're saying there, which I think is about responsibility and this kind of dialogue between games and society.  You're sort of saying that the biggest games, the kind of AAA development side of it, is not responsible for changing society but it does reflect society.  Is that sort of what you're saying there?
Yeah.  Yeah, I've always had the philosophy that media – games, movies, books – I don't think are responsible for changing society.  They're just a reflection of it.  So if we as society want something changed, then we shouldn't make the games responsible for that.  We shouldn't say, "Do this," but we should, instead, change ourselves, rather than blame someone else for it.
But does media change society?
I don't—  (Sighs) Maybe.  I don't know.  It's something weird.  On the one hand I would say, no it doesn't, but then when I start looking at it, it probably does.
Do adverts change people's behaviour?
Yeah, definitely.  Probably.  Yeah, I mean, that's the other question; do you have any freewill at all, or are you just guided by a bunch of impulses?  Which I can't really answer.
(Laughs) I don't know.  I'm compelled not to answer that.
(Laughs) 
Okay.  A couple of little bits here.
Sure, yeah.
They're not the biggest bits left.  So, games development from your perspective.  What are the pressures on games developers when they're making a game, when they're releasing games?  What causes them stress or what allows them to do their best in their job?
Yeah, I think, from a design point of view, it's the player experience that causes the most stress.  First of all, the finding; what exactly do we want the player to experience?  So if you want to address the big issues, how exactly are we going to do that?  Are we just going to show the problem flat out and give a solution in the game, or just say, hey, this is here, maybe you should think about it?  But then also, how exactly are we going to show the experience to the player and make sure the player actually experiences that?
Yeah, okay.  Cool.  If I were to talk to you in ten years' time and go, "What do you think is different now from ten years ago about games?" what sort of future trends do you think we'd be looking at?  So we've said multiplayer over the last ten years, a big change really.  What's going to be the next one coming up, in your opinion?  This can be complete guesswork.
Yeah, honestly, I'm hoping for more narrative, that the narrative will pick up in video games because I really enjoy narrative games and I think, yeah, it's still lacking in a lot of cases.  So I'm really hoping that, in ten years, the narrative will basically form around the player.  Still with a certain goal in mind, but the player's experience is formed from their experience.
(Laughs) 
Hang on.  The game Shadow of Mordor, the Nemesis system, I'm hoping it's going to be something that a lot of games will do, which is the game will shape towards the player experience.  There's still a goal set in mind – you know, kill Orks – but how you actually go about doing that, what challenges there are, are created by what you did in the past in that game.
So the story evolves to reflect the player's actions?
Yeah.  Yeah, that's a much better description (laughs).
(Laughs) That's my job.  Okay, yeah, that's interesting because that's a predominately single player experience in most ways, what you're describing there.  Or would you like that to be both for multiplayer experiences and for single player stuff?
I think it's (sighs)—  I think it is not predominately a single player experience because I think part of the experience is talking about your experience that you had in the game with a lot of people and comparing those experiences.  I would say that's also kind of multiplayer because you're interacting with other people about the game.  You're sharing your experiences, yet they happen to be separate when you had them.  But then they kind of combine when you start comparing, "Okay, so you did that.  Oh, I had this.  That's really interesting."
So in some respects actually, what you're saying there is that you'd like to see the culture around games become more—  So in the same way that people talk about films and kind of go, "Oh, I watched this last night.  It was so exciting," you'd like to see, or you expect to see, an increase in culture where that kind of dialogue around games is much more common?
Yeah.  I think it's already growing very rapidly.  It could be because I'm now much more in the culture of video games that I'm experiencing that and, on the outside, no one cares about it.  But yeah, I'm hoping for that so I can share experiences with people and connect with them through video games.  Maybe not multiplayer.  We weren't together when we had the experience, but we can still talk about it.
So I suppose that's sort of conferences, conventions, just a shared community or—?
Or just even talking to people I know about a game I'm playing.  Maybe Zelda Breath of the Wild, for example, is a great example of what I would love to see where people are like, "Oh okay, so you got that item.  I got it in a completely different way," and it's just two people who maybe overheard someone else talk about Zelda.  So I'm hoping it will increase outside of conferences, just in normal social life.  You're having a beer and you're talking about how you conquered people in Civilisation.
Yeah.  Yeah, there's something else in there but I can't get to it now in my head, unfortunately.  Ah yeah, that's it.  Okay.  So do you think that games, by the nature of being interactive, by the nature of each person's experience being either slightly or radically different, do you think that they promote that kind of conversation?
Yeah.  I mean, if I talk about movies, I talk about my favourite parts.  I still talk about my experiences with the movie.  I don't talk about what the character did in the movie because the other person also experienced that.  So I just talk about my differences, which is what games are so amazing at because everyone experiences a game differently.
Hmm, nice.  I think that's a very nice point to end on.
Okay.
Thank you very much for the conversation.
No problem.
Yeah, cheers.