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

Could you say your name and your position in the games industry?
My name is [anon], I’m Belgian, a game developer living in Iceland now.  I currently have many hats.  I’m a teacher at the University of [anon] since this year, lucky enough to start a game design course there.  I am one of the cofounders of my own company with two Danish guys, called Glitchnap where I mostly do game design.  We call it, slightly jokingly, evangelism because I go to a lot of conferences and talks to talk about both our games and our ideas and do workshops and stuff.  Here at the conference, I’m on the advisory board for the independent games tournament, which is the part of the conference were independent games [0:02:28].  Those are the big things, I guess.
Thank you.  What would your games be like if you had no market considerations in mind when you’re making them?
What would they be like?  We’re, all three of us in Glitchnap, pretty big dreamers.  Like we really like to make new experiences and try to figure out both what the technology allows but also what new things we can do in the physical or social space.  We were doing this right before VR became, room-scale VR became a thing, and we were doing stuff with mobile phones and accelerometers and gyroscopes, and lots of experiments.  It’s a little bit – reminds me of what we did as students because as students, you’re not too worried about the markets and you’re motivated by curiosity and exploration and it’s definitely a dream for us to get back to that at some point, to have the financial stability that we don’t have to constantly worry about the thing we’re making, is it going to sell?  I think what it would be for us, it would be more curious, more experimental, more artistic by some measure, I think, as well. 
Thank you.  Do you think players have their social views or behaviour changed by playing games in general or by playing your games in particular?
I think they can, for sure.  Like there’s been this whole wave of – they called them empathic games, which I see lots of really positive responses for.  So there’s kind of two different questions there because we don’t make those type of games specifically.  We’re very interested in figuring out what we can do with game mechanics, not the story of the game.  Most of our games almost don’t really have a story, other than the story of the people who played the game, like the experiences they had is what we want to focus on and enable them to have.  So we made a team building game, kind of, or something inspired by a team building exercise into a computer game, where players have to shout in real [0:04:31] space, commands at each other, to overcome challenges.  I mean, I wouldn’t go as far as to say that changed people but for a lot of people, that was an interesting experience they wanted to do more of, sort of like the positive things from a team building exercise, done in a more casual setting.
So even though there’s not narrative content, it is quite pro-social.
Yes, the argument has been made by academics better than I can make it but there’s two layers of stories.  There’s the story that’s in the game, the stuff that we would put in there.  Oh, it’s about my mother and – but there’s also the story of the player, who does the thing.  I jumped on the crate and I shot the enemy in this particular way.  That’s also a story and we like those second stories more.  In our game, it’s about telling people to turn, in place, a certain amount of degrees or turn all the way behind you and stuff, and they’ll be telling stories afterwards to their friends, about like I yelled behind you or I said 90 degrees right and she went left and it was a big mess, and then we died.  
Those are the stories that come out of our games and I do think they have an effect on people.  I haven’t done the math on how big, but yes, that’s why we like to put people in different experiences and we absolutely include the social space and the relationships between people in our games.  Even with single player games, we try to give them stuff to talk about.
Cool.  Thank you.  Most games use really fantastical or very extreme social settings, such as warzones and stuff like that.  In your professional practice, have you or your friends created mechanics, scenes or whole games that are not looking at those kind of themes, different themes or non-violent interactions?
Yes, so for probably our biggest game, that is the type of the game we would make if we could make any game, that’s a lot of things I’ve said there.  I mean, the most Glitchnap game we’ve made is called Sentree and it was – as a student, it started out as a zombie shooter game, where one player has a phone, is blindfolded and turns around and plays and can reload and shoot zombie as they come in.  They were originally just white spheres and I made them zombies because that was obviously and it was a shotgun because you could do the shake – you could detect the shake motion really well with the phones.  It felt like [makes clicking sound].  Then the other player looked on another device and saw the game world, and had to communicate, like turn left, turn right, those things.  
When we decided to take that project further, we had this exact conversation.  Do we want to spend six months working on a zombie shooter game?  And we said no, not really.  Let’s find something that does the idea justice and makes it more accessible to people who aren’t necessarily excited about shooting a bunch of zombies.  So we completely rebranded the game and made a rich 3D world, the world of Sentree, with little creatures that you have protect from enemies but just by shining light into the dark forest, and you just scare off – until morning comes again, you scare off the enemy.  That was a super deliberate choice that we would make again, I think, for future games and I’ve seen other people around us make, for sure.
Just as a quick one, what drives you to not want to make a zombie thing?  Is it just wanting to be different?
A part of it is the zombie cliché, a part of it is not being different but it’s definitely, like I am very excited of moving away from most stigma that exists around games, and violence is a really big one.  I play violent games and I enjoy them, and I absolutely don’t enjoy violence in the real world, so I’m able to disconnect those things, but I’ve seen parallels as well.  Like I’ve seen people who enjoy violence in the real world and also enjoy it in video games and then I, as a creator, can feel bad or enabling.  If I can remove it and still be successful or still achieve the things I want to achieve, then that seems like an easy choice to make.
While making games, do you recall intentionally addressing issues such as gender, minority representation, political culture or any of these kind of serious or socially educational topics?
Yes, I’m lucky enough to have two collaborators who care about those things and we’ve grown to care about them more, as we learn more about how – especially in the games scene and culture works.  It’s talked about lot and we have, a few years ago, taken a very deliberate stance to sit down and shut up and listen.  Like the one reason the B panel here at GDC, has been a good sort of – we’re first to learn about these things because we are the default humans and all the doors are open and we don’t notice them, just as developers.  We try to slowly start to put some of that stuff in our games.  
Again, Sentree, the blindfolded shooter game, the main character was a female hero.  I mean, it’s a fantasy character who has a tree for a head, but it was important to us to refer to her as she and also, in all of our writing and stuff, to do that.  Just a tiny tweak, but by not choosing, you’re also choosing.  You know, by not thinking about it critically, you’re still making a choice, so we decided to spend five minutes and we were like, can the main character be female?  We’re like yes, sure.
What was the player response to that?  Did players notice that it was a woman character or did they respond in any way?
Not really in that game, but also the social space is so much more important than the digital part of that game.  So didn’t really happen in that game.  It’s definitely something we care about and want to take with us, if we ever would make a game where it’s about a group of people, we would probably take active measures to do some representation stuff.
Do you think that these discussions, when they’re happening in studios, it is happening in your studio for example – do you think it depends on professional skill sets in some way?  So do you think designers think about these things more than programmers, for example, or producers more than visual artists?
I don’t think so.  I think it’s definitely – like not everybody will openly and happily call themselves a feminist.  It took me a few years to get to that point as well and I’m glad I am, but in our company, we talk about these things a lot and we started to think about them in a similar way, without stopping to talk to other people.  You know, one of them is more programmer than me and one of them is more designer than me.  When we work with artists or just work with external people, we don’t have them sign a ‘I’m a feminist contract’ but if there’s problematic behaviour, we address it, or avoid working with that person in the future, for sure, but we haven’t – I haven’t seen any sort of like this group of people has it more than others.  
Like people who come from a more traditional software development background may have been less exposed to it.  I feel like games are – I have some friends who have a bachelor in computer science and some people I studied with there, who went on to work for banks and insurance companies, are amazed by how open-minded and vocal these voices are in games.  I am very happy that they are.
You said a moment ago that it took you a few years to recognise feminism in yourself and stuff like that.  What’s really influenced you to get these kind of views in games, in relation to society?  That might be towards violence or minorities, women.  What helped you get to where you are now?
A big part of that was probably my girlfriend and surroundings, but in my professional work, I think it was talks like the talks at the Indie summit and at Lost Levels, which is the conference that happens here in the park, where it’s basically a bunch of speaker’s corner-style talks and rants by people who may not easily get into GDC, or want to.  That sort of stuff is really eye-opening.  These are people whose games I played and enjoy and admire, and then you hear them speak in this particular way, that I don’t necessarily understand or relate to, but felt inclined to investigate, read up on and, you know, keep an open mind because I’m not experiencing the discrimination or negative treatment that these people have.  There’s no reason for me to doubt that it exists and when you start from there, you start to figure out like oh, yeah, them.  There’s a lot of stuff we can change for the better.
A specific example, I played Dys4ia by Anna Anthropy, I’ve seen it on IndieGames.com, which I consider relatively mainstream indie game news, and then met her at GDC 2013 or something.  I doubt she knows I exist but that was a real – hearing her talk and hearing her talk to other people, it’s like oh wow, you know, this is a cool person and I want to use some of my privilege or whatever, if I can, to make that person’s life easier or to make it better for all of us.
On a very quick one, because we’ve got a few more questions to get through, do you think that your views – somebody could read your views from playing your games?
Yes.  Do you think somebody could read my views from playing my games?
Yes, so if they just played Glitchnap games, they’d go oh, these people do believe in diversity, for example?
I think no, not at all, but…
That’s fair enough, then (both laugh).
Yes, they’d have to look pretty deep and it might not be there in some of them.  In our first game, it was called Laser Knights.  It was a four player [0:14:09] game.  We had four futuristic knights and there was one female and we made her pink, without thinking about it.  I still feel a little bit silly about that.  We’ve grown a lot since then, but I think the best way we’ve found to deal with it, mostly because we do want to make these mechanical games – like the game we worked on last year is a logical puzzle game that has no – any reference to anything in the real world, let alone gender.  
So I think it’s not there in that part of our work, but it is there in all the stuff we do when we give talks or when we got to events, or organise events, because I organise a festival in Belgium called Screen Shake, where we take an active stance and try and get as diverse a line up as possible, like 50/50, at least, gender balance in speakers and stuff.  So it’s present in my work and in our individual work, but not really in our games.  Would be nice to do that at some point, it just hasn’t – we haven’t moulded that part of our careers to send any particular message.  We’re still figuring stuff out.
That’s fair enough.  Last big topic, really, is are you aware of any research, academic or otherwise, on video games, entertainment video games mostly, that’s influenced your games development directly or indirectly?
Academic research that influenced our game development directly?
Yes.
A resounding yes.  A bunch of books and texts.  I mean, that’s why I have a Master’s in game design from ITU, where I actually studied – well it’s technically a Master’s in game analysis, and I ended up mostly focusing on design but from a somewhat academic angle.  I read a bunch on player communities and transgressive behaviour and transgressive play, how players like to break games and that sort of stuff.  I’m trying to remember – [Aspen Orsett 0:16:08] wrote this amazing paper about people having transgressive behaviour in Skyrim or I think Oblivion at the time, because it’s a few years ago, and I was really into that stuff.  It really made me kind of understand motivations of both players and even me as a designer because I took a lot of that player description into, by the way, I design things.  I very deliberately try to do things to digital stuff, like both software and hardware that’s not intended and see what cool things come out of there.
Have you been involved, directly or indirectly, in academic research yourself?  Have you published anything or submitted to an academic journal?
I think I submitted a paper once, but as I started making more games, I did get sort of less – both time and interest in actually writing papers because it took me a lot of time and I didn’t get as much enjoyment from it as actually making games.  Writing my Master’s thesis was sort of the final, okay, I think I want to just make the games and not right about them.  So I guess the answer is no.
Was that paper, the one that you did, was that aimed at an academic research community or was it aimed at other games developers?  Who did you want to read it in the end?
At the time, mostly my mentors at the university, I think, but it was a paper on – as I started to basically just learn what academia was because my bachelor was purely practical computer science.  I got into this Master’s programme and people were talking at this academic level and I was just really excited about that and I found this little niche that seemed under-explored, which at the time was briefing in Minecraft which then grew into my interest on transgressive play and glitch arts and all these things. 
 So I think it was mostly aimed at just furthering the understanding of why these things are what they are.  There was, at the time, really only one or two good resources on this type of super transgressive player behaviour.
So there’s not that many resources out there, you think, that are…
There probably are by now but at the time it had only been like virtual communities, like EverQuest and World of Warcraft that had been investigated, and those were incredibly restrictive games.  In Minecraft we started seeing things like incredibly creative briefing and huge community mods and patches.  Like the most – I remember this, and this was in my research, in my paper, the most downloaded Minecraft mod, or the most popular set was a jail, which I thought, okay that seems super significant as a thing.  I’m not sure that designers would particularly care about this.  I mean, they might have.
Minecraft became a huge phenomenon, you know, pretty shortly after that period, so it may have been interesting for designers as well but I think they could have come to similar conclusions for whatever is relevant for design, but for just like – what I was thinking, this could be relevant for sociological research of digital communities and they had, for the first time with Minecraft, given this massive toolset and it seemed like none of the researchers at this time, in 2010, were really paying attention to it and I’ve never really followed up to see if they caught up.  My paper never got published.  I was okay with that.
Let’s do two very quick questions because we need to wrap up in a couple of minutes.  Do you think that conferences are basically the academia of games development in some ways?  So you come to conferences, we learn or exchange.  Do you think that’s – you said yourself you’ve not been interested in kind of academia for a few years.
Well I haven’t been interested in the writing.
But you’ve done a lot of conference contributions.  Do you think that’s part of the reason that the academia stuff didn’t happen?
Yes, maybe.  I guess it’s true that I’m – I’m definitely interested in theorising and learning and critically looking at things.  I’m less interested in the traditional academic language of things and the lengthy writing and sourcing and stuff, that I see the value of but that costs me a lot of energy and that’s a skill, like I say, writing papers and books in an academic style for an academic audience is a muscle that you need to flex and train and that wasn’t particularly appealing to me.  Yes, that’s a good point, I never thought of it that way, that I definitely – my [0:20:40] that I’ve been channelling that into events, both by speaking and curating talks and games.  
It’s definitely a lot in there and has more freedom because you don’t have to take 100 years of academic research baggage with you all the time.  It’s there somewhere and people will call bullshit if you don’t source and reference things on your talk and your statements, but I feel like we can move faster at conferences than you can with writing, writing and reading papers and books.
Returning to that very first question then, is there anything you’d like to add about what you think would happen to games if they were free of market restraints?  Like a three sentence answer.  If money were not a consideration, what do you think would happen in light of social ethics or research or these kind of things?
Yes, if money weren't an issue, I think games would be even more used to just further our – three sentences.  Vocabulary, toolset, I’m trying to think.  Let me start over.  Glossary, maybe.  I’m trying to come up with the perfect word.  What I think the coolest thing to work on in games, and I see a lot of people share the same, is to increase the amount of experiences we can have as humans and the problem with following the market is that it is safer and better to build upon prior understandings, rather than venturing into new territory.  
So what I would think we would see, and we see when it is the case, when it does happen, when governments grant – you know, create fundings and stuff, you see the stuff that comes out of there is way more creative, way more out there, way more fragile and vulnerable, often fails because it is in an unexplored territory, but I think both as humans and as game players and designers, we’ll be better for it.  
I’d love to see people make games for diverse, small subset as well.  For example, like make a game for your friends or for your grandmother or for people with a certain disability or a certain characteristic or something.  Those things exist and have happened and that’s great, and I’d like to see more of that, in the same way we see it in other art forms.
Absolute pleasure, thank you very much.
You’re very welcome.
Thank you for taking the time.
I hope some of this is useful.
It will be, definitely, thank you.  Cool.  Cheers very much.