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For the sake of the video could you just say your name and tell us what you do to do with the games industry?
My name is [anon], I’m primarily a games writer.  I write for a bunch of publications.  I make games in my spare time sometimes.
Thank you.  Just to start off with, you have made a few games yourself, what would your games be like if there was absolutely no market restraints?  If there was no sense of having to sell it to users or anything about commercial interest there?
I think actually the indie games aren’t beholden to that kind of thing as much as AAA or people that it’s their primary source of income.  I’m lucky because I’m freelance I don’t have to worry too much about the market.  I tend to make things that I either want to make for myself, so I made a couple of games that are like exploring something that I think would be good to explore through games, so kind of like self therapy I suppose.  And other games that don’t have to be super well polished, because I’m still learning.  I think the thing is with games it’s a thing that you can release stuff that isn't very good because you’re like, look, here’s the process of me learning.  That’s the kind of thing I think.
Yeah, the indie scene is much more friendly to those kind of things, isn't it?
Yes.
So we’ve got a few questions about games and society, a few about academia and a few things about ethics and stuff like that.  How do you think players – or do you think players have their social views and behaviours changed by playing games at all?
I think games can be a valuable learning tool, especially when it comes to empathy, games are unique in terms of a medium that you can watch.  Because they are interactive, so rather than just watch someone else do something like in a film, you’re actually being that person.  So there are games that put you in the shoes of someone that you might not have thought about.  So people who are from different backgrounds, people who are diverse in other ways than you, games that explore things like sexuality or non binary people.  And I think it’s really important that we have games like that because otherwise people wouldn’t have any experience of seeing or being that kind of person.  I think that’s really important.
I think they can affect people in a negative way as well.  Obviously there’s the issue of violence in games.  I don’t think games necessarily make people more violent, I think it’s more that they normalise violence and that’s a problem in itself.  They’re not alone in that, films and TV are way more violent than they used to be.  But games will put you in the shoes of someone who’s going to go and beat up a stranger for no reason.  Like obviously GTA is a big thing in that it gives you the tools to do things you wouldn’t do normal life.  I think personally I like the idea that it’s a way of getting out something that you wouldn’t be able to do in real life and there is a lot of that in games as well.  Again, with like being people that you wouldn’t normally be in real life, that includes bad people – I would rather people were doing that in games than real life I guess.
One of the questions we had was would you typically characterise these experiences as kind of pro-social, positive things, or more on the negative side.  Do you think there’s maybe a split between different genres?  So indie scene does it more pro-social and AAA is more antisocial?  Or do you think it is much more mixed than that kind of binary?
It’s interesting.  I think indie games tend to be the experience of very few people because they’re made by a smaller team.  And generally the fewer people there are the more personal the story is.  With indie games it’s more about experiencing generally the writer’s point of view.  They tend to be more pro-social I would say, whereas AAA are very aware that they have to sell this kind of experience or it has to be explosions and exciting things.  And it isn't one person’s experience it’s just an entirely made up character that maybe is affected by some of the writers’ experiences but it’s like a mix of everyone.  There’s not as much risk I guess.  When you’re writing a character like Trevor from GTA 5, if it was one person writing that character you’d be like, oh, are they okay?  I’m a little bit worried about them.  But because it’s a team effort it’s sort of just a made up character.  So I think AAA can afford to be more like that if that makes sense.
Yeah, definitely.  Trevor in particular was the reason that my partner absolutely hates GTA, I know that person basically.  So a lot of games use very fantastical or very extreme social settings.  So you either have fantasy worlds or you have war zones and stuff like that.  Stuff that hopefully a lot of the players won't have a day to day experience of.  In your professional practice when you’ve been making games or when you’ve been thinking about designing games, have you ever created mechanics or scenes that are like the non-violent side of it?  So not those extreme settings, the everyday settings?
Yeah, I think for me that’s more interesting.  If I was writing fiction, which is like a completely separate thing, it’s more fun to be fantastical, you’re depending on somebody’s imagination and you’re going, what if all this stuff was happening and there was a dragon?  And people are like, yeah, that sounds great, because you’re trying to hook them in with that.  In games because it’s so much more visual you can afford to set things in a tiny apartment or somewhere a bit more normal, a bit more recognisable.  Because that’s not what you’re trying to draw them in with, you’re trying to draw them in with the story.  I think in games it’s easier to set the story in somewhere that’s familiar to the player because it’s more accessible in that way.
I enjoy playing games like Dragon Age and the Witcher where it’s fantastical but they still do have an element of normality.  Like in the Witcher you can go to the pub or you can walk around the forest, it’s still recognisable.  In Dragon Age Inquisition it’s a little bit different because there’s lots of monsters on it, but it’s still ultimately kind of lowish fantasy.  Because the real star of the game is what’s happening in those settings I think, yeah.
You did Awkward Dating Simulator?
Yeah.
What inspired you, is it purely for reasons of relatability for your audience?  Or was it because you wanted to personally make something that was with more real world set?  What inspired you to choose a non-fantastical setting which is kind of a stereo type of games, I’m going to make a game, going to have dragons in it, what made you choose to not do that?
One of the things I’m interested in with games is how they make people interact with each other.  Again, this is I think a huge difference between AAA and indie is that AAA is engaging with you as a player on a one to one basis.  And indie games are sort of a dialogue between you and the person who made them because they’re so much more personal.  I find that kind of relationship really interesting in itself.  But also some of the games I enjoy most tend to be local multiplayer.  So things like TowerFall, Love is in a Dangerous Spacetime, Drawful, which is like Pictionary.  I enjoy playing games on my own but I enjoy hanging out with my friends.  So if I can combine the two it’s a great time for everybody.  
When I started making Awkward Dating Simulator I was drawing on my experiences of being like a little bit socially anxious and wishing there was a social lubricant other than alcohol that would make it easier to get to know people.  I read about this thing, this thirty-six questions to make someone fall in love with you thing, it’s been on I think the New York Times.  It’s this list of very intense questions.  It starts off very normal, very low intensity.  Like how was your day, what do you do for work?  And it goes into what’s your relationship like with your mother, who would you be most upset about if they died, that kind of thing.  It’s meant to sort of foster this kind of fake intimacy but in a nice way.  If you get to know people really, really well in a short space of time I guess your brain just thinks you know them better than you do.  
At the end you’re meant to stare into each other’s eyes for four minutes.  I have actually tried this and it’s horrible (laughs).  It’s sort of embarrassing in a kind of nice way, it’s obviously not how people normally meet each other.  So we didn’t put that bit in the game because it’s awkward, it’s not that awkward, I don’t want to make people feel uncomfortable but I did want to encourage the physical interaction in some way.  So I added in things like instructions, during each question it’ll give you an instruction like hold hands or whisper, the sort of thing that encourages you to interact with someone in a different way to just reading the question off the screen.  
And since I made Awkward Dating Simulator I’ve looked into other games that do a similar thing.  There’s a very similar game that I didn’t know about beforehand called Friendstrap.  It’s a mobile game and you and another person hold on to either side of the phone and it gives you questions.  It’s a very simple interface, it’s a very simple idea.  Again, it does the same kind of thing with encouraging physical proximity with holding onto the same phone.  I think it’s really interesting that a game can be social lubricant in that kind of way.  I hope there are many more examples of that.
Do you know Fingle by the same people who made Friendstrap?
And Bounden.  I played Bounden two days ago in a pub.
It’s so good, I love that game.  They’re Dutch developers, Elena who used to work – great people.  Anyway, getting off topic.  While working on games do you recall intentionally addressing issues such as gender, minority representation, political, culture or other serious or socially educational topics in your work?
I haven't gone too far into that but it is something I would like to explore.  A lot of my friends are exploring gender and sexuality through games, and that’s something I’m more interested in as a writer.  It’s a very heavy topic to explore so at the moment I’m kind of enjoying sitting back, watching other people do it and then seeing how that’s made me feel.  So I played Ladykiller in a Bind fairly recently and I wrote a bunch of stuff about it because I thought it was just fascinating.  One of my friends is making a game called 29, which is a semi-autobiographical game about exploring gender.  It’s these two people who live in an apartment, they’re both non-binary, so it’s like I said earlier, it kind of puts you into the shoes of someone you might not really know in real life and kind of seeing how that affects their life, which is really interesting.  I would really like to make a game that does something with sexuality, because I think sex in games is a really interesting and very important way of exploring the topic.  But I’m kind of scared of doing it really because it’s a big deal.  So yeah (laughs).
Cool.  You’re the first person to kind of say no they haven't done it actually.
(Laughs)
Although you haven't been directly consciously addressing those things, do you think any of those topics have unintentionally come into your work?  You didn’t intend to make it about sexuality for example, but for example the Dating Simulator might have raised issues in there that perhaps you hadn’t thought might have been in there?
There’s a couple of things with Awkward Dating Simulator.  The first is that I originally wanted it to be a role-playing game.  Going on dates is awkward, especially with a stranger, which is what the game encourages.  I thought that if it was a role-playing game in which you were given personalities and names and things to talk about like a background then it would be easier.  It still encourages the same sense of false intimacy because it still feels like you’re spilling all your secrets to a person even if you’re role-playing someone else and saying someone else’s secrets.  So we initially had that.  And it would generate names at the start of each game I guess.  That was a difficult thing for me, because I was going, okay, I don’t know the gender of the people who are going to be playing, do I always have it as a girl and a guy, do I pair them up?  What do I do?  
And in the end the easiest solution was just to have it completely random, just have like a bunch of names and it just does them completely randomly so you can get any gender.  I also had them all as old people names because I felt like that wouldn’t be as uncomfortable.  Like if you were role-playing as someone who had your name or a friend’s name it might feel a bit weird.  Whereas if they’re old people names you’re less likely to know someone with that name, except for maybe your grandparents.  So it sort of touched on that.  
The other thing is that I’ve been really interested in using the colour pink in games.  It feels like this weird political statement which is odd.  It’s a thing I’ve done a few talks about, like girliness in games.  Whenever I talk about it people get very weird about using the colour pink in games, they think it makes it seem less, it makes it seem that girlie is a bad thing, appealing to young women is a bad thing.  When I was younger I rejected the colour pink as being like, oh it’s for girls.  And it’s tied up in this whole thing of thinking girliness is bad.  So using pink in games is me trying to reclaim that in a way.  It’s like this very tiny political statement.  I’ve been seeing it a lot more in indie games and I’m really hoping that it is a little sign of a bigger movement.
Do you know Jasmine, Jazzy Fem on—
No, I don’t think so. 
You should meet her, she makes explicitly girlie games for women.  And she’s just awesome.  I will introduce you at some point.  Do you think the discussions of these kind of topics in studios are driven by studio interest, we must do these things, or do you think it’s really just individuals who’ve come in for example from a feminist background who kind of go, okay, I think we need to be addressing how we’re representing women in our games more.  Where do you think the – it does feel like there’s a change going on, where do you think that change is coming from?
I mean, to be totally cynical I think any kind of change is never, ever going to come from the higher ups at a studio.  Especially with AAA games, they have a pattern, it works, why would they change it?  I think the pressure does come internally from people who are interested in seeing things change.  Usually it tends to be minorities and women who are going, why am I not in these games?  And I think the higher ups are going, our audience isn't you.  And they’re going, what if it was?  I find that really interesting.  I mean, there’s a statistic floating around that even with the big hardcore games the audiences are forty percent women.  
And if currently women aren’t even being advertised to and still forty percent of players are women, imagine what we could do if we did actually start advertising to women, it might even be an overwhelming number.  It’s disappointing that the studios aren’t again in a very cynical way trying to take women’s money (laughs).  We’ve got money, we have jobs, we can pay for stuff (laughs).
Moving on to academic research type stuff.  Are you aware of any research, academic research or any other kind of research, on video game development or video game culture and society that’s really influenced the way that you make your games?
Not specifically academic research but I’m inspired by a lot of my friends who have some really specific ideas.  Most of them are artists, so they come from this entirely different background of wanting to express themselves.  When I was growing up, games were about entertainment and now games are about expression and lots of different things.  I watch a lot of peoples’ talks and I’m inspired by that.  I have one friend called Paul who is part of a French collective called Klondike, and he did a talk last year called games as conversational spaces.  That’s something that’s really inspired my work at the moment, thinking about games as being a dialogue between you and the developer or you and the game itself and what that means and how that can be changed to make a different point.  
He made a game that’s very low in interaction and that kind of made me realise that games sometimes could, rather than being a two way dialogue, can be a one way dialogue where you’re doing most of the talking and you can project your own feelings onto the game.  I think that’s really interesting.  It’s not something I’ve seen a lot, I think it’s emerging still, so yeah. 
Interesting.  Have you ever been involved in doing academic research outside of this interview?
I don’t think I have (laughs).
Why do you think knowledge sharing in that kind of way, academia, making sure research happens, education is looking at entertainment games, why do you think that hasn’t been part of your work?
I think there are a lot of different scenes within games and I think people tend to pick one (laughs).  A lot of my friends are involved in the academic side of things.  One of them has just got an offer for a PhD in America to study procedural games which is really interesting.  A lot of my friends have degrees in this kind of thing.  I guess I don't know, once I left university I was like, I never want to learn about things again.  Obviously I’ve changed my mind since then because I learn about things I care about.  I guess I haven't done a lot of academic research.  Maybe I might start to get more into it, if I find something that appeals to the kind of thing I like to read about, yeah.
It’s just very interesting because almost nobody is doing anything academic, and part of our research project is to demonstrate there is very little entertainment industry academic stuff.  So it’s – your answers are in line with lots of people.  Why do you come to conferences like GDC and do you present or talk at them or are you attending them?
I’ve been to a lot of different conferences.  E3 and Games Con I go to for pretty much business because they’re very different socially.  It’s very much like meeting after meeting.  Whereas I go to a lot of small events, mostly in Europe, so things like Screenshake, IndieCade Europe, Wild Rumpus, that kind of thing, and those tend to be more social.  I’m going there to see friends, I’m going there to see friends do talks.  I try and do talks at as many as I can.  GDC is weirdly in between those two where there’s a bunch of business going on and I’ve kind of been ignoring most of it (laughs).  Because I’m mostly here to see my friends, I know a lot of people in game development and they live all over the world and this is the one time that we can all get together in the same place and hang out.  And it’s weird, I’ve never been in a community like that before.  When I was at school, everyone lived down the road.  To come here and for everyone to be in the same place despite the fact we live thousands of miles away is something that I can really only do once a year.  And it’s been fantastic (laughs).
I had the same experience.  Just go back to that last question again.  We’ve talked about maybe academia is a thing you could look at or looking at sexuality and stuff like that.  Once again going back to that thing of if there was no desire to – or no need to sell or no need to conform to any market restraints, what would you be making?  What would be your ideal thing?
I love writing about sex in games and I love playing games that explore that topic.  If I had an unlimited budget and people who were good at doing all the stuff I can't do very well I would be making a game about that.  I haven't decided what way I would explore it yet.  Obviously a lot of the best sex games tend to be visual novels because sex isn't very good in animated games, it’s all sort of clunky and stiff.  So visual novels can explore it in a space that looks good and doesn’t have to stick to all the ugly animation stuff.  But I think there are also more ways of exploring sex in games that aren’t necessarily explicitly sexual, they’re more just they talk about the topics around it.  I wanted to do a Toyin game that’s kind of like an erotic fiction, but it ends up turning into this horrible branching monster that I’ll never finish.  So if there was a way I could get a bunch of people to help me streamline my idea then I would be making something along those lines I think, yeah.
That was the last question, so thank you very much for your time.