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Bold:		Interviewer
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This is a research project, we’re trying to make a nice video but we’ll see what we get out of it.  So for the sake of the video could you say your name please and summarise in a sentence or two what you do with the games industry?
My name is [anon], I’m an educational game designer from Germany based in Copenhagen, Denmark.  I work on games and teach kids programming. 
First question, we’re looking at things like market influence, what sort of game would you be making if market influence or restraints were absolutely nothing to do with it?  If they were low priority or really irrelevant to you, what kind of game would you make?
I’m actually already making the games I want to make, I’m quite lucky that I could get some funding to make games that don’t need to be selling very well.  That’s one of my issues, that I’m not quite sure how to make money.  As the years progress it gets harder and harder because there’s more and more competitors.  So making educational games that are actual entertainment products is something I’m super passionate about.  It’s just something that’s really hard to do proper marketing for, to get it out in front of the right audiences.
So you’re already on track almost to not make things with market restraints?
Right.  I mean, like there’s also a couple of projects, like I do some consultant work on other educational games and I see a lot of projects that use some weird gimmick, like technology, augmented reality, because that makes them look cool and that’s how they could get some special funding from somebody.  They said we have to use this special technology and it’s in the way of the development, we could make a better game if we actually did it in 2D or if we didn’t use augmented reality, if we could just focus on the quality of the project itself and what we’re trying to do.
So funding does hold things back sometimes?
Right.  Because somebody puts up a fund and makes special rules to basically exclude other people, make sure that the pool is rather small.  People tailor their applications for this specific funding but not really because they’re passionate about making games in that way or because that’s the best for the product.
Do you think players have their social views or their behaviour changed by playing games in general or by your games in particular?
I guess currently a lot of games basically reinforce stereotypes that we have.  There is a very stereotypical image of what a hero in a video game is being portrayed, very male focussed characters or storytelling.  And can you repeat the question?
Do you think players have their social views or behaviour changed by playing games or by your games in particular?  What sort of changes would you think people have?  You sort of said, yes, I think a little bit, there.
Yes, I think a lot of games don’t necessarily challenge peoples’ stereotypical view on things right now.  But there’s a lot of movement in the indie scene and in some niche games where people are really trying to get to the core, some core emotion of a player, and change it.  Games that try to help us relate with people who are very different from us or games about really traumatic experiences, something like that.  That gives you something really personal.  It’s not really a trend yet but it’s slowly moving there and I hope we can do more in this area.
You kind of touched on two sides of it there.  Some impact of games is reinforcing negative stereotypes but some of it’s kind of pro-social.  Do you think that’s a fair description that games are working in both directions?
They can work in any direction I guess, there’s a lot of potential there.  I think we have been over focussing on one side of the story but there’s a lot of social impact that can be done.  Games really have this power of touching people very personally, a lot more than movies do or books for example, because they can really speak to you.  And I think there’s a whole lot of untapped potential that we can explore.  Making people relate to others.
In regard to that potential, do you think that the nature of the interactions or viewpoints changes the power a game could have to get these things across?  Or is it something that just depends on how people choose to use that medium?  So is a role-playing game more powerful than a puzzle game, or is it just how we use those things?
That’s a really interesting question.  I’m not quite sure if the type of mechanic or the genre really – role-playing for sure has a massive impact on somebody tells you you’re now this different person and you start really feeling it and just acting according to this one role. In a puzzle game it doesn’t necessarily talk to you but it could.  I wouldn’t say that there’s any one genre that cannot do this, maybe shooters.  But even shooters I think can depending on – you can work with the themes and the skins and some kind of ethical decision making, you can definitely do that.
A lot of games do use fantastical or very extreme social settings such as war zones and stuff like that.  Do you create games with those kind of mechanics or those settings?  Or do you go for more non-violent or different settings from those?
I do more non-violent games, violence is not really an interesting thing for me to explore.  It’s happening a lot.  I’ve actually been listening to a talk from [Steeker on Double Tap 0:06:13] about violence in video games.  He’s been phrasing it perfectly what I feel about it.  Ever since I was a kid I had trouble with the whole death thing, when we were playing shooting each other, people would be like, you’re dead, and I’m saying, no, I’m just sleeping, let’s make this a little less dramatic.  I think death is something to take really serious and games just totally trivialise it and you can always live again.  So games that explore stuff like permadeath, that’s a lot more interesting going back to what does death really mean.
The settings of your games, are they real world settings or more fantastical settings?
I have a whole bunch of game jam games and I guess it’s really hard right now getting a feeling of what kind of settings there are.  They’re not extreme fantastical settings.  I think they’re quite – I guess what I’m doing is quite realistic most of the time.  I once did a story telling kind of game that you basically are trying to replay your life and trying to make decisions that lead to a better or worse ending of your life.  So it’s kind of a normal, mundane life, but the decision you made when you were seven, if you kissed the childhood love or not, that changes your entire life and opens up different endings.  I try to design it with gender neutral characters, so anyone could play this game and feature their relationships in it.  That I think was more like a realistic, at least generic relationship kind of thing.  I think the most fantastical did was a programming teaching game that is in a robot world.  A robot girl trying to repair things and it still plays in a way like in our everyday life because she has a job and she needs to do stuff and needs to prove herself and learn to become good at repairing machines.
So the setting was a metaphor.
Right.
Why did you choose to set that in the fantastical world of robots, even though you’re addressing real world themes?
Well, I was trying to teach programming and I want to relate – basically that was a great metaphor to use for programming machines, cogs, gears and cables, because they can be easily translated.  The programming concepts that I want to explain are translated into real things that people know how they work.  Then the rest of the setting basically just came after that.  If we have machines then why not have the characters also be robots and machines and place them a little bit in a world that kids would expect from games, that don’t make it look too educational. 
That’s obviously looking at very practical logic based stuff like learning programming and things like that.  When you’ve been working on games do you recall intentionally addressing issues such as gender, minority representation, political, culture, all these other serious socially aware topics?  You mentioned before you chose to have non gendered characters.  Is that something that you do quite a lot in your work?
I try to as much as possible.  I realised that with Machineers, the programming teaching game that I was just talking about, that is kind of male focussed still because it’s robots and girls are not necessarily that interested in it.  So the new game that I’m working on now is called To Be a Whale.  And it’s about being a whale in the ocean, I think that’s the most gender neutral thing I’ve ever designed because it really doesn’t tell you who you’re supposed to be.  You can be analytical, you can be caring about a family of whales.  And I think we can really talk to anyone independent of their gender.
You mentioned there at the moment girls are not so interested in robots generally but whales are something which is outside of this.  Do you think it’s the role of video games to try and make girls interested in robots or do you think it’s the role of society to change or to allow women to be more interested in mechanical engineering for example?  Where do games sit on this circle of trying to educate or letting society fulfil the education first?
It really is a circle and it’s kind of hard to tell exactly where to jump in.  There’s this boys are good at technical stuff and girls are not, this stereotype.  If you hear it often enough you believe it.  Boys like games and girls don’t, this is the kind of stuff that you hear.  Girls are like, I’m not supposed to like games. I think we have to really go into a lot of different steps, especially in education, where there’s this study that programming courses are a lot better visited, they have a lot better gender ratio if you remove the requirements of knowing programming beforehand.  If you change the title of the course to be something about creative things, that you can create something.  And if you put some female role models.  So if you do a field trip and meet other female software engineers.  If you do these three things you can basically reach a fifty/fifty gender ratio.  We’re not quite doing that, although it’s a really easy fix I think.
Have you ever deliberately been antisocial in your games’ themes?  Like chosen to do something which you would consider antisocial?
What is antisocial?
That’s also up to you in some ways. A conservative person might think making a game that’s very liberal would be antisocial or a very liberal person could think making something very conservative would be antisocial.  What would be—
I mean, somehow mainly because of the word social makes me think of a game that I made last summer called The Nipple Effect.  Where you play an Instagram moderator who has to look at cropped images of female and male breast and chest and decide if they’re female or not and place tassels on them. (Laughs)  There’s nothing really social in that except that for you have to judge peoples’ body parts based on some assumptions.
(Laughs)  Do you think these discussions are happening in studios a lot, big studios or small studios, about the ideas of representation of diversity?
I don’t think they happen often enough.  If I look around the game studios in my area, my friends, basically anyone I know don’t think a lot about diversity and hiring diversity.  In Denmark I’m aware of one studio that really does that, that’s [Klabnot 0:13:04] Games, they really actively encouraging people from diverse backgrounds to join the team.  Everyone else is just – you know, you hire the people you know and that are around that you’ve been working with that are confident enough to walk to you in a bar and say, “Can I have a job?”  And they’re like, “Yeah, okay.”  That would be the default thing for me to do as well, if I have any kind of job opening, it’s easier to hire just who I do.  But I want to look a little bit more into how can I encourage people, how can I even find – because they’re not in your face all the time coming towards you saying, “I have the skills you need.”  Anyone who’s not a white male it’s like kind of lacking that confidence or the visibility basically, it takes a little bit more work to find them.
On a personal note from you what’s influenced your view about games in relation to society?  The responsibility of games or how society views games?
Yeah, they’re also very connected.  In the beginning I didn’t quite know what I was going to do when I got into games, I just thought I was going to do educational games because I care about transforming education into something that can be really enjoyable, and just really open up opportunities rather than judging people.  The more I’ve been doing it and making casual games with friends at game jams, the more I realise this – all these amazing experiences that we can build into, the social impact we can achieve.  And we can reach people – games have an amazing power to transform people and we’re not using it enough, I feel like I keep saying the same thing over and over (laughs).
Let’s move on a little bit then.  Let’s go on to academia and research in video games.  Are you aware of any research, academic research or any other research, about video games that’s influenced your games development directly or indirectly?  Had academia influenced you I suppose?
I guess the most amount of research I’ve done was during my Masters thesis when I was writing a design guide for how to make great educational games.  I’ve been researching, I think the best material I got was from [0:15:21] study the three generational model of educational games. But that’s quite old I think, maybe ten years ago that he wrote his PhD on it.  There’s not a lot of good research to be found in that area.  Also for me the practical application is really important because you have to make these games and test them with kids.  How do we measure if they’ve learnt something, it’s really hard to do, because learning programming means we have to do long-term studies.  We have to test when they do programming courses later on is that actually helping them or not, and how do you quantify that?  I don’t have time when I have to make a living of video games to do this kind of research.  Then I’m trying to collaborate with universities, but for some – I don’t know quite what the holdup is but it’s really hard getting just a PhD researcher to take my game and test it or help me with what I need.
So you’ve felt quite a lot of frustration when you have tried to work with academics?
Yes.
Have you ever been involved, either directly or indirectly, in academic research yourself?  You say you’ve tried to get your games to academics to test, how has that worked out?  Has it actually happened?
No, it has not.  I’ve talked to a lot of people who said they were excited to do that, we could probably collaborate and it always stays in these super excited conversations where we’re like, oh man, we love the same things, and you have the research part and I have the practical experience, we can merge it and it’s going to be perfect.  Maybe it’s a money issue, maybe it’s the time, I’m not quite sure what it’s like to do academic – like do PhD research.  I think the resources are probably pretty limited for people.  They can't easily choose to just take this one game and do this testing with it, I’m not quite sure how it works.
You haven’t written for any academic journals or anything like that?
I went to the conference on human factors in computing science with my game in 2014.  I basically had to shorten my 140 page Masters thesis to a 4 page abstract I guess is what they call it and present the game and then do a little talk on it.  And we won the award for best student game I think, best – no, it was the best game for purpose, that was pretty cool.  But I don't know, I didn’t get any feedback on it, also on my Masters thesis.  Although I was working with pretty amazing researchers, [Pippen Bart and Rula Cullitt 0:18:04] were my Masters thesis supervisors.  But I don't know, I didn’t get enough feedback to know how good my research even is.
So is there a lack of feedback within the academic community?
I think so, yes.  You have to really go out and ask for it and look for it and find another person who’s passionate about this specific thing.  I really have trouble finding anyone who’s this passionate about it. 
Obviously you’ve got a lot of knowledge, you’ve made quite a lot of games now, little things and bigger things, how do you go about sharing that knowledge with other developers?  Or researchers?
I basically do talks as much as I can in conferences.  Game developer conferences or academic conferences.  Sometimes I get invited to conferences on educational entertainment products.  I was at a place called [Fatich in Ancora 0:18:55], did a tiny little keynote on why it’s important to teach programming to kids and how games can help you get there.  I wish there were more ways I could share my experiences with people.
So why do you come to GDC?
That’s a really good question.  I think it’s important to stay in touch with the community, to show my face and show people I’m still here, I’m still making games, even though it’s coming a little bit slow.  I’m actually in the luxury position that I just acquired enough funding to do my game but it’s not developed far enough to show it to people, it’s not playable yet.  I just have – I show people – I give them the pitch and I gives them some stickers or a postcard and hope that they stay excited, maybe follow the Facebook page.  Slowly build up my community and maybe I’ll find a researcher, a journalist or some other kind of press people who stay and watch this, watch our Twitter account and wait for some exciting things to happen.
Interesting you mention you’re trying to find a researcher, no, a journalist.  Do you think an academic researcher looking at your work would be useful to you?
Yes.  When I look back at the first game I made I see a lot of flaws.  I see a lot of broken puzzles or like where we broke the metaphor and all of a sudden it’s not really good at teaching programming anymore and it’s just sliding towards becoming a puzzle game.  I’m really worried the same thing is going to happen with this game as well, at the end we’re going to make compromises on teaching programming in order to have better game play.  I want to try to keep this as close as possible together.  So having some outside eyes on it of people seeing those mistakes or where we’re tending the wrong way and stopping us, that would be helpful.
Why do you think other people come to conferences?  Do you think it’s the same thing, to have their face seen, or is it knowledge sharing or networking?
A lot of people do meetings.  Business meetings, publisher meetings, they try to I guess establish and broaden their network.  Maybe try and get more consultant work or figure out who can help them with their game in whatever way they need.  Press I think is really important, showcasing games.  Probably also the award show is an important thing for a lot of people.
Going back to that first question in some ways, because you’ve talked a little bit about trying to make sure that the game fits its educational requirements but also is game play enough but not too much game play almost, and trying to balance these things out.  How do you feel – is that a market force driven thing in that you want players to engage with it in a certain way?  Or are you trying to make sure that game play and the experience go forward – is your player a market I suppose is something we could ask, is your player the market, regardless of money, is there experience that you’re trying to create here?
I have trouble with the question.
Sorry, I’m not phrasing that very well.  We started off with this question of whether market restraints changed the way you create.  And obviously within the games we have play and game play as this kind of holy grail almost.  Do you think that that is a constraint on you in itself?  Or do you think that you’d lose players if it wasn’t play enough?  And does that harm education?
I guess I generally have trouble finding players because the way into my target audience goes through schools.  They have a long process of how will they integrate games, so that might take up to two years for them to actually establish.  For me to give it to a school material publisher who will then push it through their pipelines, I think once we’ve established that, we’re actually distributing the game to schools, there will be probably a lot longer income than from regular entertainment products.  We haven't quite gotten there and it’s hard to tell what that will look like.  Of course we need the players and that’s what I’m making it for.  But the route to how to get them, shall we go through the entertainment thing, shall we target the parents and hope that they’re trying to educate their kids on the side?  Or do we go through the schools and hope to establish it that they use that in classrooms?
Do you think that schools have adequate knowledge, adequate training to use games at all?
Not at all.  It’s quite a problem that a lot of European countries are integrating programming into their curriculum for kids from a really young age, but they don’t educate the teachers on how to teach programming.  They basically just take maybe the English teacher or the Math teacher and say, “You are the new programming teacher now, good luck with your job.”  There is no education that tells us how to teach programming to kids.  Even if they went to university to learn programming they wouldn’t learn how to teach it to ten year olds.  It’s a whole different thing.  Adults are struggling with this, we don’t really know how we’re supposed to be doing that.  They don’t get extra money, they have half an hour to prepare for a class.  
If they get this game and the game does everything, like basically we print out maybe a pdf that tells them this is the exercise for today and this is how you talk to kids.  If they ask you how to solve this problem, here’s the solution, and that’s all.  You print it, you read it through, half an hour preparation time, and then you just put the kids in front of the game and let them learn by themselves, and you can just support them without losing face. Because of course you have to be the authority and you have to be smarter than the kids.  And they know games better and computers better than the teachers, so it’s intimidating for the teachers to use technology.
So in some ways actually the market need or the need for educational games is driving you and inspiring you to create better products.
Yes.
Fantastic.  Thank you so much.