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

Hi, nice to meet you.  How are you doing today?
I’m doing great.  
Good.  Before we go any further, just to let you know, we’re already recording, okay?
Yes, okay.
Just so you know that, we have the consent form and everything, that you know that we’re recording, we’re transcribing what we say in the interview and that’ll be all made anonymous but it will be used to study in the project.  And it will also, following the EU’s guidelines now, it will also be made freely available to others, but in an anonymous form, okay?
Okay.  Is the sound okay?
The sound is absolutely fine, it’s great.  Am I coming through okay?
Yes, loud and clear.
Great.  That’s good.  So just before we start perhaps we can – I’ll just run you through the preamble if you like, the introduction.  Just to remind you that we’re doing this round of interviews as part of a number of rounds of interviews with different stakeholders groups involved in games and gaming.  We’re looking to gain the perspective in this case, in this round, with people involved in education and educators.  Their perspective on games and gaming, both in education and in society generally.
Okay.
And this will be used to inform the further analysis and outputs of the project further on, to gain that landscape analysis it’s called, of gaining the views of different sorts of groups and how they see games.  So that’s the setup.  As far as the interview goes, the important thing is that you know that it’s open in the sense that I’m going to put some questions to you.  We’re not in any way aiming for a journalistic style interview, in that sense you can take as much time as you like to think about, to pause, to reflect, to change your mind about anything, to stop and ask me things if you want clarification, no problem.  You can also if you want decide not to answer any of the comments or suggestions on questions that I make, that’s fine.
Basically what we’ll do is this.  In the work so far we’ve outlined some general themes.  So the interview is going to follow those themes.  I’m going to put up a couple of slides that will show you each of these very general themes and ask you to comment about these, some questions.  When we’ve done a few questions and talked about each theme at the end of that theme if you like I’m going to show you the same slide with the name of the theme plus some keywords.  And these are keywords of topics or issues or aspects that have come up already  in the project.  So we’ll look at those keywords in that topic and see whether we’ve already discussed them, whether you’ve got things to add about things that we haven't mentioned or whatever.  And I’ll talk you through that as we pass from one theme to another.  We haven't got a strict outline, you’re free to take the comments and take the interview forward as you like.  Okay?
Yes.  
At this point we can more or less start.  I’ll just put up the first of these slides for you.  
I can see the screen perfectly.
So you can see the slide there.  Can you still see me in the video?
Yes.  I can see you, me and me again, because I can see me represented on your screen.
And you can see the slide?
It says Games and You.
We’ll start off just if I can get you to tell us who you are, what you do, where you work, your background, and a little bit about your work and experience with games?
Perhaps I need you to break that down while I’m talking because that was a lot of subjects.
Sure.
My name is [anonymised].  Educational wise I have a background in IT and a Bachelor degree in social education.  I’ve been playing games and playing all my life, I’ve never really stopped.  I started as many kids playing with legos and advancing to board games with my family.  Early on my family bought a Spectrum, an early 8-bit computer.  Then I advanced to an Amiga and I kept playing and I was playing PC games.  I started playing role-playing games, tabletop role-playing games.  Then for a while I stopped playing because I found I felt that it was uncool somehow to play games.  This was while I was doing this education in IT.  I was doing a lot of music production and coding and hacking if you will.  Working with security and UNIX and networks.  And that period of time in my life I felt that gaming was somehow less worthy than what I was doing elsewhere.
I wanted to start up a security firm with a guy I was studying with, so I needed to do something completely different while we were starting that company.  I didn’t feel that it would be possible for me to work in security in some other company while starting my own.  So I got a job as a social educator, because I felt that was completely different.  While I was there I thought maybe I can use some of my IT skills to give these kids a boost in an area where I felt society as a whole was lacking behind.
So what I did was I started playing video games with them.  When I did that I found that a lot of the things that they usually couldn’t do or was told they couldn’t do or experienced they couldn’t do, they could actually do when they were playing video games.  So then video games, the role-playing games became kind of relevant to me again so I picked it up again.  This wasn’t really all that organised.  It was just something to do.  This wasn’t in a school setting, the kids at this foster home, it was their spare time really.  What I was doing was I was playing cooperative games with them and games that would require them to focus for longer periods of time than they would usually focus.  Then slightly upping the attention span needed to play the games.
I remember in the very beginning they were all very keen to play games but they would often just play games for five, three minutes at a time then they would swap games.  So what I did from the start was say, yes, you can play any game on this Playstation or on this computer but you have to play at least ten minutes.  Then I just upped it along the way.  Then I got a little daughter and at this point I was working all the time at this foster time so I needed a more regular kind of job.  So I started working at a school and found out that all these things about games that I experienced in this foster home were exactly the same with these kids.  They were able to concentrate and discuss ethics and morals and sit still for prolonged periods of times, way longer than their diagnosis or their papers would say that they were able to.
So then I thought, perhaps there isn't really anything wrong with these kids, perhaps there’s something wrong with the way we teach them.  I started very basic in the beginning, I had no idea it was called gamification back then, but I started to model their education on the role-playing games that I was playing with them, so that they were able to do all these things.  I started giving them virtual currency, so I rewarded them with currency when they did the things they needed to do when you go to school.  In the beginning it was simply entering the classroom (laughs).  I would reward them with coins for that.
Then the coins that they got, which was of course virtual currency, they could then use each Wednesday when we were having these role-playing sessions.  So they could gain in game currency by doing off game activities.  And this worked relatively well.  It wasn’t a miracle but it worked okay.  But then a new teacher came to the school and was placed in my team and she was the first person I’ve met professionally that could see what I was trying to do and where I didn’t have to explain everything and almost apologise for things I did.  
So all of a sudden we were two people working on this and it meant we could bounce things off each other and we could really get things done.  So we further developed this teaching method and got some even better results.  Then some colleagues from not our own school but some other schools felt that it was really interesting and wanted to copy what we did.  Then they were kind of challenged because everything we did was based on role-playing games.  So they needed a game master to do a role-playing game, game master, to do what we were doing.   And we thought, well, this doesn’t scale very well, we need to do something if this is to help kids beyond the four kids that we were teaching.
So we actually thought, what if we take me out of the equation as a game master.  What if we substitute the game master with a computer game.  Say, okay, we set the teachers free from game mastering in this hardcore way and then let the computer do all the managing.  When we started doing that we actually had – we didn’t really plan on this beforehand, but what happened was that the things that I had been doing in the foster home with training basic abilities like how long the kids were able to concentrate on a single task, how many items on the screen they were able to—
To try to—
Yeah, to try at once.  We suddenly when we went from role-playing games to computer games we started seeing an increase in these kind of skills as well.  So actually three months into using computer games we went from being able to teach these kids for fifteen minutes at a time, usually two times a day, rest of it was more or less resolving conflicts, to be able to teach these kids for full double lectures, that’s one and a half hours at a time.  And we could then do that two times each day and then still have one and a half hour left for gaming and reflecting on what we were playing.
So we were doing that in this special needs school for two years and while we were doing that we went from being three teachers teaching four kids to only being two teachers teaching eight kids.  And we have these national tests in Denmark, they’re not great really, a lot of problems with them, but it was the testing methods we had available to us.  During that time the pupils have an average improvement of one hundred and twenty-one percent.  That meant that several of our students caught up with their peers in normal school and some of them even surpassed them.
So what we thought was if we can teach these kids this effectively what would then happen if we taught this way in regular schools?  Some of these kids that get sent to special need classes and special need schools, could we actually keep them in classrooms in a meaningful way?  So we wanted to test that out and the municipality where we live got on board and they said, okay, you’ve got half a year’s salary for both of you, implement this in as many classrooms as you can and let’s see what happens.  
While we were doing that some researchers from Allborg University in Copenhagen came to visit us.  They thought that this was so interesting that we should see if we could get funding for a large scale research project on this.  And we did.  So for the last two and a half years we’ve been doing this research project on our teaching method in regular schools across Denmark.  And this August we’re ready to go public with our amazing results.
I’ll very much look forward to seeing those, they sound absolutely fascinating, amazing.  Just to look at this first general theme, you’ve spoken a lot about your experiences in quite clear detail and the context and the sort of impact that’s had.  And you mentioned different types of games there, gamification, which sounds like it was a starting point for you, and then moving into computer games.  Both serious and entertainment games do you think?
No serious games at all.  We’ve quite deliberately steered clear of any type of serious games and educational software.  And this is because I feel that very few serious games or educational games actually work well enough as a game to really do what we want to do.  So what we do instead is we take good off the shelf entertainment games, of course this can take some time finding the right games.  But when we find the right games what we do is we look for games that require the basic skills that we want the kids to learn, could be cooperation, could be communication, could be anything.  And then we play those games, practising these skills.  
Then what we also do is we do these special assignments that we call portal assignments.  These are assignments that we make especially for the games and for the subject being taught.  And the object of these assignments is to have the students realise how the subject matter can make them better at playing the game.  Does that make sense?
Yes, I understand.
So if you take a game like Starcraft.  Do you know Starcraft?
No, I don’t.
This is a real-time strategy game where it’s really a logistics race.  You’re trying to build your base and your army as quickly as possible to defeat your opponent.  So in our special needs class we were teaching multiplication.  So we did a portal assignment where we showed them that if you have your base here and you have your mineral fields here, once you put out these SCVs they’re called in the game, these worker units, to mine these mineral fields, if you have less than three per mineral field there will be times when the mineral field isn't in active use.  And if you have more than three your workers will be standing in line waiting.
So once they saw that if I do fast multiplication in my head, if I see, well, my base is here, there’s seven mineral fields here then I need twenty-one workers, and that will actually give me an advantage.  Once they saw that, once they realised that what we’re trying to teach them actually was applicable in a setting that they were really engaged in, in some activity that they wanted to become better at, we could then go back to our regular school books, boring, unsexy school books.  And then they would actually carry this enthusiasm and this willingness to learn onto the books.  Because now they actually have a goal within themselves for learning how to multiply in their heads.  Instead of us saying you need to do this because there’s an exam coming, or your mother and father want you to do it.  It became an internal goal.
So evidently the motivational aspect is very strong in this sense, it’s a driving force in the learning.
Yes, it is.
This brings us very nicely on to the next general theme, which is games and learning.  So looking more specifically at some of the aspects of learning, learning through games or with games, where as I said, you just mentioned motivation as being a central driving factor in attaining the potential what you see as the added value of using games for learning, would you say that’s true?
I think there’s great value in learning in games.  There’s just some – there’s a core here that of course pertains to motivation but really has more to do with relevance and meaning.  Because what are we using the games for?  We’re using the games because they are motivating for the kids if we choose the right games.  But they also, and this is the most important part I think, provide relevance and meaning to the things that we want to teach the kids.  So the game really becomes a meaningful context for learning rather than sugar coating or – yeah.   Does that make sense?
Yes, it does, perfect sense.  So there’s intrinsic motivation through the meaningfulness of the activity.
Yes.  So we sometimes operate with a term called real, where we are talking about real assignments.  Which is tasks that will actually make a difference to either the student doing them or the world around them.  So in this case with Starcraft I was just talking about, it would be a real assignment because it would make an actual difference when they were playing the game.  
So once we’ve established, once we’re dealing with real assignments, real problems, we like to think that we will then get closer to what we call real students.  Which will be students who are actually interested in learning what we’re teaching. And the last part of the equation is what we call real teachers.  Teachers who actually intrinsically motivated to teaching the subject.  And who are also actual experts on the subject.  So once we have real teachers, real assignments and real students our claim is we can do almost anything.
It sounds to me, correct me if you think this is not true, it sounds like there’s a lot of let’s say experiential learning that is driving the sorts of approach that you are trying to take and to realise.
Yes.  It is a driving force but it’s not the only thing happening.  There’s also learning and experimenting also involves a lot of practise and honing skills.  But the driving force is the experimenting and the applied use of the skills that we’re teaching or we’re learning.
Would you say that you’ve noticed some limitations in this sort of approach?
When we’re trying to get the teachers to do this there are of course some obstacles.  One of the more boring but obvious obstacles is that a lot of the teachers aren’t that technically qualified.  Simply setting up the games and the networks and getting everything running smoothly can be a huge obstacle for many teachers.  And we’re getting there, we’re getting closer, but I don’t think we would have been able to get this thing started in the first place if I did not have several years of experience from the IT business.  
Then there’s a lot of tradition in teaching, at least in Denmark.  When we have been guest teaching at teacher colleges we have almost always been baffled by how little the students are guided by current research or theories and how much they’re guided by their own experiences as pupils when they were in schools themselves.  So there’s a huge tradition of what you do and what is school, what is teaching, what is learning, that is an obstacle also.
Good.  So let’s just now – I’m just showing some of the keywords that have come up in this theme so far in the project.  You’ve talked – again, you’ve mentioned the different sorts of games there and the motivational factors and the impact in terms of skills, soft skills in particular you mentioned.  And also the content knowledge, curriculum knowledge and so forth.  What about collaboration and competition in this context?
I really wanted to say something about competition.  Because a lot of people when we talk about games and gamification they sort of jump to the notion that games are about competition.  And of course some games are.  But what we found is that we can motivate the most pupils, the most students, if we focus on collaborative games and we focus on PVE games, player versus environment games.  So we have groups of players competing cooperatively against a computer player, an AI player, rather than against other human players.
Also our gamification of the classroom has almost no focus on competition whatsoever.  We are using a lot of different gaming techniques, gaming mechanics, but competition is something we’d rather not go into.  There’s a lot of other ways to motivate and make things relevant and exciting than competition.  And competition I think there’s really enough competition in schools and education already.
It’s very interesting you mention that in terms of gamification specifically.  Because I imagine you’ve also read and heard of a lot of the quite critical comments that are made about gamification techniques and I’m sure you’ve seen some of them relate to that aspect specifically.
Yes.
As a limitation.
You mean competition as a limitation?
In a gamified context of leveraging—
Our way of gamification is rather different from anything else I’ve seen.  Because gamification is more like a role-playing game with a role master than it is a mechanical game setting.  So in some ways it’s more like playing rather than gaming, does that make sense?  So the teacher is a game master who’s actually on the same team as the students.  When you’re playing a dungeon master, a game master, in a role-playing session, you’re really on the same team as the players.  And your job is to make sure that it’s interesting, that the challenge level is right, to keep things flowing rather than judging who’s best.  Does that make sense?
Yes.
So our gamification is really not fair in the sense that you can win it, but it’s fair in the sense that everybody gets challenged on their own level and everybody is rewarded for whatever they can manage to participate with.
So it sets a fairness in that.  It’s interesting you mentioned fairness, because that brings us on to our brief look at ethics as well.  We’ll move it along a bit and the next general theme is games and the individual.  So thinking about the way different individuals might respond positively, negatively, in different ways, to gamified experiences, to games, digital games and so forth?
What we’ve found is that every person and every pupil is different.  That is actually quite challenging for us as well because that means that our teaching method and our gamification is quite complex.  We are using a lot of different game mechanics, game dynamics, to make sure that we motivate everyone.  We have seen pupils in every classroom that do not respond or respond negatively to some aspects but we haven't seen anyone who does not overall respond positively to the entire package.  But this is also a challenge because to implement this in classrooms the researchers really want us to dissect the method of teaching, the teaching approach, into small manageable objects or—
Chunks?
Yeah, chunks.  And of course we can do that, and of course these chunks will be effective somewhat on their own.  But when you do that you’re just left with some kids who are really not motivated by this particular chunk.  And we want everybody to feel as a part of a whole.  So we want – we actually need all these different types of motivations if you will, all these different types of mechanics and skills to work in unison, to really get where we want to go.
You mentioned before some of the impressions that people have of games and gaming, you were talking about how it has this impression of being something based largely on competition.  Other impressions about the impact on individuals that can come up are things like addiction and violence and those sorts of things and unhealthy lifestyles, nerdiness.  I wonder what your feelings are about that aspect?
I have yet to see evidence that video games actually make you violent.  I have yet to see convincing evidence that people who isolate – that people actually isolate themselves with video games and when they do, if they do, that it won't just be for a period of time and then they will return to normal life if you will.  I’m really not that concerned.  Of course, we have stumbled upon some individuals who think that it will be an issue.  When we were teaching our special needs class, I think we were one year into the project, and we wanted to play a World War II based first person shooter with the kids.  Because we’ve read some research that said that the visual processes when you’re playing FPS, first person shooters, are quite similar to the visual processes that goes on when you’re learning to read.  
So we wanted to see if we could improve our students’ reading skills by playing first person shooter games.  And also we wanted the opportunity to have a game where you could have friendly fire, where the kids could actually kill each other.  Because we felt that we had graduated to a level of game literacy and social competence where it would be an issue that would be manageable.  So we of course had to go to these kids parents and say we want to play this game.  According to the PEGI rating you can only play this – or it’s recommended that you only play this once you’re sixteen or older, but this is why we want to do this, this is what we want to achieve, are you okay with it? 
And every parent, without fail, said, well, we’ve seen what your teaching has done to the kids for the last year, you can do anything.  Just hit the throttle, go with it, let’s see where this takes us.  And we didn’t see any increase in violence or aggression whatsoever.  However, we saw that half of the kids felt that actually just focussing the right place in the books became easier.  And while we were playing we had a focal point around saying – it was a Danish phrase of course, we called it [coot 0:37:40], which means it doesn’t matter.  Because you will accidentally shoot each other when you have friendly fire, it just happens.  
So we were working on the ability to say it doesn’t matter, he probably didn’t mean to shoot me in the back.  And we were trying to create a friend from that to the kid’s ordinary life, and they felt that for instance in the breaks in school when there were a lot of kids trying to get in and out of doors and hallways at the same time, they felt it actually got easier for them to go, [coot] (laughs).  
Great.  So that brings us, I’m just showing some of the keywords that have come up here in this theme of games and the individual.  We’ve talked about the addiction side perhaps.  There’s also physical activity as well. 
Yes, I’d like to tie something to the physical activity actually.  Before we were doing this, before we started using gaming mechanics and gaming dynamics in our classroom it was actually quite hard to motivate the kids to do physical activities.  They would just refuse.  So what we did was we created a concept we called physical game jam, which we went outside and played a regular game that they already knew.  It could be like dodge ball or whatever.  And once everybody was on board with the rules and what the rules were we would call ‘game jam’ and gather the kids and then let them try to reshape the game into what they wanted it to be.  
It always needed to relate to some subject in school that we were teaching.  So they had really to make their own educational physical game based on games that they already knew.  And they really liked this activity.  We would call ‘game jam’, gather them, say, okay, so how can we do this, how can we change this game?  Then we would accept two to three different rule changes and then we would try them out for five minutes, then we’d call ‘game jam’ again and say, did it work?  What happened?  What actually do we want to happen here?  Can we change something else?  So they got really excited about the physical activity through games and games thinking.
Good, okay.  So we’ll now move on from that general theme and move to the next one, which is games and ethics.  You’ve mentioned this already of games as ways of looking at ethical questions.  You also talked about your experience using games as an agent for inclusion which could be also considered perhaps an ethical issue, an ethical topic.
Yes.
Are there other aspects of ethics that you have come across, concerned with, or have heard about that you think are either pertinent to games and gaming?
When we’re teaching different subjects we’re of course using them as a meaningful context.  But we are also using the games as a laboratory where we can try out different theories that we create.  This is both regarding subjects like maths or communication or whatever but it’s also regarding ethics and morals and who we are and who we want to be.  This is – games create a safe space where we can actually play with these things.  We have been in different classrooms using the game Black and White 2, do you know that?
No.
No.  It’s called a God game where every action you make is judged by the system as either good or bad.  You can interact with the civilisation, you have to rebuild a civilisation and you can either do that by making your civilisation hugely impressive and peaceful so other civilisations will join you, or you can conquer other civilisations by force.  There’s no really right or wrong way to do this.  Sometimes when you want to achieve something good you have to do it by doing something bad.  I mean, if your villagers need wood you might need to pull out some trees for them.  Which is good when you give them the wood but it’s bad because you pull out the trees.
So the way we used that game was we played that collaboratively in class, this is a single player game so the students took turns controlling the game.  And each time we came across a moral or ethical dilemma we would pause the game and we would talk every possible option through.  And then we would make an anonymous vote on what we should do.  For instance, we have this pet in the game that you can teach by either – it comes up with different ideas, you can also nudge it to get different ideas – it comes up with different ideas and then you can either slap it if you don’t want it to do it or scratch its belly if you want it to do these things.  
And quite early on in the game this creature will pick up a villager and ask, can I eat it?  And then we would pause the game and say, okay, can our creature eat the villager?  Regardless of what the kids say we would start discussing this and inform them that if he eats the villager he will get stronger, there’s a lot of protein in villagers.  And the creature will have an easier time defending you from enemies.  Another option could be saying, no, you can't do that and trying to grow some livestock or perhaps raising an army to defend your villagers.  But armies are considered evil in the game as well.  So what do we do?  And why do we do it? (Laughs) 
So yes, I think ethics wise games can be a really great tool.  It can create a safe environment, this laboratory for trying out who you are and consequences of different actions.
You mentioned identity there a couple of times and you may I suppose have come across a number of positions, comments and so forth of people who are from an ethical point of view concerned about the sorts of identities that are often associated with games and gaming in terms of things like gender, race, sexuality and so forth.
Of course.  We run into these things all the time.  But in the kids and in teachers.  My partner in the company is a woman and I find that when we have to teach someone, if it’s kids or teachers or whoever about games and what games can do, it’s really a lot easier if she’s present.  Because the females in the audience will respond to her in a different way.  My impression is that they have a notion in their heads about what games is and that it’s a male activity.  And that they somehow can't engage in it.  But when she’s standing there in some kind of pop culture t-shirt saying, games are cool, I play games every day, it becomes okay for them. 
What we saw in the research project was actually quite interesting.  Because even though this was also evident in the data we collected before the research it kind of levelled out during the project.  The girls in the project really changed their perspective on games a lot but the boys didn’t really.  And this led us to believe that the boys already know what games actually can do and what it takes to play a game, what playing games actually is.  But the girls didn’t necessarily know that beforehand but they did afterwards and started playing games in their spare – they already played games but they played different games.  They played single player games, casual games.  These big complex games that we use, they didn’t really play beforehand.  But they do afterwards.
So we’ll just look now, I’ve just put up some of the keywords that have come up regarding games and ethics and we’ve talked about things like violence and aggressivity and identity, diversity and inclusion.  There’s also monetisation, social equity there as well.
Yes, what do you mean by that?
Monetisation in terms of the issues surrounding the finances or the financial side of the games and game production.
Okay, so like free to play models, that kind of thing?
That sort of thing, yeah.  Just the way some people have expressed perhaps concerns or questions about how that is integrated in game development and how that may affect.
I think those issues are really mostly located in the casual gaming market.  And we only use complex games where you often times pay once for an entire game and then you own it for life.  We have on some occasions used MMOs that required a subscription but we have mostly turned ourselves towards these play once, large, complex games.  Also in terms of the cost of the games in the educational setting, our experience is that a lot of game makers actually want the games to be played in the schools.  And they want to participate in social responsible behaviour.  So if we ask them, most video game developers will say okay, here’s our game, you don’t have to pay.
So let’s move on to perhaps a very broad area, looking at games and society in general, sort of impact, changes that you think that games and gaming have had and are having on a social level, at a cultural level perhaps as well?
I think in many ways – and I think this is why I do what I do today also – I think in many ways gaming have rescued me actually.  I was a bright kid, I could do everything the teachers asked me to without really trying.  But if I hadn’t had that gaming space to really explore and develop on my own I do not think I would have ended up where I am.  I remember after ninth grade I had just taken an exam in English and I had gotten the highest possible grade, an A++ I guess it would translate to.  
And my English teacher turned to me and said, oh, so scolding you actually did work.  And I thought, no, of course it didn’t, I didn’t learn English in your classroom.  I learnt English because the Dungeons and Dragons manuals were only in English and I had to learn if I wanted to play.  I think what games can do and in society probably what we see games can do in education in terms of levelling the playing field and – I don't know, some kind of social equalisation actually where everybody can participate on their own level and have challenges presented to them that are meaningful for them right now.  So I guess games can somehow go against this trend of standardisation because they’re so adaptable.
I’m just bringing up some of the keywords that have come up in this theme.  And you’ve mentioned some aspects there of social and cultural change.  And that’s perhaps in that last respect something to do with game related innovation, it’s a sort of innovation that could – social innovation in a way that you think could come through as a result of pervasive use of games.
Yes.  I haven't talked about marketing.  I don’t know really what I want to say.  I think that the way marketing employs games is often very clumsy and ineffective.  And I think that the adults of tomorrow will be able to see through it like it was a glass pane.  I hope they will (laughs).  But I think most game based marketing is focussing on points, badges and leader boards and that is just crude and ineffective to my mind.
So if we move on now, let’s say getting to a sort of conclusive phase, it would be interesting if you have any particular suggestions that you would make?  Thinking about taking games forward both in education and society generally, any suggestions that you might have.  And it could be for any of the different stakeholder groups going from players to educators, to developers, policy makers, parents and so forth, what suggestions you might have for them.  I mean, you have mentioned about concentrating, from an educator point of view, concentrating on role-playing games, larger scale more challenging role-playing games rather than a casual game or entertainment style games.  Or the same suggestions you made perhaps for gamification developers of not relying on cheap if you like or superficial mechanics of things.  Are there other suggestions you would make to different players as it were in the gaming and game landscape? 
I think regarding teachers and parents and anybody who works with kids, I would say sit down and play with them, engage in these games, see what they actually are.  I find that a lot of both teachers and parents they don’t really know what’s actually going on.  They have a lot of ideas about what is going on when their kids or their pupils are playing games, but you can't convey what a game does by reading about it or by being told what it does.  You have to experience it.  So I would really want parents and teachers not to become gamers but to try and play the games as the kids play them.  
Because I think it would – what we see when we do this with teachers and parents is that it’s a massive wakeup call for a lot of people.  They simply do not know what it takes to play a game.  They do not know the level of skill it takes to coordinate a guild raid in World of Warcraft.  They don’t know, they have no idea.  Or simply even smaller games that could require massive amounts of knowledge that you have to acquire and skills you have to acquire as well to just do okay.  And I think this would support some kind of movement away from these small entertainment games and casual games into more complex games in all settings anyway, if people actually understood what is going on.  Or even if they don’t have a deep understanding of it simply to have experienced what actually is going on and what it’s about.
And in terms of gamification I think gamification has to mature a lot, gamification of marketing, if it should not just die and have been some kind of fad.  I think it needs to grow up a lot. 
So that would be a suggestion I’ve just put up there, the keywords with the different stakeholder groups there, so that could be something directed towards developers of maturing those sorts of approaches you think?
Yeah.
So at this point, unless you’ve got any further suggestions in any of those directions—
No, that would be – what we saw in the research project was really that once everybody was on board their motivations for actually playing games could be different, but we saw very little variations between genders when we were actually playing.  So I’d like to see this boys games and girls games eradicated.  They’re just games.  This actually goes on to both players and developers, to stop splitting things up in gender gaming styles, gender games.  Because I don’t believe it’s true.  I think we saw larger variation within the genders than between the genders in what was motivating and what the kids enjoyed.
Great.  That’s wonderful.  Thanks.  We’ll wrap this up here.  As I mentioned at the beginning we wanted to give you the opportunity to add something, to comment on something else that may have came to mind or that we haven't discussed or covered that you think is important?  Or perhaps to make any comments or ideas about the interview itself and what you think about it?
I thought the interview was pleasant.  I just remembered one thing more about genders that I’d like to say.  I have an eight year old girl and I play the Lord of the Rings online with her, that’s a large MMO in case you don’t know it.  And we have been recording some of our gaming sessions and we have created a YouTube channel where we broadcast these gaming sessions.  She was very worried about this being shown at her school, even though her teacher wanted to show it.  And for a long time I thought her concerns were about whether the boys would approve, because she could have felt that she was moving into the boys’ turf on some level.
But a few weeks in, after they actually saw the films or they watched the movies in class, she was very relieved and what she told me was that she was relieved about the girls’ reaction, not the boys’.  So what she was actually worried about was what will the other girls think if I step out of the girl territory, not what will the boys think when I go over theirs.  She wasn’t worried about that.  I don’t know really where I want to go with that, but it was just really interesting to me that that was her concern.  
To do with her identity and her relationship with let’s say her peer group or identity group.
Yes.  But fortunately they thought it was pretty cool.  So I hope that she can get more girls into gaming. (Laughs)
Great, if that’s it then I think we can wrap it up.  I’d just like to thank you very much, it’s been a really interesting interview.  It’s a little frustrating for me because there’s just so much that I’d like to jump in and exchange and share with you.  But obviously in this context we can't.
Perhaps we could do that at another time.
I was going to say, there will be some further opportunities.  And one of those if you’re interested is going to be an event, a project event, in Brussels in July which will gather together a number of different people concerned with games that we’re talking to and we’re interacting with.  It’s a one day event.  We’re able to invite some people to that, we can cover the cost of the flight and accommodation.  So if you were interested in that I can send you some more details and we can take it from there.
That sounds really interesting, I’d really like that.  
Officially it’s called an unconference in the sense that it’s—
An unconference like an ed camp?
Yeah.  It’s a bringing together of people with different perspectives and different view in different professional areas but trying to perhaps develop their own agenda as it were to work through on this one day workshop event.
What date is it, do you know that?
I can't tell you offhand, I don’t remember, but I will send you the details, together with your participation certificate and so forth.  Just to let you know about the output, as I said it’s all anonymous, but in this case from the interviews we’ve collected input from a number of different sources, literature, the European Commission’s policy statements and calls on games and gaming, gamification, so we’re bringing together different sources and we’ll analyse those.  And then in summer, towards the end of summer, we’ll be publishing the report that gives some indications about the output from that.  
Obviously we’ll be in touch but we’ll definitely send that to you so you get an idea of where this process has gone, what sort of conclusions it’s come to.  And then the next stage will be developing some scenarios, some suggestions about different ways that games and gaming and gamification might be taken forward on a more effective and a more equitable and also on a more ethical basis.  So a lot of this input that we’ve done today will feed into that process.
And you will send me whatever reports are made?
Yes.  The project deliverables, we’ll send you the links to those documents.  But we’ll be in touch also about that event in Brussels as well.
Thank you for a pleasant interview.
Thank you very much, it’s been my pleasure.  And yeah, we’ll be in touch very soon.