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

You do know you’re being audio recorded?
Yeah.
I will explain to you how this interview works.  As I said, we are interested in your experience with gaming, video games or games which are at least in part digital.  More in general about what are your thoughts on the influence of games in society.  During the interview you shall see – I am sharing the screen.
I can see it.
We have these PowerPoint slides that will guide our conversation.  And we have six big themes we will cover.  For each of them we have a few keywords that can just help you find something to talk about.  So I will show those keywords like this but you are not required to use all of them and talk about all of them, you can just take them as cues for finding what you think, what you want to talk about.  Okay?
Fine.
I will begin.  As I said, we are interested also in your experience with games and we will start with that.  If you can tell me what type of games you play, how long you have been playing and so on?
Sure.  Lately it’s been kind of competitive games where I play RTS, strategy games, platformers, just about every game imaginable.  And I’ve been playing as long as I can remember, as least since middle school.  I don’t have too much memories of elementary school but as long as I can remember playing video games so I’m pretty into the scene.
Do you play single player, multi player?
Both.  Multi player is definitely becoming more and more popular for me, because there’s a – especially I just moved out of state so I don’t really know people in this area and multi player games have been a great way for me to stay in contact with my friends.  My friends that live far away, if we play a similar video game we stay in contact far more often than friends I have that don’t play the same game as I do.  So it’s a great way for me to keep my friendships up.
Where are you from originally?
Michigan.  I just moved down to Kentucky.
How old are you?
I’m twenty-six. 
What kinds of platform do you use?  Computer or—
PC almost exclusively.  I do have a Nintendo Switch but it’s almost all PC, it’s the best way to play. 
And you don’t play on mobile?
I don’t play any phone games at all.  Oh, chess, I play chess with a friend but that doesn’t really count (laughs).
Another thing I wanted to ask, but of course you are free not to answer me, is how much money you spend on games typically?
I can give you a pretty good answer to that.  Let me look it up one second.  I play all my games through Steam and there’s a website that calculates how much money you’ve spent.  They have sales, so sometimes a game will go down to twenty bucks when it’s usually fifty, so it gives you a range of how much you could have spent.  So somewhere between thirteen hundred dollars and three thousand eight hundred dollars.  It’s probably somewhere in the middle there, I buy quite a bit on sale but definitely I wouldn’t maximise.  Let me say that this has some really good statistics.  There we go.  Every game I’ve bought in the last six years probably, it also shows like average price per hour that I’ve played.  Lots of interesting information there.
Thank you.  I will move to a harder question, which is what influence do you think games have on people?  What influence do you feel gaming has on you?  And what influence do you think games have on other people?
That’s a very complicated question.  It depends a lot and I think my relationship with games has kind of changed over the years quite a bit.  I will say I think – I’ll start with the positives, the value that I think gaming gives to people.  On the positive ends, I think games in a lot of ways it’s like problem solving just distilled in its more purest form.  And it’s really beneficial that people are addicted to problem solving, and games are constantly putting up issues or blockers in your way that you don’t understand, you can't get past a certain area, and you have to get creative and figure out how you get past certain scenarios.  Which is great, I think it’s a good sign. 
Also, I talked about this earlier, the social aspect, me being able to keep in contact with some friends and family through playing it.  And it definitely is a – I think they call it a – what’s the word – a cooperative cognitive artefact, it’s something that when you do it it helps you with other problem solving outside of the games and gives you a good toolset.  I think this is going to get more extreme as we go on, we’re going to be presented with – you get presented with scenarios in video games that are impossible in the real world, like they can't exist.  
I think Antichamber is a game that’s a really good example of this, where you’re navigating in a four dimensional geometric maze, and you can't do that in real life.  The best puzzle that I’ve experienced, it’s the first one in it, is you have two sets of stairs, one that goes up, one that goes down.  You go up the stairs that go up and they go round a corner and you end up exactly where you started.  You go down the stairs, you go round a corner and you’re exactly where you started.  How do you get past this puzzle?  If you turn around and go the opposite direction, all of a sudden you go through a different path and you end up somewhere completely different.  
This is a geometry that’s completely impossible in real life, but it kind of gives you intuitive sense of how your dimensional geometry works.  And I think especially for kids playing this, I think that would be hugely beneficial for them to understand math and other concepts.  You take that same scenario and put it in a virtual reality and now they’re literally navigating impossible geometries.  I’m curious to see how that would really affect peoples’ understandings of these not really intuitive concepts.
The more negative side is that video games are super addictive by design, I’ve definitely had an issue, struggled with game addiction.  I’ve gotten much better at it, I’m about an hour a day now which is I think pretty good wind down time.  But it’s really easy to get hooked on these things and just spend all your time on it.  I think it provides a lot of benefits but anything in excess is a problem of course.  
May I ask you how long did you play for?
It depends, I think at my worst I was probably doing like four hours a day, four or five.  And that was pretty bad (laughs).
So you decided yourself to tone down how much you play?
Yes.  
You actually already touched two of the keywords we put about addiction and about cognitive benefits like problem solving.  I would like to ask you about the effect of physical activity of games?  You said you play mostly – or only sedentary games, right?
Mostly PC games, and I’m sedentary, I’m sitting down playing.  I got virtual reality recently, so that’s kind of changing.  Those games are very active.  Some of them I can only play thirty, forty-five minutes before I’m just exhausted, I have to take a break.  I think that’s changing but games have definitely made me – games and work – I mean, my whole life is pretty sedentary, and I have to go well out of my way to make time to be active and move, which is tricky.  But everything in society wants me to sit down and not do that.
Something you already touched a bit on is about collaborating when playing games or competing when playing games.  Do you have any thoughts on that?
Yeah, it’s one of my favourite aspects of video games by far is the collaboration.  And being in constant contact.  The game I play mostly right now is Rocket League which is a team based game and it’s heavily communicative, where I’m just constantly, “I’m going over here, what do you do?  This is what I’m doing.”  We’re in constant communication with each other.  And I play exclusively with friends that I had in real life in Michigan so I keep in contact with them.  Puzzle games, like Portal, their multi player are just some of the best games, when you have a puzzle and you work with someone else to try to solve the issue with them, it’s a great experience.
If you don’t have anything else to add I will move to the next topic.
I’m just looking at these words really quickly.  Yeah, I’m good.
Another thing we’re interested in and also you already touched on it, is practical applications of games, so games used not only for entertainment but also for practical advantage.  You touched on it because you said about how puzzle games can be used with children which is already a kind of practical application.  Do you see others, or what kind of opportunities do you see?
I honestly think video games has the biggest potential for revolutionising education just in general.  Especially with virtual reality coming out, I have one VR, it’s not really a game but it’s super awesome.  I put on the headset and it shows someone’s arm and I can zoom into the arm and I’m standing on the skin.  And I see little text tiles that pop up that tell me about the skin cells and stuff.  I zoom into the cell and I see mitosis and all these other processes going on.  Life size, like all around me.  It’s super interesting and it’s way more interesting than a cellular biology class, that’s for sure.  I think you gain a lot.  I mean, it’s the philosophical question, Alice in the black and white room, do you gain something by experiencing something that you wouldn’t by just reading or gathering the information?  I think you really do.
That’s the one thing that video games can really give you, you get to experience the knowledge in a way that’s not really possible from a textbook or from a lecture, you get to be inside of the system that you’re trying to understand.  I think there’s a study, they compared Luminosity which was that game made by neuro-scientists or whatever to help people with memory and things like that.  They did a kind of test between people who did that and people who played Portal.
I think I read this study.
Yeah.  And people on Portal, they had far bigger benefits than the Luminosity one.  Another one they were comparing first person shooters, Call of Duty, and peoples’ ability to distinguish between different shades of grey or count the number of moving objects.  And even playing first person shooter for an hour had a tremendous benefit which can help with driving, with reaction time.  I mean, a whole bunch of things that gaming can help you with.
Do you think these games can be used also in school?
Yeah.  They can be used in school but it’s tricky because they have to be educational enough to play at school, but they can't be too – it can't just be a fun game, it can't be just Portal, which you’re not really – you’re getting benefits from it cognitively but you’re not actually learning about a subject.  And there’s not a lot of games that I’ve seen that have really struck that balance well and that’s a very difficult problem that’s going to take really good smart game designers to solve.
Are you familiar with the terms serious games and gamification?
Yeah.  I can talk about that.  Gamification, this kind of goes back to what I was talking about where I haven't seen a game that really strikes the balance between education and being a game.  Playing educational games that try and gamify learning, I think they really missed the mark, because they’re not fun. (Laughs)  Which is the most important thing about a game, it has to be enjoyable.  And it’s tricky to integrate those two things together.  I mainly play serious games, really competitive or hard, difficult games.
Do you see ethical issues in games and gaming, but also maybe in the message they are conveying?
Are you talking about maybe like portrayals of women in games or portrayal of men in games?
For example, yeah.
Not particularly.  Because I think it’s art and I think art you have a lot of leisure and whatever the art is it’s so expressive and it’s – I mean, this is such a heavy topic, but it’s – we shouldn’t be criticising the creativity of people and the art that they make, because it’s a personal expression.  And we shouldn’t really limit their expression because of our maybe ethical or moral standings.  Even discussions with unethical people can expand your understanding of certain topics.  I’m really against that concept.  
Like the women, video games have traditionally been for men, they’re transiting now which is a good trend to be more inclusive.  But the whole princess in the castle and you’re always saving the dancer in distress issue with video games is really the male power fantasy.  It’s men want to save the women and get the kiss at the end.  It’s not really a negative portrayal of women as much as it is the fantasy of men that made the video game.  
I don’t really see a problem with that, I wish there was more representation of other concepts, which is happening, it’s a maturing art form, and so it’s going to start out really simplistic for technical reasons and just because it’s a new art.  We’re now getting to more serious and more rich story telling that isn't so two dimensional as it used to be.  Yeah, it’s evolving.  I don’t really see much issues in that line.
Do you feel the same way about the violent content of video games?
No, I think people are pretty good at understanding it’s a game.  I think it’s a good way to get out violence and to wind down and if you are really angry to just shoot some Nazi zombies in the face and then you’re not as angry anymore. But I am curious to see with virtual reality, a whole new set of rules, that might change because of how immersive and how realistic it feels, or it’s going to feel.  It still feels like a game but I can see into the future and it’s going to be indistinguishable from reality within our lifetimes.  Then the question of violence is going to crop up again and I just don’t have enough data to really comment on if that’s going to be a problem.  I don’t think it’s a problem now though.
Looking at some of these words, piracy.  The issue with piracy with all media content is if you make it readily available and at a fair price piracy drops.  I used to pirate movies and music all the time, I got Netflix, I got Spotify, I don’t pirate anymore, because it’s made readily available to me at a fair price.  So the need for piracy went away.  When there’s a show that I’m incapable of watching without pirating I will, like a Chinese film or something, there’s no other way to get it besides piracy.  Which is kind of a necessity in some cases if you want to get some media content.
So you don’t see much of an issue anymore in piracy?
No.  I don’t know a lot of people who really pirate video games anymore.  I used to but with Steam and with the digital platforms that have come out it’s so trivial to get them now, the necessity for piracy has decreased significantly.
Something connected to that is the issue of monetisation of video games.  
Actually, that’s a huge issue.  This is actually the biggest ethical issue I have.  So games like Counterstrike Go, Rocket League, they have a crate system where you play, you get a crate that has a random item in it and you buy a key which is like a dollar to unlock it.  And it’s literally a roulette of what item you’re going to get.  And there’s kids playing this and you’re teaching kids to gamble, which is highly concerning to me.  Because I mean, gambling is very addictive, it shrinks the reward centre of your brain and it is not something – I don’t think we should be teaching kids the “value” of gambling in video games, and it sucks.
But more and more game designers are doing it and it’s really, really disappointing that gaming aspect.  Micro-transactions is kind of the same thing.  It’s odd how valuable digital content can be, like there’s knives in Counterstrike Go that go for a thousand dollars.  It’s absurd, it’s a digital item, it cost zero money to produce, literally zero money to produce an infinite number of them.  Yet their artificial scarcity is causing them to have tremendous value behind them.  It’s really, really bizarre and it’s going to get worse I think which is unfortunate.  That’s probably the biggest ethical issue I think I have with games in general, is the way it’s trending towards getting money out of people is not good.  Mobile gaming is like the cesspool of this, it’s one of the reasons I don’t play mobile gaming, it’s so; give us more money, give us more money, give us more money, and I’m morally against that aspect.
So you said it yourself, it’s also connected to the issue of addiction, right?
Yeah.  I  mean, it’s a huge problem to get people addicted to spending money like that.  I don’t support it.  
Another topic is the most abstract question I will ask of you, how do you see the influence of games on society?  Do you think they influence society?  And if so, how?
Yeah, that’s tough.  I need to sit and think for a second about that one.
Take your time.
One part that I touched on before is definitely the social aspect of it.  I’ve been connected to people who live in very remote places, in Europe and Canada and other places I’ve never even been, and I’ve developed friendships with people that I’ve never seen or met.  And I think social media is too, but to be connected with people from such varying backgrounds I think is definitely a positive.  And it’s interesting to have friends that you’ve never seen their face, it’s definitely an odd experience.  Beyond that, I think there’s tremendous potential for games to be beneficial to society.  I’m not an expert in analysing that information so I don’t know if they’ve really had a positive impact.  Going back to problem solving distilled and teaching people really core concepts of how to solve problems.  
And also how to – this is a little bit off topic for games in society, this goes back to the first thought, but I just thought about it and I think it’s an important part of it.  Games is the only media I can think of that requires you to be good at it, otherwise you don’t get the content.  Just because you bought a game doesn’t mean you get the full content.  If you’re not good enough at the game you don’t get to see all of the content.  And that’s a very important lesson for peoples’ lives.  You don’t read a book and then halfway through the book it gives you a quiz and if you fail the quiz the book slams shut and you can't read any further.  Or a movie where, what’s that character’s name?  You don’t know?  Back to the beginning of the movie.  
This doesn’t happen in any other media but video games.  That trial and error and that difficulty in restricting the content based on your skill level I think is very beneficial lessons to people that they can then apply to their day to day lives, which kind of goes back to society.  I think that’s probably as much as I can say about that because I don’t really know the impact that games has on society, so it’s hard for me to speak on that subject.
A thing you already said is that you consider games a form or art, right?
Yeah.
It’s something that is very widely debated if they can be art or not.  So it’s interesting that you have a very clear position on that.
Oh, games are absolutely art.  I always laugh at the people who say games aren’t art.  It’s a very silly and narrow definition of art, especially when we live in a time with post modernism and where art can be so abstract and so much is considered art but they exclude games.  I think that’s a pretty silly position to take.
A thing I’m interested about is regulating the use of games because before you talked about children playing video games and how this can be especially dangerous for them if they are gambling.  What do you think about how video games are regulated?  So for example, the rating system to say this game shouldn’t be played by people under sixteen or eighteen?
The rating system is there, I don’t know how much it’s followed.  If it’s present and it’s not followed it’s not really useful.  I don’t really know how many parents are following, I know my parents didn’t really care about the rating system.  I don’t know many – when I was a kid I didn’t know many parents that really cared about that either.  If it’s there but it’s not being used it doesn’t really matter.  As far as regulating other parts, we have to be careful with any regulation, you have to be really – just because your intentions are good and you want a positive outcome doesn’t mean that the regulations you’re going to put in place are a) going to make that true, and b) aren’t going to have really negative unintended consequences.  
The biggest thing I would regulate in video games is the gambling aspect of it.  It’s gambling and I think it should be regulated as if it was gambling, because it’s what it is (laughs).  If you want to go really deep into the – so there’s regulations on like child pornography video games, things like that.  And that comes up with a really difficult moral argument, where if that stops paedophiles from having sex with kids because they have this digital outlet to it, should we be regulating that?  I don’t know the answer to that, that’s something that has to be studied and researched.  It’s already against the law so they’ve made up their mind.  But if it true that it would decrease the amount of abuse for people who are neurologically paedophilic then those games probably should be allowed, because it protects children in a way.  
But it’s such a moral grey area, you got to be so careful with regulation.  Because it might be a good intention, let’s not have video games with this explicit content in it but has the unintended consequence on making sexual abuse of minors more prevalent because they don’t have that release that they could otherwise be getting from video games.  You can take that and abstract it to as many subjects as you want to with violence, people who have violent tendencies, video games are a good release to that.  Does that decrease their level of violence?  I don't know.  I know there’s been some studies, I don’t remember them well enough to quote so I’m not going to.  
But at the same time you’re giving them the virtual experience and the question is, are those experiences of violence or explicit behaviours, is that immoral to even experience it, or is it really the act upon the other individual that’s the immoral aspect of it that needs to be – that’s a tough question (laughs).  It requires a lot of research and intelligent implementation of these regulations.  I don’t really have faith in government to really do the research or be – I still don’t think government is really data driven so I’m kind of on the whole against regulation, but it’s mainly just my lack of faith in the people who are making the regulations to be able to do it from a scientific data driven perspective.
Another thing I wanted to ask, you said you just bought a virtual reality headset.  I’m interested in what you think of the future of games, also virtual reality, how do you think they will change if there are new opportunities presented by this technological innovation?
Yeah.  I mean, the question is really difficult because it’s not so much – because what’s important to measure is not really the change but the rate of change, the delta change.  The rate of change is so high and so insane that even predicting ten years out of what video games are going to look like is extremely difficult.  There’s Moore’s laws but there is some really interesting research that’s being done that could really surpass Moore’s law.  Google just came out yesterday and announced a screen that had ten times the pixel density of any screen before it.  And it’s going to be close to – when they’re talking about specifically putting in a virtual reality headset which they’ve done, and they said they’re approaching the point where it’s indistinguishable from reality, already, today.  They’re already getting to that level of fidelity which is unbelievable.  
I don’t know if you’ve read the book Ready Player One which directly deals with this concept of virtual reality in the future where it becomes indistinguishable from reality and it’s a better reality because it’s designed by humans than what we live in now.  So people retreat to it because it’s a fun awesome reality where you’re the hero and life isn't like that.  Movies are great because it shows this reality that’s so captivating and interesting because it was made by humans for humans.  And if we create a whole universe of these different realities why would you choose the real one when you have this compelling experience that’s always there and always available to you.  It’s going to be a very difficult problem for us to overcome.  
This goes to more of a deeper thing where more abstractly the concept of reality itself is going to be deeply challenged in the next couple of decades of what is real and what isn't real.  And we’re going to – what matters is the subject of reality, the experience or reality, and we’re going to open the gateway to things that aren’t possible in the real life are now possible in an experiential way where your brain – what’s that experiment where we’re all just brains in vats experiencing this reality.  That’s literally going to be true very soon.  And you could spend your whole life where every time you say fireball and you put your hand out a fireball pops into existence and flies forward.  That’s your V-reality that you experience is where magic is real.  What does that do to the human psyche or your experience, is that a good experience?  What’s the moral values of that?  I have no idea.  It’s going to be exciting, I’m ready to get on that rollercoaster but the greater impact that that’s going to have on people, I can't say.
I see what you mean.  So you think it’s going to be in some ways a problem.
I don't know if it’s a problem, that’s – I mean, there’s another thought experiment where you could – it’s the experience machine where you could live your whole life in this fake world and it’s incredibly satisfying, it makes you incredibly happy, or you could spend your whole life in the real world with all of its problems and issues that you’re facing.  If you choose to live in the fake world is that life any less valuable than the life that was lived in the “real world”.  I don’t really think there would be a meaningful difference from the perspective of the person which is really what matters.  Is there a moral issue there or is there a problem with living your life in a completely virtual environment which is something we’re going to face in our lifetime, a hundred percent sure.  I don’t know if there is a problem with living your life entirely virtually.  Maybe, but I’m not really seeing the issue there.
Going to the last topic actually of the interview.  We talked about a lot of things about games, potential problems, potential opportunities.  What advice would you give to different categories of people who interact with games to make the future better for games and for gaming?  I don't know if I explained myself well.
I know what you mean, I’m just thinking.  I mean, educators, I feel like our school system – I’m in America, I don’t know about over there but our school system is not very game friendly in any way, shape or form.  I think that’s a big problem.  I think they really need to start – because there’s so much tremendous opportunity there, they really need to start investing in those kind of experiments.  I know they’re starting to use Minecraft which is fantastic.  I’m a computer science major, when I was in college Minecraft came out and there’s – I don’t know if you know about Redstone and how that works in it, but it’s computer engineering, it’s making circuits.  And I was able to understand computers at a fundamental level by playing with the circuitry in Minecraft.  That was very beneficial.  
I think educators really need to start taking a serious look at the benefits that they can get from video games.  As far as developers, they need to work with educators in a way to – I mentioned this before, I’ve not had a compelling experience where that was both highly educational and highly fun at the same time.  There’s a big gap there that needs to be bridged.  I think there needs to be a collaborative effort between game studies and teachers and educators.  
Researchers, the research I have read on video games seems to be pretty good.  Parents, they need to know what video games their children are playing.  That is the most important thing and I think they should play video games with their kids.  They need to understand the experiences that their kids are getting and they need to be – if you play games with your kids you get this beautifully shared experience with them that is – it’s like playing backyard football with your parents and your brothers and family or whatever, it’s a great bonding experience.  I think parents are pretty dismissive of video games these days, which is unfortunate.  I think they should be embracing them and experiencing them with their children, because there are so much benefits that come from there.
Players, don’t play so many video games, take a break, walk away.  Go outside, see the sun.  That’s huge.  Exercise.  It’s so easy to get sucked down the rabbit hole of addiction with video games, you have to have the discipline to stop.  And that’s something that wasn’t instilled in me as an adolescent and it’s something that as an adult I had to come to terms with and get out of those bad habits.  I still fall into it every now and again playing too many games, but it was not easy to come out of the heavy addiction of video games.  It’s challenging.  I don’t really know what can be done to make that better but I know like South Korea has video game addiction clinics to get people off it, but they have a very unique culture in video games so it’s slightly different.
Anything about institutions, so the government for example?  Because you mentioned them before and said they’re not really data driven, and so you don’t have much confidence in what they are going to do.
Yeah, I would prefer they wouldn't do anything because I just don’t trust them.  That’s a whole issue.  I feel like every aspect of our society is knocking it out of the park except for government.  Every other aspect, we’re doing so good, and then government is just such a letdown, it’s very disappointing.  They just don’t care about facts, it seems like, or truth, and that’s the only thing that matters is the facts and the truth and the data.  But it seems like they’re so driven by emotion and what they feel like and corruption and lots of other issues, but yeah, I don’t have much faith in the government’s ability to regulate video games in an intelligent way.
Is there anything you want to add we didn’t touch on, some thoughts that came up when we were talking about something else?
I think I covered all my bases pretty good (laughs), it was a pretty wide conversation.  
I guess the interview is over.  It was a little faster than I expected but it’s very dense.  So thank you.
I hope I gave you what you want.
Thank you very much for your time.  If you are interested when we have the interviews analysed and we have our research output I can send it to you.
Yeah, I’d be very interested in anything you guys get from this study.
I will keep your contact and I will send it to you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, goodbye.