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

Thank you for agreeing to be interviewed.
You’re very welcome.  Thank you for finding a time that we can both do, I realise it wasn’t easy. 
You know you’re being recorded?  And you’re okay with that?
Yes.  And if I remember correctly the recordings will be anonymised but publicly available?
Yes, the transcription will be available anonymised.
So the transcription will but the physical audio recording won't?
Yes.  I will explain to you how this interview is structured, because as I said we are interested in your experience with games and in your thoughts about gaming and society.  I will share some slides, you should be able to see shortly.
Yeah.
Great.  We will explore six themes.  These will guide our conversation and there will be some keywords like this which you are free to use, you are not required to talk about all these topics, but you can use them as cues to help you collect your thoughts and think about maybe something that didn’t come to your mind.
Sounds good.
Feel free to ask me to repeat what I am saying if my accent is bothering you (laughs).
I will, but I’m sure I won't, don’t worry.
Do you have any other questions?
No, that all sounds good.
We will begin by talking about your experience with gaming.  What do you play, how much do you play and what role games have in your life?
I’ve been playing games since I was about two I think on my dad’s laptop.  When I was about three or four we got a bunch of old home PCs – well, old home computers, we got a Spectrum, a Commodore, an Amstrad and an Electron, and they came with about three thousand cassettes or something mad like that.  I just completely fell in love with them.  Since then I’ve owned most consoles that came out since then, I’ve got a PS1, a PS4, an N64 Game Cube, an XBox, an XBox 360, I’ve had a bunch of PCs, a bunch of laptops.  I can't even begin to imagine how many games I have now and how many games I’ve played.
I kind of changed a little bit in terms of what kinds of games I like to play.  When I was very young and just playing home computer games it was just whatever games were there I liked.  When I was in my teenage years it was very much real-time strategy games.  One of which I played very competitively and became one of the five best players in the online ranking system.  Which was Red Alert 2 Command Conquer.
Then after that I got slightly more into first person shooters, played Counterstrike quite competitively for a while but also Team Fortress and Halo and things like that.  I had always enjoyed card games but when I was about eighteen I discovered poker so I was playing online poker and started making money at that and started making a living at that.  And I intended just to play poker as my life until the end of my undergrad degree when I decided to do a PhD and to quit poker.  So I did that, and quit poker and started doing a PhD.
At that point I was playing a few RTS games but mostly indie games, also EVE online.  And since then I’ve mostly been into indie games and these days I’m a games academic and I make games.  I also do lots of freelance writing about games.  And games are probably my number one or my number two life passion I guess.  
I can see that.
There you go.
How much do you play in a typical day or week?
These days sadly way less than I’d like to.  Because academia is fairly demanding and fairly competitive.  These days, I don't know, maybe – probably no more than one hour a day at the absolute most.  Probably more like half an hour a day or like one hour every two days type of thing.  Something like that I’d say.  More in the past during my PhD I definitely played at least two hours a day.  These days, probably half an hour a day, one hour every two days, one hour every three days, something like that. 
But to make up for that I watch a lot of games on Twitch.  A lot of the time when I work I watch other people playing games in the background, which is partly for enjoyment but also partly since as a games scholar I kind of should know what’s going on in games.  But if I don’t have the time to play them then I have to watch someone else playing just to keep up with what’s taking place in the games world which I don’t have time to play.
You said you played mostly on any platform I can think of.
I’ve never played handheld games which is not because I don’t like them, I just never got into handheld gaming.
And mobile?
I’ve never played mobile games, no, I’ve always been PC/console.
So there is one kind of games you don’t play (laughs).
Yes.
Do you play also single player or only multiplayer competitively?
Only single player.  I don’t have the time it would take to become good enough at a multiplayer game for me to enjoy playing it basically.  Pretty much only single player games these days.  My multiplayer game peak was between when I was about sixteen and about twenty, when I was playing a lot of RTS games, lots of first person shooters and poker.  But these days I’m purely single player.
So that’s also something that changed when you had less time.
Yes.
Last thing I want to ask you, and you are free not to answer (laughs), is how much do you spend in games?
These days very little.  Recently I wanted to play Bloodborne on the PS4 and I didn’t own a PS4, so I bought a PS4 purely to play Bloodborne, making it the most expensive game that I every bought.  But it was definitely worth it.  Broadly speaking I definitely spend under – Bloodborne aside, I definitely spend less than two hundred pounds a year these days.  If you went back to my PhD it would probably be more like three to four hundred pounds a year, if you went back to my undergrad it’d probably be more like five, six hundred a year.  
But it’s a reduction in spending that just came because you are playing less, it’s not something you are actively controlling?
Definitely.  
Moving on, you played a lot since a very young age, what kind of influence do you think games had on you, or any kind of influence?
Games have definitely influenced my career path in the sense of when I learnt that one could be a games academic I thought, that sounds like the greatest job on earth, and decided to start doing that.  They definitely influenced me to make games which is what I’m far more well known for than my academic work.  I’d say more people download my game in one day than have ever read every paper I have ever written.  Which is kind of the nature of the job in some ways.  But it’s definitely influenced that.
On a more philosophical level I guess games have influenced me in the sense of – particularly something like poker, has shown me that luck still plays a huge role in one’s life, even when one works hard and is skilled and all these type of things.  It taught me to think about the long-term rather than the short-term.  And competitive games I guess in general taught me that but poker particularly.  And this was entirely online poker so kind of like a video game.  And those kinds of lessons have definitely been really crucial for me I think.
It’s definitely helped me meet a huge amount of really amazing cool people.  On the back of my games research I’ve been all over North America and Europe and East Asia on research travel and that’s all been fantastic.  I can genuinely think of nothing negative I’d say that games have done to me or done for me.  I’d say the influence of playing games and more recently studying and making games has been one hundred percent positive.
I’m interested about competition since you played competitively.  Do you think your view on competition changed due to games?  Or even your view on collaboration if you’re playing the team games I mean?
Yes, the big thing would be the thing I said about that doing well in anything is always a question of the long-term.  There are so many aspects of luck in one’s life that one can't control.  To do well at anything I think means doing well every time until the factors you can't control line up and then you win.  And that applies I think to poker events but also to lots of competitive games in general.  Where if you’re playing 5 V 5 then a lot of your winning or losing is based on your teammates.  And all you can do is play as well as you can every game.  And then over the long-term you will slowly win out based on when the luck facts of how your teammates play line up with you or not.
I’d say also games have taught me that competition in general – where competition takes place in a space where everyone is able to opt in or opt out, as in a game, I think it’s very healthy and very rich and very enjoyable.  But that any kind of translation from game competition to real world competition and where people are born with massively different advantages and disadvantages and demographic backgrounds and all that type of stuff is hugely detrimental.  One of the beautiful thing about games is that – and this is a slightly sweeping comment – but is that broadly speaking games are a fairly equal playing field I think compared to real life.  And I think that’s one of the best things about them.
In terms of collaboration.  I don’t know if games have really taught me much about collaboration.  Maybe I spent too much time playing EVE online which is famous for backstabbing and cheating and skulduggery.  Being a games academic and being a game designer have taught me a lot about collaboration but I’m not sure if the actual act of playing games has taught me all that much about collaboration because I tended not to play team based competitive games.  Or when I did – like CS is a team based competitive game but it’s also a game where the individual plays a much bigger role I’d say than something like Dota or League or Heroes of The Storm or that type of thing.  
So I wouldn’t say games have taught me bad about collaboration but I don’t think they’ve taught me anything particularly positive about collaboration either.  But they have taught me both about the positives and the negatives for competition I think.
Another thing I’d like to ask you, you played a lot of strategy games, poker, which also requires quite a bit of reasoning.  Do you believe that games improved your reasoning capabilities?
Absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt.  I think there’s no chance that I would – not to sound rash – but I don’t think I would be where I am now without having learnt a lot from games and without having honed decision making skills through games.  And also in a sort of – and so I think games have kept my reflexes extremely fast as well.  I do play some kind of reflex heavy games quite competitively as well as strategic games, and in those cases I think that has definitely kept my reactions sharp and that type of thing.  
I think it was at a conference a while back – this was quite funny – someone knocked a glass off a table and I went woo, and caught it, on the way down.  And this was kind of right in the middle of when I was playing a lot of really, really incredibly fast reflex heavy games.  And all the people I was with then said, well, that’s the arcade games paying off there.  Whether that’s true or not, I definitely think games have done a lot for me in terms of making good choices in life and in terms of just keeping my brain and my eyes and my hands quite sharp.
Do you think that games can be addictive?
I think that’s absolute nonsense in my opinion.  I think all kind of models of – in general I think addiction models in psychology in general are tremendously flawed and written through with a lot of implicit ideological assumptions about how people should spend their leisure time and some very condescending opinions on the extent to which one has free will and the extent to which one should be allowed to go in one’s own time and things of that sort.
To an extent I think anything can be addictive, but if games are addictive then to me personally I think the fault, in so far as there is fault, I don’t think – let me think a second how to word this.  The “fault” definitely doesn’t lie with the game, it lies with an addictive personality on the part of the person in question. Which I am not saying is their fault at all, but it’s definitely not the game’s fault.  And I think it’s extremely easy clearly when we’ve had a lot of kind of moral panics around games for the newest one to be, oh games can cause addiction and get you trapped inside and you never go out and you never engage with people and you never go to school and you never work and blah, blah, blah.  But anything can do that.  
And things that are healthy for most people, like you could get addicted to TV and I think that you could argue that a lot of people are in fact.  But I think games make a very easy target and I think placing the responsibility or placing the agency at least on games rather than on the individual and on the kind of wider social context in which the individual has been raised and has been socialised I think is a big mistake.
You are in a very interesting position on the topic of addiction, because it’s widely debated whether games or addictive or not.  And there are several voices in academic research for or against this kind of position.  But when games are presented as addictive there is often this comparison with gambling, which is much more recognised as an addiction with potential detrimental effects.  And it’s interesting because actually you are a gambler online as well, so you have both of these – an experience with a kind of behaviour that is much more often conceptualised as problematic.  But I gather you don’t perceive it that way.
Well, without a doubt, no.  I mean, I made a long-term income, I never—
You said you see the problem in gambling more as part of the individual, the problem with addiction in the individual rather than the activity?
Only in the sense that an individual is a product of a society/childhood/context/whatever which has raised someone in a way that they can't control how they wind up gambling.  And by that I mean I very much break with traditional psychological approaches of addiction which placed the blame solely on the person.  I do not feel the blame lies with the media product, but the blame – well, I don’t think blame is the right word.  I think responsibility or agency are the better words, and those lie – it’s the individual who can't act in a responsible way but the only reason they can't is not an internal flaw or some moral weakness or this type of thing.  It’s as a result of the social context which have created that person.
I think in terms of addiction might be from gambling games, again, most people will gamble with no long-term harm.  There are lots of people like me who make full-time incomes, who make steady, regular incomes from “gambling games”.  Clearly those people aren’t harmed.  For me it did nothing but good.  It made me money, it was a career path I would have enjoyed.  I met a bunch of cool people and they taught me a lot about how to live and life and things of this sort.  
So I think putting the agency on the tool I think is a huge mistake, and putting the agency on the person is also a huge mistake.  The agency comes from the social context which in turn then creates the person who can't control their impulses or balance their life in a healthy way.  And also just to go off the transcript for one second, can I look over the transcript before it goes out?  I just want to make sure that I just said what I wanted to on the record?
Just to be sure, sorry?
Will it be able to look over the transcript before it goes public?
Well, we didn’t plan for that.
I would like to if that’s okay.
Okay.  I will make a note of that.  
Just since addiction is a fairly contentious topic and I just want to make sure what I want to go on record basically, even if it is anonymised.  Great, thank you.  
Last topic I’d like to touch on in this theme is physical activity.  Do you feel games – you already said a little about reflexes which are some kind of physical benefit you had from playing games.  But do you think games impacted your physical health?
That’s an interesting one.  A little bit, yeah.  Games definitely damaged my posture a little bit.  I’ve mostly improved that back to what it should be now but it’s been a long and slow process.  Up until I was about twenty or so I never did any exercise in my entire life except for what school forced me to do.  I don’t think that was related to games.  My hate of exercise and my love of games I don’t feel were related.  But in the last seven or eight years I’ve become far more physically active, I do lots of running, I spend lots of time at the gym, I go hiking.  And that I don’t feel – personally although the cliché is clearly for the kind of unfit gaming nerd, I personally don’t think there’s any relationship between my lack of enjoyment and then my lack of enjoyment of physical activity and games.  Those are two kind of different trends in my life I think.
In general though, do games influence physical activity negatively or positively?  Clearly things like Just Dance will be positive. Most games, I don’t have enough data on whether there’s a causal relationship between games and physical activity to comment.  For me I don’t feel there was any relationship there, the reason I disliked and then liked exercise had nothing to do with games in my view.
Thank you.  Moving on, the third thing to touch are I will say practical application of video games.  You said you had a lot of benefits from playing games.  Do you think games can be used for a purpose other than pure entertainment, these or other kind of benefits?
Definitely.  But for the big caveat which is that I think things like – things which explicitly label themselves as being educational games and so forth, there’s a reason that no one buys those and that’s because they label themselves in that way.  And when I look at games like – when I look at historical games like Civilization or the [Europa Universalis 0:23:54] series, or the Crusader King series, I think those teach players a tremendous amount about the past but they do so in the background to game play.  I think labelling a game as something which is designed to be educational and wholesome and things of this sort, I think that’s a real mistake and that turns people off.  
And I think that there’s a reason why no educaotinl game in history has ever reached the top of the charts or got top reviews or this type of thing.  Because no one likes to be almost to be preached to I think in a way.  There’s something a little bit preachy about those kinds of games, about this idea that peoples’ leisure time should be explicitly coopted into something productive and something useful rather than just accepting that leisure is useful in its own right.
So to me I think games like those which implicitly and tacitly teach players things are great.  I think games which are explicitly educational games in some ways I don’t think they are even really games, they are more like interactive learning simulations or something.  And then in terms of physical benefit, yeah, games can definitely improve one’s thinking, improve one’s reflexes.  Improve one’s physical fitness if it’s something like Just Dance or other games where you have to stand up and move around and things, those sort are quite rare.  
You did have a practical aplciatoin of video games, which is using them to earn money, but – how would I say it?  Did you play specifically for earning money or was that a side benefit of what was an entertaining pastime activity for you?
When I started playing poker my single objective was to become good enough to make an income from it.  I really enjoyed it and it was really fun and challenging and deep and complex and all these good things.  But my core objective was to become good enough to make a living from playing it without a doubt.  Yeah.  And clearly one can earn a living is one streams on Twitch or if one’s on eSports players and things of this sort. But on the other hand something like League of Legends has a hundred million players and something like five hundred professionals or something.  So it’s absolutely a tiny, tiny apex of people who can make a living from doing this.  Clearly most of those who try to make a living and then fail will have “wasted that time” which trhey could have spent on something else.  So although one can earn with games there’s still very few ways to make money or to even make a living from playing games.  And those which do exist tend to be egxtremely competitive and extreamly demanding.
So you didn’t earn money when playing competitively, was it Red Alert 2?
No, I earned no money from that at all.  There was no kind of economic ecosystem around it, no.
Another thing I would like to ask you, do you know gamification as a concept?
Oh yes.
I imagined as much.  Do you have any experience with gamified systems?
Well, I am very strongly opposed to gamification.  I think it’s a very – for two reasons.  Firstly gamification I think is something of a misnomer.  If say you have a system which tracks how much work you do each day and then you get points or trophies for doing more work, that’s not a game, that’s making people work harder in traditional neoliberal labour. And that’s not in fact a game and that’s not playful.  
The secod issue with it is just that.  Gamification is designed to make people do what they don’t want to do by deploying psychological tricks and pretending it’s all fun and playful where it’s in fact quite the reverse I’d say.  And a third issue I guess with gamification is this kind of – this incredibly naïve philosophical claim that the world can be made better by just making it more fun and having more play and making it more game like.  
And it blows my mind that anyone can have such a simplistic model of the world to think that would sovle peoples’ problems.  But that seems very strong throughout the gamification literature in general.  That kind of perspective immediately closes on any kind of serious analysis of social inequalities or of labour processes or of work, employment contracts, precariousness, etcetera.
I don’t dispute that gamification can – well, if gamification was something else, if gamification was a genuine kind of making playful that which is not playfurl, I think that would be far more desirable.  But inherently that would be something far more anarchic and far more subversive.  Whereas gamification right now is basically completely complicit in neoliberal capitalism and therefore I’m not a big fan.
I personally can’t think of an example of gamification made for making something really enjoyable. (Laughs)
Likewise, yeah.
It is an application, a practical application of game elements.  Is there anything you want to add here?  Or shall we move on to the next thing?
I guess just a brief comment on serious games.  I also think serious games are a bit of a misnomer again.  Again, I don’t think they are really games as such.  I think they are interactive simulations or they are something of that sort.  But I think that that use of the word game doesn’t really fit in there because they lack the kind of playfulness which I’d say is crucial to what a game is.
The next question is whether you see any sort of ethical issues in the use of games?  Some you already talked about, for example, about gamification (laughs) [ethics predation 0:31:24] I would say.
Mm-hmm.
So ethical issues both in the use of games and in the message they convey?
Yeah.  Well, hmm…  I think gamification stands out as my biggest issue in this kind of area.  Outside of that though I think there are some big ethical issues around the depiction of contemporary events, like recent invasions of the Middle East and things of this sort.  Clearly a lot of games portray the ongoing conflict.  I think it’s important to think about how games portray those and how people are therefore encouraged to think about those conflicts.  
I think games do have a certain ethical responsibility as well when they portray the very distant past or when they portray archaeology.  I think there’s a certain ethical requirement to at least try to engage with the current academic understanding of those eras, even if that means adding more kind of world building complexity than maybe the developers would like to.
May I ask you, are you thinking of specific games when you’re saying this kind of problem?
Not immediately, no.  But in the first case I’m thinking about a lot of first person shooters and this type of thing.  In the second case, a bunch of games but generally more indie games rather than AAA games.  And then I guess another ethical issue is how free ot play games and not free to play games encourage players to give more money, I think it’s a pretty gigantic issue.  I think the monetisation of game platforms and the psychological tricks used to encourage people to pay more, I think that’s a pretty huge ethical issue.
Again, I think some responsibility lies with the game system, some responsibility lies with the individual, some responsibility lies with the society that conditioned the individual.  But I think that’s definitely a pretty big ethical issue for games I think.
Monetisation was actually something we were thinking about.  You don’t play free to play games?
I don’t.  I don’t think I’ve ever played a free to play game, no.
Because you don’t like them or is that a personal stance?
I don’t think there’s a single free to play game that’s worth my time, to be completely frank.  I can't think of one that I feel would be worth the time I would put into it.  Yeah.
Another problem you cited was the depiction of military conflicts.  The issue we were thinking about which is also related with that is depiction of other races or…
Yeah, yeah.
…gender roles.
Yes.  I would definitely include those.  I think those two are extremely important.  Especially as the demographics of gamers are no longer even remotely just white men.  I think games have got to recognise that now and start changing pretty substantially.  I think that there’s a lot of games which do great stuff in this kind of area.  A lot of games which are somewhat less great, but I think overall I would say the industry is getting a little bit better at doing that, yeah.
And then to briefly comment on inclusion and piracy.  I guess inclusion just goes within what I said.  Piracy I think is a super, super complex issue which is way beyond what I could say here.  Basically I think I don’t think I’ve ever pirated a game, if I have then I’ve wiped it from my memory, but I don’t think I have ever.  But I don’t think piracy is colossally moral, I think it’s very contextual.  I think there’s a lot of factors that add up to whether piracy should be considered ethically okay or not.  
For instance, I read a great paper a while back about gamers in – I don’t remember what country, in a South American country I think – who have minimal access to traditional ways of buying games.  When they pirate the paper argued I think they are not taking money away from the game because the game would have never got money from them because they couldn’t buy the game.  But in having pirated the game if they like the game, if they like the genre, if they like the game dev etcetera, then in the future when more games of that type come out and those might be available for purchase, having pirated and then enjoyed one game which didn’t take any money from the dev, they might then be able to buy a later game.
So I think examples like that are pretty crucial for thinking about priacy.  And for thinking about it not as some kind of binary, yes, no, good, evil type thing but as something which is highly contextual on how the labour process and how the economics and how the global distribution of games functions right now, and the access people have to games and how people want to play games and what context people want to play games in.  I think all those are crucial on how we should think about piracy.
In a way it’s also related to monetisation, because I mean, some kind of for example subscription models could be implemented to get around the problem of piracy for classic [pay to get it 0:37:54] games.
Yeah.
Another thing I would like to talk about is the depiction of violence in games.  Because of course that’s also very widely debated, both in how it’s portrayed by itself and also in whether or not it can increase aggression in people. 
Well, my feelings on this one are quite strong.  I think violence is completely fine in games as it is in any media format.  And if someone plays a bunch of violent games and then goes out and kills someone they would have done that if they watched films, if they’d read books, if they’d gone to the theatre, if they’d had any contact with violence anywhere.  Again, blaming the game is just completely absurd there, it’s just a lot of that kind of moral panic.  If there’s any link between games and aggression, which in no way I’m convinced by, then I think that the positive side to games still colossally outweigh those downsides.
I have a question on my mind, maybe I’m misinterpreting something you said.  Because both when we were talking about gambling and when we were talking about violence you saw the fault I would say of the problem not in the game but in the context of the player, yeah, the wider social context.  But when we are talking about free to play games and the gamification you placed quite a bit of blame on the system.
Yes, this is true.
So I feel you are treating these kind of issues differently, is that right?
Hmm.  Yeah, that probably is true I think, yeah.  I think a certain degree of the blame, of the responsibility for gamification, does lie with systems, how they are implemented.  But I think violence is very different.  Because gamification systems are trying to make someone do a certain thing, violent games are not trying to make people violent.  And I think that’s a pretty crucial difference actually.  I think in terms of violence, in terms of game violence affecting people being the question that’s outside the game itself, if I can use myself as an example, I can't think of how many heads I’ve blown up in games, I can't think how many people I’ve killed.  But in my real life I’ve never been in a fight, I’m a vegan, I make sure not to step on insects.  I’m the most peaceful pacifistic human on earth.  And there’s conceivable way that violent games would have shaped me to become more hostile in real life.  But if it does then that’s not on the game in any way, shape or form I think. 
Thank you.  Moving on towards the end of the interview, this is the most abstract question I would say (laughs) which is about the relationship between games and society.  Do you believe games influence society and if so, how?
Oh definitely.  I think society’s influence on games is probably stronger than games’ influence on society right now at least.  But I think historically there’s so many ways we can see how games shaped society.  Looking at things like the Go academies in medieval Japan or looking at chess in the Cold War and things of this sort, I think can see extremely strong ways where games and how people thought about those games and thought about the people who played those games affected back on wider social life.
These days I think games are – well, games have offered people a new and tremendously enjoyable form of leisure.  Games have pushed a lot of industries forward, games have pushed a lot of artistic practices forward I would say.  Games have I would say have had a hugely positive effect in terms of forming new relationships for people, new friendships.  There are clearly people who have got married to people who they met in games.  Like I say, I think games do teach people a lot of very desirable things.  Yeah.
I would like to probe a little more what you said about the relationship between art and games.  You said – if I remember the exact words you used, they push artistic practices.
Yes.
Do you believe games can be art then?
Of course, every game ever made is – well, every game is an artistic work just as every novel is an artistic work.  But as for how many games are worthy of being classed as high art or something I think the number’s quite low.  But I think the number of films is quite low and the number of books is quite low and the number of theatre performances is quite low and the number of ballets is quite low.  I think if you look at every single thing ever performed or written within a genre, I think inevitably most of it is going to be garbage at the end of the day I would say.  It’s still an artistic work since it’s a piece of media produced within a certain art form, within a certain artistic practice.  
But the quality will vary hugely within any art form.  I mean, games have produced a game like Dark Souls and games have also produced Custer’s Last Stand, which might be the most despicable piece of garbage ever created in the lifetime of games.  And one of those is art, the other is a piece of media, a piece of artistic work, but it’s not high art.  So yes, I don’t think more games or fewer games are “art” than films or TV or literature or whatever.  But I think definitely – in some ways I think what would mark out a game as being worthy of the “art” label is perhaps broader than something like film or literature.  
Because you can do more with games in some ways I would argue, because you can do more, you can have more kinds of interactions between the player and the game can be I would argue more experimental than in almost any other media form.  I think the breadth of what could be counted as high art in games is broader than in say cinema, I would argue.  But that would be a fairly contentious claim I think, but that’s what I would say anyway.
Can you think of a few games you consider art?
Okay, so I would say Dark Souls 1 and Bloodborne I think are two of the absolute pinnacles of the game art form.  In terms of game play, in terms of narrative, in terms of they are so thematically dense.  They are in conversation with so many other games, with so many ideas, with so many mythologies, with so much literature.  Visually they are just beyond stunning.  And I don’t mean that in terms of the graphical fidelity, I mean that in terms of the artistic quality of what’s shown on screen.  So to me, those are two of the absolute pinnacles of what games have been so far.
I guess I would also give extremely high praise to – let me think a second… I would also give extremely high praise to the original Command and Conquer from 1995.  It’s slightly overlooked these days, but again it’s remarkably thematically deep, it has an amazing prediction of the last twenty years and the conflict between the West and this kind of nebulous anti-Western group or a group that is perceived as being such.  The story told and the world depicted is hugely deep and hugely dense.  The game in general has no kind of gaps and no holes and there’s nothing missing from it.  It’s a very complete and very kind of singular piece of work.
I will just try and think of one more.  Let me just look at my Steam list to jog my memory about what games I in fact like.  Oh yes.  I guess another would be EVE online actually.  It’s so unique, it’s so different.  It’s so – again, much like Dark Souls and like Bloodborne and like Command and Conquer, it’s so singular, it has a single core concept which is completely unique and takes that concept to its full completion.  And does everything with that concept you could possibly do and exhausts that concept.  
And I guess a fifth I would mention would be Dwarf Fortress.  Which again I think takes a concept and runs with it as far as it can go, and is so unique and so idiosyncratic.  And the interactions which take place in that game are so unlike anything in any other game ever.  And I think Dwarf Fortress – which the Museum of Modern Art in New York listed as one of its top art games a few years ago, I think Dwarf Fortress is also a great example.
And I suppose the commonality in all those to use a cinematic term, these are all kind of high concept games I guess in some ways.  Where they have a single core completely unique concept and they take that to its total limit and completely embody the space of what that game might be.  I guess those are some of the games I’d say which are the absolute highest outcomes of the forms of art.
What I find interesting is that all these games you are referencing are very much entertainment games.  Entertainment is still forefront, because—
I don’t know if I agree with that.  I don’t know if I would actually agree with that.  Do you mean as opposed to – opposed to what?
Because here I’m speaking of my experience, personally, I can think of a few titles which have a more purely artistic intent.
Are you thinking of things like Journey or Flow and those sorts of games?
Yeah, Journey for example, yes.  Flow I don’t know about.  And those are games in which game play is not really the focus I would say, it is a component but not the focus.  I would consider the games you cited, I mean, Command and Conquer for example, the game play is central…
Yeah.
…and then there is this world around it.
I think the best – yeah, that’s true.  To me, I think the best games manage to be incredibly deep and complex games but also to be deeply meaningful and deeply rich and to have a lot of thematic content and to have a lot of artistic ideas alongside that.  To me, although I have nothing against things like Journey, to me those completely hit all the artistic marks but they don’t really hit too many of the game marks for me.  Whereas the five games I listed get a ten out of ten on the artistic front and a ten out of ten on the game front as well.  To me that’s the real apex of what games could be I think.  
Okay, thank you.  What do you think about how games are marketed?
That’s a very big question, can you narrow that down a little bit?
(Laughs)
Okay, that’s fine.  I think games are definitely still marketed in a way that assumes all gamers are white men for one thing, which is very negative and undesirable.  Game marketing also tends to – well, it tends to hype games up far beyond what they turn out to be in the end.  I think it would be harder to dispute that looking at some recent examples which I won't name, mainly because I’m friends with other people who worked on them. 
I think there’s definitely – the divide between the setting up of expectations in players and the delivery of the game itself I think is a big issue.  And there’s no fault or no malice on the game devs.  I know that people don’t mean to mislead players.  But the games industry has reached a point I think in terms of marketing where one has to hype one’s game up so much that it becomes harder for the game to truly deliver in the end.  In a similar vein, I think if we look at game reviewing, a lot of people have noted that seven out of ten is the new average in some ways.  And that when people see a five out of ten they think, oh this game is shit.  Rather than, oh this game is average, because that’s what a five should be.  It should be exactly average game.
And this kind of constant pushing towards the top and everything has to be defined within being the absolute best and marketed as being the best and the reviews have to kind of push upwards in order to sell these types of games and to describe what these games are doing, I think all of that is a big problem.  And I’m not sure what exactly the way out of it is.  But it’s definitely a problem.
The last thing I would like to talk about is innovation in games since you have been a player for a very long time, so you probably saw quite a bit of innovation.  Recently there has also been quite a bit of talk around VR or augmented reality as a possible way of making games.  So again, it’s kind of a broad question (laughs).
That’s fine.  Yeah, there’s definitely been a lot of innovative stuff in the last twenty years.  In many ways – in almost all ways I think it’s indie developers now who are doing the really cool, new, fresh stuff.  There are “huge play” companies who are doing really cool stuff.  I think FromSoftware who make Dark Souls and Bloodborne, I think they are probably the most original AAA developer around right now by quite a margin.
But I think most innovation right now comes from indies who are willing to try whacky new things.  Indeed in the game I make, I’m trying to make something which no one’s done ever before and maybe it’ll crash and burn but maybe it’ll work out well, who knows.  Either way I think that’s something worth doing.  In the AAA space though, I think there’s very little new happening outside of a tiny handful of companies such as FromSoftware.  Yeah.
How would you see the future of video games, if you had to hazard a guess?
Yeah, so in terms of VR and AR and things, I guess overall to me the four kind of really big new trends in games right now are eSports, livestream, VR and AR, personally.  To me, I remain unconvinced by both VR and AR personally.  Now, I must acknowledge my bias here with this answer, which is that my focus of research as an academic for the last year and a half has been solely on eSports and livestreaming, not on VR and AR, so I know more on those topics than on VR and AR.  So I should acknowledge that.  
But I think AR, it’s tricky to see – I think the issue with VR and AR is an interface issue.  That with both of them you’re adding a layer of interface, it feels like one’s adding a kind of obstacle between the player and the game in some ways.  AR, you need the alignment of the player, of some kind of console, and some physical object and you have to keep them within a certain alignment for things to work perfectly.  It’s not that that’s extremely demanding, but it still requires a level of maintenance that lots of types of play don’t.
And then VR, on the one hand I can see a future where people are willing to do the headset and goggles and gloves and things in order to have that kind of full William Gibson style emersion within the game.  On the other hand I can see a future where people say, sod this, this is way too much effort, I’d rather just go and play Bejewelled on my phone.  Again, with VR, because it requires extra effort from the player it’s another layer of stuff to deal with.  I’m not convinced where that will go.  
Again, I think there’s also an issue with both VR and AR which is that controllers and keyboards are extremely good ways of allowing players to do a lot of inputs across a wide range of things extremely quickly.  VR and AR, again, it’s kind of hard to see what will input systems look like here, how can you create games which – and clearly not all games require really deep and complex input systems, but a lot of games do.  All games require input systems where you can act with precision even if the system itself is quite simple.  And for both VR and AR it’s kind of tricky to see how you can get that kind of precision or that kind of complexity in input systems for either one.  Again, maybe I’m completely wrong, but those are my concerns about VR and AR.
By contrast, for eSports and streaming, I mean, the reason I decided to focus my study on them is because I think those are the future.  I think eSports is only getting bigger, like a hundred million dollars in prize money was given out last year, that’s completely bananas.  And I think it will only continue to grow from there.  I think it’s something people want to watch, it’s found a good way to engage the viewer to make a link between what the viewer watches and the viewer’s own playing practice in CS:GO, in League, in Dota, in whatever.  
Streaming is even more popular.  Two million people stream each month and hundreds of millions of people watch.  It’s come from almost nowhere within five years to become a completely ubiquitous part of gaming I’d say.  And maybe it’ll be a bubble, of course, these things do happen.  But I think streaming has taken a desire that people have always had to watch other people playing games from the era of the arcades up until now and transform that into something bigger and more formal.  Not in a bad sense, but more formalised and more present and more there.  
Also of course streaming – like I said at the start, with the conflict between peoples’ lives being increasingly dominated by work but with more and more games which come out each year, streaming allows people to vicariously enjoy games without necessarily having the time to play them, which I think is also very—
As long as you watch videos at work.
Or when you’re doing something else for fun.  Like you play one game but you watch another in the background.  So those types of things.  I think streaming and Twitch specifically has come along at a perfect time and has hit a pretty strong nerve.  So yeah, I think eSports and streaming I definitely think are the future, but then like I say, I acknowledge my bias there.  But VR and AR I’m willing to be proven wrong but I’m not convinced yet that either of those will be the future beyond small niches.  Or if they are, I think both will have to offer something which is so compelling that it gets past the kind of gimmick factor in some ways.
Let us talk a little more about eSports and livestream, because it’s something that has been really rarely touched upon by our interviewees, so I’d like to take advantage of your expertise (laughs).   How do you think they evolved?  I mean, is livestreaming now different from how it was in the beginning apart from the sheer volume of it?
Oh yes.  Livestreaming when it started you could livestream basically anything at all.  And that as you can imagine ran into certain problems and certain issues with some things people chose to livestream.  But it was only when Twitch became focussed on games specifically that livestreaming exploded.  I think that that’s – streaming in general definitely speaks to our broader desire either to be celebrities or to watch and actively engage with celebrities.  I think those two desires are clearly very strongly reflected in streaming and on streaming.
Twitch has recently released IRL which is the in real life category, and they’ve kind of returned a little bit to livestreaming roots by allowing people to livestream anything, or almost anything.  It’ll be interesting to see where that goes and whether that will kind of dilute the platform or just continue to grow it by letting people watch people eating in cafés or on the bus or whatever it is people do in their lives.  Yeah, so livestreaming has definitely evolved quite a bit.  
And also a course a lot of this evolution has been through monetising the platform and making sure that both streamers can make a living and the platform itself can continue to make money and grow and so forth.  It’ll be interesting to see where that goes in the future as Twitch is very active and very – well, yeah, Twitch is very active in innovating and finding new ways to monetise the platform and to build a sense of community on the platform, and seeing where that goes in the next few years I think will be very interesting.
How about eSports?
eSports has gone through a bunch of ups and downs and a bunch of points where people thought, right, this is it, eSports is here and then dies, then comes back up, then dies, and so forth. To me both eSports and livestreaming, not to be technologically determinist about this, but eSports and livestreaming are both significantly contingent on modern internet speeds basically.  Because you need that to play against people and you need that to watch other people playing games basically.  So to an extent I think both of them could only have appeared within the last five years where within North America, within Europe, within East Asia, within Australia, where internet speeds are so fast that you can do these things at a high level and watch these things in high quality streamed videos.
And also at the same time I think one – so eSports found its recent success because of Twitch, because Twitch allows it to reach millions of people and it does.  But also it’s also interwoven with the success of games like CS:GO and League and Dota and Overwatch [Halston 1:05:03].  But then also the success of those games is woven in with eSports and streaming.  So there’s a complex kind of conference of factors of games, of what players want to play, what players want to watch, of both streaming technology and of internet speed in general.  And these have all kind of come together at this point to allow eSports to become what it is now.  And I think it’s extremely unlikely that we are in an eSports bubble right now.  I think eSports from this point onwards will only continue to grow.
Something I was thinking about when you were talking about the complex relationship within games and eSports is that in a way eSports – well, games in general, but eSports especially need a community around them.
Hmm, definitely.  
There is something we have not touched on the in the interview, the community of gamers, the communities of gamers.  What do you feel about them?
That’s a big question.
I mean, you said you met a lot of interesting people and a lot of new friends from playing, I don’t know if you have ever been part of the community or felt part of a community around games?
Hmm, well, right now – I don’t know if you’ve come across roguelike games?
Yeah.
Right now without being arrogant, I’m definitely one of the ten biggest people in the roguelike community I think, in the world.  Because the game I make is roguelike, I’m a big part of the main roguelike podcasts, I do a lot of writing about roguelikes for magazines and stuff.  And that’s the only community I felt really a big part of ever really.  It’s a lovely community of lovely people, in general, with one or two exceptions, who I will not name but they know who they are.  
In general I’d say everyone is very nice, is very supportive, is very smart, is very interested in games.  And the poker community I was never a big part of the poker community, I was pretty active on the big poker forum back in the day but never really became a big part of the community.  Partly because I lived in the UK rather than in the US and in that era at least poker was so heavily focussed on the US that it was hard to be someone who didn’t live in the US and to be a real part of that world.  
So from both roguelikes and from poker I’ve seen gaming communities which are incredibly just composed of amazing, smart, nice people.  But at the same clearly gamergate also exists within games and that is the exact opposite.  I’ve never really have much direct encounter with those kinds of people, thank goodness, but I do know that they exist.  I think gaming, there’s so much variation between what genre you play and what people within that genre you engage with, it’s impossible to make any sweeping comment about gamers or gaming communities I think.  Some are amazingly inclusive, friendly, smart, cool people who I still have friendships with.  And others are incredibly toxic people.
I’m a little, well, not surprised, but something that came up in all interviews with gamers I conducted, I mean, when we talked about the gaming community everyone has something bad to say about online interactions.  I don’t know if it’s the different kind of games they played.  So if some games are a worse community, if it’s something in how they interpret some kind of interactions.  Or even if it’s something in how communities are regulated.  So maybe some games attract more toxic player I would say, or maybe it’s not that at all and it’s just a matter of how the community is managed.  I don’t know if you have any opinion about that from your experience?
I think there’s definitely a genre difference.  But it’s also a question of how the community is structured due to the nature of the game.  Roguelikes are purely single player games for instance and that means you never have kind of live online chats in the middle of a game where players are competing with each other.  You only talk on Reddit or on Twitter basically, or on like forums and things.  And I think that’s a pretty gigantic difference to be honest in the context where people are engaging with other people.
At the same time there’s definitely a question of community management to an extent.  But I can't think of a game community offhand which I know about I can see a difference between a well managed and a poorly managed community.  On the other hand, maybe that’s because when the community is well managed you don’t see that it’s well managed and that all management is kind of hidden and maybe that’s true.  But to me, I think the bigger issue is what’s the relationship between the social interactions and the play of the game, I think is a bigger issue than how a community is managed personally.
So you think it’s a problem of the context of interaction?
Yeah.
Live online interaction in a competitive game?
But I do also think genre of game does also matter somewhat as well.
Moving on to the last section of the interview, I mean, we talked about possible advantages, opportunities of games, but not so much about problems because you have a very positive outlook on games.
Mostly.
I would like to ask what kind of advice you would give to different kind of people when interacting with games to make this better or even better?
To developers I’d say try new things and – well, I think that’s the most important by a huge margin.  Try new things, don’t be afraid to try new things, and please be realistic about the promises you make about your games.  To parents, I’d say understand that games are not toxic and the game’s not evil and the games will not ruin your children’s lives.  There’s a tremendous amount of career opportunities in games these days as a developer, as a tester, as an artist, as a sound designer, as a player, as a streamer.  And also even if your child doesn’t take those kind of routes games still teach you a lot about competition, about cooperation, they train your reflexes, they train your decision making. 
To researchers I’d say look more closely at the social context of games.   Look more closely at the whole skill and ability and interface and interaction in games, which is something reasonably overlooked in games academia I think.  There’s been a lot of great work in this already but I still feel it’s an area we need to look at more deeply.  To educators I’d say stop making educational games immediately.  Make games which happen to teach you, not educational games, and there’s a huge difference – there’s a gulf of difference between those two kinds of games.
To players I’d say try to be less toxic.  To institutions, what do you think about in terms of institutions, do you mean governments or—
Yes, for example.
I’d say recognise the huge benefits that games can bring.  And I think that’s the only thing really I’d say, that’s kind of an echo of what I’d say to people who count I think.
Okay.  Is there something you want to add that we didn’t touch on?
Let me think a minute… 
Of course.
I don’t think so, no.  
Okay.  I guess that’s it then. 
Right, fantastic. 
Thank you a lot for your time.  
You’re very welcome, I hope that was at least vaguely useful.
Yeah, it’s an interesting perspective due to your double type of role.  I will send you the transcription as soon as I have it.
Thank you, I really appreciate that.
Then I will send you after we analyse the interviews the output.  If you want you can read it.
Excellent, I definitely will.