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

Part 1
Hi.
Hi [anonymised] , how are you?
Okay, thank you, how’s it going. 
Good, I’m all right, thank you very much.  Thank you for talking to me and for doing this interview.  Nice to see you; as I said, I’ll probably switch to audio once we’ve kind of greeted and waved, my connection will probably be better if I do that, so I’ll switch off the video.  
So I’ve sent you information about the project, I’m just going to give a very brief outline of what we’re doing and why we’re doing this; feel free to ask any questions, hopefully I’ll give you enough information for you to know kind of what direction we’re coming from.  
So Gaming Horizons is a European funded project, where we’re looking at, or we’re listening to and looking at the discourses that exist around video games, and we’re thinking about the role of video games in society and video games as cultural artefacts.  We’re trying to explore the ways in which video games are understood by experts, of which we’d consider you an expert in different groups, so we’re speaking to researchers, developers, gamers, educators, policy makers, and so this interview is one of about sixty that we’re doing, where we’ve not got a specific schedule of questions that we’re asking, we’ve got some kind of areas that we’re interested in.  We’re hoping to have a discussion for about thirty or forty minutes where I’ll lead with questions but feel free to take it in whichever direction you think’s appropriate for you and for your experience.  
Okay.  
Is that okay?
That’s fine, yeah, sure. 
Great, and just for the tape, you’re aware that this is being recorded and you’re okay with that?
I am and I give you my full consent.
Thank you very much.  This recording will be transcribed and your name will not feature with the transcription.  We’re putting all of these interviews together to kind of get a sense of the different discourses that are happening, so that’s what we’re doing with what you say really.  
So as I said at any point feel free to stop me, or clarify, or ask anything.  My questions are fairly open and I’m not particularly trying to get you to say something in particular; we’re interested in your perspective.  
Okay, I’m just thinking actually while we’re talking it might be a good idea for, I’ll do the same, to have my websites open already, but just because I might refer to them, so one will be the DARE website digital, if you google DARE Collaborative.
Yeah, brilliant.  Yeah, I’ve seen DARE before, but I’m getting it up now, that’s great.  
And the other one’s my website, which is [anonymised] [anonymised] .org.
Great, got that up as well, thank you very much.  Okay, so this will probably relate to some of the things on the website, but my first question really, to lead in, is, if you could give me a bit of an outline of your experience in relation to games and gaming, that would be great?
Okay, so – well the first project I did with my kind of colleagues was, I guess it’s almost fifteen years ago now, 2001 it started, which was the project of role playing games, which produced a book called – so it was an academic research project funded by the HRB as it was then.  We produced a book called the Video [0:04:29] it’s text, narrative and play that was co-authored by me, David Buckingham, Diane Carr and Gareth Shott, so that was published by Polity and basically it gives out some approaches to the analysis of games as media texts, it’s the analysis of the fan culture surrounding them and to a sort of early tech you analyse them, online role playing games as well.  So my only contribution was the most, around Final Fantasy 7, so that was the first project we did.
We’ve done a number since then, I mean some of these you can find on the website, probably the most significant ones to mention are the ones which began with a project called Making Games, which was funded by the EPSRC, now I think about ten years ago to develop a game [0:05:27] so kids could play games in schools.  So the rationale there was, you know, in media education which is what we were mainly concerned with, you could gain a kind of critical understanding and it created sense of film, website development, radio programmes, comic strips of whatever, but games were hard to do because of the programming elements, so we wanted to develop a software that would enable us to make a 3D, a convincing 3D adventure games, without any background in programming.  So that was the thing that produced software Mission Maker; the history of that since then is that the firm that made that with us, Immersive Education in Oxford went bust in the recession, so we bought the software off them, well we bought their company basically.  So we’ve been running that as the magical projects, for about four years now.  
So, particularly interested in Mission Maker, which we’ve now rebuilt in Unity because it was kind of getting a bit old and [0:06:31] and we’ve had two projects since then, both of which are on that DARE site under projects.  The first one is, was in 2012, that’s [0:06:41] is Playing Shakespeare.  Where we work with the Globe to develop [0:06:52] Mission Maker says the kids can make games based on that Macbeth; and then the second one in 2015 was Playing Beowulf, these were both funded by the AHRC, where we did a thing called Beowulf in collaboration with the British Library.  So those are the most significant projects I guess, and we’re still developing software at the moment. 
Great.  So you talked there about getting people to make their own games and kind of make that an accessible experience for them. 
Yeah. 
What is it about that process of making, or what is it about making a game that makes it distinct, or important, or valuable and worth doing, do you think?
Well I mean I guess there are lots of answers to that, well the one main answer I suppose would be that it’s of a piece with the general, you know, emphasis on participatory culture in contemporary society and the research which addresses this, so I think people learning to make the media as well as use and access it.  A more specific one in relation to education is that we’ve done a lot of work over the years in the field of media literacy, and media literacy - media education in schools used to be analysing the media and of course with the advent of new digital editing, and altering technologies, it’s moved towards more creative production, so I think most people nowadays think in media literacy and this applies to most definitions of it, actually it’s one – including the European Union’s one, would involve a critical understanding of the media on the one hand, but an ability to create and produce their own media on the other hand, so it’s an aspect of media literacy in relation to games, they need to have some way of making their own games for that reason. 
So it’s something about the game as a cultural artefact and having a role in creating that as well as kind of engaging with pre-created games.  In terms of peoples’ engagement with games, you’ve talked about people creating their own, do you think there is, or what do you think the value is of actually playing the games?  Not necessarily the ones that they’ve created, but playing games more broadly, do you feel there’s a value to that?
Yeah, again I mean I think it’s probably complex because it varies depending on what kind of games you’re talking about.  Most of the games we looked at are being narratively styled games, of one kind of another, so in relation to those I think the value is fairly similar to the reasons for which people might engage with other forms of narrative media, whether it’s reading books, watching films or reading  graphic novels or whatever.  So I think it’s another way of telling stories, of representing the world through a narrative.  The difference is of course you get to play a part in the narrative to some extent, which isn’t to say that people don’t have an active relationship to narrative in the other media, but we know it’s, well it’s qualitatively different in games in certain ways.  
So I think it’s, for the same reasons, so it’s about pleasure, it’s about a playful engagement with the way the world’s represented through various cultural forms.  It’s part of what it is to be human I guess, and I think it was – Barbara Hardy, I think, who’s Professor of English at Birkbeck a long time ago said that, to describe narrative is a primary act of mind.  I think it’s kind of part of that really. 
Yeah, I think part, a big part of the reason I was eager to get your voice involved in this was because of that focus on narrative in video games, and I think that’s something that often gets left out of discussions around games, particularly in terms of education, the kind of importance of that narrative in a game, and I know you’re work involves children constructing narratives within video games, and I think that’s quite a valuable perspective.  
You talked about the potential for a video game to let the player be involved in that story.  Can I push that just a little bit further and use that as a way to talk about mechanics of video games.  If we’re talking about however you take the idea of mechanics or a bit, how a game is made up and something about the mechanics of the game, do you think that that ability to be involved gives something that other media doesn’t give?
I think it’s kind of yes and no, it can enter with the discussion about narrative, because, you know, in relation to narratives well there are narratives and narratives, you know, so parents and educators will often be very anxious that children acquire and understand and experience narrative from the cannon of great literature, but they’ll be a bit alarmed about the kind of narratives kids might be engaged in, in either shooting games or zombie shoot ‘em ups or Grand Theft Auto, whatever it might be.  But I mean the arguments, and one of the arguments I’ve been interested in, all the way through this, was kind of sparked off actually by Janet Murray’s, Hamlet on the Holodeck, where she makes a point about when people are concerned about video game characters being clunky and not possessing kind of well-developed psychologies, they’re making a kind of category error, because she said, they’re not realising that they’re the kind of characters that you find in some more archaic forms of narrative, she uses Homer as an example.
So nobody worries about Achilles not having a very well developed psychology and about beating Trojans, you know, it’s what he does, it’s an element of that kind of archaic oral narrative where protagonists solve problems through external action rather than through internal psychological processes.  I found that very compelling, that argument, so I’ll come to the interaction thing you just linked to in a minute. 
Yea, that’s fine. 
I think people often think of video games as the newest form of narrative, and in a way they are, and yet they’re also strongly connected to the oldest forms of narrative through those very strong kind of action based narratives, which used to be the staple of our [0:14:01] culture, you know from Beowulf to Robin Hood, from which nowadays educators and parents frown on a bit because they think they’re violent, you know.  So that’s one thing to think about, to rethink narratively a little bit differently through the lens of video games, I think it’s very valuable to that purpose in education, as well as anywhere else.  
But then you think about how people interact with these texts, and you think back to the oral narratives and the way they work, whether it’s the Homer poet or the Beowulf poet would be, the poet would perform the text, they wouldn’t just repeat it, they would draw on the kind of serious resources in their memory and they would customise it for that particular audience, so they’d missed bits out, add new bits, they’d improvise, they’d shuffle the bits around, which is kind of not dissimilar to the way in which people play a video game.  You may not play it in the same order that the author intended, you may decide to go on a mission or go fighting, or the other way around, or go shopping, or the other way around, so there’s something about the oral performance and the way in which it was improvisatory and drew on the bank of resources that does kind of resemble something about the way in which video games are both made and played, and similarly the audiences of the oral poet would join in, they’d participate, they would prompt the poet, they would complain if their favourite bit had been missed out, they would experience certain forms of repetition which would help them to get a handle on a narrative so that they’d be happy for things to be repeated over and over again in different ways.  
So again, you know, there’s something about the way the audience of the oral performing, the performative oral poets resembles the playing of a game, as well as participatory and they can join in, you know, they may demand a reordering of the sequence and so on and so forth.  
So I think that kind of interaction is new, you know, we can do things with video games that we couldn’t do before, we can see ourselves visually, we can cross the stage, the edge of the stage as Brenda Laurel said, we can become the protagonist in certain kinds of ways, but it does also connect to these more archaic forms of performed narratives and the way audiences behave I think.  So it’s both new and old, is what I’m trying to say in a nutshell (laughs). 
Yeah, it makes sense.  We talk about a particular type of game and inevitably when we’re talking about video games, we kind of generalise or get very specific, so I’m happy for, through the discussion either, we can very much generalise or talk specifically.  With that in mind there are categories that people kind of refer to when they’re thinking about games, they talk about serious games, applied games, entertainment games, are they sort of distinctions that you would draw?  Do you think they’re helpful?  Or would you use those sort of terms around your work?
I think, the question of entertainment is kind of interesting, I wouldn’t, I’m never very happy about the word ‘entertainment’ really, because it seems as if it kind of trivialises the, you know, if we talked about Shakespeare just as entertainments I think the kind of literary scholars would take exception to that and I’m not saying life’s a video game.  I mean you can get games that are the kind of light hearted fairly disposable form of entertainment just as you can get novels that are the same thing.  But I think you can also get games which are either more durable over time as kind of, cultural forms or [0:17:59] of interactive narrative which deserve to be taken a bit more seriously.  
By the same token I’m a bit anxious about the serious games label really, because again it suggests that some games are applied to serious focuses, like education and others, or what would the non-serious games be like, I think this is the problem.  Or would they again just be entertainment or trivial or pointless, you know, so in a way I suppose for me all games are serious, it’s in different degrees and in different ways, so the idea that serious games are the ones which can be applied for a serious purpose doesn’t work for me really, because I think, a sense of being involved in a narrative form is a serious purpose in its own right.  So you don’t have privilege education or military training, or you know, video games in care homes or whatever it might be over the core function of video games to tell stories and represent the world.  
Yeah, that makes sense.  If we think about games as, I’ve got a statement here, if I give you this statement and if you can kind of react to this as you feel.  The statement is, ‘games are powerful tools to change behaviours and attitudes for the better’, what would you make of that statement?  Would that be something you agree with, disagree with, or probably something more complex?  So, ‘games are powerful tools to change behaviours and attitudes for the better’.
Well I think on the whole I would disagree with this, though having said, because it sounds as if there, just the word ‘behaviour’ it means, it sounds as if it’s rooted in the kinds of behaviourist notion of how people engage with culture, which would always be a bit reductive I think, or instrumental and it implies certain forms of causality or cause and effect that I think the sort of effects that sought by experimental psychological approaches to give video games, you know, do they make people violent for example, and I think you just have to look at the two biggest instances of this to realise where the danger lies, they’re the positive and the negative ones.  
On the one hand we argued that, the argument that one effect of games is to make learning better, but on the other hand the argument, that one effect of games is that they make people more violent.  I mean, you know, of both the predicated on the kind of cause and effect, you know, behaviourists effects model of human behaving.  So I think for me on the whole games again, like literature or film, if somebody said film is a powerful tool for changing peoples’ behaviour for the better, you know, well there would be two disputes,  one that behaviour can be changed in that kind of way.  
It’s not to say that these cultural forms don’t have any effect, of course they have effect, they have emotional effect and they have cultural effects.  People learn new stories, their cultural horizons have widened, their [0:21:22] repertoire might be extended and all that kind of thing, but the idea of sort of, monkey see, monkey do, idea [0:21:28] it’s a life or shoot someone.  Or a bit more positively they’ll go back into the classroom and suddenly be better at maths.  I think it both kinds of salacious really, I mean for me the main educational purpose of the games is for kids to learn about games themselves.  You know, if you look at the history of film in education, I can remember, I’m old enough to remember when the [0:21:54] was introduced, people arguing and getting very excited and arguing that it transformed learning, and it didn’t really transform learning, I mean it took its place as another technology alongside the ones we already have.  But now, if you look at film in the curriculum and say the most important role of film is for people to learn about film, just as they might learn about music or dance, or literature or art, and I think you can say the same thing about video games, they’ll take their place as another tool in the repertoire, but their main purpose will be, for people to learn about games and although, I mean really to anticipate another question of yours, I’m not sure, although our Beowulf and Macbeth tools, so it looked like a form of gamification, it looks as if we’re developing new games technology for people to learn about literature that’s not really what’s happening.  They’re to learn about games and their cognate forms.  
Literature and games are both narrative forms and are closely related to each other, you know, the forms of role play or drama, or fictitious depiction, or depiction of fictional worlds, so it’s about exploring the connections between these things and gaining a kind of more extensive, more sophisticated, more innovative way of looking at both forms, to look at games through the lens of literature for instance and look at literature through the lens of games gives you new insight into both of those forms.  Sorry, a rather long answer. 
No, it’s a great answer, because you’re bringing in a lot of discussion around the nature of games and how games can be seen that isn’t necessarily the kind of thing that dominates the kind of research around gaming.  We’ve done a fairly extensive literature review around gaming and video games, and as you  mentioned, you mentioned the word ‘gamification’ the idea of games being a way into something else, and so yeah, you kind of pre-empted there the idea that your use of Shakespeare and games isn’t to get children necessarily interested in Shakespeare as Shakespeare being the most important thing, but the gaming itself is the thing that you are focusing on.  So I think there’s loads of really interesting, really useful things there, so no, that was a good long answer and I’m responding in far too much detail now as well, because I need to hear more from you. 
If we think about – you mentioned some of the things like – when I gave you that kind of provocation about behaviour, you mentioned some of the typical things that people think about when they think about video games, like aggression, addiction, violence, that sort of thing.   So if we can kind of take those as given, that people talk about those, what I’d like to do is think a bit about the ethics or even the politics of gaming in relation to the kind of work you do.  So when you think about, when you get kids, students to make games of a certain type, what sort of ethics would come into play in those situations?  
Well I mean the kind of [0:25:24] – a reasonable debate about age appropriate games, which intruded for instance to the Byron Review, that was instigated by Gordon Brown about were video games and the internet and their effects on young people, and while disputing the effects of them, I think at that kind of review concluded that, you know, games were an important part of young people growing up and their culture and their adult culture, but then there might be age appropriate games that you wouldn’t give.  You wouldn’t give Call of Duty, Blacks Ops to a six-year old, and I think that’s fair enough.  However, I think there are lots that come out as misplaced anxieties about this question.  
So for example, I mean when we developed Mission Maker for the first time we agitated about whether to put weapons in, because we knew they would be controversial to teachers, and we decided after not too much debate that you know if you didn’t put the weapons in there the source couldn’t even have a debate about violence.  Actually I believe the violence, you know, of a particular kind needs to be in there for all kinds of reasons; first of all, so young people can explore it in a safe place, with their teacher if that what the teacher wants to do, if they want to explore the question of violence in video games rather than simply censoring it.  
Secondly, because in young peoples’ culture, you know, quite young children’s culture there is a good deal of violence, fantasy violence, so read up a fairy tale, the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale collections or Hans Christen Andersen original literary fairy tales there is a good deal of death and violence, and I think most people who, most people in the area of childhood studies or children’s literature, would argue that that’s a kind of necessary part of young children’s culture and it’s the way in which they get to grips with the darkness in the cupboard or under the bed, and allow it to have some kind of concrete form, so that they can experience it within a narrative as something that can be overcome, or battled with.  
And those battles, you know, as with aural culture generally are not battles with the mind, they’re battles that take the form of external combat and conflict and we know that that’s a legitimate part of gaming culture, just as it’s a legitimate part of literary culture.  So if you took all of the violence out of children’s fairy tales or indeed all the violence out of Shakespeare now you wouldn’t have, you know, you’d have a pretty anodyne set of texts.  So for those reasons I think it’s justifiable and it needs to be in there.   And if it’s a controversial thing, then you know, it’s a way of debating that with young people in a safe place.  
We have had experiences since then, in fact I’ve got a PhD student at the moment who’s going to be running a session with the Beowulf version of Mission Maker with a primary school class in London later this month and they’ve said, they don’t want the weapons to be there.  It’s just ridiculous, you know, I mean they know they’re not real, real weapons and they’re not going to go out onto the streets with knife crime.  There is a certain amount in games research literature if you’re on animal play of course, as you probably know, and all of that represents the idea that young dogs, cats, lions and tigers know how to play fight, they know the difference between the real fights and play fights, and you know, kids do as well.  They know that those cartoons like Beowulf are not representations of knife crime on the streets of Brixton, they know the difference.  So I think teachers and parents are very confused about these categories, and aren’t necessarily censorious. 
I’m assuming there that the problem is because it is weapons represented in a video game whereas in the story written in text, on paper, that probably wouldn’t be such an issue. 
Well, or indeed if it was Shakespeare.  
Yes. 
Yet they would happily take them to go and see Macbeth at the National Theatre and the stage can be awash with blood and there can be weapons all over the place, or Hamlet, and everybody’s dead at the end, that’s fine.  It reminds me actually a course we used to teach on horror, using Buffy the Vampire Slayer, working in Cambridge where a parent complained about this module and said they didn’t want their child in a Buffy Vampire the Slayer list and we said, why not, they said, well it involves the occult, it’s morally ambiguous, it involves death and violence, we said, yeah, but you know, next year they’ll be doing GCSE English and Macbeth is the set text.  
Yeah, absolutely.  
The occult, morally ambiguous violence, and that was okay because it was Shakespeare.  So it’s actually often the judgement about cultural value as a judgement, that you’re posing as a judgement about ethics and violence, it’s because it’s trash culture.  It doesn’t have the alibi of great literature or whatever.  
And those different forms of media then end up having different kind of ethical conversations around them, because of the type of media they are.  
Hmm. 
Great, okay.  Thank you.  
So we’ve talked a bit about your research and I think the value of the kind of research you do is kind of implicit in all of the answers that you’ve given, I just want to ask you just a couple of questions about research around video games.
Do you feel that a certain type of research around video games is valued more than others?  Or is happening more than others, and is there a sort of research around video games that is more likely to be funded for example, do you think?
Well it depends which research council, you know which funder you’re talking about I think.  On the whole I guess maybe in Europe and in the ESRC the relationship with games, to questions of society in particular, you know, questions of exclusions, questions of violence or questions of social dysfunction of one kind of another, I guess that, those are the kind of topics that are more likely to be funded.  The AHRC in the UK has been interesting because I think they’ve caught onto games rather belatedly.  You know I think they see them as a social [issue 0:32:04] for the ESRC, not really recognise them as an art form until more recently.  
And in that case, I mean I had an interesting experience actually, I missed a large grant a few years ago because one of the review panels said, well it’s that old screen media, and I think that particular panel, review panel member was suggesting that screen games were a form of popular culture, they were old school, they were somehow limited and they were, you know - I think the implicit thing was they were part of popular culture and what she was suggesting was, you know, a much wider approach to ambient gaming, or the playful city, that kind of thing.  And my worry there I think is in relation to young peoples’ cultural landscapes and popular culture where screen games are still the default model, that’s where most kids play games.  
So if you make a sort of playful game which is, to use an example from Bristol, a lamppost which captures your shadows, okay that, I worry if that’s the kind of project that gets Arts Council, AHRC funding, because it seemed [0:33:28] it presses the buttons of a particular zeitgeist because actually it seems a bit of an indulgence to me, that’s not going to change many things in the world of gaming for thirteen year olds, or in, you know it’s not going to kind of make a great deal of difference to a year-nine class trying to study Macbeth on a wet Friday afternoon.  I’m not sure it would make a difference to really, so I think there’s a question of the responsibility of the funding authorities to kind of do good and fund research which is going to have some kind of serious impact on people in sphere of the arts, rather than funding kind of projects which might be kind of sexy and of the moment, but might be a bit indulgent. 
You mentioned there the idea of impact and research having impact, which is obviously something that we think about in terms of research, if you think about your research and the kind of research you do, do you feel that it has impact on policy, on the way people do things, what sort of impact do you feel your research has had?
Well my own, well the Mission Maker series of projects and software itself has had a certain kind of impact, in fact it was submitted actually as an impact case study for the last REF by the Institute of Education, and I think that document is in these boxes actually.  It might be on my site.  Yeah, the section on ‘impact and legacy’ near the bottom of the Mission Maker page.  
Yeah, got it.  
There’s a link to the ref case somewhere, if that’s still working. 
Great, thank you.  
It looks like it’s not working, okay.  So I’ll try and find that document and maybe send it to you, actually if you just Google ‘Mission Maker impact case study’ something might crop up. 
Anyway, I think the point it made, unlike actually most case studies, it was actually able to quote sales figures for instance, so-
Oh I see. 
It could demonstrate the Mission Maker had actually been sold quite extensively in the UK and Australia and New Zealand as well, I think, and so was used in classrooms, and was giving people a way to look at, you know, another way to think about a game design.  So there’s that kind of impact.  Policy, so an impact on education practice I guess.  
Policy makers are much harder to get at [0:36:36] we’ve managed too much there.  I was a member for a while of the, while it still existed… what’s it called?   The European umbrella organisation for the games industry, it’s kind of gone.  I mean that was the closest I think I got, policy makers; or also I’m actually a member of the European Commission, so media literacy expert group, which is a group where I’ve tried to raise the question of games on several occasions, including a demonstration of Mission Maker, but it kind of falls on deaf ears I think, because you know, for different reasons.  I mean for most people in the European member states, media literacy is kind of, they’re more interested in a sort of adult version of media literacy which is really driven by information technology, and how young people understand the information on the internet and how is it helping them to become kind of the voting citizens of the future, as written, what they’re interested in, and if they’re interested in the media arts, the one that dominates all European funding in this respect, because it’s available is film, so video games don’t get a look in [0:37:52] so again that’s my attempt at influencing policy, largely failed I fear.  
Well I mean you’ve talked there about other ways in which you’re influencing, and so absolutely, as we know influence and impact doesn’t necessarily just mean policy.  We are, we are on the project concerned with the way that policy is kind of framed as part of the European discourse, but absolutely, any kind of impact and the way in which you’ve talked about the impact of your research is really fascinating, so thank you for that. 
Yeah, I think also, I mean just to sort of relevant to your questions about, you know, the dominant laurels in research.  I mean in relation to education course, I think as you’ve already said, I mean by far the most dominant model is really aversion for gamification model and I, so the argument I’m making for studying games as a cultural form in their own right, it’s tiny in the national debate.  I mean by and large the debate is about how can we teach geography or maths better by using games, and it’s interesting to track it back.  I mean I think there are two reasons for it, one is James Gee’s work in the States, and his book on, you know, what can we learn from video games and literacy and learning, where literacy has got kind of overlooked [0:39:16].  
The literacy argument would be, you’ve commented with our argument, it’s an aspect of literacy really, but I think the learning one is the one that got picked up and the principles of learning that he enthuses at the end of that book, and although actually he wasn’t saying literally that we should turn the curriculum into video games, that’s what people have understood him as saying and he has kind of colluded with that interpretation it seems to me I’m afraid, although his arguments are much more subtle.  
I think the other – so that, you know, his influence has been enormous, you know the centres for games and education studies, in the States like Madison but the other reason, and I think, which is kind of an accidental reason is that the US doesn’t really have media education in the same way that we have here in the UK, or Australia or Canada, or New Zealand, or to some extent, South Africa.  You know, it’s, we have it as a curriculum subject, which is focused on understanding, appreciating and making the media in its own right, the States don’t really have that.  
I mean there are certain people, individual people, trailblazers who do, but on the whole that curriculum model doesn’t really exist in the States, and that’s why people like Henry Jenkins and James Gee don’t really understand what it would mean to have some project in the curriculum where you might study video games alongside film, alongside television, alongside comic strips, you know. 
So yeah, as things in themselves, absolutely.  Thank you that’s really important and I’m really pleased that you’ve made those points.  
I’m conscious of the time, so I’m going to kind of start wrapping up.  Just, if we can just take that conversation slightly further, given that that’s the kind of state of play and how things are, what future directions do you think games or gaming, or research in gaming could take?  And is there any way in which things could be reframed to be more like how you want them to be, how you would like them to be, or how do you see the future in this area?
Internationally, or in the UK?
That’s up to you to choose really, what you prefer to talk about. 
Well you know internationally, America remains the great driver of practice, research practice and opinion, I think it would be nice to think that – I wonder whether actually practice with the research, whether the same thing will happen with games that’s happened to film, where nobody researched it, nobody told them what to do, but slowly and surely the place for film in education became as a cultural form in its own right.  
And the way that happened I think was a kind of, kind of model of that possibility first, more in higher education and then schools could kind of appropriated it, as a legitimate model.  So when film studies became respectable at universities it was easier for schools and exam boards, the curriculum policy makers to accept film as a kind of subject in its own right and alongside the media studies, and I wonder if games studies, which is, it’s a [0:42:44] now, we’re about fifteen years , it’s a kind of field in its own right I guess, we’ll see the same kind of trajectory that is becoming reasonably respectable in universities, it already has its own professors, has had for a while and so whether at some point it will become more acceptable in schools, to study it in its own right, because I think that’s where teachers will want to go, particularly teachers who are involved in media education or film education.  And if that happens it maybe that the pendulum will swing a little bit in the research field and research would start to look at that which is what we’ve always been looking at and move away from the kind of – I think the gamification thing will run out of steam actually.  Because as with film I think it will become clear that although games might be a valuable tool in the repertoire of educators in certain ways, they’re not going to transform learning in the kind of magical ways that people are claiming it won’t.  
That’s brill, thank you.
It’s my hunch (laughs).  
No that’s good.  We’ll end it there then.  Thank you so much for speaking to me, I’m just going to stop the audio now. 

Part 2
I probably should’ve done in relation to education particularly, but also, well also higher education was that I think games uniquely, well perhaps not entirely uniquely because you could mix say [0:00:14] through the animation or something like that.  Because it’s a programme form, it offers a kind of bridge between the arts and the sciences, and the computer sciences in particularly.  Now that’s a divide we’ve always struggled working [0:00:32] maths teacher talks to the English teachers, and it’s a divide in higher education as well, even in our own research lab, which is supposed to be a meeting of social scientists and computer scientists, the dialogue’s very different, [0:00:45].  
So I think, you know, one of the things we’re trying to do with Mission Maker, I mean with available projects we had a, one of the bits of that project was with a school and we had the British Library where we got the English teacher and the head of IT to work together to make it available for games for the kids.  So what one of the teachers – they understand rules, they have set programming, wire space of computational thinking it’s in that developing and the English teacher’s thinking, what they’re learning about narrative what are they learning about in that setting, what are they learning about [0:01:18] representation, and that’s for me the kind of, a good way forward.  
I actually think, you know, if you want to look at it in curriculum you really need to bring down quite a number of those curriculum barriers, the mission of our project - we did for instance a group with eleven year olds had the media teacher, the English teacher, the IT teacher, the music teacher, the art teacher, all in the same room working, working on it together and that’s what you need to do I think.  That’s the kind of mix of skills you get in a game company, it’s a good model for what the curriculum might look like and it’s as challenging for primary schools as it is for universities that are trying to do them. 
Yeah, so it sounds like you’re talking about the value of video games as a kind of way of working in a cross disciplinary way at all different kinds of levels, in primary schools, in secondary schools, in universities, in research, they have something about them that can bring different people together. 
Yeah, yeah.  It’s just – there are teams we’ve had to help through research projects for this, have involved people from folklore studies through to computer science and I think it has the same kind of demand and effect of benefitting in schools as well – so that was the only thing I should’ve added. 
That’s great, thank you, and I should clarify I restarted the audio, so that has been recorded as I prematurely stopped it.  Thank you, so that is all recorded and part of the interview.  
So I will now formally say, thank you very much for talking to me, it’s been a…