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

Okay, the recording’s working, everything’s playing.  Good.  Could you say your name and spell it, please?
My name is [anon].
Cool, thank you.  And just to confirm, you have signed the consent form, haven’t you?
Yes, I did.
Excellent.  Thank you very much.  So what is it you do within video game development?
I am a video game designer.  More specifically I am trying to specialise in level design, multiplayer level design and going towards production in these late stages.
Okay.  And how would you describe overall the job of a designer?
Hmm, that’s a good one.  Designer creates the rules for the game worlds to function and make sure that the game is fun to play.
Okay.
And then, yeah, the artists come into make it pretty and the programmers make sure that it functions, maybe, really roughly (laughs).
Cool, okay.  And what does the producer of a game team do?
Producer makes sure that everybody works well together and that time schedules are respected and that everything gets together in a nice manner, without breaking.
Good stuff.
This is rough (laughs).
That’s fine.  What do you think are kind of some of the big trends in games at the moment?
Ah, that’s a good one.  Exosuits.
Exosuits.
It sounds like it’s getting really cool all of a sudden.  We are probably transitioning from exosuit to a lot of old subjects, like old wars is coming back up a lot, old games renewed, also I’m seeing a lot of that.  Narrative, it’s getting, I think, a bit more present compared to the past.
Okay.
Yeah, that’s just – yeah, just me.
So when you say old wars, you mean kind of historical settings?
Yeah, yeah.
Okay.  And you think that narrative is an increasing emphasis?
Yeah, I think so.  I think players are currently searching for something that is a bit deeper than I’ll just shoot this guy in the head because he’s the bad guy.  That’s at least the feeling I’m getting.  I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting old and I look more for it, or if it’s these actual games doing it more, but yeah, that’s at least my impression.
And you mentioned maybe players are getting older or maybe you’re getting older.  How would you characterise the games’ audience?  Who buys games?  Who plays games?
Nowadays I’d say everyone, from like eight-year-old kids till 60 – well, probably 60s, starting to get to the maximum of 60 or 70 is probably the oldest I’ve seen players play.  But I think the more we go on the more gaming is going to be a culture from the start for the new generation, so never know, people playing games when they’re 80 in like 20 years.
I expect I will be, yeah.  As long as I can still move my thumbs well enough, which is a genuine risk, you know.  It’s possible that with arthritis it’s going to be quite hard to press buttons.
Fair enough.  [0:03:21] controllers?
Yeah, I think that is a big market of the future.  Yeah, okay, so basically everybody plays games.
Not everybody, but I think compared to 10 or 15 years ago, the market has increased significantly, like 15 years ago you would assume, for example, women to not play games at all, and now you just assume it as something normal.  I don’t know, or even like 50-year-old parents, when the first Xbox came out, I’m pretty sure not a lot of parents were playing games and now they are, and it’s nice to see.
Yeah.  Do you think that’s impacted on how people use their leisure time?  Do you think it’s taken time away from other hobbies?
Probably.
Yeah.
I’m not sure if that is good or bad, but it’s a hobby like another hobby, right?  So it’s just like saying a hobby is taking time away from hobbies, but it’s still a hobby.
Yeah.  Do you think there’s – that playing games brings something different to a person’s life from other hobbies, such as painting or reading books or watching films?
I think everybody can find these sources of relaxation or stress relief and games can be any really; it can be a stress-relief moment, it can be a relaxation moment, it can be a learning moment, it can be, how do you call it?  Get together moment.  Games can be anything really, depending on what the game is itself.
Yeah, okay.  Have you heard the term applied games or serious games?
Yes.
Yes, do you have any general impressions about those?
This is just me personally, but in general, generally speaking if we’re speaking about serious games, only for learning purposes, so I’m thinking of create a game to teach kids to do math or these kind of things, I personally do not necessarily like it because what my experience was with it is really a forced learning, so it’s like we’re trying to make something fun that is not necessarily fun and that, I don’t know, if I had to think about it myself, I feel like somebody’s trying to like sneaky, sneakily trying to teach me something.  And for applied learning, like maths or physics and these kind of things, I don’t really like it.  When it comes to more conceptual learning like, I don’t know, sex preferences, acceptance or these kind of things, I think they can be really nice and really changing experience for a person and I do really like those ones much better than actually teach math to kids in Africa.
Can you think of any examples of the good ones you mentioned?
Well, Fragments of Him I’ve heard was really nice.  I always remember the name of the other one, the one that came out recently about the two teenagers.  Oh…
Life is Strange?
Yes, Life is Strange.  I found the last was extremely touching, really, really, really touching and also eye-opening on, yeah, father and daughter relationships in some aspects.  But yeah, I think games can really touch inside parts of us more than films or books can sometimes.
Do you think that the makers of Fragments of Him, my own game, Life is Strange and The Last of Us, do you think the makers intended those to be serious or applied games?
I think, ah, okay, it really depends how you define applied games, I think.  But I think that what they did with the game did not come out of nowhere or out of chaos.  I think it was the initial plan to have an experience that as a final aim was – had the one of touching people inside and making sure that they deliver a message.  So, yeah, I definitely think that they knew what they were doing.  I don’t know if they were thinking, “We’re making an applied game.”
From my knowledge of those teams, no, they – that was not their intention.
Okay.
They would be considered entertainment games, but they have, yeah, as you say, from a certain light, from a certain perspective they are seen – they have applied outcomes, which is sort of one of the things we talk about here really.  I mean you mentioned that some games have historical settings.
Yeah.
Have you played many of those?
Yeah, quite a bunch actually.
What sort of games have you been playing then?
On the side of really narrative-heavy games, I tend to really like first-person shooters, so as for historical settings, I am currently playing Battlefield 1.  I played a bunch of World War II first-person shooters and, yeah, a couple of strategic games.  Yeah, I think they were World War II.
How do you feel about the representation of history in those games?
I think from a certain aspect it’s really, really nice to have – like what I’m seeing is people even close to me that never even considered getting interested in history, for example, all of a sudden researching World War II events and checking like, “Is this actually happened?  This is amazing?  What is this?  This is super-cool,” etc., whereas before they were just like, “History?  Nah.”  But, at the same time I think it can be risky the moment developers start mixing actual reality with fiction without telling it to the player because then there are also players that just assume that everything they see is the actual – how the facts went and then they just assume that that is history and then, yeah, that’s bad.
Yeah, I mean I take it you’re familiar with the Assassins Creed ones?
Yeah.
That’s one of those mixing.
Yeah, fair enough, yeah.  I did play a bunch of Assassins Creed game, but at the same time I do believe they state quite clearly that that is just fiction, right?
There’s actually a lot of historical fact in there.  There’s the kind of the files that go with it, which are actually the kind of true history.
Right.
And there’s stuff you do which might have new people in it and stuff like that.
Right, okay.
A friend of mine who was also inspired by playing those games went off, went “Really, that can’t possibly have happened,” and all the stuff that seemed ridiculous was the true bits.  He was like, “Oh, wow, okay.  Fair enough.”  Yeah, so in some ways do you think there’s any clear boundary, or sometimes there seems to be a clear boundary between serious and applied games and the entertainment and art side, but you kind of suggest that maybe sometimes it’s unintentionally that line is crossed perhaps?
I just think that we instead should redefine what an applied or serious game is, because I think games are, at their core, made to be fun, made to be entertaining.  So I would define a serious game as something that is, at its core, something not made to be fun but made to be teaching something specifically.  So, yeah, I think sometimes the line is crossed unintentionally and it can blur the separation between the two, but I also think that it might be actually interesting to start separating teaching kids math through a Match 3 game and actually going into more deep subjects, like the definition of those at least.
Are you familiar with the term gamification?
I did hear it at least, yeah, I did hear it multiple times.  Was that about teaching maths?
It’s quite often actually some of the stuff you’re referring to there as like…
Okay, okay.
…the definition that we have here is that gamification is the idea of using game-based techniques in non-game contexts.
Yeah, okay.
So, for example, teaching maths and just sort of slapping some arbitrary smiley face on it almost…
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
…trying to make it seem more fun, and that seems to be the thing that you’re most heavily critical of.
Yeah, yeah, then yes, I think, yeah, I think I was actually confusing the two, then yes, the gamification part is the thing that I don’t particularly like.  Then basically serious games or applied games are not those or they are part of them?
They can be.  They can be, yeah, yeah.
They can be, okay.
These terms are quite slippery.
Yeah, fair enough.
They’re not brilliantly defined.  Well, you’ve already answered this to some extent, but I’ll just get it sort of said clearly here, games are powerful tools to change behaviours and attitudes for the better.  So games are powerful tools to change behaviours and attitudes for the better.  Do you agree with that statement?
Yeah, deeply.
Yeah, and what makes you agree so clearly with that?
Well, again, I played games that changed my way of thinking.  Like I am pretty sure that after playing The Last of Us I was fairly closer to my parents, like it showed me why sometimes parents can take decisions and why that can hurt both parties, but why is that for the better, for example.  I’m not saying that it’s going to change me from A to Z, but I’m pretty sure that games that can touch the right button can really change the perception of things for a person. 
There are a few that can do that well and without actually making the player realise during the process that they are doing so and actually just  making them realise at the end, but when they do it well, I think it’s a really powerful tool.
Yeah.  Those are all positive effects.  Do you think that by the same measure they can sometimes have negative effects?
If they are aimed at that, yes.  But, again, I’m still pretty sure that you cannot blame Call of Duty for kids going into school and make a carnage, but I am fairly sure that as much as games can touch the right buttons to make a person get the right perspective in things, if, to a certain extent, the person is ready to change also for the worst, that is also possible.
So, it also depends on the player and who they are, what way they’re going to respond?
I believe so, yeah.
Yeah, okay.  Do you think that serious and applied games or gamification are better at producing more positive outcomes or more effective at producing positive outcomes, positive changes to behaviours and attitudes?
Better than normal games?
Better than, yeah, normal games, entertainment games, yes.
Right, well, again, it really depends on how you define serious and applied games because if – I think any entertainment game can be defined an applied or serious game the moment they can touch somebody’s feeling, so, I don’t know, I feel that it’s a bit hard to answer this question because I still feel that there should not be that much separation between entertainment games and serious games, to be honest.
So, games that have explicit leisure purposes, so entertainment games, are also applied and serious games in your opinion?
They can be, depending on how you want to make them.  Like, of course, you cannot teach empathy probably through a Call of Duty game, but I am pretty sure – well, you possibly can, but what I’m saying is depending on how you structure your game, you can  have a lot of fun with it and look back at it once you’ve completed the game and think, “Holy shit, that happened.  Now this makes me understand this and this thing that happened in my past,” and yada, yada, yada.  Like it shouldn’t just be like this is a serious game so it’s going to change and this is an entertainment game so it’s never going to change you.  Like even the examples I gave, like just doing Call of Duty much, probably for an old person it might be reminiscent of the violence that they lived in the past and might make him click something, like I don’t know.  I really don’t think we should separate them.
Okay, that’s a very – I think that’s one of the first – I think there’s Call of Duty Modern Warfare where typically in games you play a hero who’s almost invincible really, and then they sequence a nuclear strike goes off and a helicopter falls down and there’s nothing you can do except climb from the wreckage and then die.
Yeah, fair enough.
And that was quite a powerful scene for a lot of people, and like, “Oh, that’s nuclear weapons.  You know, I might be the hero of this story, but nuclear weapon goes off, you still die.”  It was an interesting moment, a good piece of storytelling even within such a kind of blockbuster action thing. 
Okay, so we’ve actually covered a lot of these topics in this column, so let’s not go in there.  Actually, just to put it down more explicitly there, do you think there are some distinctive features from kind of the entertainment and arts game field that could never come across sort of to serious and applied?  
So, for example, combat mechanics or open world multiplayer stuff, do you think these could never be translated across, or is it just really about a different – is it just what the designer chooses and how they use it?
So if all this could be applied to a serious game?
Yeah.

Yeah, I think there is no limitation in there.

Okay.
Like, again, I think it’s all about the message you want to bring at the end of the experience and I don’t think that changes if you want to do it through melee combat rather than weapons, rather than MMORPG rather than single-player campaign; it’s just the way you bring the message, but the content of it, it doesn’t really change.
Okay, so the mechanics can translate across, just depending on purpose.  Okay.  So, how long have you been working as a games developer?  So you’re studying here at the moment, but—
Yeah, two years.
Two years, and is this your first experience making games?
Making games?  Yeah.
Yeah.  And what were you doing before this?
Before this I studied for two years in university in Italy, communication, media and advertisement.  Done a lot of study on cinema specifically for that university.  Before that I have been nine months in Australia, working holiday.  And before that I did language, four languages and literature at high school.
Okay, so that’s quite a varied background there.
Yeah, yeah.
General theme of media though within it?
Yeah, yeah.  Australia was probably the most far from it, but it was – I had a family that is really, really strict with studies and this is why, of course, adolescence and rebellion, you want to do what your parents tell you not to do.  So I wanted to work, and I ended up in Australia, working and surviving with my own pay.
Nice, always good.
Yeah, but it also made me want to study more (laughs).
I’m very pleased it had that effect.  We hope people see the value of education anyway.
Yeah.
So, obviously you’ve only been doing this for a couple of years, but do you think there are, from your perspective, do you think there are specific pressures that a lot of people within the games industry feel when they work in a studio or on their work?
Pressures, I think nowadays it’s almost physically impossible to not trigger someone because anything you do, it’s under the lights of the entirety of the board and there is always going to be one person already that is absolutely deeply offended by what you do.  And it’s more than – I think we should really try to do as much as possible to not – like to offend less people as possible, but I think as a developer it’s also hard to realise that at some point you’re going to have somebody raging at you and you not even know where it’s coming from and you’re just going to have to apologise and keep it in account for the next time.
But I think it’s, yeah, I think it’s going to be hard at the moment.  I’m going to have also my things released to start realising, “Oh, well, I offended this person in Korea and this other person in Africa and I’m really sorry but I didn’t know about it.”  How can you know about everything, you know?  So, yeah, that, I think, is kind of one of the most pressure factor nowadays, I think, I feel at least.
So cultural awareness, awareness of global – the global medium.
Yeah, yeah.  I think, again, I really doubt that there is a way to do something that will not offend anyone, so that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to; it just means that at some point you’re going to have that hammer smashed on your head and it’s going to hurt.
Yeah, fair enough.  Oh, well that does lead us quite nicely to the next topic actually, which is while working on games, do you recall intentionally addressing issues such as gender, minority representation, political culture or other serious or socially educational topics?
If I what?  If I recall addressing?
Do you remember dealing with gender, minority representation or other topics like that?
While developing games or while playing games?
Well, let’s start with developing, but playing as well.
So, if I encountered it as a pressure, as in something that I noticed that was happening and I would do something about it or—?
Or something you chose to put into a design of a game or…
Right.  As a developer, let me think, let me think, let me think.  I do not believe so.  I don’t think we ever made it part of our design, to actually address any of those issues or topics.  No, I don’t believe so, no.
Okay.  Do you think any of those topics would have been unintentionally addressed in any of the games you’ve done?
Oh, well, for sure.  Like I’m pretty sure that somebody got a feedback in our year about the fact that they only had a male character to play with in their game and where was the female?  So, again, this ties up into what I said just before that there’s no matter what, you’re going to have somebody coming up to you saying, “You were offensive for this and this community.”  “I didn’t want to.”
Yeah, it is.  Offence is one of those words that is an interesting disguised.  I was talking with one of the other interviewees yesterday.  She was saying how we find lots of ways of saying other things because offence is actually – sometimes people are just offended and there’s really legitimate basis for that, but sometimes when they say a community has been offended, actually what it means is it’s contributing to harm.  Now there’s a different thing because if you’re contributing towards, for example, the lack of women being seen as role models…
Right.
…that’s not just offence, that’s harm.
Yeah, so that’s physically contributing to the building of a stereotype.
Yeah.
Alright.  Okay, fair enough.
So I think it’s an interesting perspective that we use a word such as offence to kind of make ourselves feel like we’re not doing harm, and it’s almost like, “Oh, it’s just an internal thing,” but it could actually affect the external structures of people’s lives.
Fair enough.
So, yeah, it’s an interesting one.  Do you think discussions about gender, minority representation and such like, political culture, for example, do you think those happen in games studios very often?
Oh, so while developing?
Yeah, during development.
While developing.  I think they must happen at a certain point because at some point during the development of the majority at least of games, there is going to be somebody coming up saying like, “This might be considered offensive by this and this specific group or community,” or, “Maybe we should consider adding this because it would make this group or community really happy.”  I’m pretty sure it happens, at least for the majority of games, possibly not for like, I don’t know, car racing games might be hard to offend politicians or genders with car games, but it might as well be.  But I don’t know.  I think it’s a worthwhile discussion and I think it happens more often than people think.
Yeah.  Do you think that – I know what your answer will be in some ways.  Do you think that games rely on psychological mechanisms to make people play them more?
Many do.  I think I spent more than €500 on Hearthstone, so looking back at it, I’m not happy about it (laughs).
Ah, so there’s a very interesting question there then is like do you feel the developers of Hearthstone are being socially responsible by making a game…
No.
… that you spend that much money on?
No.  I don’t think they’re socially responsible, but at the same time I think the people that decide that the game has a loop that makes people spend a lot of money without noticing is not decided by the people that make the game fun.  That’s probably their bosses or whoever that handles marketing or monetisation loops, that is not necessarily the developers that you have in your head when you think about the developers.  That is people that draw the cards or actually make the game fun, so it’s like the [0:26:54] of the developers in a sense.
Yeah.
Yeah, I don’t think social responsibility is at any point taken into account.  Maybe just to make sure that it’s not that evident, but at the same time I also can understand the dark side because game industry is still defined as an industry so they want to make money, so there’s probably a better way to do it, but…
Yeah, yeah, you’re not the first person to mention kind of dark design patterns.  These seem to often be related to finances and business models and often are related to micro-transactions.
Yeah.
Do you think the business of micro-transactions and free-to-play is possible to be done in an ethical way?
Hmm, in an ethical way, well, to start with they could – like I was actually researching this with Blizzard the other day.  They have functionality that is really well hidden into their systems to actually catch up how much you spend in total.  Funny thing is, it’s not working.  I tried it on multiple accounts, multiple machines, multiple set-ups, none of them work.  So it’s there, it’s super well hidden and even if you find it, it doesn’t work.  I think that that would be already a good start to let the players know, like, “Yeah, you’re giving me just another €1.99 for an arena run, but that’s like the 200th time.  You’re already at €500 this month.”  It’s like maybe you should give – like just allowing players to see how much they’ve spent so far.  
I think it’s one of the things that keeps you going the most, the fact that you don’t know what’s the amount of money that you’ve spent before that.  Yeah, I believe that for a lot of people, if they realise that even just the last month, not even the last year, that would be scary for me.  But even the last month, it would probably hit the brake.
Okay.
It would make it at least a bit more socially responsible.
So, yeah, there is a very interesting term you’ve used there, socially responsible.  So, not just on the topic of finances and micro-transactions, but in general regarding representation of minorities or women and things like that, do you think that games developers are responsible for this or should be working towards it in an ethically responsible mode, or do you think they are sitting outside of society because they’re entertainers?
I think they should do that.  I think a lot are trying, but at the same time I do feel that there is almost a defence and fuck you back mechanism that is coming into place sometimes with developers kind of sometimes getting sick of people calling them offensive for every single move they do and then just saying like, “You know, we’re trying really hard and we’re, even with the small details, you’re still telling us that we’re inconsiderate so, you know what?  We’re not even going to try.”  And I think it’s something that in a couple, yeah, I think it’s visible sometimes, but I do think that it can be prevented and it should.
Like I think many developers are trying, that’s the bottom line.  I think they could try – many developers that are not trying, they should try it, but I also think that we should, as gamers, keep an eye on who is trying and try to make sure that we also tell them good job when they do a good job and not only throw a ton of shit at them when they do one small mistake.
Yeah, and I think that’s the nature of especially things like Twitter, where people tend to jump on small mistakes.  And there’s a lot of maturity which is required to be developed, I think, within the criticism of games.  Do you think that games criticism is currently ready to tackle these big issues in games, as in some way that literary theory exists to look at novels and kind of go, “Well, this novel written 150 years ago actually endorses slavery in a way that probably wasn’t noticed at the time.”  Do you think that games criticism is of a similar level of sophistication that it can observe games in that way?
The thing is I’m pretty sure that whoever is doing the review of that novel written 150 years ago that is probably 600 pages spent his time, and a lot of it, to analyse every single little aspect of it and take conclusions out of it, whereas right now, the people that are being critical probably just take a glance of any game and just their eyes is caught by the only detail that is kind of fucked up and they just throw shit at developers, whereas I’m not sure what people would say if they would actually stop and look at the overall picture in that.
Okay, cool.  Just got a couple of questions, which is first one is if you were to look at the big trends in games in the last ten years…
Right.
…just a quick few points, what would you say are the big things that really stand out from the last ten years of games development?
I think we’re getting a lot less, how do you say?  I’m going to say it crude, but we are getting a lot less boobs.  How do you call that?  Hyper-sexualisation, is that—?
Yeah, hyper-sexualisation.
There you go.  We’re getting a lot less of that.  I think in the last ten years we’re getting a lot less of American dream, the macho and I am big muscles and big guns, I’m going to destroy everything, and a lot more of the common guy, common family, common situation kind of context that is, I think, much appreciate-able.  Appreciate?
Much appreciated?
Appreciated.  Yeah, I think games are getting really much more refined as a medium, whereas before they were, well, more than ten years ago they started as like arcades and you could just shove in there anything you wanted.  I remember going to the Flipper Museum, where apparently they created one of the first Easter eggs that history had was on a flipper, the Easter egg was actually a picture of Hitler on the flipper.  So, you know, we went from put anything you want in there, who cares?  They’re games.  To this is actually getting to a lot of people so we should probably be more considerate with what we are doing that is actually a lot nice to see.
Yeah, okay.  If I was to ask you that question in ten years’ time, what do you think you’d be answering?  What do you think have the next ten years got in store?  Just a couple of big trends.
I don’t know about the next ten years, but I do believe that the general trends that is probably not going to be achievable in ten years but in more is just going to go more and more towards second life kind of things, so more of like second life simulation and less of an actual this is a game and you know that it’s a game and it’s a safe place for exploring stuff that you cannot do in real life and more towards this is a second life.  Maybe you want to get lost, a bit more towards that rather than your actual life.  That’s, to me, a bit scary.  But, yeah, we’ll see how it goes.
Fair enough.  Cool, I think we should probably wrap that one up there, so thank you very much for the interview.
Yeah, no worries.