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

Okay, that's recording.  Could I get your name and could you spell it for us, please?
It's [anon] , and I give my consent for this interview.

Cool.  Thank you very much.  Could you describe to me what your job is?
I am a writer and I work in video games and comics and film and TV, pretty much everything that requires a writer.
Cool.  And how long have you been involved with video games now?
Since '98, in some form.  So I originally started out as a freelance journalist in 1998 and became an in-house journalist on PC's own magazine in 2000, and then went freelance again in 2002/2003.  That's when I started getting into the development side of games, and I've been doing that ever since.
And what brought you to video games to begin with?
My dad used to be into them.  I'm an only child, so I didn't have any brothers and sisters, and I was endlessly fascinated with what my dad was up to.  He was very into games, electronics and robotics, and he brought me a Sinclair ZX81 with a game called Mazogs on it.  I was six and I was scared of it initially because I'd never seen anything like it.  There was a little pixelated man running around a little pixelated maze being chased by little pixelated crabby creatures, and I think I found that quite terrifying at six years old.  And then I realised that the little pixelated man could get a little pixelated sword and fight back against the crabby creatures, and that's something that clicked in me and it sort of started a long-term love affair since then.  
I would play games alongside my dad.  He'd sort of do the driving part of the games.  Not literally racing games, but just playing the game and I would sit beside him, watching him, offering advice, navigating and drawing him maps.  So I was usually his navigator.  And then when I got older, he gave me my own machine and he would play games and then hand me down ones.  Or sometimes he would get two and then if I finished it (laughs)—  It became a bit of a race sometimes.  If I finished it before him, sometimes he'd lose interest (laughs).  I remember that happened with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.  I was delighted I managed to finish that before my father.  It was my first big gaming achievement.
It's interesting that from the very beginning of that you're describing it also in emotional terms, that there was fear and then you kind of had a love affair with games.
Yeah.
So there's a sense that it's more than just a functional hobby.  There's something else.  It speaks to you in another way.
Yeah, and also, I made it a social experience even before it became as social as it is now.  So I used to play adventure games with the little girl that lived next door whose dad worked at Hewlett Packard, therefore used to get good machines and good games.  We used to play a lot of adventure games together, sort of try and solve the puzzles.  I even remember there was one time where we got stuck on a puzzle – I think it was one of the Monkey Island games – and  we'd left it to go and have tea and we came back (laughs) to find her six-year-old brother had solved it while we'd gone.  But yeah, I used to play games with her and we used to play the old Leisure Suit Larry games.  
There wasn't any official classification for games but they considered you needed to be eighteen to play them.  But the gate-keeping on the games was asking you questions about the American political process to check that you were eighteen, or very knowledgeable about the American political process, which they seemed happy with.  So we kind of learnt quite a bit whilst trying to even gain access to the game.  
Then we learnt the word prophylactic from Leisure Suit Larry, which I think is something every girl should know, and I also learnt the word falafel from Sierra's Conquest of Camelot (laughs).  I didn't know what a falafel was, but it sounded so amazing and exotic and the word had such a nice mouth feel to it.  Then I had a falafel much later on when I moved to the big city of London and it was very disappointing.
It is very disappointing, yeah (laughs).  If you were to characterise people who make video games, are there any things in common that you'd say are kind of part of them?
They're usually sort of—  Oh, I don't know.  I'm trying to think about that.  It's just that I'm so entrenched with them it's hard to stand back and observe.  Usually imaginative, passionate, usually are into comics, films of the eighties.  Yeah, gamers and game developers are usually very creative, very imaginative people.  
'Nerds' always seems a derogatory word, and I don't see it as a derogative word because I feel that that's part of it.  A nerd is just someone who's passionate about something, and I think game developers have a lot of passion and they usually have a lot of passion outside game development as well.  So, be it books or sci-fi fantasy or movies, they're very well steeped in entertainment culture.  They're very passionate about their entertainment.
Yeah, I don't know.  What kinds of things have people said?  I don't know whether I need to be more specific.
No, no, it's one of the questions a lot of people kind of pause a long time over.  Some of these questions are very general just to see what pops up, but a lot of people say things like very inquisitive, wanting to solve things.  Quite often you get a mix of people who are very detailed focus and they have to work with people who are big picture focused, otherwise it doesn't work.  So yeah, that's quite interesting.
Yeah, I was just trying to think of the kind of commonalities of it.  Because I work in writing, I'm used to dealing with the creative types more than the programming types.
Would you say those are different types of people?
I think that programmers can kind of be more analytical and less big picture focused.  I mean, I do think you get programmers that are interested in the narrative.  In every discipline there are those that are interested in narrative these days.
It was interesting.  When I was speaking at girls' schools about the games industry, I did a little bit of work with a company called Little Miss Geek that did a lot of research into girls' perceptions of the games industry and who works in the games industry, and it was basically someone that looks a bit like a geography teacher, the kind of cliché image.  It's hard maths and science and not bathing and it's all a big boys' club and stuff, and they just didn't have any idea that games have writers and musicians and artists and designers.
So a bit of what I've done is just talking about there are all these different opportunities in games.  The door is not shut to you if you're not particularly interested in hard maths and science.  Those are kind of important in certain disciplines, but there are many others and they're never the things that get talked about in schools.  
I remember going to school and I think there were about five professions that you thought you could be.  It was like, doctor, fireman, policeman, teacher, maybe journalist if you're lucky.  Maybe that was a rogue slip (laughs).  I would do everything to engineer for it to point to at least journalist because that seemed like the nearest interesting thing about the five to seven options of what you could.  And I don't things have moved on that much at school.
Because I wanted to draw stuff, they always gave me mapmaker, cartographer.
Right, okay.
That was always my one because it was like, "There's no work.  There's no money in art.  Therefore, if you want to draw for a living, you'll have to be a cartographer."  And I was like, "Okay."  That wasn't a safe prediction for the future these days, cartography.  I don't think anything is drawn by hand, ever.
No, and after a while, there's not a lot of change (laughs).
No.  Well, it depends which city you're in.  If you're in the Netherlands, they'll change the road every three weeks.
Oh right (laughs).
Yeah.  Are you familiar with the term 'serious or applied games'?
Yes, but very lightly.  I haven't worked with serious games.
Okay.  What are your opinions of serious and applied games?
I think there's definitely a place for them.  I think they can be kind of helpful, particularly in communicating difficult subjects to kids, or just engaging their senses in a different way.  Not everyone learns in the same way and I think they can be very good for kids that are maybe more visually focused and just need that extra stimulation to learn.  I think it can be a very good way of contextualising problems and ideas and the world in ways that can resonate with younger audiences.
Okay.  Are you familiar with the term 'gamification'?
Yes (laughs).
(Laughs) What do you think of gamification?
Yeah, I can see why it works.  I've seen a lot of gamification in all sorts of things throughout my life, whether it's a Weight Watcher's app giving you stars or something when you lose weight, or the pedometer app emailing me to tell me I've walked the height of a hundred buses or something.  
I think it does work for a particular mindset, if you like that sort of reward or earning points or things like that.  The old Weight Watcher's version used to be that you could earn points through exercise and spend them on food, and it had a little pedometer that would count the points up, and that was quite good.
I think it appeals to a particular mindset and I know that some people don't really like the term 'gamification', almost like it's—  Gamification is really game design and it's just game design being brought into other things.  It's almost like it's become game design is seen as, oh, too geeky, and so they have to have a new word for it.
Fair enough.  I've got a statement here.  Games are powerful tools to change behaviours and attitudes for the better.  Do you think that is true?
Yes, sort of.  I still think we've got a long way to go.  I think there's a lot more potential than we have embraced.  Games resonate on a different level to anything else.  You can argue that, okay, TV, movies, books, they're sort of interactive a bit, but they're largely passive.  There is an interactive element, but it's sort of minor.  
I was definitely interacting with Wonder Woman and wanting to cry at every action scene because you'd never really seen anything like that before.  Look, it's amazing, there are two strong fighting women on the screen at the same time and, look, there's loads of women fighting.  Yeah, there were these women fighting, with no men involved, and there was definitely interaction happening there.  But with games, you're shaping the story, you're right there in the middle of the story, you are the story, and that's very powerful.  You're put into the shoes, not all the time, but into the shoes of different characters and different worlds and different experiences, and that can be very powerful.  
I think we're only really starting to embrace that and kind of tell more personal stories and branch out on narratives in what we have to say about the world.  I think that's systematic of maybe game developers getting older and wanting their games to say something, to be more meaningful.  There's a lot of AAA game developers returning to Indie games because they want to say something deeper.
So I think we're starting to explore that more and these games are saying more things and being about things and having deeper themes.  They can still be fun and interesting to play, but they resonate on different levels.
Would you say that's something you've been working on doing in your own work with AAA or with the Indie teams?
Where possible.  Certainly with the Indie game Lost Words, which is about the intersection of grief and memory and the seven stages of grief in particular, the manifestation of the seven stages of grief as artistic themes as well and puzzles and things like that, taking a personal and slightly abstract concept and turning it into something more solid.  So when you're playing through a level that's themed around anger or acceptance, things like that, how would that look as a puzzle?
As I mentioned earlier, we've got a little bit of funding from the Wellcome Trust to do that.  So the Wellcome Trust fund film, games and TV that have a scientific or medical element to them, and that's quite broad.  Possibly even if you had a game that had a lot of witchcraft element, that would still come under it because they have quite a broad remit for it.  Because Lost Words is the intersection of grief and memory, we spent quite a bit of time talking to child therapists about how children and young adults – eleven/twelve year old girls – go through grief and deal with it, and that was very interesting and we're incorporating some of what we found into the game.
Likewise, Hellblade by Ninja Theory, who I did Heavenly Sword, they got a Wellcome Trust grant because their main character is suffering from schizophrenia.  So they worked with Wellcome Trust consultants to advise them on how to deal with that and how to write about it and how to present that in game play.
Hmm, okay.  What do you think are some of the main pressures on games developers in their career?  Just in the workplace or in the work that they're trying to do.
I think work-life balance is a big issue in games development, and the proliferation of crunch and the romanticising of (laughs) the slightly Gordon Gekko-ish lunch is for wimps type of mindset where you're sort of—  We've seen a few advertisement out there recently.  They're being flagged up as kind of, "Oh yeah, I haven't seen my children for three months," (laughs) and things like that.  
Yeah, I think one of the biggest problems for games developers is too much crunch time.  In the games industry, that's basically overtime.  I don't know how often it's paid but crunch is almost expected of developers.  So they won't get weekends or they'll only get a one-day weekend, or they'll be expected to work very late, and too often crunch is often factored into the development schedule.  It's very disastrous for families, especially single parent families, and it has been responsible for a lot of families breaking up.  It's very difficult getting that work-life balance sometimes, and that can change from studio to studio and some have better and healthier working cultures than others.
But yeah, the romanticising of you kind of go through a crunch period like it's some wall that you come out of and you've got this invisible badge, and that's the only way you can justify it to yourself (laughs).  You have to reward yourself with a visible badge that says it was all okay.  But it's not and it's disastrous and—  (Whispers).
(Interruption)
Yeah, it's almost like the gamification of making games, isn't it, really?
Yeah.  Yeah, yeah.
We treat it as a competition.
And a boss battle.  Yeah, it is a boss battle and it is not healthy for anyone.  I think that is a big problem.  
The industry is waking up to be a bit more diverse with its games and its characters.  I mean, too often when we talked about diversity in games it sort of meant putting a woman in it, and it's trying to push the conversation wider.  Diversity is, yeah, about gender, but it's about sexual orientation and ethnicity and background and ability and age, all of those things, and it's sort of pushing out the conversation further than just female characters.
I think it was last year we had Watch Dogs 2 and Mafia 3, both of which had black male protagonists, which was really unprecedented, and you know, it seems that we get fewer protagonists of colour than female protagonists.  I'm not sure if I've seen a—  Obviously Faith was American-Asian, and Nariko was sort of Euro-Asian.  Yeah, I don't remember a black female protagonist.
There are some.  I looked it up a little while ago.
Okay.  Oh, Broken Age, I think, is the only one I remember.  That's still fairly recent, isn't it?
There were a couple of PlayStation 1 heroes and things like that.  There's not been many at all though.
Black female protagonists?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.  I actually looked it up deliberately just to see if there were any because I couldn't remember any either.
Okay, yeah, that's interesting.  Probably not mainstream, were they?
They've not been huge hits, no.
I remember the first black protagonist was Shadow Man, which was a PS game, PS1 game.
One of the other people we interviewed for this was Gordon Bellamy, who was the lead designer on John Madden back in the nineties.  He now teaches at USCB; he's obviously been working all over the place.  They could only afford to get one shade for the skin of their footballers – he described it as zero zero one – so he just used [0:22:37] black as it goes because it was just cool.  In the end he just went, "I'm going to make them all black."
But the funny thing was that, because it was so tiny on the screen, you would only notice it if you hadn't noticed it ever before, I think.  I played those games all the time and I didn't notice it, but to look back on it, that was a major thing.  It was a huge release from a big studio and he made every single character in that game black.
And did he have any pushback against that?
I don't think he did, actually.  The thing is, it still had John Madden on the front cover, who is an older white man, so (laughs) that's a thing.  
There's been people trying to work on it for a long time but, as you say, it's very hard to think of examples of many people of colour in games at all, certainly protagonists, lead characters.  There was a study done a little while back which said the vast majority of black men, when they do appear in games, are either thugs or sports people.  There's not really the good guy who's a person of colour, generally.
Hmm, I know, because you could argue, in The Walking Dead, that he's still—  He breaks out of a police car, so he is a criminal.  I can't even remember what his—
I can't remember.
I think it's all mysterious, what he did, but he's a criminal, although that isn't focused on.
No.
It's interesting because I was speaking to a male black game developer about what he liked in particular or what characters fascinated him, and he actually said he liked Franklin in GTA5, even though he's not, I would say, necessarily a good guy.  He said he felt that they kind of paid attention to the language and spoke to a lot of young black men and got a good sense of how they spoke and how they interacted with their friends.  I think he liked a lot of Franklin's interactions with his friend.  He said, "It was exactly like how I'd talk to my friends," and that sort of resonated with him in particular.
Yeah, I thought the writing was very nice where they had the tonal difference between Franklin and his friend, then Franklin and the other lead characters.  The language was, tonally, quite significantly different, and that was a very interesting thing.  If you want to read social commentary into that, there is the white man's language to kind of get authorisation within society to operate within that domain, and then you've got the language the he uses with his friends, which is from the culture of the inner city.  The writing shifted so much, you can imagine that was a deliberate thing within there.
I really notice it with my trainer, who is a London Muslim.  He gets really London-y with the other trainers, where it's all, "Innit, bruv."  He speaks (laughs) much more precisely with me, and then he's all, "Innit, bruv."  I think that's quite funny, but I don't know why he does it.  I don't think he really notices it.  I think it's something he just automatically slips into because he has a different relationship with the other trainers.  It's more sort of friendly with the client.  But yeah, sorry.
Can you give any examples of where you've addressed items such as gender or minority representation in your own work?
So, let's give you different examples.  I mean, in Tomb Raider, we actually got fallout because our characters of colour survived, which they thought was some kind of big statement, and it was sort of vaguely coincidental.  We had a Maori character who'd spent a lot of time in Hawaii.  He was born in New Zealand and then he moved to Hawaii to live with his grandmother.  And then there was a Polynesian, you could say, character, who's Jonah, who's Lara's mate, and we had a Japanese/Portuguese character and we had a black New York ex-cop, and they all made it (laughs).  They all made it out and we actually had people having a problem with this (laughs).
So player response was not very positive?
No, it was in general, but people will kick off at anything really, particularly in this current climate with Gamergate and everyone being super-kneejerk about representation and diversity and feminism and things like that.  It was a really weird thing to get het up about and sometimes you have to think, okay, I'm going to annoy someone; who don't I mind annoying?  The racists and the sexists, don't mind annoying them (laughs), if I have a choice.  
With Rival Kingdoms, which I did a lot of character creation for – so Rival Kingdoms was a multiplayer mobile game – my job, once I'd sort of put a wrapping round their world, was to continually create characters for them.  When I came on board it was pretty much white men and monsters and, yeah, I think they had one lady who had quite a low-ish neckline.  So I built it out a lot in terms of diversity of ethnicity, a little bit on sexual orientation, but kind of wanted to do it in a way that you didn't feel unnaturally forced into something just to say you've done it.  Yeah, a lot more diversity across ethnicity, age, background.  
I didn't get as much in terms of body shape as I would've liked to have got and I kind of had to get a little bit annoyed with them at one point where we'd done a character – I think she was for the—  We did quite a few characters for different markets and I did one for the Chinese market, and she was sort of based on Darji.  I think she's kind of a nine-tailed fox spirit character in Chinese mythology.  She's really evil and I did a character riffing on that.  It was almost nipples out on her.  I had to kick back against that because they'd done a really good job so far of actually making the female characters dress appropriately, and then suddenly it was nipples out.  
What made it bad is that I looked at the note that had been put from—  I don't know who it was, but it wasn't the person I was working with.  It was saying about the visuals, "Yeah, we haven't got many sexy archetypes," (laughs) and I was like, "Fuck off!"  They considered a low neckline was a sexy archetype, and that really annoyed me and I kicked off.
There's not enough sexy emperors in your game (laughs).
Yeah.  So that was one where I kicked back and they took it in hand and sorted it out, possibly because they didn't want to annoy me too much.  But I could say, "Look, you don't do this with the other female characters.  The female characters are dressed in robes or armour or things like that." – I think it was a different artist – "Don't just start doing this.  It's just—  No."
But yeah, I focused a lot, where I could, on diversity and it just makes it much more interesting from a writer's perspective.  Not only was I trying to push diversity in ethnicity and age and ability and background and stuff, be being able to create characters for different communities as well.  So I did one for the German community, the French, the Chinese community.  That was very interesting as well.  Oddly, that led to quite a bit of diversity, but that was mostly being pushed by me.
So as you say, obviously from a writer's perspective, this is a very nice thing to do, having different characters involved in there.  How do you think it affects the quality of the game?
I think it helps make it just more interesting because you're bringing in different characters, different perspectives.  I mean, ultimately, the quality of the game is going to be decided by a number of factors, but putting players into the shoes of different genders and races and getting them to experience the world, or a world, through those eyes I think is very important.  
Even with something like Tomb Raider, we got a lot of feedback from male players who were put into different situations in the game through a female character that they wouldn't experience as a male character in the real world.  Suddenly they got much more of an understanding of how women have to navigate the world, and I think that's something that is very hard for men to understand.  I'd go so far as to say almost all women have to navigate the world from where you're continually just assessing—  The night before, you're kind of almost thinking about your route back, where your keys are, that kind of thing, and this is something that men never really need to worry about.  Well, not never, but not as much.
It's a different way.
Yeah, it's a different way.
It is definitely done in a different [0:33:39], yeah.
And that was just having them occupy a female character.  But I do find a lot of male players say they prefer playing as female characters because they're usually more interesting, because the male characters tend to be cut-out type of characters.  You know, your brooding types.
Yeah, brooding white guy with a gun.
Yeah.
Yeah.  Last question.  If you were to look back in ten years, what would you think that some of the big changes might be, or what are the big trends we've got coming up?
Oh god.  I mean, I think VR is going to be interesting.  I don't think it's going to revolutionise storytelling.  I think we're just going to find different ways of telling stories and it's just going to be a very different way of telling stories.  I do think we're going to have to adapt our storytelling language for the VR environment, but I think as more writers are getting involved and more writers are getting more power in the industry, we'll see games coming out with more to say for themselves and more of a narrative consistency throughout their world.  
Some of the best rated AAA games have been ones that have had writers who are game directors or creative directors, like Neil Druckmann, or Amy Hennig when she was working on the Unchartered series, or Ken Levine.  They are writers with hard power and they can kind of pull together a narrative world, as well as great characterisation, and twin that with great game play as well because they understand games and they've been designers themselves.
So I think as more writers get power, we'll start seeing a lot more of that in the writers' space as developers get older and they feel that they have more to say and they want to kind of do more with their games and leave more of a legacy, I think.  We've seen a lot of what's called the dadification of games where game developers have got older and had children and then suddenly now we've got a lot of characters in games that have kids or are bonding with kids, or have lost a kid, or have a surrogate child.  You don't see the mumification of games so much.
No (laughs).
But yeah, it feels like there's so much more we can explore.  If you take where TV is at the moment in terms of diversity and storylines and characters and breadth of imagination and experience, it is worlds apart from where games are at the moment.  Games always used to look to movies because it seemed like the shiniest thing, but they really should be looking towards TV, especially at the moment, because that's where the most impressive stuff is, the unusual journeys, the unusual characters.  
If you look at how popular Orange Is The New Black is and the wealth of diversity in that and the storytelling, it's sort of immense and we've never seen it on TV before.  When I started watching it, I felt like this was a game changer.  It felt like Wonder Woman.  There were these game changing moments where something's going to… this is going to change things now, because it was popular, because it was interesting, because it had a kind of diverse path in storytelling.  There are these moments where you see things and go, yeah, that's going to change something.  It may not be quick, but it's going to be that—
It's a tiny snowball, almost.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I was thinking of theatre as a good inspiration as well because that always feels a little bit more interactive.
Yeah, and there's the rise of interactive theatre as well with kind of Punch Drunk and [0:37:20].  VR in interactive theatre have a lot in common as well, so I think we'll—  I've seen a lot of interactive theatre companies starting to work with VR people.
Yeah.  Let's wrap it up there.
Yeah.  Is that all right?
That's lovely.  Thank you very much for your time.