KEY
Bold:	Interviewer
Italic:	Camera/Sound Operator
Regular:	Respondent
[ ]:	Uncertain word(s)

So for the sake of the video, could you please say your name and summarise in a sentence or two what you do within the games industry.
My name is [anon] and I'm a game designer.  I was very lucky to work for more than twenty years in the mainstream video games industry, including stints at Chrystal Dynamics and at Naughty Dog where I was the lead or the co-lead game designer on the first three Unchartered games for PlayStation 3.  I now am an associate professor in the USC games programme at the [anon] here in Los Angeles.
Awesome.  Thank you.  What would the games you've made be like if market restraints and market considerations weren't a big part of how you were designing?
Ah, what an interesting question.  What would the games that I have worked on be like if it weren't for market constraints and market considerations?  I think that they might have been more diverse and more personal.  
I'm a big believer that any kind of constraint can aid a design, and working in a commercial art form like the mainstream video games, obviously the constraints of the market are key considerations in the design of whatever we're making.  These are multitudinous, these constraints.  They might be everything from a consideration of the ages, and therefore the subject matter of a game, the ages of the audience and what certain subject matter is appropriate for.  
There might be certain constraints that we might view as to do with ability, or even disability.  Certainly an understanding of the physicality of our players and whether they have fine motor skills in their thumbs or whether they have motor skills in their bodies, the ability to stand, the ability to hear.  These are all the kinds of constraints that might come to bear on the design of a game.
But unfortunately, certainly in the earlier part of my career, we would often receive constraints from the people in charge of considering the commercial aspects of a game production that I believe did not accurately reflect the audience, or perhaps the potential audience for our games.
So as I was coming up, the received wisdom was that video games were predominately played by men and boys in a certain age range, from maybe teens or younger through to early twenties, and I think that that drove the video game industry towards certain kinds of representation, particularly in the player characters and the characters in the game allied closely to the player character.  For many years, the received wisdom was that those characters all had to be men or boys because men and boys in the audience of players would only accept those characters.
I think it's always been the case that vast numbers of women and girls were playing these games and that they would have welcomed representation of characters that they could relate to more directly.  I'm also a big believer in the idea that it is incorrect to say that men and boys uniformly prefer not to play as characters who are women and girls.
And so, yeah, I think this impacted, as I look back across my career, the games that I worked on somewhat.  However, I was very fortunate; I worked on games that had something of a diversity of representation in their cast of characters.
Cool.  Do you think players have their social views or behaviour changed by the games that they play?
Hmm.  Ah, that's a very interesting question.  I think that people have their views changed or sometimes perhaps reinforced by all of the culture that they consume, including video games and other kinds of games, like board games and card games.  I think when we see a product of culture, the symbols, the representations that we see there do build an internalised understanding on our parts of how we stand in relation to culture and how culture and, in the main, how society at large relates to us.  So I think it's undeniable that, yeah, this is a major mechanism by which the relationship between the individual and society at large is forged, formed and reinforced.
So those changes that we say are happening from these kinds of social reinforcements, how would you characterise them?  Are they positive?  What sort of behaviour do you think they're enforcing at the moment?
Well, I don't think it's possible in a few sentences to summarise the character of any kinds of changes or reinforcements that might be taking place because you would have to consider the whole plethora of different types of games.
However, having been in GDC last week and having attended a talk by my friend, the game designer and writer Steve Curran, about gun violence in games, Steve presented statistics about the vast preponderance of gun violence in video games.  And having also been to another talk by the game designer and engineer Brie Code who worked for many years at Ubisoft, who gave a very compelling talk about alternative models of human emotional behaviour and social behaviour that are not currently reflected in the interaction patterns that we see in game design – in particular, she identified a newly recognised psychological phenomenon called 'tend and befriend' that correlates the release of dopamine in the brain to patterns of social activity – these two ideas put together make me think that, yes, whilst the game industry has historically had a problem with certain types of behaviour that we could consider to be negative or antisocial to be reinforced by both the mechanics and the narratives of the games, while other kinds of behaviour that we might see as being more socially and individually positivistic around building strong social relations of collaboration and mutual emotional support are not yet being supported by certain aspects of game culture.
I do think that we've made tremendous strides over the last ten to twenty years around this, and that year on year we're seeing more and more games that do less of the former and more of the latter.
Thank you.  Most games use fantastical settings or they use very high extreme social settings, such as war zones or terrorism or something like that.  In your professional practice, have you created games with mechanics or scenes or whole scenarios which are non-violent in their nature?
Indeed, yeah.  In my time in the game industry I've worked on some games that we might see more as games aimed at kids where the core mechanics of the games were less around violent conflict and more to do with a kind of cartoon-y magical combat where it seems more like the enemies are being magicked away rather than killed.  That was a game called Pandemonium that I worked on in the earlier part of my career.  However, not across the remaining arc of my career in the mainstream video games industry did I work on a game with a similar non-violent character until I joined the University of [anon].  
My first research game, which I ultimately did not ship but which I worked on for a couple of years, was a game called Between Hotel, which was a game about the relationship between domestic space and our interiority, our emotional lives and our inner intellectual lives.  This was a game that we might call an experiential game.  It was a game about exploring a space that seemed like a sequence of hotel rooms, or perhaps a sprawling apartment complex, where the rooms were generated procedurally and where you encountered certain items from everyday life that had certain kinds of emotional resonance.
So once I was at liberty to explore whatever kind of game design that I wished once I'd joined a university and the freedom afforded to academics, I immediately went towards these modes of game design.  My last two projects, the virtual reality project The Meadow, and my current project, currently untitled but with the working title of Minmax, are both similar experiential games that are not oriented around any kind of fighting but which, instead, are oriented towards an exploration of a space of possible experience.
Cool.  Awesome.  Let's pause that for moment, shall we?
Yeah.  It's ten minutes.
Pause and…
Have a drink.
…have a drink (laughs).
Relax.
Is this good?  Is this the kind of thing that you're after?
Yeah, absolutely.  Yeah, especially that last answer, which is absolutely spot on what I wanted somebody to say at some point.  In fact, these are very good answers indeed.
Okay.  Thanks.  I've had lots of media training.
Yeah.  Oh, I'm sure you have done, but equally, there's a lot here which is—  There's very much a lot of stuff which is about you, which is in line with what we're trying to make Europe invest in in some ways really.
Great.  Terrific.
Okay, are we ready to go again?
Yeah.  I'm just checking the focus.  It looks fine.  If you are using your hands, because the frame is close, you can gesture a little higher because I've got, basically, from here up.
Can you see my hand now?
No.
Can you see it now?
Just about.
Can you see it here?
Yes.
Okay, so I can bring them up near my face.
Yeah.
Yeah, okay.
Brilliant.  I mean, I could go back a little bit more.
No, you're good.
No, don't worry.  Don't worry.
You're good, I think.
But then the frames—
And then we'd have to re-edit.
Right, okay.  So I'm going to press the thing and you can go whenever you want to go.
Cool.  Very good.  Let's do this again.  Right, okay.  So while working on games, do you recall intentionally addressing issues such as gender, minority representation, political culture, or other serious topics?
Yes, certainly.  While working on games, I was constantly addressing issues of representation around gender, ethnicity, and perhaps somewhat around issues of perhaps sexual orientation.  Certainly in the course of creating the Unchartered games we had ongoing discussions to make sure that we were doing service to the world and to culture at large by not hitting any political notes incorrectly.
The Unchartered games are, in large part, inspired by a kind of contemporary reinvention of the Pulp adventure genre leading back through the Indiana Jones films of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and back further towards Lucas and Spielberg's source material in the 1930s and the 1940s.
We were always aware that there was potentially a kind of colonialist inheritance to those kinds of adventure with people from the West travelling to parts of the developing world to have adventures there.  And we were aware that sometimes that led to politically problematic either representations of people or situations that we might consider are tainted with colonialist exploitation.  And so we worked very hard in all of our design and narrative conservations to make sure that we were not falling foul of these kinds of potential problems and, by and large, I think we did okay.  We may have made the occasional misstep, perhaps around a certain lack of diversity in the first game, but in the second and third games we worked hard to readdress those issues, and I think our games were well received because of it, I would hope.
So can you give me any examples of how those kinds of considerations manifested, perhaps the difference between maybe the first game and the second game?
Yeah, sure.  In the first game, Unchartered Drake's Fortune, there was a relatively small cast of central characters and their ethnicity, especially in the core cohort of the three main protagonists, were all Caucasian.  Whereas the enemies that you encountered in the game, who were meant to be a hired mercenary army sourced from mercenaries originating all around the world, from every country, from every continent, at least, we intended for the mercenaries to seem diverse in their ethnic makeup.  But I think that we misjudged, somewhat, the balance of apparent ethnicities among those enemies and some people perceived them as being disproportionately composed of people of colour, which was not something that we intended.
So in the latter games, we redressed that balance.  We made sure that it was more obvious that the antagonists in the game, the enemies that you encountered, had many national and ethnic origins.
Did you get a clear response to themes from the player groups?  So for example, in the second and third games, did you see a more positive response at all, or were people largely silent?
Well, I think we saw a change in that we heard less criticism from the second game onwards around this particular issue.
Have you ever been deliberately antisocial in your games' themes?
Have I ever been deliberately antisocial in my games' themes?  Wow.  Well, let's see.  I guess it would depend what you mean by antisocial.  
In the Unchartered series, Nathan Drake is intended to be a good-hearted person who has kind of a rogue-ish streak.  So somebody who might bend or break the rules to get what he wants, but is inherently a person with a strong ethical principle and a large amount of integrity.  And also, rather than being driven by greed, he's really driven by a kind of intellectual curiosity.  So I would say that the Unchartered games are actually not antisocial, at least within the parameters of what I've just described.  I guess it depends on how you feel about bending or breaking the rules.  
The previous major games series that I worked on, Soul Reaver, I suppose we might see that somewhat through a lens of antisociability.  The Soul Reaver games are gothic horror games based on a kind of Gnostic myth.  Their chief influences were John Milton's epic poem, Paradise Lost, about the fall of Satan from heaven to become lord and ruler of the underworld.  They were also rooted in Gnostic stories about a false god who is the creator of the world but who is not the true God, who is flawed.  
Raziel, the hero of these games, at one time was an intensely loyal lieutenant of the vampire who has risen to become ruler of the world.  The vampire is known as Kain.  Not coincidentally named from the biblical Kane, one of the first wrongdoers in the Bible.  Raziel's story is a story of struggle against the forces that I just described.  I think that we might identify Raziel's quest as a kind of existential one.  Another major influence for the game series was a German expressionist film of the 1920s and, in that time, philosophically, existentialism was kind of coming into formation in European continental philosophy.
So there is a kind of moral, ethical argument there to do with individual liberty and fealty to groups, and we might see that as being perhaps about issues of antisociability.  
By and large, I consider that the arts and literature have an instrumental role to play in the formation of an ethical and moral understanding on the part of culture at large.  And as someone who at least strives to be an ethical, moral person with a strong sense of integrity, I've always wanted my artistic work to reflect those values.  So I guess that's a long way of saying, no, not really (laughs).
(Laughs)  On a personal note, what's influenced your personal view of games in relation to society?
Ah.  My first encounter with what we might see as a video game was when I was five years old and my parents took me to an amusement arcade in Tenby, in the south of Wales.  I was fascinated by all these boxes, upright boxes standing around with people putting five pence pieces into them and engaging with them for a few minutes.  As someone who, even at the age of five, was already captivated by television and film and radio, I understood that there was something special going on there.
My father had to hold me up to this one particular arcade game.  I believe it was called Shark Attack, and it was actually a pre-digital arcade game.  It features briefly in the movie Jaws.  It's electromechanical rather than being made of digital computing and it uses zoetrope to animate the phantom light of the flickery sharks that appear to come towards you through the water while you have to use a little metallic pistol, a dart pistol, to fend them off.  
I think in that moment, when you're five years old, I guess you're coming to an understanding of the adult world around you and the interplay between the actions of the individuals and the culture that they participate in.  Perhaps it begins with a festival like Christmas with all of its codified traditions and rituals and key pieces of media that are associated with a holiday like that.
So I hope it's not too high-minded to say that it was in this moment, at five years old, that I began to understand the relationship between a mechanised amusement, like a video game, which now I understand as a procedural art form and culture at large, the cultural commerce between me and you, between my parents and I, and also the culture commerce between our family and society at large.  And I still see video games as a very important part of it and as an increasingly important part of that.
Cool.  That's another eleven minutes.
Cool.
Okay.
So we'll stop and sit—
Phew, these are great questions.  Are you happy with my answers?
Yeah, they're lovely.  Yes, they're great, yeah.
Okay.  Good stuff.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to stop.
Ah, the need to please (laughs).
Yeah, yeah.  Let's just pause this.

Are you ready?
It's actually called Killer Shark.
Killer Shark, right.  Okay, go.
We can say that now if you want.
I will do.  Are we good?
Yeah.
Oh, that game is actually called Killer Shark, I believe.  Not Shark Attack.
(Laughs) Cool.  How much of your personal views on society do you think could be read from the games you've made?
I don't know how much of my personal views on society can be read from the games I've made, at least not in a particularly direct way.  I think my views on society are a little bit complicated, although I think, by and large, I'm mainly influenced by my Christian upbringing.  I was raised in the Church of England and I hope that, given that I've been quite selective about the games that I've worked on, I've been able to pick and choose to some degree and I've deliberately chosen games that reflect my personal values.
I hope that my values do come through, although given that I was a lead game designer rather than a game director, I haven't had total control over the content of the games.  Therefore, you might expect to see a different relationship between my views and the games than you would between my friends and the game director Amy Hennig's views in the game.  Although Amy and I see the world in very similar ways.
Do you think, with your more recent games that you've made since you joined the university, that perhaps your voice is coming through more strongly?
I do think that the games that I've made since I have joined the university, all of which I have been the game director of, you can see more of me in a more direct way in those games.  Yes, yeah.  My current game is another experiential game, which is an exploration of California light and space art, the west coast reaction to minimalism that happened from the 1960s, which continues to flourish to this day with renewed interest in artists like James Turrell.
My current project also has elements of playful musicality.  I'm very influenced by artists like Toshio Iwai, a Japanese installation artist who is also known for making video games, like Electro Plankton, and that's another major influence on me which is coming together in my current virtual reality project.
I want to play it now (laughs).  Moving on slightly, was there any academic research or market research, or any other sort of research group, that influenced you in the way you were making games, either very directly or indirectly, do you think?
Oh, there's certainly been lots of academic research and some market research that has had a big influence on me as a game designer.  As someone who joined the game industry at a time when there really wasn't a games academy and who has keenly followed the release of each new textbook or monograph on video games and other kinds of non-digital games and their design, and as someone who has eagerly read many, many academic papers studying game development, I can't really begin to summarise the impact that this work has had on my game design practice.  I could mention one or two things.  
I think that the paper Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics by Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc and Robert Zubek had a major influence on me in giving me a model for game design that freed me from what is sometimes called the tyranny of fun.  Game designers, in the first half of my career, would often bandy the word 'fun' about as a kind of Holy Grail for game design without ever really interrogating that term to find out what they thought it to mean and what else it could mean.  The MDA model opens us up to consider other kinds of emotional, intellectual and otherwise phenomenological impacts that a game could have on a person, thereby expanding the design possibility space for games.
Another paper that had a big impact on me was Hegemony of Play by the feminist game design collective Ludiker, which included the director of the USC games programme, Tracy Fullerton, my friend and dear colleague here, which critiqued game design practice in the way that some of your questions invite us to look at it, by considering who is included in the design considerations and who might be being excluded.  
Hegemony of Play, as a paper, proposed that there are large market segments going unserved by current game design moors in the industry and embedded in culture.  I think that paper has had a big impact, and certainly through the work of people like Tracy Fullerton and her mentorship of Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago of that game company, this has led to a reciprocal impact on the market with the creation of games like the 2012 Game of the Year, Journey.
Where do you find new information?  Where do the academic sources come to you?  How do you find them in the first place?
I think that I find new sources of information, academic information, largely through the internet.  I'm a social media user, and so am fortunate to enjoy connection to a large community of game designers in the industry and game academics at universities internationally.  And yeah, people talking about what they've discovered is often a cue for me to go and investigate something and see if it can be of value or of interest to me.
I guess that I use other resources, like academia.org or the archives of conferences, like DiGRA and FDG, in order to seek out subject matter, as well as just more general library searching to look for texts from outside the world of games academia which are of relevance to me in my work as a games academic.
Have you ever been involved, either directly or indirectly, in publishing research yourself?
I suppose, to this point, I have been involved indirectly in the publishing of games in academia.  I am now well over due to publish myself.  I've actually recently completed writing a paper for which I am now seeking a home at a journal and conference.
Why do you think it's—?  You said you've been making games for twenty years.
Hm-hm.
Why has it taken you so long?
I've actually been making games for twenty-five years this year, twenty-four and a half right now.  I think it has taken me so long to publish, in part, because I would always really throw myself into whatever major project I'm working on.  
I think one of the great challenges facing games academics is the division of their attention.  I think academics of all stripes are forced by their circumstances to work on many, many projects at once and – I don't know – it's a limitation of my mind that I find it hard to focus on more than a few things at once.  I think that that led me to get sidetracked in writing.  I've had a goal to write for a long time and certainly I have published sort of quasi academic things down the years.  In the late 2000s, I began writing articles for Game Developer Magazine, which would also get published on the website Gamasutra, and that constitutes the greater body of my writing, my academic style of writing about games to this point.  It's certainly something that I plan to do more of in the future.
That was a silent burb.
(Laughter) 
I managed to keep it in.
Yeah, okay.  Have you got another page?
There's just a couple more questions and then we're done.
Okay, that's fine.
Cool.  Was that five to three?  Can you check the time?
It is two fifty-nine.
Two fifty-nine.
Oh, shoot.
So can we just wrap it up really—?
Bethany will knock on the door and then I'll yell at her to give us two minutes.
Okay, that's fine.
Let's finish quickly.
Yeah, we'll just go through these quickly then.
Okay.  So you're rolling.
Yeah, okay.  So we're definitely going there.  We are all good?
Yeah.
Yeah, okay.  So as I said, this is one of the interesting things of why knowledge sharing is not a key part of the games industry.
Hmm.  Hm-hm.
So why do you go to GDC?
I go to GDC because it's like going to graduate school for game developers.  I went to my first GDC in 1995.  I'd heard about the conference first in 1993 and I was keen to go because I was keen to connect with a community of other practitioners like me and I'd started to see the first texts that were emerging, things like Chris Crawford's early book.  I'd also been to a couple of Game Development Conferences in London, in Islington at the Design Centre there, and I had this overwhelming sense that there was much for me to learn, a sense that I still have today.  I think we're only just beginning to work out what this discipline, this practice, is all about.
So I've been to every GDC but one since 1995 and it's an incredibly rich, rewarding experience for me.  It expands my horizons, gives me practical knowledge, gives me philosophical ideas.  I think it's hugely helpful.
Do you think that skills and knowledge development is one of the main reasons people go, or is it networking?
I think that skills and knowledge development is a major part of the reason that some people go to GDC.  Certainly it is for me.  But I would say an even more important aspect of GDC is community.  
Beyond networking, which might suggest something superficial, I think it's the deep human relationships that develop between game designers as they meet each other, in their authenticity, in the earnestness of their practice, in the interests and the values of their practice which connects them to one another, first professionally in the sharing of practical skills, but ultimately deeply connects them subjectively as human beings.  At the end of the day, it is a community of practice, a community of players that allows us to grow and strengthen all of the positive aspects of something like game design.
So, final question.  In the light of what we talked about here with the need for knowledge sharing, the need for personal expression and awareness of diversity, for example, do you think that your first answer, which was about, free of market restraints, what you would make, do you think that would be a common answer for other developers?
Do I think that my first answer about being free of constraints would be a common answer for all developers?  I think that most creative people who work in a commercial space would give a complicated answer if you asked them what would it be like to be free of commercial constraints.  I have a sense that the very best practitioners in the world in any form, whether it's writing a video game or a novel, are already working independently of commercial constraints.  I think when a great pop author – say, Stephen King – sits down to write, they're thinking artistically first and only of the market in a tertiary kind of way.
So it's difficult because, of course, there's another answer that says that great progress happens in an art form when people shrug off history and shrug off commercial constraints.  We might think of the renaissance in black filmmaking in the United States from the eighties and nineties, and I'm a big believer in the sense that quality will out.  But at the same time, I do know that very often great works get made and then languish.  They don't connect with their audiences because they're not afforded the resources provided by the sales and marketing and PR operations of major commercial entities.  So it's difficult.
I think that, as time goes by, the best publishers, the best developers, are giving their best designers and developers increasingly more freedom to pursue their own interests, to activate their own voices, and I hope that is a trend that continues because I believe it benefits us all.  I think audiences of players connect to authenticity.  They connect to uniqueness and individuality, to true stories that they can recognise from somebody else's life, even if it's coming through a fantastical or a playful milieu.  So I think it will help everyone as the form is increasingly liberated from our old ideas about who is playing games and who is making games.
[anon], thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.
It's a pleasure.  Thank you so much for wanting to speak with me.
No, it's been great.  Thank you.
Cool.
Awesome.
Good stuff.
Lovely.