KEY
Bold:	Interviewer
Italic:	Camera/Sound Operator
Regular:	Respondent
[ ]:	Uncertain word(s)
So we are obviously recording this. We’ve got the video running over here.  So basically I just want to emphasise that just be open and honest about whatever you think, think it.  We’re really interested in kind of the most genuine answer, even if it is considered controversial or anything like that.  We will obviously do our best to edit things in a polite way for the general public.  
For the sake of the video, could you please say your name and summarise in a sentence or two what you do with the games industry?
Okay.  My name is [anon] [anon].  I am a lecturer at [ANON].  I teach game design, focusing mostly on the fundamentals.  And I used to be a game designer working primarily with advertising companies and media – well, mixed media companies.
Cool.  Awesome; thank you.  So let’s kind of start off with one of these things; what would the games you made have been like if they didn’t have market restraints and market considerations to take into account?  And how do you think they might change from the way that you’ve developed them so far?
My gut response is to say that without market influence, without market research, I think that creative games, they would have never been finished, effectively.  You know, without an end goal to a project, without project requirements, it becomes increasingly more difficult to make decisions in a creative environment.  I consider one of the fundamentals of design to be working towards a purpose and that purpose in many cases is a creative goal, but I don’t think I’ve ever really worked in an environment where I have had a 100% personal – this is everything I want to do – kind of goal.  There’s always been a requirement that it ends up in someone’s hands.  You know, I never had a market influence that came from a monetary perspective as such and maybe lucky in that regard.  But there has always been a case that I need players.
I generally disagree with the idea – I generally dislike the approach of game design when you don’t think about who’s going to play it at the end because for me, (sighs) it’s a little harsh but the term I often use is it’s like a creative masturbation.  If you’re only making a game because it’s what you want to make then, you know, that’s fine but do it in your bedroom where no one else can see it.  Nobody really wants to watch that (laughs).  Does that make sense? (laughs) 
Yeah.  Do you think the players have social views or behaviour change by playing games in general or by playing the games that you’ve made in particular? 
(sighs) Ah, that’s a good question, yeah.  Are people influenced by the games that they play?  Absolutely.  I think – I mean nobody exists in a vacuum.  We are always influenced by everything that is around us.  There is only a degree to which you can ever innovate away from what other people are doing and people will still find it acceptable.  So, absolutely; people are influenced by things.
In terms of games that I’ve made, yeah.  Absolutely; you do see that influence.  You do see people referencing things that they played that you made.  It’s a very rewarding feeling.  I do know that I was quite proud to have been part of a game we made for Stand up for Cancer – or Stand up to Cancer – even though it maybe didn’t change anyone’s viewpoint on cancer, it gave them a willingness to participate in an otherwise mundane task which was the end goal of the project, and we met that.  And it’s a very rewarding feeling so, yes; definitely.  
So with the changes that you’ve – your games have made on people, you kind of characterise those as kind of positive, pro-social kind of things, or—
Yeah.  I think the question of whether games affect people’s social behaviours, I think that it’s not something I would come into contact with personally because my games have never really had a great community to them.  I’m trying to think because I have had a couple of experiences of this.  Certainly, my experience of this is quite limited.  We did create one of the first games on children’s BBCs web site that actually used social game mechanics and generally speaking what I saw was positive.  I didn’t see any kind of negative community arise from that.  I saw people sharing game times and sharing challenges and pushing each other which was quite nice.
The question – apologies if I’m jumping ahead to like your next question, but the question of whether as a game designer we are responsible for those communities that arise from our games, is interesting. 
That wasn’t my next question. (laughs) I suppose my next question really would be whether you think that kind of positive social thing is typical of games, or whether that’s typical of the games that you’ve made and the things that have driven you? 
Okay.  Well, I mean games are arguably – I mean some – actually, some game design enthusiasts and game design academics have made the argument that games are inherently social by their nature; that even single player experiences are directly affected, require us to have a culture around us where we feel that we are doing better than others.  So in some ways I think that gaming always pushes us to be more aware of people around us.  They certainly remind us of things around us.  
Yeah.  I think they have a massive capacity to help us with these kind of things.  Whether they always do or not is – I’m not sure. 
So I mean you have created quite a few games that have kind of non-violent settings – not sort of always fantasy or warfare type things, you’ve created quite a few are-?
No.  Yeah.  I’ve created games for that fantastic 0 to 6 age group which is a lot of fun to design for.  
And what made you choose that now, or was that a company choice?  Was that—
Yeah. (laughs) That’s absolutely a company choice, yeah.  
And was that a business choice for them, or—
Yeah.  It was really just there was a need at the time for games for that particular age group.  And it was specifically a request for work that was sent out relating to CBeebies toddler age TV show.  Yeah.  
Awesome, okay.  So that links up quite nicely really.  While working on games have you – when you were in the studio, can you remember deliberately (pause) do you remember deliberately addressing topics of gender, minority representation, politics – political culture, rather kind of serious topics?  I mean obviously cancer, you mentioned earlier. 
Yeah.  
Were gender or minority representation ever the sort of thing that was—
Gender is something that’s been discussed in the past.  Generally speaking I don’t think I’ve ever worked in an environment that wasn’t progressive enough to at least aim for gender inclusivity.  Unfortunately, the majority of my work was related to existing IPs where we’re bound by the characters that we’re given basically.  It’s something that definitely is in the forefront of our minds when we’re looking at character design, when we’re looking at decisions, yeah.  I mean it’s definitely something that’s been discussed in the past. 
So when you say that the IPs obviously were a limitation and you have to respect these things, so do you feel the internal discussions had any change over how the IP was represented in the game, or do you stick entirely with that IP restriction? 
I mean generally when you’re working with an IT – especially when it’s a mixed media IT – you’re very forced in the way that your game represents these things, you know.  The dialogue that you have with your players has to be the same kind of dialogue that the short or book or whatever has with its participants so, yeah.  We’re very, very fixed in that unfortunately.
I think I know the answer to the next question but I’m going to ask it anyway.  Have you ever deliberately been anti-social in your games theme and—
It depends what you mean by that because I think it could be argued that, you know, deliberately avoiding social game mechanics or deliberately avoiding the option to share things can be considered certainly disruptive to social networks.  I can say that we have definitely had the discussion with regards to sort of social network visibility of how comfortable sharing our content was; how much we wanted to push it our content into social networks, being aware that this is a disruptive activity.  You know, to put it plainly we know nobody likes game updates in their Facebook feeds but we kind of had to put them in there anyway.
So there was a discussion there of – it comes down to we’re just – and we know this is annoying but we’re going to promote it anyway because we need our game to be out there.  So yeah definitely, and I think there is a point at which with regards to marketing we have at times pushed game mechanics which are not conducive to a wonderful social network environment at the very least.  I don’t think we’ve ever knowingly pushed aggressive or anti-social behaviour between individuals.  I would be hard pushed to ever imagine such a scenario, to be quite honest. (laughs) 
Pause for a second.  One problem that I already perceived; we knew where we go.
Your memory card will need a lot more space. 
Yeah.  Because this is a 16K card and then it allows me to record for a few minutes of max quality video.
Interesting. 
Yes, which also means that we have this storage problem for me, carrying around like 16 hard discs. 
When we get a - I can take a portable drive with me; I think I’ve got a one terabyte one sitting around somewhere. 
Yeah.  
Are we going to be able to record any more in this interview?
Let me check there’s actually a spare one because I didn’t realise it was going that quickly.  (clattering) And this is why do this, so. 
Yeah.  This is why we always do this before, yeah.  (laughs) Because if we’ve got three hours’ worth of videoing to do per day, minimum—
Yeah.  And I need 60 different SD cards there’s also the chances of using the wrong card for example, a problem.  Nope we don’t have another SD card in here. 
Okay.  In which case we’re going to have to wrap up this this interview at the moment.
Or I quickly unload the card.
If you can do that, yeah.  
No clue how quickly that I can do that but we’ll see. 
Can we go. (laughs) (pause) (sighs)
Have you seen what we’re up to in the first year of this blog?
No. 
Looking quite interesting.  We’ve got six RFPs from local games companies. 
Cool. 
That students are now working on, basically delivering a concept pitch for those.  So first year, some interesting stuff happening.  One of them is with – the two that I’m babysitting are – it’s with Forcefield VR but then they’re working with a company in Canada called Outer Room which we can’t find any details on but looking to do installation and VR games for arcades and malls and things like that.  
That’s good to know because there is an arcade/mall going to be built in Breda. 
Oh, cool. 
You know where the bowling alley is at the moment?  They’re going to strip down that building and put the bowling alley the lower floor and then the top – the other floor is going to be arcade and stuff like that.
Yeah.  So arcades, VR place bases, those kind of things.  We already contacted this for potential development.
Yeah.  So good to know that’s going on, yeah.  (laughs) 
Yeah.  Well, basically at the end of this project we will have – we are wanting to take – sort of talk through the three projects to Forcefield but Forcefield – it’s not that likely to take any of them on as actual projects.  But those that they don’t I’m sure we can get them to sign releases on so that we can then take them somewhere else.
That’d be good, yeah.  And even if they do take them we have elements that we have that we can use, yeah.  Or Forcefield could be contacted to get them into this place. (laughs) 
Absolutely.  We’re also working with – so I’m working with a company called Sticky Studios; they made a simple puzzle game with kind of shitty graphics and – was that fun discussion I was having with the team earlier, when I was saying to them, you know, because one of the things they’ve requested in their RFP is like we want to do a sequel to this game.  We want to maybe add some new game mechanics but we want a lush, vibrant art style.  I was discussing it with them there and I was like – because, you know, I mean let’s face it, we know what it looks like.   It looks like – and it said stop and I said, well - .  
You know, and I have a little proud papa moment two years ago I’d have said it looked like I had a graduate game.  This year I’d say it looks like a first year game, yeah.  (laughs) 
Nice, yeah.  
Absolutely. 
The quality is amazing.
Yeah.  I know, I know. 
Yeah.  It turns out when you let people focus on the skills that they want to learn the most they focus and learn the most.  Jesus Christ. (laughs) 
Do you mean that it’s a good idea, programming for nothing? (laughs) 
Yeah.  Well no.  
The amazing thing is how many of my design students, the thing is I think if you – it’s about context.  Like if I was to say to the first year design students out of the blue, “You have to do a block of programming” they would go, “Ah, no.  Ah, that’s horrible.  Ah, I hate it.”
But if they—
(Overlapping speech 0:17.20) 
Yeah.  But then you give them Unreal Tournament and say, “Right; you guys need to make a level in this” and they go, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could do that?” And I go, “Well, if you learn how to programme you could do that.”  And then suddenly they want to learn how to programme, yeah.  
Yeah.  That’s how I got into Unreal as well, it was like – oh, because I had the year with Brian and I was like – never again.  But then [0:17.50] came by it’s like, no base programming.
So, yeah.  Blueprinting does change everything. 
Yeah.  It’s almost like the whole curriculum is designed to build intrinsic motivation.  Shit!  (laughs) Yeah.  It is really nice because obviously I’d started a conversation about this stuff with Bill about three years ago or something like that and it’s all kind of come to fruition and it’s just fucking working. 
Actually, one of the most frustrating things about that is finding out that we weren’t alone in doing that even though I’m pretty sure you guys thought you were. 
Right. (laughs) 
So one of the things I’m speaking to – and I’m speaking to guys in Imagineering about the performantory and their fantastic ability to make up a bunch of words.  (Laughs) Performantory and the Imagineering department of the (makes up a word). 
Yes. Well, I think they stopped calling it the Imagineering department now; that word has gone out of favour quite heavily. 
Okay. 
There’s some political thing going on in [ANON] about it. 
Would it by any chance be Disney getting upset that it’s a trademark?
I wouldn’t be surprised, yeah.  
But, yeah.  They’ve been doing project based learning with a whole bunch of students and clients and all sorts of things for years already, so as – okay, why have we not talked to you.  [0:19:06] don’t talk to anyone. 
They do – really, really [0:19.13] but they also, I mean we were doing it in Game Lab before it’s just this is kind of – oh, Will basically said, “Right, that’s it, Game Lab’s too distracting.  They’re not finishing their courses because they’re doing Game Lab too much.  I went, “Let’s do it the other way round.” (laughs) And he was like, “Oh yeah that’ll work.”  And I said “Let’s talk about that in six months and then write it up”. (laughs) So that’s basically how we got where we are, okay.  
So where were we?
We were in a very different body position for a start. (laughs) Which is not strictly necessary if we’re going to cut between different – no, it’s fine. [0:19.41] Okay.  
So we were talking about – you were saying that you kind of – you’ve never made deliberately anti-social games and stuff like that.  Yeah.  So are we going again?
Yeah.  
Cool, okay.  Do you think that discussions about minority representation, gender, anti-social behaviour and stuff like that, do you think they happen in studios frequently or do you think it’s also in a particular skill set within studios, so it happens with designers or not with production or anything like that? 
I imagine that (pause) it’s difficult for me to say for studios that I haven’t had direct contact with, obviously.  My general experience is that the more a studio – the larger a studio gets and the more fragmented the project becomes, so the more direct your work space is; the more focused you are, the less the sort of overarching cultural relevance of the work matters to you.  And I think that, that is interesting.  I don’t know what would happen if you were to have more discussions about cultural implications with an AI programmer.  That’s a bad example because AI actually has a lot of cultural relevance.
Yeah.  I don’t know if having discussions of cultural relevance and representation with people who work on backend systems issues and things like that, would actually be of any use to them.  But, yeah.  I’ve not really worked in large enough companies to comment. 
Okay.  On a personal note, what’s influenced your own views rather than the studio’s views?  What’s influenced your thoughts about games in relation to society?
Well, one thing is fundamental, understanding fundamental design.  I am a big supporter of user centric design.  I just believe that the concept of user centric design is fundamental to all nature – all elements of design.  I think that there is always people at the heart of what we do.  And starting to – and realising that and breaking that down, understanding what that means for me as a developer, for me as a professional designer, and how that affects my motivation, has changed the way I think about things.  So my motivation is maintained by the fact that I know there are people going to be entertained; there are people going to be moved.  People’s lives enriched, perhaps even people educated by what I do as a designer.
I maintain that if you are (pause) a supporter and you are a practiser of user centric design it’s basically very hard to be an asshole because you are trying to make something that is good for people.  This requires empathy and empathy – it’s difficult to maintain empathy and hatred at the same time, I would have said.  So it’s perhaps a little over the top, saying that user centric design can save the world, but hey. (laughs) That’s kind of where I am. 
Cool.  Do you think that that kind of view could be read from the games you make? 
I think so.  Maybe not directly because I haven’t really spent enough time making games for myself or making games outside of the professional setting.  But, you know, thinking back over the few sort of game jams and things I’ve participated in I don’t think you would ever see anything malicious or mean or – but at the same time thinking over how ever many years of looking at these kind of games myself and the indie market, I don’t see games that target people in any particular way.  There might be some games that fail to represent minorities, fail to represent gender in an even way; fail to represent race in an even – on an even keel.  But I rarely see any games that actually attack them in that way.
I do feel it is down to the fact that at the end of the day we are entertainers and it’s quite hard to – again, if what you were looking for are smiles or physical responses and emotive responses from people it’s kind of hard to do that with hate in your heart, I think. 
Okay.  Thank you.  Are you aware of – moving topic a little bit here.  Are you aware of research, either kind of academic or otherwise really, that – about video games that’s really directly influenced kind of their development or how they go about it?  For example, an engineering research or psychological research? 
Well, I think such things do happen and they happen more and more as years go by.  Right now the most prevalent area of that is when you look at virtual reality.  We’ve reached this sort of nice technical new ground area where people don’t actually necessarily understand what they’re doing and I’m seeing a lot more developers look to academic research for answers to some of these questions because they are questions about psychology, there are questions about human physiology and how we respond to visual cues, things like that.
I do think that games have a history of – I mean as a designer and especially as someone who teaches design, I’m very, very acutely aware of how poor design has been in the past.  But I think that has really changed over the past few years, and within my lifetime I’ve seen games go from being entirely developed by the seat of the pants developer to having a structured, rational design process behind them.  So very proud to be part of that process myself. 
So if you say this kind of academic stuff is coming through in VR, would you say that the academic studies prior to the last few years have not really been used in game studios?
Yeah.  Definitely.  For all the wonderful things that do happen between academia and games the studies that are most useful to game developers from academia seem to rarely be actually directly related to games; they seem to be more related to human psychology and general human computer interaction.  I haven’t seen that many studies of – to be honest with you, I just haven’t seen that many great studies about computer games over the past few years. 
Okay, thank you.  Have you yourself been involved in academic research of video games, like publishing papers for journals or anything like that? 
Definitely; if you’re watching this, yes.  Of course I have. (laughs) Not to any great degree. 
That’s fine.  Why do you think that knowledge sharing through academia hasn’t been part of your work so far?  Not just at [ANON] but also within your games development history. 
Yeah.  There is generally not a great history between academia and games in my opinion.  I think there are numerous reasons for that, one of them being that academia in general moves quite slowly, changes very slowly.  Games on the other hand change very quickly.  And they both have quite similar goals which is something – it’s a complex thing to explain but, you know, generally speaking as a game designer you’re seeking to create an interactive environment in which people slowly get better at something over time and funnily enough, as a teacher you’re creating an interactive environment for people slowly get back at something over time.
So you’re talking about two worlds with similar goals but different rates of change.  So it’s not really surprising they don’t get along in that sense.  There again, in terms of what we do here – I’m turning this into an advert for [ANON] again, but, you know, I think the more academia can catch up with what games do the better really. 
Do you ever go to conferences to share knowledge or to – just to game for other people; is that the kind of the games industry’s answer to academia? 
Yeah.  I know I should. (laughs) I don’t go to enough of them.  I do think that the answer at the same time – I’m acutely aware I think as a game designer – I think due to my particular circumstances where I am a game designer but also an education designer, I have become aware of the fact that the standard format for conferences where one person stands at one end of a big room and just yells a bunch of information out, is not the most conducive format to learning.  And I think that’s something that academia and conferences in general aren’t quite catching onto although they’re slowly getting there.
You know, I think they’re important.  I think developer do love sharing information.  It’s just this question of whether we need to all be sitting in a giant room being very uncomfortable and sweaty, listening to someone talk about something; or whether there’s better ways that we can be sharing information. 
So you say perhaps conference is more of a networking thing in some ways than information sharing? 
Yes.  Conferences are very useful for networking. 
So there’s a demand for something else in some ways? 
Yeah.  There’s a demand for information sharing.  There’s a demand for forums in which to do these things.  But there is that opera thing that conferences tend to be about people getting themselves noticed and things and I don’t think that from the creative standpoint of the games industry, from the development standpoint, that we really care so much about networking so much as information sharing.  As a developer, as part of a development team, I care more about what other developers have to say than who they actually are.  Whereas I can see from the business side, you know, networking sort of maybe becomes very important and it’s about who you know, etc.  
So I think there will always be a use for networking and conferences and things.  But in terms of information sharing as a developer it’s more about actually just having some kind of forum or a portal where I can gather this information. 
Okay.  I’m sort of going to go back to the first question in some ways. 
Yeah.  
It’s the last question of the interview.  So you mentioned a couple of times that while kind of some of your personal ethics might come through, things like Game Jams might be a way to express who you are a little bit more.  But in the very first question you kind of talked about individual artistic pieces as being something you do by yourself and not share. 
Yeah.  
So if market influence wasn’t a thing, if trying to sell it – or if it’s played by a very small amount of people wasn’t a concern, if money wasn’t a question of this do you still think you’d make games or think about games the same way that you do at the moment?  Would you teach games the same way? 
(sighs) It’s a big question.  For me it comes down to a question of why you do this.  To me, when it gets to the stage that there are – I don’t care how many people, who my audience are and I don’t care how many people are there, you know, it begs the question of why I’m doing this.  It’s kind of like saying if you didn’t care if you had an audience, would you still be a comedian?  You probably wouldn’t.  You’d be standing there on an empty stage; there’d be no point in doing it.
So to me there is always an audience demand at some point.  Now, whether that is considered a market or not is another question.  You know, I’ve never really found a point where I want to make a game because I have something to say.  I have found points where I want to make a game because there is a particular conversation I want to have with an audience and that I think is interesting.  I think there are perhaps some more challenging kind of games that I would make but I would always make them with the intention that certain people were going to play them. 
Do you think that that ambition is ever restricted by money?
We’re out at this question.
Oh, and we were just on the last thing then. (laughs) 
Okay.  Yes, I would have said basically. 
(laughs) 
We need bigger SD cards.
We need bigger SD cards is a big result from this study so far. 
Yes.  And one thing also for the recording is if he knows a hitch in your question, just pause and redo the question because we needed the audio for the question to be good.
Yeah.  Okay.
Because maybe in speech it’s not a problem but if the question is somewhat blurred at the end and it’s not as fluid sentence—
Well, you could probably post it. 
(Overlapping speech 0:34.29) 
On screens?
Yeah.  Probably.
Also we might just have the text to my questions on the screen rather than—
Probably as well, yes. 
Okay.  Cool.  
Yeah.  I mean, thank you very much.  We might use that as part of the final research if you’re okay with that? 
Yeah.  Absolutely that’s fine. 
Yeah.  Awesome, thank you.  Can we – have you got a couple of minutes while we do this because it would be nice to have a – no, we’ll have a thank you when we just put [0:34.50] shall we?  Yeah.  Okay.
Okay.  Cool. 
Cheers very much for coming.  It’s really appreciated. 
No, no problem at all.
Well, that was good – interesting questions for you? 
Yeah.  Definitely. 
Yeah.  Good.