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Bold:		Interviewer
Regular:		Respondent
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Do you consent to having this interview recorded?
Yes, I do.
Thank you.  Can you tell me what is your area of professional practice?  What have you done to do with games development?
As a games developer I have worked over a number of years in an array of fields.  Everything from art games to advert games, to games for change and working for the state department.  I’ve also done a lot of advocacy and activism work to bring women into the field of game development. I’ve made a lot of games for human installations and I’ve taught games now for six years.
At the moment your job title is – you’re a lecturer is that right?
Lecturer in computing at [anon] University of London.
And do you have any other positions as well?
Yes.  I’m the founder of Code Liberation Foundation as well as the CTO of Do It Kits which is a tech based start-up for learning in schools.
What was your background?  How did you get into games development?
Through music.  Through music and art and film.  I started off making intimate films and then I decided I wanted to have more of the viewer’s time and that a short film wasn’t a substantial enough experience for me to convey what it was I wanted to convey to my players.  At that point in 2004 I applied to Harvestworks, which is a non profit in New York, and got a five thousand dollar grant and a residency for a year – I think it was actually a ten thousand dollar grant.  They supported the development of my first project, which I didn’t programme any of it, but it let me put my head into the design space for games for the very first time.  It was my very first indie game.  It didn’t get completely finished, I hired a very bad programmer and in hindsight I think I could have coded what he did in an afternoon (laughs).  But it did kind of strike that.  And it was so early, there was no indie scene yet, and the iOS stuff hadn’t happened, so I started doing it in Flash because the most common thing was people playing Flash games online.
How many years ago was it you started?
Thirteen.
Obviously you’ve worked with a lot of different people who work in the games industry, is there any way that you could generalise their kind of character or what their interests are?
It depends on what field I’m working in.  It’s a very different set of interest to be working with people who are in education versus people who are interested in advertising, versus people who are interested in social games for change.  Each one of those groups of people has a totally different set of agendas, including games for artists.  Do you want me to run through them really quickly?
Sure, why not.
Games for change people are usually more concerned about accomplishing a specific learning objective that meets the priorities of the organisation and the funders.  That’s their priority.  Often they’ll have a predefined curriculum, predefined outcomes for what they want to be able to evaluate the project for.  Be that making an idea clearer or conveying information.  Arts people tend to just want to have fun.  They’re very interested in the discourse of games, where games are in culture and how they can deepen engagement with players. 
Advertising games people are really interested about the money frankly.  And they are other than the art gamers the closest to the people who are actually having fun.  Because they have a bit of feeling in that regard because they feel slightly outside the game space, and most of them are bored interactive designers.  So it’s a good job if you get put on a game project.  The education people have completely different agendas.  Their agendas tend to be much more research led.  So they will have a body of research they’re attempting to develop and games are the methodology through which they’re executing that research.
Out of these people, one of the things that comes across there is a lot of it is looking at the interests of funding groups or personal interests.  Would you characterise any of these people as looking specifically at their audiences?
Only the art gamers.  Yeah, I don’t think that – I think typically games for change people are really bad at looking at audiences.
Is this based on previous experience of working with those groups?
Yeah, it is.
Do you think at the moment there are any particular genres or types of games which are more influential in games for change or in the entertainment market at all?
I actually think the most impactful games in games for change are games that are coming out of independent studios for personal endeavours.  I think these stories are being far more successful at doing the kind of advocacy work that people who would say make a game for change are doing.  I think their games are often not meeting the fan engagement that actually leads to large scale penetration in the market for a title.
Have you got any examples you can think of of those?
I think Anna Antrophy’s Dys4ia is a really good example.  I think you could have a LGBT society want to make a game about transition and it would never come out that real and it would never come out that successful.  That game has been really, really important to a lot of trans women who’ve been transitioning because I think they really feel a deep connection with it.  I don’t necessarily think that connection could have been made from a cisgendered person making a game about gender transition, if that makes any sense.
Yeah, definitely.  Looking back at the last ten years do you think the change in the acceptance of games is altering the way people use their leisure time?
I think the normalisation of games actually is what has altered how people use their leisure time.  Often we have these dead spaces and now we have these digital devices in our hand and we’re bored.  So I think that they’ve normalised a lot.  I think acceptance, if you ask people if they play games they still say no even if they play Candy Crush on the train every day.  And I think that that has a lot to do with how they see what a game is versus what developers see what a game is.  They don’t count casual games or games on their phone making them part of the gamer community.
So perhaps when they might have been reading a book before now they’ll be playing a casual game, but they might consider themselves as readers but don’t consider themselves as gamers?
Exactly.
This is a very generally worded question, feel free to interpret it how you like, as quite a few of these questions are.  What do you think of serious and applied games?
I think that it’s an interesting beginning.  I think they work best in museum contexts, in short spans of engagement.  I think they really do fail to connect game mechanics through to actual experience.  I think about the last game I worked on which was to help people experience what it’s like to be a political refugee.  The game that we presented to the client was extremely difficult, and it was almost no matter what you do some plate’s going to fall.  It felt like spinning plates and there was no way to keep them all going, something was going to drop.  You had to prioritise which one of those was going to fall.  That’s actually I think much closer to the actual experience of moving to a new country for the first time.  It’s really overwhelming, it’s daunting, there’s a tonne of things that you need to know that you don’t understand.  
Instead of going down a route that matched the mechanic to the experience we went down this very educational route and we signposted.  We had people pick which one of these decisions should you make as a bullet point list of questions.  Which I think is potentially the least engaging way to get what people are thinking as a problem.  I don’t think it really leads to that deep, deep level of – it doesn’t make them walk away and say wow.  We did achieve some of that with the game.  Ironically when we built the system, we balanced the system, we got a good game, we got a functional game and we tuned it.  Then we overlaid the educational content into it.  It was really interesting to see how it had actually lined up with my experience of emigrating to a foreign country.  I was like, wow, this is really accurate.  But it didn’t cause me to change my behaviour, if that makes any sense.
Yeah.  You mentioned earlier that Dys4ia is perhaps more impactful than a lot of other things.  Would you say that that would have been traditionally classified as a serious or applied game?  Or was it by the developer framed as a personal, artistic piece?
I think she always framed that piece as a personal, artistic statement.  She actually gets really, really angry and I have sauntered into this with her before on Twitter, she really does not like to talk about work in that way.  So much so she wrote a Motherboard piece on why her game did not teach empathy.  Which is worth reading.  And I think that that is actually the root of the problem.  If people are like I need to teach empathy for this segment of the population.  Then they make kind of like an emotionally voyeuristic tourist game and they cannibalise an experience in an attempt to explain that experience. 
Versus if you look at something like That Dragon, Cancer, that’s an amazing game for cancer awareness.  Like phenomenal.  I bet that could raise more money for cancer awareness than any serious games you made in that topic.  And it’s because you just can't help but to lose a piece of yourself in that world and you come out of it a little bit altered.  It doesn’t allow you to be a voyeur in that game, I think that’s a big difference.  Yeah, I think there have been some successful serious games but I think they’re harder, they reach fewer people and they have very targeted demographics, if that makes any sense.
Definitely.  Do you have any experience of the term gamification?
I worked in advertising.  
And what do you think of the effectiveness of gamification?
It is awful, gamification is one of those words that needs to be lit on fire with gasoline.  I think gamification is really a capitalist structure for – it teeters on dark design, right?  So it teeters on the same stuff that gets people pulling slot machines in Vegas.  And we have a lot of documentation about how to design in those contexts and how you create those kind of dopamine with word cycles, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a great thing.  I think we also named something that people have been doing for a very long time, like rewards and coupons and all kinds of commercial strategies.  And that’s really concerning to me.  I think that the largest gamification ever I saw was Scavenger, which was that platform that was invented to allow people to make gamified story environment stuff around businesses for fans.  I don't know, I don’t really go in for gamification.  I’ve seen a lot of people try to do it.  I’ve tried to do it with communities like diabetics to encourage them to track their medical information.  I don’t know if it necessarily – (sighs) I have feelings on whether that even deserves to have the term game in the title.  It doesn’t create any sort of – there’s very little complex system involved, it’s usually very direct.
And just for the sake of the people who might read this transcript as a research thing later, can you briefly describe what you mean by dark design please?
Dark design patterns are patterns that designers know cause specific behaviours but are relatively seen as socially – I guess you could say occupying potentially negative spaces.  Like gambling or shoplifting or hacking.  Dark design patterns, a really good thing is when you download a piece of software that you think is free and it asks you to install a bunch of stuff but it does it in a way that you don’t realise you’ve done it until after you’ve clicked install.  Your browser goes havoc and you now find out your computer now has ransomware on it.  That’s an example of dark design.
Some of those psychological mechanisms in there, would you say that those are used in similar ways both in kind of applied games and serious games as well as in the entertainment or arts side of it?  Or do you think that these things are more prevalent in one area than another?
I think you could in theory make a case for a dark design pattern in a drawing today.  If a reward in it was substantial enough to give you that dopamine kick that gamblers get.  But if there’s no linking of that kind of rush, then this is a slippery slope because very quickly in things like poker there is.  But in terms of games that don’t have you gamble and what you’re doing is buying candy or bobbles in the app with virtual currency that you didn’t pay any actual money for, I think that the play cycle is really similar and probably leveraging a lot of the same neurobiology that we have for other kinds of things that get triggered in things like Las Vegas casinos.  But the outcome isn't linked to a malicious act or an act that could potentially cause harm.
So there are similar things, similar patterns of design, but they’re not commonly, deliberately linked to negative behaviours?
Yeah.  That would be the way I would characterise that.
I’ve got a statement here which is quite related to this, which is games are powerful tools to change behaviours and attitudes for the better.  Do you agree with that statement?
I think that’s a complicated statement.  I think it’s too large to have a simple answer.  I think it’s potentially there in the same way that books and film can change behaviour.  I don't know, I think it depends on the game.  I’m trying to think of a game that changed my life.  Maybe Pacman but for different reasons (laughs).  Yeah, I think games do something really different.  I don’t think we even really understand what they’re doing yet like on the generalised sense.  They’re cultural tools.  
Like I say, a lot of the questions here are big and quite general just as a starting talking point.  As professional games developers what do you think the main pressures are on people working in this field?  Any genre of games development, what do you think the main work place pressures are on them?
It depends on what city they’re working in.  I think in cities like New York or London where the competition for the job that person has is really high, there’s a lot of burnout because people feel like they’re going to be replaced.  And the single largest damning thing I have seen the games industry do is not respect our employees over a duration.  They hire them and lay them off, hire them then lay them off.  And I have quite a few friends in game development that I would actually go so far to say as I feel like they’re traumatised.  And their sense of self is wounded on a fundamental level because it’s tied to their ability to hold an income and survive.
So the instability of the workplace is a major issue there and lack of confidence in your future employment?
I think that is the single largest and most demanding pressure on everyone who works in the entertainment industry.
I know the start of the answer for this one, 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 in your work?
Yes.  
How did these considerations manifest in your work and what you do?
I mean, the political situation is obviously the refugee game I worked on.  They manifested in my work as a system, and I was paid to work on that project.  It was good for me, it worked in my life and it paid me and I ate.  I enjoyed thinking about it, definitely made me reflect on my own experiences emigrating to Holland from UK, even though it was a completely different set of circumstances than most people were facing.  It was still – I was still going through a lot of the things, like having to deal with bureaucracy I didn’t understand, having to deal with cultural norms I couldn’t comprehend and having to deal with language difficulties.  Even though I moved to a country where most people speak English.
And this was reflected in the game – it was literally about keeping the plates spinning, was that the mechanic in the game?
That’s what we wanted to do but it ended up not being that.  It ended up being much more tile based and much more – there also end up being – yeah, I think the biggest thing that I thought was like there was just a sense of connection with the material on some level.  In the sense of if I could go back to do it again I may have done things slightly differently, I might have prioritised my approach differently.
You obviously have worked with getting women into coding, that’s been a big drive, and female identifying people into the coding.
Yeah, into the coding?
Yes, that’s a bad phrase.  So when did you start working in that field?
I actually found a thing, it was the very first time I wrote it down, and that was back in 2012.  So I guess you could say that the very first actions I did was in 2012 and then I formally founded Code Lib in 2015.  Code Liberation is a non profit that helps women programme games and create creative applications for games and creative practice.
What drove you to make the choice to start up the Foundation?
In large it was the lack of community for women in the games industry.  If they were included in games communities they had to be the girlfriend of somebody and they weren’t necessarily seen as developers in their own right.  I met a bunch of very talented developers and if I asked – I was looking for one of their names, I actually didn’t know her name, and I said, “Do you know the name of that girl?”  And I described her and they were like, “Oh, so and so’s girlfriend.”  And I was like, oh my God, you did not…
I think that that is really common in that scene, and that was what I was seeing at the time in my community, that women were only welcome if they were dating someone or if they were in business or if they were making money in some way, or maybe-maybe even not so welcome but accepted if they did art.  And there were no women in the primary position of economic control, which is programming.  In the games industry people who can programme and design games are safe, full stop.  They have the ability to publish their own titles, to find ongoing employment, and to not necessarily be so vulnerable to the pitfalls of the industry.  That was a really important observation for me.  As someone who can do both of these things I thought to myself, why don’t I bring a few people around me to work with me on this project because it would be better to not be alone functionally.
And how has the response been to that from the people on the course and who’ve been participating but also outside of that community, people looking in on it?
From inside the community it’s been really positive.  The community manages to still be incredibly healthy and strong four years into our inception I guess almost, which is rare.  We’ve had multiple rounds of members come into the organisation and transition out of the organisation as they’ve moved into the industry or moved away from the places where we had hubs.  It’s been really positive.  I would say overall it’s been one of the most deeply transforming experiences of my life.  And one of the most profoundly unexpected ones.  I didn’t think it would ever get to this (laughs).  I never thought all this would happen, but life is how it is.  
Outside the organisation I think people have a lot of different thoughts about us.  I know that we have been seen as good, bad, otherwise by multiple groups of people.  It was interesting to watch gamergate try and hate us but not be able to figure out why. (Laughs)  Because the simultaneous thread of gamergate is all gamergaters are social justice warriors.  And they were like, but this organisation they actually do programming, so they didn’t know how to handle it.  
It was funny to watch them struggle to hate us.  I had numerous people watching the forums for back chatter there and I definitely suddenly got very lucky that [Romy Ishmail 0:26:53] let me know about the [0:26:55] situation that was going on that I didn’t know was going on.  He let me know there was a really big chance that was going to happen.  He also was just keeping me abreast.  Also my allies in the space, I couldn’t open those doors, they were just too toxic, but a lot of allies kept an eye out for us and often said that people – we confused them, they were super confused.  So that’s interesting.
Within our own community we’ve seen multiple ways, which is whatever it is.  I think anytime you do something for four years so visibility there’ll be some back slaps, that’s just an inevitable thing.  I think one of the most interesting back slaps that we’ve felt and caught me really off guard and it’s taken me a long time to really understand it, because it’s not true in any regard, we have numerous trans women in our ranks and in our organisation and in leadership positions, was this idea that we were transphobic, which was laughable at best of times.
But in large part it’s the whole like in the Bay area right now in the queer scene there’s this real hostility to development in programming and it’s got to do with the physio-economic displacement of folks in the Bay area.  So an organisation that is teaching folks how to programme and making no money and doing a lot of volunteer work might be like that on the back side but because our public presence is so large I think that a lot of people often think we’re bigger than we are.  We’re not just like five people working for free on the weekends in a basement, which is more likely the case. Sometimes not a basement, sometimes a proverbial basement, sometimes an attic, we don’t really have any of that. 
But I think there was some blowback there that caught me really off guard and I was really confused by there’s a real division against technology in that space right now.  It was interesting because a friend of mine on Twitter was at an event and she’s trans and she got really – she’s a technologist and developer engineer, and she’s like this has got to stop, this is really bad, making me want to flip the table basically.  And you can understand it but it’s a really scary thread because it’s the opposite of the gamergate thread and it’s extremity makes me worried about the state of technology in twenty years.  Because if it’s allowed to exclude trans women and people of colour where are we going to be?  
And if they self select to exclude because the technology itself is hostile that’s an even deeper problem and we need to stop and look at that and really ask meaningful questions there.  Somebody needs to do some real research there because that’s terrifying.  So that would be my experience on both sides.  On that note I really think a lot of systems don’t really support the kind of way and need for privacy and identity control and security that a lot of trans women need to just function day to day.  I think these systems are designed by white men and they fail to really understand that the only way we’re going to fix it sadly, heartbreakingly so, is if people fix it who are within the system.  Or, you know, bring it down, I’m fine with that too. (Laughs)
Is a lot of your work the goal is to get more women and people of colour in and basically non mainstream identities involved with software development, games development, engineering?  That’s kind of an average theme?  Or is that an aside of your work or is that your core work I suppose could be the question?
That’s a complicated question, I ask myself that often.  Because as a researcher I have a very serious body of research that I’ve been attempting to cultivate.  And the activism work that I’ve felt really compelled to do because the community is in such a toxic state has definitely come at a cost of some of my own research, which has been frustrating.  I really wish I didn’t have to do this stuff, it would be really nice if I didn’t have to, that would be great.
What would help you to be able to do that research?
Well, first of all, having more people, particularly in positions of power, that would support it and fund it, versus a whole army of white guys who don’t fund exploratory research.  Not to be hostile about that but we’re up to six percent of women in executive roles now, which is part of why I left advertising.  We are at three percent of people doing VC funding and your odds of getting funded as a VC or as a start-up if you’re a woman are really, really, really slim.  And women in academia often, even on grant proposals, if they have a female name, get ranked down.  There’s a lot of stuff like that that’s really, really toxic.  A lack of bias here in the society in my field would help a lot.
Not watching the younger women around me getting bullied and abused, that would be really rad, by my colleagues even sometimes.  This is all anonymised, right?
Yeah.
We had a – and I’m working towards fixing this, I really am, and I think we’re on our way to do it and it was an accident but it was super heart crushing.  We had a faculty member call one of our trans students “it” this year, in front of her peers, in class.  And that led to her being bullied all term and I had to do a lot of triage and emotional labour there to keep her from falling apart.  Then she was unable to complete her course on time because the person in her group was one of the worst bullies.  I approached the faculty member that I – who respects me, knows and respects me, and let him know what was going on and she applied for the extension and he didn’t give it to her.  Even though she was just getting completely beat down by this guy.  
Now I’ve had to go to the point where she’s filing a formal college grievance against this guy to get him thrown out.  It just really sucks that the burden of that was on her and not the professor.  Systems like that, it’s really hard to watch stuff like that going on if you’re in a position in an academic institution.  Because essentially what that says is if you are in a lower power position I would do this to you.  So it’s a really – all that stuff not being there would be really great (laughs).
Yeah, one of the things we’ll be discussing in Brussels is looking at scenarios to improve things in future, so trying to find active ways that European policy can support improvements and changes within this.
Tie the funding to the amount of diversity in the academic staff full stop.
I was about to ask, positive discrimination, how do you feel about these kind of terms?
It’s working for us in the US.  And I think it’s important, I think that the Equalities Act is a giant disaster in that it’s used more often than not to protect people who are already in power.  And that is a really big problem.  We had something, like I think an MP sued someone – I can't remember the exact details, he sued a woman over it and that’s just ridiculous.  Equality should not come at the cost of beating disempowered people further down.  So I really am, being American, having had positive discrimination my entire life, I appreciate it.  I appreciate being in courses – and I think if you look at it more like my entire life I’ve been exposed to more people of colour and more diverse types of people in academia because in the US if you have an all white staff you’re fucked, it’s not happening, you can't do it, it’s just not cool.  
Like various situations that I’ve lived through where I’ve watched people in more – and men are not majority or minority in the population at whole, but in STEM it’s really bad.  In STEM you can have a department that’s all men.  And I was working in a place where it was all men and they hired another man and HR was like, you are no longer allowed to hire any more men until you’ve hired some women.  And those three women they hired helped shift the balance of that employment environment significantly.  I think that said, unless you take these times of – you can't just say, “We’re going to look at everyone who applies,” because it’s the way you write your job applications, it’s the way you share the job applications with the people you know, it’s all of the system and it’s built us into that point that actually does the discriminating for you.
Yes.  It obviously is a very controversial thing, positive discrimination, but I think it is such an important thing to build the foundation so that in the future it will naturally be more balanced anyway.  But you don’t get to that state without a bit of pushing.
We did in the US when we had a black President (laughs).  It’s worked out really well for us and it’s really – you know, there’s still your terrible frat boy who makes a joke that the black kid is only there because he has to be.  But I mean in the end it pays off and change happens.  I don’t think US is going to need positive discrimination in twenty-five more years.
Which leads on to the final topic of the interview which we got to eventually, which is if we were to look back in say ten or twenty years time, what do you think might have changed in the game development world?  That could be serious, applied, arts, entertainment, anywhere or all of it, what do you think is going to change?  The big trends that we might see perhaps in the next ten or twenty years?
Procedural learning and machine learning are just going to get baked into games.  Games are going to do things like watch people play and change ramping cycles based on difficulty and success levels.  That’s going to happen, that’s going to be a short-term – we’re going to see procedural content generation become the norm.  We’re going to watch content leap through into our lives.  I really do think while Google Glass is the about the douchiest thing you’ve ever seen, (laughs) it’s going to – something like that, some mixed reality type technology will reach mass market.  And games will continue to be played in these new technologies.  I think we’re going to see a splintering of the internet in a really fundamental way.  Particularly as different countries restrict information in different ways.  I think the dark web is going to get darker.  Because you can't restrict human nature.  
I think we’re going to have more machines we play with.  So I think that you might see – I think that [0:40:13] has one but it’s only in the game.  You know the little smart AI that follows the guy around, is that there or am I making this up?  But I think we might have like our physical interfaces in our lives might play with us.  Like you might have – when people work it out, things like FO will become much more playful.  They’ll become really whimsical and they might embrace a lot of the play and study around play research that’s going on now.  Particularly I think that kind of stuff. 
I can see your kitchen appliances developing an attitude.  I think a lot of people would appreciate technology if it felt more like this.  And I think games are ripe for that.  I had a friend made a crazy person suggestion that I actually liked, what if your toaster had feelings and if you yelled at it one day the next day it burnt your toast.  (Laughs)
There’s a TV series in the UK called Red Dwarf that has an artificial intelligence toaster and it was called Talking Toaster, and it would go, “How about some toast?”  It had an American accent.  Then after a while they’d go, “No toast, I don’t want any toast.”  It’s like, “Okay, no toast.  How about a muffin?”  
I think we’re going to see the holodeck happen on some level.  I think there’ll be games on whatever mixed reality platform that has.  I think there’ll continue to be widely social.  I think we’re not going to ever see the end of massive multiplayer because that was there at the very beginning, it’s what’s driven games all along, people want to play together, they want to be connected, they want to have real life experiences.  I think that’s going to continue.  
What do you think—
Wearable, we’re going to see the body get into the games.
What do you think of VR?
As a technology on its own it’s a stepping stone to something else.  No one wants to have to pee and take a headset off and on eight times in the night.  People want to be able to drink their beer while playing video games. Seriously, everybody wants to sit on their sofa, get home from work, drink a beer and play a game to unwind.  Every time you have to strap one of these things on your head it takes you out of that ability to really relax.  I think until we see a merged technology in something like glasses or something that has different levels of immediate reaction to human movement.  So maybe if you stand up the visor goes from pixelled to white and you can see through it.  Something like that, it’s that need to take a giant thing on and off your head I don’t think we’re going to get mass market penetration.  
I think it will be a niche thing.  My mom plays a tonne of games, so they’re all casual games, they very much drive the games market.  My mother is not putting on a VR headset, ever (laughs).  And I don’t think GENXers are going to be much more willing to put on a VR headset.  Maybe millennials but I doubt it.  I think they have to fix that problem first.
I think that’s a very fair description, yes.  At that point I think we’ll probably wrap up the interview.  That’s all the questions covered in quite extensive detail, so I want to say thank you very much for doing that part of it.