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Could you say your name and spell it for the recording please?
My name is [anon] hopefully are self-explanatory.
And can you just state for the sake of the recording that you have given your consent to being recorded here?
I’ve given my total consent to be recorded for this project, totally. 
Awesome.  Good stuff. 
Can you tell me what you do within video games please?
I am a freelance narrative designer and writer.  I used to do mainly journalistic stuff, I still do journalistic stuff, but I’ve moved into the creation side and now I don’t want to leave. 
Has this always been what you did, how did you get into this side of it?  What you led towards games?
I was a kid who loved games, as you’ve heard in a lot of stories.  The difference was, I was twelve when WordPress was a thing, before the YouTube boom really hit, and if I wanted to get free video games I heard you could start a gaming blog.  So I started a gaming blog at the age of twelve and understandably my reviews were crap, but I got free copies now and then and it was like, oh hell yeah, this is awesome.  
It was five years before I wrote anything that was good.  I was seventeen and I wrote my first good thing; I was getting dissatisfied with just reviewing stuff ten out of ten.  I wrote my first op-ed and I was like, oh this is actually good and everything else before that was terrible, okay.
Was that on your own website or was that for other people as well or-?
It was all on my own website, my parents always raised me with the idea that you, the work you do for yourself is something you get to keep in moving forward, keeping IP and etc.  They didn’t put it in the terms of keeping IP but that mind-set I was raised with has turned out to be super-beneficial.  I’ve had a lot of chances to jump ship and do things, I would’ve seen quote/unquote more professional, but building my own IP has actually been pretty essential to my own success. 
And it’s been a few years now that you’ve been doing games?  You’re still fairly early in the career, is it two or three years?
So five years in Enthusiast Press and then I, around the age of eighteen I was like, I’m going to get out of gaming, because again I started at twelve, so I’ve seen a bunch of studios rise out of a bunch of people who were much smarter, more talented than me.  At like fourteen/fifteen I looked up to these folks and by the time I had become an adult they had crashed and burnt, and I didn’t want to be that guy.  
So I said, I’m getting out, I’m just going to make one game and then I’m going to leave; and I made that one game and I was hooked (laughs).  It was called All Hail the Spider God and people really dug it and I realised that not only, hey, it seems I’m actually kind of good at this whole games writing thing, or writing in general but I might be able to do this for the rest of my life, and since then I’ve been working increasingly, professionally and yeah so for my professional capacity has been in the past couple of years, last year primarily, my one year anniversary of getting paid for things regularly.  
But before that it was seven or eight years of hard work that if I ever do well, people would say, he was an overnight success.  But no, it was ten years of being absolutely terrible first.  
Yeah, as I think is often the case, especially with the writers I think, that you write a lot of stuff and everyone going, they’re debut novel was amazing.  It like, well yeah, I’ve written five before that that didn’t get published.  A friend of mine that’s happened to literally this year and I’ve known him for twenty years, it’s not his debut novel, but it is really good.  
That’s good to hear.  
So you’ve been meeting people obviously at this event, but also others.  How would characterise people who make video games, or can you characterise people who make video games?
It depends on the field of games that they’re working in.  You see - I think the greatest thing that you see in gaming, that is often ignored when any sort of perspective is published upon the text space, is that in all these other different fields, such as music or literature, you get people treated as individuals, as mavericks, they have this perspective, or that perspective, that comes from their backgrounds and outlooks; and then when you get to tech, and in particular video games, you hear about the lonely nerd, sitting in their parents’ basement making video games, or the big studio making video games, or etc.  It’s this stereotype that is so unfair, because at this event alone, even when you look outside of innovative developers, there are people who are very outgoing, very good at public speaking.  There are people who make incredible games very nuance narratives, but are very, they have very unpolished public speaking styles.  
In video games everyone is truly an individual and brings something unique to the table and the fact that we don’t see that reality reflected more often in the culture and press provided around games is a shame.  
Cool.  Who would say – can you characterise the audience who plays video games?
I would say that the audience who plays video games is similarly diverse, with a caveat being, that if you’re trying to break into a specialist space, such as my first title was interactive fiction.  I didn’t grow up with old Zork games, all that was made actually before I was born, and yet I’m breaking into this space.  I’m actually now running one of the free primary competitions for that space, this year, starting this year.  
There’s some very set definitions of what interactive fiction can be or can’t be; and there’s people within that space working to change that perception held by some people in the community that interactive fiction is typing into a [0:06:19] and nothing else.  You see similar movements happening in other genres, such as Rogue likes, only games made like Rogue that are ASCII graphics and etc. are Rogue likes.  But then again you have the same people within a space that say, no, Rogue likes can be a lot of things, gaming is a big tent and the fact that we’re seeing those voices being given more press is a testament to the maturity of our medium as we start to realise, hey, games can be a lot of things. 
Yeah, and it’s a growing maturity though isn’t it, it’s something that we can see is changing so fast, it’s growing so fast in so many ways.  I think it’s hard to predict exactly where it’s all going to end up. 
In the past year alone. 
Yeah, definitely.  
Are you aware of the terms ‘applied games’ and ‘serious games’?
So if I’m understanding your question correctly, do I understand what serious games are?
That’s obviously the next follow-up question really, or what are your thoughts on them is really what we follow-up with.  Because not everybody is very familiar with the term and it’s okay if you’re not familiar with the term.  There’s no right or wrong answers in all of this. 
From what I know, games are seen as these frivolous leisure activities and serious games are seen as the titles that will elevate the medium to quote/unquote, art.  But in practice, from what I have seen again, from my own personal experience, that has not been the case.  Serious games have turned out to be these didactic things that lose a great – that get a lot of press coverage for elevating games, but from the gaming audience is recognised as the somewhat stodgy, again preachy works. 
Yeah. 
But yet, within games themselves, these things that were written off as frivolous – we see even within titles that are quote/unquote these big dumb action games.  We see this nuance and true, and narrative death being communicated through, not only story, but they’re game-playing mechanics themselves.  The fact that there is seen, as still this divide between games and serious games, instead of games can be serious and silly, and everything in between within the same title is again, it’s something that is a perception that is changing and I kind of wish it would change sooner. 
I think that’s really interesting that you – it’s interesting that you’ve been working with that as kind of a critic within the entertainment field, and then worked into becoming a producer within the entertainment field.  So generally within European boundaries, applied and serious games are games – applied games, you could say games for health and positive behavioural change.  Serious games, are education and training games.  
So some of what you’re stepping across to, is actually describing what we more consider kind of arts and creative sector games.  Some of which are taking themselves very, very seriously indeed and possibly don’t do as well because of it.  
I think Call of Duty Modern Warfare, the sequence where there’s the nuclear explosion and your helicopter crashes and all you can do is stumble out, and for a little while walk before you eventually die from radiation and the injuries.  That is a very serious commentary within an entertainment title.  That would not be considered a serious game, within the serious game, capital S, capital G, because serious games are about teaching explicitly, and the fact that you can shoot two-hundred people in the next room would take it out of that categorisation.  But I think what you’re saying there sort of recognises that flexibility of the boundary. 
Our medium is a very flexible one and to go back to Call of Duty Modern Warfare, or Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare, as the example you chose, the games opens with you being sort of this dictator of a middle-eastern country and being executed by your people.  That’s the, and it’s all depicted in first-person, you’re tied up, you’re executed and that’s the spark that lights the conflict that goes throughout the entire game. 
What’s amazing is, again, now as much as Call of Duty is seen as this, I think wrongly, as it’s wrote, not iterative, because that has a sort of positive term, but it’s wrote stereotypical serious that does the same thing over and over, providing for the audience.  
That initial game, 4 Modern Warfare, and even moving forward in the series has some real moments of disempowerment that the stereotypical game-player who laughs at titles like Gone Home, that go for some narrative significance, that’s real moments of disempowerment that wouldn’t be out of place in a quote/unquote serious game, or an independent title.  
Yeah.  Are you familiar with the term ‘gamification’?
Yes. 
What do you think of gamification? 
(Laughs) I have this title on my phone, the reason I don’t play, the reason I don’t play remote games is because I don’t like feeling beholden to a title.  I admit, I’ve been addicted to games, especially in my youth, and I don’t want to get engaged into a system that draws me back to it again and again unwillingly.  So when I feel a game is a loot grind, or it’s taking up an unnecessary amount of my time, and I have to keep coming back if I want to maintain a certain level of skill, or just a competency within the title, that’s when I start to get uncomfortable.  
So live games, even just games with live elements are very uncomfortable for me.  So there’s this game on my phone, to come back around to gamification, called Marvel Avengers’ Academy, and it is, has some brilliant narrative moments inside of it.  Those narrative moments are cushioned by about three to five hours of shifting tasks from hero to hero and just seeing timers go down and praying I have the self-control to not spend money to speed up that process.  
But you don’t notice that’s been three to five hours because it’s just five minutes when you wake up, you assign the tasks and a few hours from then you get the notification on your phone, and you spend a few minutes again and it’s just slowly over time you see the time tank and you feel, and when you get the feeling, I want to get off of this hamster wheel, you realise I’m going to lose every single bit of this progress, and that’s how I see gamification.    
I’ve had so many experiences in games, well not so many experiences, but definitely powerful negative ones, where I said, it’s gone on too long, I’m in too deep, I want to get off.  I don’t want to see that mind-set crop up into my daily life, the gamification of the way I move through the world; and that’s a possibility.  
I think there is healthy, positive ways of doing it, I’ve seen it in action, but there’s definitely unhealthy ways to do it, and if they become standard they become standardised, and that becomes the de facto approach, which I don’t want to see. 
So I mean this relates to actually what’s kind of the question in some ways.  There’s a statement which is, ‘games are powerful tools to change behaviours and attitudes for the better’, do you agree with that statement?
Absolutely.  
Yeah.  Do you have experience of that at all, or is that just something you observe in others?
I have observed it in others, but I know making games has increased my own empathy.  Speaking to people within games has caused me to change certain deeply held mind-sets I’ve had in the past.  
The act of playing games themselves, I’ve felt emotions and understood perspectives I never would before, in games that were for entertainment.  More so than for any games I’ve played for a serious purpose, and the fact that the very culture of games itself, increasing as we get into more social media oriented activities, YouTube and Twitch.  The fact that so much of games not only encourages you to play them, but to participate in the culture surrounding them.  To [0:15:00] to share your own moments inside the game play, to write about the games, criticise the games, praise the games, make fan art.  The fact that all of these things converge makes games themselves a medium that is not only built on creativity, but inspires creativity in others and I think that’s one of the things that inspires me most about the medium that encourages me to stay here.  The fact that, oh, actually, every time we see one of these games, even games that are looked down upon, there’s dozens of people that are being inspired and are learning about how to make your own things and make them better.  
People who grew up with Doom twenty years ago, are now making Gone Home and What Remains of Edith Finch etc.  Despite the panic that, it’s going to destroy our children, that is what I love about gaming and that’s what I look at when I’m looking at the medium.  I look about how, man, this medium is getting better and a lot of it is because of the medium itself.  
Yeah, cool.  Do you think it can work the opposite way, which games could be powerful tools to change behaviours and attitudes for the worse?
Particularly in cases of compulsion and psychology, I believe that is the case.  We’re doing a lot of research right now in gaming, how can we get people to play our games, and that’s a healthy goal.  How can we make experienced people want to come back to it.  
We start getting into the market aspects of that though and it starts to become, not only how do we keep people playing our games, but how do they keep spending money and how do they not want to stop.  
When I first moved to South Korea, I downloaded this game called Marvel Puzzle Quest, because I loved Puzzle Quest as a kid, that title, that whole take on the Match 3 genre, and less than two days later I was waking up at 4am babbling about how my team composition was messed up and Iron Man needed to be paired with Storm, and did they heal up yet, did I switch them out yet, how was I doing in the leader boards, would I get the gold-plated Wonder Woman, not Wonder Woman in this case, but Invisible Woman; and I just was lost.  Because when you do act upon Skinner’s Box techniques, when you do act upon becoming, making your game a critical part of a regular part of someone’s life, there’s a level of responsibility there that I think gaming does have to come to terms with.  
We’ve come to terms with our responsibility as creating mature narratives, and in many ways we’ve come to terms with our responsibility to create engaging experiences in many ways.  Things that stand on their own feet, aside from simple graphical capability.  But as far as our responsibility as creators, about the effects on our players, in terms of addiction or compulsion, I think those are – we haven’t seen the real damage that can cause to peoples’ lives, and I don’t think – and I think until we even come to terms with the fact of taking more care of our own health as creators in making these games, because a lot of people sacrifice themselves to making these things, I don’t think that that responsibility will really come to light, or really be held in fruition.  
Yeah, I mean we’ve touched on a few things, I’ll jump actually forward here slightly, which is one of the questions.  What do you think are the pressures on games developers?  So you mentioned there about people almost sacrificing their lives to do these things, could you a little bit more about that?  How does that manifest in their lives?
A lot of the workforce of games is young, and that is changing for the better, and I’m so happy about that.  But a lot of the reason you could argue that the workforce in games is young is not only passion, but energy.  
To give a little bit of perspective, I spent two weeks making a game that a lot of people were able to go through in five-minutes; and when you think of projects like even Fire Watch or What Remains of Edith Finch, these stunning titles that have a lot of nuance and experimentation within a two-three runtime and you realise that these have taken three or four years’ of peoples’ lives to create.  It hits you just how much work is involved to create a new game, even more so than a lot of other creative mediums.  
Because it combines a bunch of creative mediums in one, and adds the additional looming massive issue of interactivity; how do we make this experience engaging to play?  And when you count that, the pressures upon game developers is myriad, there’s, how do we have money to continue to make this game, how do we use limited game to make this game.  This game is going to take two to three years to make, when we release it, will it feel like an artefact of the past, will we already be outdated and outshined?  And that perspective combined with, again the massive workload needed to make a game and make it within a reasonable amount of time, means a lot of people they work eighty-hour weeks, alongside day jobs.  They will work full-time on a project with a team of other people.
When you start counting up the man-hours, yes gaming is like a ten-billion dollar business, or if not, more, but if you look at the time and energy spent by people making them, that figure probably starts to seem a little bit small in terms of the effects, not only on peoples’ lives, but on their families and on their health.  
Yeah, it was a hundred-billion dollars last year, globally. 
Oh (laughs), I thought it was ten, I thought there was ten-percent of that gone. 
Oh no, it’s way more.  It’s just scary how much money goes through it, it’s the biggest entertainment industry. 
A lot of that doesn’t get passed onto developers as well, because we don’t have the whole Hollywood system.  A lot of game developers, there’s a huge pressure to go a little bit that it’s faced, is that people want to make video games.  You are expendable and if you aren’t expendable, that’s the message that is given to you by your company, because they need to profit off of your labour.  
The fact that game developers are making these creative projects but not getting creative investment in their titles, a cut of the money that they make is a big reason why like you see people, they can be in the industry for years making multi-million dollar, if not billion-dollar franchises, and they can exit and they can be in dire financial and health straits, because they don’t have creative rights to their work.  
You can argue that part of that is fair, but when you’re talking about a hundred-billion dollars and you’re saying, okay a million of that from one of the largest videos wen to the studio heads, or the development leads who were making that possible.  That’s a drop in the bucket. 
Definitely.  So you mentioned a little bit, about kind of Skinner’s Box and things like that.  What sort of principles do you think there are that make video games work?  What is it that distinguishes them as a medium?  What makes people want to play games?
That is a big question. 
Yeah; in your opinion.  
What makes people want to play games, in my opinion – really that games are unlike any other medium.  I think that part of it is because it pulls in so many aspects of other mediums.  It’s theatre and stage craft used to make people believe in things that may not even be in a game, a level of immersion or a simulation that might not even be there.  
There’s an element of literature in terms of the stories and narratives being created.  There’s a ton of music and sound design.  There’s of course the visual aspect, which has praised or derogative, depending on the person you speak to as far as criticism goes.  
But greatest of all is when you have all of these different things mixed together you think, okay, you have film, theatre, all these different things, they mushroom together, suddenly you have to find a way to communicate this to the player.  Games are the medium, more so than any other I believe, of communication.  Whatever you do in a game it doesn’t matter how much work you put in behind the scenes, if the player does not realise, or if the player, if you’re not communicating to the player what they are doing, what the consequences of their actions are, and the effect upon the game itself.  
If you have this – I spoke, one of my, the people I look up to, so I’m fortunate to speak to regularly, is Greg Johnson, the developer, the dude who created ToeJam and Earl and a number of other seminal titles and medium, going years back.  He said, his first game, or one of his first games was, he had this detailed combat simulation, not just to damage done to a person, but to skin and bone, and organs, and blood, it had so much simulation done to ensure, and so much research when into it to ensure that the game simulated these aspects and did so realistically.  
But when he put it into the, when he put all the simulation together and he made the game, and he played it, he typed in, attack blank, and the player character attacked the thing and it said, either you hit or you miss, and that’s it.  Nothing about the detailed simulation, nothing was conveyed of perhaps the gash that was created in their shoulder, whatever, it was just, you hit and you miss and it was boring as hell.  
That idea, that games is this medium that, if something is not outward facing or doesn’t communicate its function in some way it doesn’t matter, means that the considerations you have to make on every element of all of these different disciplines you’re pulling in, is two-fold.  How do we create it and then how do we make it interactive; and that push-pull is part of why our medium is so experimental and beautiful, but it also means it’s that much more difficult to make.  Making games is really hard, it’s really hard, it’s just hard.  
It is very hard.  Have you ever seen academic work, research work that has helped you as a creator, or that you see has helped other creators make games?
Academic work?
Yeah.  
In what fields?  Just in general, like using research from journals to create things, or…
For example─
…academic, academia used particularly, or academia particularly on the topic of games?
Preferably on the topic of games.
I recently interviewed some people from, I think it was the University of Santa Cruz, they have a game lab there, staffed by some super-creative, talented people.  One of the people at that lab made the game Façade, which is a pioneer in AI and narrative that players can interact with organically and shift, and change.  
I spoke to them about this tool they made, which could seem super-trivial at first, called Game Space.  And what they did was, they took the Wikipedia entries of basically every game that has ever existed and they stuffed it into this AI that they’d been prototyping through various projects for years, and they basically had to create a universe.  Constellations are made out of games that are grouped together, so a bunch of sports games are here and there’s adventure games here, or games that have bananas in them, or the name Fred in the title.  
It created, and you put all this together and it suddenly, this academic research project, okay how do we visualise the history and the many tales that make up our medium, culminated in this project called Game Space, which is free, you can just go to it in your browser.  Suddenly it makes the connections between our, the individual games that make up our mediums apparent in a way that people had never seen before.  
The reactions of people to this title in games has been pretty damn significant.  People going in and saying, ah, why is this game in this category, why is a sports game next to the racing games, and oh you go back, it turns out one of the developers worked on a sports game that was pivotal to the creation of the medium, but he didn’t make any money off of it, so he went off into a different genre altogether, using his experience, and made a racing game.  
It’s this idea of connections, was all put together to make this product.  It wasn’t a product, it was an academic project once again.  I think the role of academia in games can be similarly experimental, it can be similarly beneficial and it can, even if it’s just a couple of hours, you just spend in this super-chilled relaxing space considering games as a medium, I think that not only does it have an effect on creators, but I think that academia has had a real effect on players as well, even if it’s somewhat invisible, because we don’t see many people talking about it. 
I hope that answered your question. 
Yeah, no it’s interesting, because obviously a lot of creators say they’ve never really had, they’ve never had an interaction with reading journals or articles about games that have helped them make games.  It’s very interesting that your view, you talk about people working to study games, like making games, so very, what’s called applied research.  Kind of a very active engagement and also trying to find a new interactive language of academia to talk about games, to investigate what games can be, which uses interaction as a way of helping the reader, audience, target, player, whatever, to explore what they want to get from that work, which is obviously quite a different method of exchange from a typical academic paper, which is very much written by an author and read by a recipient, or the other way around. 
A lot of academic language is also very, how should I say this, specific.  Almost to the point of, inaccessibility, so for game creators you very quickly need to find out, okay, what are the effects of – I did a talk about this in London recently.  How does gun violence work and what is the danger to those who wield guns, as much as those who are victims of gun violence.  
If you have a gun does it actually make you more safe?  And this is, it’s numbers and some research, and it’s chronicled in a number of papers; and yet this information that at its core is quite simple and can be communicated clearly.  It took me a good half a day, half a day I could’ve spent doing anything else, going through this academic journals trying to figure out what the heck they were saying.  I think that’s also, part of a large reason you don’t see more academic papers or academia talked about in the context of, how it’s assisted the game development, because a lot of academia is inaccessible to those who are outside of it.  
Inaccessibility means that academic researchers can translate for creators and can play a pivotal role in games.  It has been done before, but it also means that for, independent creators for example, where it’s trying to make something that is truly meaningful, academia could do a lot to make their journey easier and as a result could actually affect a whole lot more people as a whole.  
Imagine if an impending creator wants to make a game about, going back to it, gun violence and mental health, and how, the way you see a gun affects your perception of it as a victim, or as a perpetrator, or whatever.  If they can’t even read the basic academic journals, the potential message, the potential truth that that piece is founded upon, is very much lost.  That doesn’t have to be the case, we can fix this, and I do think it’s something worth fixing. 
Yeah, definitely it is, there’s a lot of topics in the world that need that kind of treatment I think.  
Yeah. 
Speaking of those topics, we’ve got a couple of smaller ones, well a big one and a small one.  One of these statements is, ‘have you deliberately addressed gender minority representation, political culture or other serious or socially educational topics in your work’?
Yes, I made a game about intrusive thoughts.  Something I deal with myself, mental health and fear, and it was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done. 
How did you communicate that topic to the player?
I did it in a table top RPG, which made the difficulties of that project two-fold.  The first is, I need to account for a player who has never dealt with intrusive thoughts possibly and may not understand what this issue is in and of itself.  It’s an empathy game.  
The second is that because it uses a dungeon master or a game master, someone who narrates the world, because they’re going to be the arbiter really of the experience, I need to somehow also make sure that this experience is being communicated with a level of truth and empathy and honesty by someone who doesn’t deal with the issue, who could potentially not deal with the issue at all, sensitively, in a game.  
Yeah. 
And it was hard (laughter). 
Would you say that that, those kind of topics are expressed in other pieces of your work less directly?
Oh yeah, I’ve dealt with mental health and fear, and religion and a lot of other stuff in my work before.  But making a direct empathy game, what made that difficult is, the approach I took in communicating this topic was, okay, be upfront with the player.  This is something I deal with personally, here’s what the issue is, here is how you can experience it as a player, here’s what your responsibility is as a group game master.  This is about – and in doing so, I, at least I hope I ensured, first of all, I restated throughout the work, this is about a disturbing mental issue, but this needs to be a safe space for your player.  
And if someone’s uncomfortable with the word, the term, safe space, it needs to be a safe area of experimentation and an area that someone can step out of if it’s too much for them.  
I took that responsibility very seriously and communicating the issue to the player, how I did so, it was, being upfront, being explicitly empathetic, setting in very clear terms the responsibilities, of both the players and the dungeon master or game master had, and finally giving it an air of abstraction.  
It’s a game about mental health, fear and the devil.  It’s called Pit-Pat Devil’s Back, there’s an air of supernatural horror there, and that’s to give it just enough abstraction, so that someone isn’t immersed in the garbage of the mind, but can say a little bit, I understand this issue but I don’t have to suffer through it myself to understand it.  Abstraction does actually lend itself in any other medium to actually communicating experiences that would otherwise be very difficult to place yourself in directly.  
And if that can be done in film and literature, and music, there’s no reason it can’t be done in games. 
How did players respond to that game?
Well, the first person I play-tested it with, even in its unpolished form I ended up having to clean up quite a bit because it didn’t fully get across the goals I wished to.  I personalise the experience for them, which is one of the things you’re supposed to do in a game.  
I was working with someone who had never dealt with intrusive thoughts, they had never even really thought about the issue, and they came away with it, with a deeper understanding of the anxieties that this can cause and also the importance that when you’re dealing with intrusive thoughts or any other mental health issue, it doesn’t have to define you.  It’s something you deal with, it doesn’t determine who you are as a person and I think that’s a very important thing I was trying to get across.  
So that initial play-test, if it hadn’t have gone well, if it had come away just not working, or just being this didactic boring experience – because even I communicate the message, if it was boring there wouldn’t have been a point.  But the fact that that first play-test went so well was really the encouragement I needed to finish the project.  
I think very few people played it, I haven’t really gotten direct emails from people who played it, but I’m glad it exists now.  I’m very glad it exists and it actually help me, personally work through an issue I had myself of, I’m getting these thoughts, or I’m dealing with this issue, am I a monster; and making that game helped me exorcise those demons, so to speak, and that was, if nothing else that was a very helpful process. 
So making a game can be a recovery process for the creator as well?
Oh yeah, you see it, you hear a lot of stories about that and I can personally testify to it.
Okay, cool.  
So what would you, if you had to try and pick a couple of major things from the last ten years, what would you say are kind of the biggest trends in games that we’ve seen?  Just briefly, we’re kind of wrapping up at this point. 
Sorry, if we went so over time. 
No, no, it’s fine, there’s lots of good stuff in there. 
Two major trends; the first is, the death of double-A publishers, so THQ, well THQ’s the main one I’m thinking about right now.  Even stuff like Majestco, they published titles like Psychonauts and they made, THQ made the Sponge Bob licensed games, and a bunch of other licensed kids’ games, including The Incredibles.  The game for The Incredibles sequel, that still has not been created yet, which is odd.  
But that, when those triple-A publishers really died, it was a slow death, but it also meant a lot of our medium was, a lot of the side bets of our medium were lost and this ties into the second major thing, I think, has been a trend in gaming.  
The death of double-A publishers was because of, video killed the radio star, in the case of – the cost of creating games has increased.  When you’re dealing with the PS2 era, you can make something blocky and weird, and experimental, and it can not sell a whole great deal, but it can sell enough to keep you going and keep the creator going.  
But as we’ve moved forward with graphical fidelity and, particularly with the accessibility of game development, meaning that there’s more competition; that means that independent creators more than ever have actually had to fill the gap that publishers used to.  As a result, the risk that independent developers face is greater than ever, because they actually fill a gap in the market, that before corporations, entire corporations used to be dedicated to filling.  So it’s more important now than ever that those independent creators do have a support structure, sources of funding and etc. to assist them in doing their jobs and being able to live their dreams. 
If I was to ask you the same question in ten years’ time, what do you think you’d be saying?  What do you think we’ve got coming up for us?
The rise of diversity in gaming.  Our medium is more diverse than ever, I think that’s only going to increase, and I think it’s going to be a positive result for gaming as a whole.  I don’t see that being a bad thing in any way, or a negative thing. 
And I think the second major thing that will happen in the next few years is, gosh, second major change is that – there’s two possibilities I see there; there’s a branching point.  Either, because we’re already at a point where technology is super-fucking advanced, considering what we’ve come to from in the past thirty years.  
So we’re either going to get a point where as an audience, as developers, we really stop caring so much about technology and whizz bang wizardry, and that encourages us to further focus on being game play and narrative experiences that we’re creating, basically using this adequate technology, even more as time goes on.  Impressive overwhelming level of technology to simply just make stuff, instead of worrying about, oh man, can we make it, should we make it. 
Or, technology is going to take on such a role as to make games a part of our daily lives, and that will make basically technological whizz bang wizardry irrelevant, because games are all round us, in the gamification and intranet of things that’s happened, and hopefully, if that is the case, it will be for the better.  And you’ll have like a micron embedded in your arm and you won’t have to deal with a weird microphone on a stand to name one. 
Cool.  I think that’s probably a good point to wrap up.  Also, thank you very much for talking to me. 
Thank you so much for your time, again I hope I didn’t go too long. 
No, it was awesome, thank you.