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

Okay, so the recording is going.  Could you please say your name and spell it for the sake of the microphone please?
All right, so my name’s [anon].
Okay, and just to confirm you have signed the consent form. 
Yes. 
Okay, cool.  
So you’re mostly in a role here as a developer of games, sort of starting off your career in that direction, and also as a player of games. 
Yeah, I’ve had more experience in that so far (laughs). 
Cool.  What is your area of kind of professional practice within games development?
So it’s mostly been designer so far, well designer and production, which means team lead, like responsibility roles in design lead and we’ve been taking classes, and exercises, and level design, build design mostly this year.  Yeah, and just car jams, like two-week project development.  
So basically, and direct development cycles and with a big focus on level design, that’s pretty much it. 
How would you describe the kind of purpose of a games design or within a team?
Uh, well that really depends on your specification, but if you would assume to be like a design lead figure, or maybe like a creative director, it kind of means that you’re a division holder of the project, which means that you kind of give go, or no-go bosses on the work that gets in, which gets bossed through the project, which gets built, which doesn’t.  
That is essentially what you will do as like your major role as a designer, I think, hopefully I’m not wrong (laughs) by now. 
It sounds about right to me.  Who would you say is generally drawn to being a games developer?
As in any development, but also approve them as artists?
Yeah, yeah. 
Well, I’ve seen like a lot of different people with various interests have it, because there’s quite a few people that I know that do not play games, but are interested in the development, because they’re either really good artists or they like programming, like ST and making things work. 
So in respect of interest it keeps like growing out, or that it’s mostly been – I think it’s actually mostly been, male, like guys my age that have an interest in playing games.  
And how old are you?
Twenty-one, turning twenty-one next week. 
Happy birthday for next week.
Yeah thanks. 
Who do you think are making up the player base at the moment?  Are there commonalities in the player base?
I think that it’s shifting a lot at the moment actually.  A lot of like online goals that I’m joining and like clubs that I joined to play various games with are seeing more and more girls, females, playing with games.  For race, I honestly don’t know.  
I think the majority of the player base has been Caucasian guys for a long time, like my friends from high school and all that stuff, but I do think it’s increasing in various countries and various locations, and also across more genders, so far.  So I think it’s, the spectrum is increasing. 
Do you think that – because you yourself, you’ve said, you’ve played games for a long time before you became a developer.  Do you think that that is, that change in the player base is going to eventually result in a change in the people developing?
Yes.  Yeah, I do think so, yeah. 
Okay, cool.  
In terms of how people spend their leisure time, do you think video games are having much of an impact, compared to say ten or twenty years ago?
Yeah, definitely, it’s just since – because video games are so engaging, as like studies have shown, and people behaviour have shown, like the mass market, the capitalist system in which we live, kind of find out, like, hey this is a really big money maker, so a lot of – because people pay a lot of money to play games, developers have had a lot of leeway to make more games and market them more aggressively, so to speak.  
So yes, the way that leisure time, we’re spending leisure time is changing, it’s definitely changing more towards video games because so many big companies are investing in making them and selling them to people. 
Yeah.  Do you think it’s changing anything else other than leisure time?  So kind of the cultural area, the wider kind of cultural area of the arts, or theatre, do you think it’s having any impact on how films are made?
How films are made, or like, how books are in it as well, right?
Yeah, sure. 
Not as a very broad sense, not in a very, like because there are games to movies are changing, but what may have an impact is, since video games are pretty much the most popular thing right now, the most popular leisure time activity, movies and books might be changing their marketing strategies, like as they’ve seen with, for instance, a games developer releases a new game every year, they try to stick more towards series and established brands to modify more on that.  So they kind of stick more to a certain formula that they know works, as a lot of game developers do as well.  
But apart from that I don’t think it really has an impact on the actual content of the movies, or the actual content of books, or whatever.  I do think that, like the way that the market works, it’s kind of drifted from establishing new IPs to sticking with certain IPs and expanding them, because of how aggressive video games are marketed.  But other than that, I don’t think it has any other changes so far. 
I mean obviously we’ve seen a decline in cinema, but there’s probably quite a few different reasons for that. 
Does it have any specific reason, or-?
Ah, there’s quite a few things being speculated about that, for example, just the advancement of big televisions is part of it, but some people are saying that video games, the internet, piracy, there’s quite a few different reasons.  
Do you think that playing games are generally having a positive or negative impacts on players?
Oh boy, that’s a can of worms.  Right, so obviously the positive impacts, we’ve kind of all had them right, like improving hand-eye coordination that kind of stuff.  
I think the negative impacts, there are definitely negative impacts, but they’re kind of, I’m not really sure, like if – okay, so which one are we talking about, like addiction, or violence, or just anything?
Anything, what do you think?
Right, so I think one of the bigger overarching issues that might be going on is that video games are fairly accessible, like anyone can, or a lot of people have internet, a lot of people can download them, a lot of people can buy games.  So people that inherently have things like anger management issues, or addiction, or prone to addiction might get – because they have such easy access to these games, like they might indulge in their problem more, which like raises their problem, you know.  I’m not a psychiatrist but I’m not sure that is a very good idea. 
Like I kind of imagine that if someone is addicted to alcohol, that you take away their alcohol, but I’m not sure.  So if people are addicted to video games you might take away their video games and then you get into this whole, what is addiction thing.  
Negative impacts; it has a negative impact on certain people of certain walks of life, like the people that are prone to addiction, that spend tons of money on digital items, like two-thousand euros, digital items, and like at some point it becomes unreasonable, that is a specific societal issue that I think is going on right now.  Other than that I don’t think, once again, like the content of the video games doesn’t specifically matter.  I don’t really think that things like violence or sexism necessarily have a bad influence on players, unless that player specifically has already been prone to like, anger management issues, or other issues.  
So if a person is violent or sexist already, you think that games could be harmful to them, but if they’re not, the games would not be?
In a way, yeah.  I think that’s kind of my standpoint on that, once again, I might be wrong, but since there are no wrong answers.  I think that’s kind of what we’re looking at right now, so in a way it might help to like figure out if people have anger management issues and like see the problem sooner, see if they can make a change. 
You mentioned something there that people who are prone to addiction are, for example, spending thousands of euros in kind of micro transactions in, for example, casual games.   
Yeah. 
Given that the mobile market most specifically, where most of these micro transactions happen, is sustained by the purchases of about 1.5% of the players, and a lot of people playing games for free, the free to play model.  Do you think there’s an ethical concern that people are targeting vulnerable people?
Yes, I definitely think that that is the major issue why, with, especially the mobile market, that they’re specifically targeting these people, these wheels that they call them, because more often than not they’ll find that they’re people that actually don’t have that money to spend and they have like relationship issues, or are depressed or anything else and they kind of get addicted to games rather than some millionaire that just really, really their game.  
Yeah, so I think there’s a major ethical issue specifically in a mobile market about targeting prone people with this.  It’s not specifically the mobile market because there’s also games like the Importers 2 and a lot of other Skinner Box, not Skinner Box, what was that again?
Oh yeah, they’re called Skinner Boxes.  
Right, yeah, no it wasn’t that one, a Japanese one, anyway, some kind of random loop system that a lot of games employ, the Importers to be one of them, which kind of targets, also targets some of these people.  But most of these games are not sustained just by those people.  So yeah, I have kind of a passion, a very negative passion against the mobile market at this point. 
Yeah, the targeting of kind of the wild player is concerning isn’t it?
Yeah.  
Moving on a little bit, are you familiar with the terms, ‘applied games’ and ‘serious games’?
I’m familiar with them, but people have kind of blurred the finishes of them, so.  
Yes, yeah, the boundaries are – actually yeah, could you say a little bit more about that, where you feel those boundaries are, if you feel those boundaries even exist?
To applied games, or-?
Between applied and serious games. 
So applied games, I would think the main difference would be the set out of the actual game is to have an actual impact on somebody’s life, whereas most leisure games are protected by the magic circle theory, which is nothing, what stays in a game, or what happens in a game stays in a game.  
Whereas serious or applied games are meant to either improve somebody’s abilities, like for the military or flight simulators, or improve somebody’s medical conditions, or whatever.  So the boundary there is, I think, like specifically trying to alter somebody’s life, like solve a certain problem, like a person can’t do this right now, after they play this game they can do it.  That is what, I think, about it.
Could you talk about whether you think claims in either direction are valid?  For example, the entertainment games, the magic circle remains, or that within serious or applied games the effects happen. 
What do you mean?
So serious and applied games you say are trying to change peoples’ behaviour.  How effective do you think they are at that?
I haven’t seen them, but as I understood from like certain papers they could be more effective and be improved by games around theory that has been used in leisure games, like Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed, although those theories I think could be applied to serious games way more than they are now.  Because usually I have the feeling that, last papers around this was a few years ago, but most of the serious games that kind of tracked were developed by people that are not completely familiar with game development theory and game design theory.  But they kind of like go from a teacher perspective and I’m sure that somebody just parts information, just sort of people being engaged with that sort of thing.  That’s what I understood from it.    
Yeah, I think that they might have improved, but the last I saw they could have been more effective, I think.  
Have you ever used applied or serious game software?
So, well I’m currently using an app to learn a language.  It has some game theory in there, but it’s more, once again it has more the set out of a teacher telling me what to do with that.  
I have actually tried some virtual reality thing that tried to teach you how to cook, that was pretty cool.  You had like the actual ingredients somewhere and you like threw around eggs, and screw up.  I think that was a little bit more effective, because you could kind of, just mess around and see what doesn’t work, so you definitely know not to do that anymore.  Whereas the app that I’m using to learn language, just says, okay this word means this word, repeat this and then go onto the next one.  Yeah, so the interaction one taught me not to burn eggs (laughter).  
So the other thing you said obviously is that games, entertainment games have this kind of idea of the magic circle, what happens in the game stays in the game.  Do you think that, quite honestly serious and applied games are trying to change peoples’ behaviour and entertainment games are claiming they don’t, do you think that it’s safe to claim that they don’t?
No (laughs).  I guess we just discussed with the whole wills, like leisure games definitely do change peoples’ behaviour in certain ways, and in negative ways.  
I think that a lot of it is positive, because in the magic circle you find out what to do, what not to do in certain situations, so you won’t do it in real life.  So a lot of games that are trying to tell like emotional stories, like the Delta games or Life is Strange, those kind of games start becoming increasingly popular.  You can try and mess around with certain directions that go like, social behaviour and peoples’ or players’ social behaviour skills might improve using that.  As well as, yeah like the age-old hand/eye coordination, inventory management, item management, leadership skills, those kind of things.  So those happen, there for a long while and they remain there and improve peoples’ skills to a certain extent.    
That’s quite a good range for entertainment games already, yeah.
Yeah, I know, but the thing is that a lot of these aren’t, the difference between these games and applied games are that they are not made with the outset of improving somebody’s inventory management or leadership skills, or social skills; and applied games are made with the outset of changing somebody’s skills.  
Then there’s the negative one with the wheels, so yeah leisure games definitely change how people behave, like [0:17:48].
Do you think that serious and applied games are more effective at changing, or helping people learn things, because they’ve tried to, or do you think the entertainment games might be more powerful, even though they’re not trying on purpose?
Yeah, so that spectrum is shifting, but for a long while I think the entertainment games have been more, more powerful at teaching people things, for the simple reason that they’re engaging and people like engaging things, so they keep doing the same thing over and over and over again, until a certain skillset they have increases.  Or when it gradually increases, because practice makes perfect in a way. 
Okay.  We’re actually covering quite a few of the questions without me having to ask them here, so that’s going through my list quite nicely.  
That’s good.  
If you were to look at the last ten years of video games, sort of development, what do you think are some of the key innovations that have been happening?
Holy crap, boy, where to start.  Right, so, the key, a key development -  so definitely World of Warcraft, like definitely that’s changed a market in a hundred, thousand different ways.  I think also with World of Warcraft, this whole psychology thing became more important, people kind of discovered that, hey, if something is increasingly addicting, people stay engaged with it, and that was interesting for business, their marketing model.  
Also, just watching how people, or observing how people behave and improve their skillset, so somebody that plays World of Warcraft for maybe a hundred, thousand hours, ten-times the hours.  How do they change, how do they improve, what is their, like do they get better at certain things?  
Addiction became a really big issue with specifically World of Warcraft, also because it was so engaging and people started researching the whole thing, why is it so engaging. Of course Blizzard already noticed, they tested all their stuff, and they kind of found this really mammoth of combinations that are actually really engaging and addictive for people to stay at.  
So there’s that.  It hasn’t been really the last ten years, but I do think that Mortal Combat, like key development things, Mortal Combat should be mentioned.  It kind of got people thinking like, are people, or are games like actually changing peoples’ behaviour, and is violence like this an issue or not.  Which has been a good discussion and we have got some interesting information out of it.  
There’s not really anything over the last ten years.  Well there has been another violence item, which is sadism in games.  What was it, it was a really great game, and everybody hated it, but it still got developed somehow, it’s like top down shooter’ish. 
Hatred?
Yeah, I think so, it was like a guy with long black hair shooting people for the sake of shooting people.    
Yeah, Hatred.  
Yeah, okay, so that was Hatred and a lot of discussion sparked about violence and sadism in video games, which was really interesting, because GTA has been a thing for many, many years, in which you can do the same thing, but it is not the game’s goal for you to do the same thing. 
So this sparked, to kind of like get to the forum to get people [0:21:23] discussion.  Yeah, but it kind of shows, like where does society as we know it draw the line, which I think was really cool to see.  Like a lot of people are rising up against hatred, and Hatred the game, because it indulged in violence in a way that hasn’t really been seen before.
Mortal Kombat again comes to mind, but that was the difference between like visual effects and visual, like the art effect and the shock effects, then there is sadism, or the Hatred game which is about sadism and not really about shocking people, but more about indulging in somebody’s sadism.  It was a really long weird, ever-lasting discussion, but I think it has been worth having that discussion.  It’s still going on, it’s still kind of like, where’s the line.  
So violence aside, there has been – the last one, the very important one, which is the rise of feminism, I’m not sure if it really started because of video games, but it has been rising a lot.  Anita Sarkeesian comes to mind and the reactions that she has.  Yeah, well where do you begin.  Yeah, so, yeah. 
Well that is actually kind of the next sort of question that I’ve got on my list here.  While working on games, or playing games, do you recall intentionally addressing kind of topics of gender, minority representation, political culture, this kind of stuff, do you remember ever doing this deliberately in your own work?
In my own work, yes actually.  There was this one, in Year 1 block B we’re making a remake of the eighties games, we picked like a core saturation game called Night Lord.  Our character designer was kind of, well so this explorer is an old guy in the game, so what if we kind of like make him, make our character his son, and he made a design, and we kind of went like, well what gender is it?  He was like, well I don’t.  
So there’s this really slight thing where we had an unidentified gender character, which I thought was pretty fun at the time.  Then we asked Andrew about it and he’s like, ah damn politically correct people, but yeah, there was this one decision made.  Other than that, what other games have I had so far, I haven’t been actively engaging with it.  What we do keep in mind is the, your third audiences for games.  If certain games are enjoyed more by certain genders, so we made one game for, which was specifically targeted to fifty year old, it was the client wanted to be fifty year olds, but since we were making a point and click puzzle game, the target audience shifted a bit to forty year old women, because women have, the marketing had shown that women are more engaged with point and click puzzle games, or point and click games and puzzle games. 
Other than that, not really, I haven’t really been trying to be this all-inclusive politically correct standard.  
You mentioned there that one of your teachers had gone, oh damn, politically correct, do you think that’s a difference perhaps between younger developers and people who’ve perhaps been making games for longer, that younger developers are more aware of people like Anita Sarkeesian and the discussions around feminism, the discussions around violence.  Do you think that the younger people have that in mind, just as a general background of their knowledge when they’re coming into games development?
So that younger people are more inclined to, are more aware of these discussions than older people are?
Yeah. 
Oh boy.  As a rule, I do not think so.  I think, actually let me rephrase that.  They’re more aware of it, but that doesn’t mean that their standpoints or opinions might necessarily change, simply because of the presence of the discussion.  I think it has more to do with somebody’s background before adulthood, and like the way somebody has been raised and what they’ve gone through in high school and all that kind of stuff, or before that.  
They are more aware that these discussions are there, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are more actively engaged.  That doesn’t necessarily mean that their original standpoint would change so much on a certain topic like feminism, violence or sexism, that’s what I think is going on right now. 
So the games that people make are a reflection of their social background.
Yes.  Erm, yes. 
You’re hesitating, why are you hesitating?
Well it’s not like, oh well, I have a thing against Yankees, so I’m making a game where you shoot Yankees, that’s not really how it works is it?  You have a, people kind of express themselves in the borders of a brief, right.  So they go, okay we need to make the next Assassin’s Creed, or we need to make a builder game for the entire office type of game; and within that spectrum people express themselves where they can.  But the brief doesn’t change because of, or the brief doesn’t necessarily change.  Ah man, this is a tough one. 
Man, I honestly don’t know.  Yeah, I don’t know. 
That’s fine.  It sounds like what you’re trying to go for is something like the request for work remains as it is, but its interpretation is coloured or influenced by the people making it perhaps.  
Yeah, that’s what I was originally thinking but then again, what we get now is these requests for work do change with these discussions.  Overwatch character design has obviously been influenced, for the better in my opinion.  
The new Far Cry has probably very much been influenced by political statuses at this time and also the type of people that you’re playing, even though you’re – or the people that are introducing the trailers for the season for it, it seems really Caucasian focused but one of the main characters is an African American so then again that probably already changed, like hey, we need to have more inclusive people and we need to have a more, have a wider spectrum in our costs to reach out to more people, is what I think happens, and the most prominent example is Overwatch at this point.  
So yeah, at this point I think that request for work is definitely going to change, or is definitely changing more because of these discussions being present.  But once again people, so people get a certain task to do, they will do that task and they will fill that in if they see fit, which is definitely influenced by somebody’s social behaviour or by somebody’s social background.  Boy. 
Oh yeah, these are big topics.  That’s why we’re talking to so many people about them, to try and get─
That’s why you have a giant piece of paper.
That’s why I have a giant piece of paper with it all written down on.  Just to, actually just for the sake of kind of the recording, could you in a sentence or two characterise Overwatch for us?
Oh wow, so Overwatch is a shooter with very prominent characters, it’s not just soldiers, like every character is really flushed out and has a really interesting appearance and because during the development, shall I also talk about what changed?  Yeah, so during the development and [0:30:30] specifically really tackled the topic of, the cast is really uninspired, I guess, in a word.  It was really Caucasian males and the females that were there were designed to be attractive to males, like really defined body figures, all that stuff.  
And definitely once that talk came in, Blizzard responded with a, I think with a letter even, or an email, but they responded somehow, and their casts changed with, well definitely a less, with more divided characters.  So, how do I say this, without sounding─
It’s a diverse cast, representing lots of different groups.  
It’s a more diverse cast, yeah, that is, yes, a more diverse cast, that’s it, okay, cool. 
Okay, thank you.  
Words are challenging. 
We’re discussing complex topics in here, so, yeah. 
Just the last kind of little bit here, which is, so obviously we’ve looked back on the last ten years of saying, okay there’s been issues with addiction but also in terms of social responsibility things have changed, and different business models, like free to play have come up and the targeting of perhaps the vulnerable is a factor within that, and discussion about it’s happened.  
If we were to look back in ten years’ time, what do you think we’d be talking about as, oh wow, since 2017 we’ve seen this happen?
Wow.  Climate is, I think, one of the most prominent issues that I see amongst my age group.  Climate change is definitely one that is lurking, it’s coming up right now.  I think that the discussion about ethnicity and sexism, like equality across all genders, equality across all races, will become more, I wouldn’t say more violent, but will become more prominent over the coming ten years.  It has been rising, like the last four or five years maybe, steadily and it will increase.  
Far Cry 5 has already sparked, it crept on our things.  Even like Call of Duty is doing it, like even at Warfare, people are really against female leads or a female lead character, or not against, but it sparked a discussion.  So many things are sparking very intricate discussions right now and game developers currently are responding by sparking more of that discussion by making more diverse casts, like Overwatch.  
So yeah, between all the topics that are on there now, which will be like increasingly more prominent, other than that, probably just the climate is such a big issue right now.  
I’ll just ask you one last one.  Do you think that VR will be a big thing in ten years’ time?
So we discussed this with Alan and kind of the, the result that came out of that was that the divisive factor in that won’t be games, but it will be the porn industry.  Because so many, were specific things like VCR, DVD have been decided because of the porn industry, so maybe, I don’t know.  
As far as, specifically as games go, in ten years’ time, I do not think so.  I think that people will, that the biggest market will still be people sitting in front of their screens, for the simple reason that it is more accessible.  So I think, and due to accessibility reasons, it might not be a very big thing in video games.  Once again the erotic industry might have a different opinion about that.  
Early data from the porn industry says that people aren’t actually going for VR stuff, although they have actually pushed it forwards. 
They are not?
No, people seem to not like it as much as watching stuff on screens, which is interesting.  But they were, some of the people who were really innovating with motion capture and various things on that.  The porn industry, also the reason we have so much secure banking these days, because a lot of the online transactions and security for that was pushed forward by the porn industry. 
That is really cool actually.  I’ll tell my mum, she works in a bank. 
Yeah, no it’s, as an industry goes in terms of technological innovation they have pushed a lot of things forward. 
That is actually really cool.  
It is, well sex, you know, it’s an important thing to us.  We were talking about sexism and gender and it’s something that I think does shape how we see ourselves and interact with the world and society around us, so it’s not surprising that sexuality is a key factor in technology as well. 
Yeah actually, look at it from some point I guess, and that might also suggest that because of the art industry not going for VR, that might also signify that games eventually might not.
Yeah, or it might be that just they haven’t done it well enough yet, and it could be that it’ll still take off, yeah.   We can’t tell.  
Anyway, on that note I think we should probably wrap that up, thank you very much for talking to me. 
Yeah, no worries.  It has been fun.