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

Hello, [anonymised].  Can you hear me?
Yeah, I can hear you.  Can you hear me?
Yeah.
Morning, or I guess afternoon.
Well, it’s late afternoon here, but thank you.  Okay, so you do know you are being audio recorded, right?
Yes.
Okay.  Is that okay?
Yes, that’s fine.
Very well.  Okay, I will explain to you how the interview works, so, as I said, we’re interested in your experience as a gamer and on your thoughts about how games influence us.
Okay.
And I will share some slides.  (pause)  Okay, can you see the screen?
Yeah.
Okay.  I will use these PowerPoint slides to guide our conversation, so I will show you sometimes a few keywords.  You can use them as cues.  You’re not required to talk about all the topics I’m showing, but you can use them to, I don’t know, to guide your ideas and help you collect your thoughts.  Okay?
Okay.
So, do you have any other questions or we can begin?
Sure, what do you want to know?
Well, to begin with, I like to know a little bit about your relationship with games, so which games do you play, how often do you play?
Well, I play – I’d like to say I play everything, but that’s probably not true; I don’t play a lot of sports games.  I tend to favour big RPG sort of games.
Okay.
Skyrim, Fallout, Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, you know, things of that nature or just like this massive world where I can just like get lost for the next 100 hours.
Okay.  So mostly RPG?
They are probably my favourite.  I mean I will do a lot of strategy games.  I’ll do shooters occasionally [0:02:54], but if you sat me down in front of an internet library I’d probably pick an RPG.
Okay.  So do you play only single player, mostly single player?
Mostly single player because I don’t generally – the time I have to play video games isn’t conducive to playing with other people.  There’s not a whole lot of my friends online at 3am on a Thursday morning, so I just tend to play by myself.
Okay, but that’s not your choice, I gather, it’s just a timing issue?
Yeah, well, it doesn’t particularly bother me.  I started streaming about a year ago so I would have people to talk to while I played at least.
Okay.  How much time do you play?
At the moment not a lot.  There’s an issue with the house buyer so I’m kind of stuck in a hotel room.
Oh, okay.
Normally it’s, I don’t know, 10, 12 hours a week.
Okay.  And how long have you been playing – how old are you, by the way?
I am 25.
Okay, and since when have you been playing?
The earliest memory I have of a video game was Super Mario for the Nintendo Entertainment System when I was – I was like five years old or something.  It was in the basement of my cousin’s, so that, I guess.  And it was just like this is the second – the second you saw it, like, “I could get into this.  This seems like something I could enjoy.”  I mean, you know, two years later it was my sole passion.
Do you still play on consoles or computer?
I have a PC that I try to use primarily.  I got a PlayStation 4 for Christmas from a friend of mine.  He had upgraded to the Pro, I think, so I got a whole PlayStation, so I’ve got a couple of the new generation console games, but I tend to favour PC, something onscreen.
Okay.  Do you also play mobile games?
Very, very rarely.  Most of the mobile games I play are ports of other games, like Hearthstone and [Channel Works 0:05:37] are games where they have a desktop client and just kind of, you know, something I can play on the go.
Yeah, so you play them both on the PC and on mobile?
Yes.
Okay, okay.  Last thing I wanted to ask you, but of course you are free not to answer, how much do you spend typically in games, for games?
Not as much as – like I generally have a budget so the games I play I usually pick up from sale or I convince people to refer, you know, special events online for me.  I mean out of my own pocket I probably spend less than like 100 or 200 a year on video games.
Okay, so it’s something you pay attention to?  I mean you—?
Yes.
You program for how much you spend.  Okay.  So, to continue with our interview, I’d like to ask you a little more of an abstract question, but how do you feel that games influence you?  Do you feel they influence you in any way?  Do you feel that in all those years playing games, you’ve changed or were changed by playing?
That’s a tough question.
I know.
If I sat down and thought about it, I would imagine it probably helped me strategically thinking, because I play a lot of card games online, you know, things like Hearthstone and I play a lot of the strategy games, Total War, Solaris, you know, things like that, so if I had to say it influenced something, it’s probably, you know, a bit of like the forward thinking effects.
Okay.
They helped me – I’d say I probably think further ahead than I’d do if I didn’t play those games quite as well.
And you think this is a – do you feel this is also something you take outside of gaming?  I mean—?
Yes.
Okay, so you feel it impacts on your daily life too, in a way?
Oh yeah, yeah.  I would definitely – I would definitely say I feel that impact, that better critical thinking, I suppose, outside the game.
I am showing you the keywords.  If there is something else that catches your eye, or, for example, something I would like to ask of you is if you think that games can be addictive, you know, in a negative way, I mean.
I – if you look at what people have been addicted to historically, I mean it’s literally everything.  Addiction is – in a lot of cases it’s a mind-set; it’s something that you have trained your body to want.  It’s not so much a physical thing.  I mean that aspect there, I definitely believe people can get addicted to video games as a concept or as a reward system because it is a very – it’s an enjoyable experience.  It’s a very rewarding thing.  And game creators know that.  They’ve devised their games in such a way that you get regular bursts of, you know lights and sounds and enjoyable things to try and keep you hooked.  You see this a lot with RPGs where they spread the progression out just slightly enough so when you get far enough, you get a new item, you get a new level, you feel happy.  It creates a rush and it’s like a circle effect.
Yeah, it’s more reward, yeah.
Mobile games in particular make their entire industry off of just addicting the type of people who will spend tens of thousands of dollars on the free-to-play games, you know, buying and adding to level packs or whatever, so without a doubt you could say people can get addicted to games.
Yeah.  Also you did say you play some free-to-play games, am I right, like Hearthstone?
Yes.
And did you spend money on it or do you try not to or—?
I have.  In the case of Hearthstone they now – I mean in addition to card packs [0:10:45] game, but they also had like – it has a DLC sort of content so I bought some of that as well.  So I think in the three or four years I’ve had Hearthstone I’ve spent $50, $60 on it of my own money.  Then, you know, people give me like cards to battle again, so I’ve probably done another $40 or so from here.
I would also like to ask you what you think about collaboration and competition in games.  I mean you don’t play much multiplayer games, so maybe you don’t feel this as much, but some games you play are competitive, competing with other people?
Yes, it’s sort of – are you talking just like, you know, casual multiplayer or full-scale eSports events?
Well, that depends on whether you play, I mean.  But—
I’ve played quite a bit of CS:GO on the PC so I’m familiar with multiplayer and the group of friends that I have online when they are there or when I have a day off or something, that’s one of the games I tend to play.
And something I didn’t quite understand, so when you play multiplayer, do you play with people you already know in person, so those people you consider your friends, or do you also play with strangers on the internet?
That will depend on the game.  For something like CS:GO, my track record, which is, you know, solo cues, randomly jump into the game and get random [0:12:49], I get a lot of – a lot of – perhaps a lot of like less than friendly people, you know, very sort of more independent people, so it’s not the type of person I generally want to work with on things.  So when I play something like CS:GO or Overwatch or something, then I prefer to team with my friends.  I tend to avoid random people when there are a lot of us in games. 
Yeah, other games it will just depend.  It’s something I – like in [Alma 0:13:29] Battle Royale or something, I’m fine teaming with random people.  I guess it just depends.
Okay.  So the next thing I would like to ask you is whether you can see some practical application or video games, so using games not only for entertainment but for some practical purpose.  I mean you already said you feel you bring your strategical thinking that you learn with the games, you take that into your daily life.  Do you think, for example, the games can be used to teach that, to improve people in this kind of skill?
I believe so.  I think if handled properly, you can use video games as a very effective teaching tool if done correctly, because the whole experience I talked about earlier as far as like addition, you know, there is a grey bit there, you can use that rewarding scale to try and help teach people.  It’s an interactive medium.  It’s not like you’re sitting someone down in front of a video, watch this as this guy explains it.  You’re taking a part of the activity or team.  So that is a very powerful tool, I think.  
When that’s utilised correctly you can use it to be a teaching tool.  And at least in the United States we’ve seen some basic attempts at like using video games to teach like map interactions and stuff like that.  There’s already some basic, you know, preliminary acceptance in that field for the last decade or so.  So I feel that there is plenty of room to go in that direction.  It’s very much an option if they utilise it properly.
But I would like to ask you a little more about what you mean by using it properly.  Do you think there is something that should be done to use them properly or some mistakes that maybe are easy to make when using games for teaching?
The biggest mistake I see is trying – you have to strike a balance between what your goal is and, you know, the players’ interaction.  And the biggest mistake is either going one way so the player just has like an open sand box and they don’t learn anything, you know.  Just give it the box of Lego and they’ll do whatever they want.  You need some sort of guided thing in order to get something out of it.  And the other big issue with those, I saw at least in my classrooms, was they were too guided.  There was very much too controlled of a path.  It wasn’t any different from me sitting down and watching a video.  Sure, I could, you know, drag the numbers and we’re going to have an answer to a math problem, but there’s only one way it would go in.  There were no extra numbers.  It was like there’s a two, there’s a two and there’s a four, can you put this math problem in order?  Well, literally anyone could if you can move a mouse, so I think that’s the biggest issue of it not being proper.  It’s either too freeform or it’s too structured; you don’t get anything out of it without, you know, a bit of leeway, a bit of critical thinking, a chance for failure, I guess.
And I’m asking myself, I mean do you think that this kind of guidance is something that is specifically needed for teaching through games because the games you cited as the games you are playing with, some are very open-ended, like Skyrim, and some are very constrained and guiding the player, like Final Fantasy, for example.  So do you think that entertaining can be also very – can let the player really free to explore, but when teaching we should be a little more focused?  Am I getting that right?
Depends on the MO behind the concepts.  I mean for most people they don’t go, hey this is supercritical, the experience or whatever, but [0:18:27] people have different tastes and like movies, sometimes you don’t want to sit down and watch action movies you want to watch comedy or whatever, and actually that works in the games, you know, an extension of that, it just all depends on what you [0:18:45] idea, a set goal or some sort of model in order to do it effectively.
Okay.  And are you familiar with the term serious games and gamification?
I’m aware of what?
Sorry, I didn’t hear you well.  I’m getting an awful lot of noise from your side.  Look, I will try to disable my video so maybe the connection will go a little better.  Can you hear me?
Yeah.
Okay.  So I was saying, sorry, do you have familiarity with the term serious games and gamification?
Vaguely, yes.
Okay.
Mainly the concepts.
Okay, well I will try to define them for you as we mean it – we mean them.  So by serious games we mean games that are specifically used – created for a purpose different from entertainment.  So, for example, we want to use games for teaching, we can use a commercial game that, by the way, teaches you something, or we can create a game specifically for teaching.  This second one we will call serious games.
And by gamification we mean the use of game elements outside of a game also for a specific purpose.  So, for example, I’m thinking of those iPhone apps like Runtastic or apps like that that track how much you run and give you a score for that and make some kind of competition around an activity that is not a game.  Okay?
Alright.
And I was wondering if you have any experience with these kind of apps or systems.
As far as gamification sort of app, I actually used one for a couple of months actually when I was trying to lose weight, and it was very similar to how you described.  You put in what your current status was, so how much you weighed that day, how much exercise and it sort of like created like a faux level-up chart or something.  Like I’m familiar with that sort of process.  My – I mean my overall thoughts on like gamification apps is maybe they work if people have – if that’s the goal they want.  If they’re just – they really want – like for a weight loss app, the problem really is to get healthy, if that’s what they actually want then these applications could be very useful as a way to make the process not quite so clinical, make you feel like you’re getting something out if it, because when you’re losing – when you’re losing weight it’s miserable because you’re always hungry all the time and if you’re doing a lot of exercise to supplement that, your body is always sore, so trying something to help that out.
But in a way you’re saying you already need some motivation towards a goal.
Exactly, it’s not something that – if you’re just random – it’s not [0:22:29].  I could really lose 10, 15 pounds, I don’t think like an app like that is going to help.  It helps those who are already wanting to do it, but it, by itself, isn’t and probably shouldn’t be the spur of, you know, activity.
Okay, I see.  I would like to move to the next topic, which is whether you can see some ethical issues in games, both in the use of games and in the messages they are conveying to players.
There’s a lot, at least in the United States, there’s a history of ethical concerns of video games.  Our legal system has looked at them a couple of dozen times now because some of the themes and the messages and commercially available products, like Mortal Combat in particular almost got video games banned back in the 1990s, so it’s very much, as someone who, you know, is very well immersed into this world, it’s something I’m very familiar with.  And a lot of games, even to this day, they don’t shy away from those topics.
Something like The Last of Us on the PlayStation, you know, you will go into very morally great things, so very dark things in order to reach a certain conclusion, I don’t want to spoil the game for people who haven’t played it, but it’s tells a very gripping story but there was a lot of moral, ethical decisions that don’t always leave the player feeling comfortable after it happened.  And I think that at least in the commercial and into entertainment experience, I think that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  There are a lot of movies and music that tried to do the same thing.  Their goal isn’t to make you smile or to make you laugh or whatever; their goal is to get you to think about something.  And at least as an entertainment thing or as a thought-provoking thing, that isn’t a horrible idea, but if your goal is to try and, you know, make video games into a service or try to use it to reach some sort of conclusion, that might be the wrong way to go about it.
So I don’t know.  It’s a very complicated topic and it’s really hard to – it’s really hard to go into detail with what would be the right thing for the entire concept of it all.
But what kind of problems do you think could arise, I mean?
The biggest problem, at least in the United States, is the lack of real oversight, I suppose.  I mean the games have a rating board.  You know, they’re rated E for everyone, you know, PG, M for mature, whatever, adult only.  The thing is this is – it was a self-regulated market so there’s no legal recourse to enforce it.  
So for a game like The Last of Us or for, you know, Call of Duty, where you’re murdering people every two seconds, those – there’s nothing to stop those titles from getting in the hands of, you know, younger people, you know, adults or teenagers, for random things.  That’s, at the moment, the most prevalent concern, at least in the US.  For something like The Last of Us that I mentioned, I would not want a kid to go anywhere near the game, a kid [0:26:34] because it does deal with very particular things and it’s how do you regulate it or how do you address those sorts of concerns.
So you feel there is not enough regulation right now?  Can you hear me?  [anonymised]?  I can’t hear you any more.  Okay, I hear you now.
Again, hotel WiFi.
Don’t worry.  But I was saying that you believe there is not enough regulation on selling games.
I don’t know if it’s necessarily a regulation concern or more a consumer, parent education concern.  It’s – I don’t know what the proper approach is.  I’m not a politician, trying to – instead of me trying to explain the Mona Lisa, it’s a painting that exists but I couldn’t go anything into the history.  I don’t know if I feel like I’m qualified to say what the right answer is to that question. 
Of course, but, you know, we’re interested in your view of the situation, so—
If I had to take a stab in the dark, I don’t think as far as like ethical concerns with video games, I think they’re at an appropriate point as far as what the industry is doing as a whole, I don’t think it’s a massive concern.  But I think the biggest issue isn’t necessarily regulation; it’s more end user education, you know, trying to tell or explain to parents and older generations, you know, within this medium what’s appropriate and what’s not.  You know, it’s very easy to sit down in front of a movie where the first thing that flashes is that this is not rated for younger audiences, you know.  That’s something very easy to explain versus, you know, in a lot of movies they’ll say, you know, because of violence, because of language or sexual content.  A lot of video games don’t do that from the outset.  There’s a sticker on the back of the box or a tiny little letter that tells me what it’s rated, but it doesn’t give the context as to why it has that rating.
You know, some people feel that language is okay versus other people who feel, you know, sexual content is the devil and it shouldn’t be anywhere near my children, it’s just something that needs – I think it just needs more thought but not necessarily more regulation.
More detail, you would say?
Yeah.
Okay, okay.  Another issue I would like to touch upon is monetisation of games, because you already told me about free-to-play games and also you know other ways of earning money by not properly selling video games but, for example, selling subscription to a video game or selling DLCs.  What do you think about those kind of arrangements?
There’s a couple of ways that video games will make money outside of the sticker price that you were mentioning.  And it depends on the specific sort of thing that – DLC is a concept, if it’s executed properly, is fine.  You know, after the game is finished the developers and the art team and programmers, they all want to make more of this game so there’s no problem with them – I have no problem with them making more of the game and then selling it two months later.
For free-to-play games, it’s a bit of a shirkier topic, because a lot of them will break down into one of two ways, one where it becomes like a fashion game, essentially just buying a whole bunch of cosmetics so your character looks the best on the battlefield, you know.  You’re going out there with a straw hat and a rainbow rifle or whatever.  You know, that’s fine with me; it doesn’t affect other people’s experience if you look like a clown out there, but I feel it’s an appropriate way to do it.  And the art team in particular always thinks there’s game development very early but are one of the first teams to finish, so them working on sales before the rest of the team finishes isn’t a huge concern with me.
My biggest issue with concepts like that is where it – you’ll see it a lot more in free-to-play models in particular, where parts of the game get made overly hard or particularly grindy.  Korean MMO in particular are infamous for this where the grind is ridiculous.  It takes several hours to gain a level in one skill, much less the other 50 that you have to worry about.  Or, instead of that, just for the small price, you know, 5.99 or whatever, you can get your next level right away and you face a situation where you’re – in the American industry it’s fishing for royalties.  You’re looking for a small percentage of people to spend as much money as possible on the games.  You have less than 1% of your players spending thousands of dollars so they have the strongest character on the server.  
And you have the game [0:32:51].  The game is made slower.  Specific items can be cut out.  So like imagine Skyrim without the dragon beams.  You instantly make the final fight ludicrously hard because you don’t have extra damage on that type of creature, and that would just be in some games, some publishers, that stuff gets cut out to resell for you.  You know, the game is still technically complete, you know, just like a car will still technically run, but, you know, if you want fuel for the car, that’s an extra.
It’s just a very – it’s a very tricky line I find with the cosmetics.  There’s a lot of these other models in theory.  I don’t mind cosmetics.  I don’t mind subscription models.  I’ve played them and always paid for their service because I enjoyed it, but there is a very risky slope to where the game is made less enjoyable to appeal to money or parts of the games are taken out because they know people need that part of the game in order to progress.  That’s my problem with it.  In theory it’s acceptable, but you have to be wary of [34:06].
Another thing I wanted to ask, especially because you play a lot of RPGs, which are very character-driven games, is how do you see the portrayal, for example of gender or race, if you think that it’s inadequate or it’s adequate or do you see any trends?  I don’t know.
Speaking very broadly as the industry as a whole, it is – it’s horribly sexist.  When you have a female character and a male character and there’s just one item in the game that just says two different skins, a lot of times, you know, like a steel armour will fully cover the male.  The female character it’s just, you know, a fancy bra with some sparkles on.
The chainmail bikini, yeah.
Exactly.  And that is an actual legitimate thing.  I have seen it myself.  That’s not some sort of exaggeration from the media; that exists in a lot of RPGs.  And if you ever pop along to – if you do game server as a woman or as the only woman on the server, it is particularly horrible, I guess, without getting into too many [0:35:38], it’s a very – it can be a very hostile environment and a lot of – to get into a lot of these sorts of games as a woman, you have to either be quiet and just not talk or you have to have thick skin enough so you can climb – you can wade through all the drudgery and find good people, people who don’t care about gender.
As far as industry as a whole, it definitely has a lot to go in order for them to be much more of an equal sense, but for individual games, there’s a lot of games that do it perfectly.
For example?
On the PlayStation 4 recently was amazing, and I didn’t have any of those particular trappings as far as like armour or, you know, discussion group, anything like that, and the fact that the lead character is female is only really brought up once and it gets shot down like two minutes later.  It’s really well done if you’ve not played that game, the idea.  So the industry, for female – for women, if you’re aiming for gender equality, it has a bit of ways to go but it’s getting there.
So you think it’s making progress?
Yes.
Okay.  Do you think the same goes for portrayal of different races too?
Race is really hard to judge.  I mean if you look at like lead characters in video games, yes, it seems progress is a lot less, you know, white male European guys, you know, Egyptian assassin brotherhood, whatever.  There is a lot less of that than there used to be and the localisation and things of that nature has done a much better job to try not to whitewash a product or whatever.  It’s another one I think that they could probably do a bit better, but it’s not as big a gap to go as it is with just women in general.  Like, you know, lead characters of colour have been a thing for quite a while.  I mean even recently at E3, the new Assassin’s Creed game from Ubisoft, you know, black lead character and all that so a lot of games have female characters in one of the leads and the new Wolfenstein is a black woman, so much less something like Mafia 3, like last year where half the lead was black.  
So at least for that sense they’ve got a ways to go, just, I don’t know, it still has progress because a lot of games still break down to, you know, the US shooting down brown people in some other country, so – and at least as far as that goes if we’re not shooting at a Nazi or, you know, a terrorist, you still have some ways to go as far as that one goes, retraining what people think are enemies.
Yeah, okay.  But you still think it’s less of a problem that – than female characterisation?
Right, it’s still a problem but like women, it’s made progress and I think it’s made more progress than the female characters.
Okay.  Moving on to the next topic, which is maybe the more abstract question in the interview, but I would like to ask you how do you feel or how do you see that game influence society in general?
I believe gaming, at least in the United States, it’s mainstream.  It’s part of pop culture at this point, you know.  E3 was this week and there was something like a million people on Twitch watching it.  It got better ratings than half of cable television.  You can’t argue with those sorts of numbers, you know, people making references to things at the time, publishers throwing millions and millions out as far as advertising goes for trying to get the word out there.  I don’t know if you watch wrestling at all, but…
No.
…WWE, there’s a company, the biggest wrestling company in the world and their biggest event this year, WrestleMania, was sponsored by Final Fantasy.
Okay.  I didn’t know that.
Yeah, like it’s ridiculous.  They had the hosts come out and address this Final Fantasy character, you know, with Chocobos and a Moogle on his shoulder, so it’s – you can’t deny that it’s there.  The average – in the United States the average gamer is a 28-year-old male.  It’s not some sort of, you know, children’s hobby any more; it is very much a mainstream thing.  GTA 5 launch week was the biggest launch week in all of entertainment, period.  No other product, movie, music, TV show sold more in their first week than Grand Theft Auto 5 did.  It’s just ridiculous, ridiculous mainstream presence.  I don’t think you can argue that games aren’t a part of society when it is that big and growing.
Yeah.  You think this is a new thing, I mean they have got mainstream recently, or do you think it’s a longer trend?
At least in the US it’s been a very hard-fought battle.  I guess going back to like the legal fights with Mortal Combat in the ‘90s and even before that the US gaming industry literally died in the ‘80s because of a couple of shifty games, and it took a long time for it to bounce back.  There was a lot of stagnant, a lot of fear, and even when it came back there was a lot of pushback to them because of – the games were appealing to an older audience, a lot of – when the industry came back it was a lot more diverse content, a lot of it more mature, you know, darker themes or more popular, will be you’re no longer just, you know, Mario going round the Mushroom Kingdom, you’re, you know, fighting for tournaments or you’re leading platoons in World War II or something.  This is very much a very dark gritty topic and a lot of people are very uncomfortable with that because they still viewed the industry as a children’s toy.  A lot of old people, a lot of people who just aren’t educated, who just aren’t familiar with it really try and continue to fight against what they feel is the new devil, you know.
It was comic books, it was movies, it was television, it was radio way back in the day.  There’s always something new that’s, you know, coming after imploding society, and video games is, I think, is finally starting to shrug off that mantra.  It hasn’t always been there; I think it’s very much, I don’t know, last – prior ten years that it’s really started to take off and get mainstream, mostly because the world has kind of changed with the internet.  All that weird stuff has just kind of been given a platform, where the old screen, the old style of media wasn’t accepting it, it now had its own platform, which is ballistically massive, like the fourth biggest site in the world.  And the second biggest site in the world, YouTube, its top creator is a gamer, you know. 
The older world was considered mainstream had a very tentative relationship with it, so they went out and made new video, you know, they created their own part of mainstream because the internet is a beautiful thing and you can do that with it, and I think thanks to that modernisation of entertainment, I think that’s what’s made video games more mainstream.
Okay.  Another thing I would like to ask on this topic, again, because you play RPGs which are very story-driven and you say some games are almost like movies, is whether you think games can be art in themselves or—?
I think as far as the question of video games and art goes, I think anyone who says they aren’t is woefully misinformed on the target because look at – look at what goes into video games.  Look at how many people sit there and design.  When you consider what our traditional mainstream art, you know, musicians, artists, you know, people consider like directors and story writers as, you know, a form of art form, video games are all of these things, you know.  You have – like Destiny 2 has like paid composers and stuff making the soundtrack and you have teams of hundreds of people to design these worlds.  They aren’t just, you know, coding ones and zeros into a computer all day; someone actually sat down and drew out, “This is what we want the world to look like.  This character will look like this with these curves,” and all of those things and all these traditionally considered art things, they all exist in video games. 
The script for like GTA 4 was like 50,000 words or something.  It’s ridiculous.  It’s just there’s a lot that goes into it.  There’s a lot.  If you look at what traditional art is, everything there is in video games.  I think it’s lack of understanding or wilful ignorance for people to say video games are not because they clearly have all components of what a rightful person would think about it.
Okay.  And another thing I wanted to touch on this topic is how do you see the future of video games?  I mean there are technological advances right now, like VR or augmented reality, but even aside from technological advances, games continue to innovate themselves and change, so what do you expect in the future?
That is a really hard thing to try to grasp because like ten years ago was the start of the – ten years ago since I started with the PlayStation and the 360 thing, a lot of those trends have continued, but no-one would have expected VR to go as massively huge as it did or for the concept of the Nintendo Wii to just basically die out.  Motion controls were a failed experiment, whereas VR at the moment seems to be doing alright.  It’s – and then ten years before that, the PlayStation One era, no-one would have predicted the success of something like Call of Duty or World of Warcraft.  These were just like fantasies in people’s heads at the moment.  This was never a thing that could happen.  
So from present day kind of to about 10, 15, 20 years, I don’t know.  More good stories should definitely be a thing.  As the industry gets better, more money gets pumped into it, I expect a lot more of these high-level stories, a lot of these amazing sort of gripping tales, more stuff like, you know, more the Final Fantasies, more of like The Last of Us or Horizon, things like that will always have a place because people always like a good story.  Obviously with multiplayer’s not going away, but I think it’ll probably shift focus maybe.  Like I don’t think – I don’t think sports games are going away anywhere anytime soon, but I think it’ll shift more towards, I don’t know, not so much like a casual environment.  I guess probably more eSports-driven would be where competitive is going.
As far as the industry with like technology, fucked if I know.  I didn’t think VR would be a thing.  I tried some of the earlier – like Oculus Rift when they were still like a death kit and then maybe motion sinking, then, you know, of course five years later they had sold millions of units.  So I really don’t know what will come up.  It’s just one of those things that like I don’t know.  And at E3 this year, it didn’t have any clues because everything was all video games.  You know, XBox got a slight hardware upgrade, but it was just all video games.  
I’m happy.  Everything that I see that I enjoy in the industry now that has been going for the last five years will continue forwards.  I just don’t know if I could speculate as to what new innovation and thinking can be done, what’s already been tried but failed.  The RPGs have moved forward something for 17, 20 years.  I don’t expect those to be going away any time soon, but what else could come out of that, I don’t know.
Okay.
Maybe more eSports.  I imagine that if that industry gets kids gathering and seeing what it’s doing, you know, CS:GO events are doing millions of dollars.  Dota 2 hands out like $100 million at some point over the course of its lifetime, so I think there’ll be a lot more of that in video games and a lot of that will be probably more mainstream.  Because the fight for acceptance for video games is as a competitive art form, but beyond that I could not hazard a guess as to [0:50:22].
Okay.  Last thing I wanted to ask you is, you know, we talked a lot about how games are opportunities, potential problems with video games.  Do you think – what advice would you give to different kind of people involved with games to make the situation better?
Oh, don’t underestimate the audience would be probably my biggest thing.  And what you take away from that will depend on where in the industry you’re trying to focus.  But in a broad sense a lot of people will look at the video games industry as, you know, free money, as a cash cow or the consumers are ignorant and they will buy whatever you put in front of them because, you know, some games that look stupid on paper make billions of dollars, you know, like Pokémon Go, like someone wants to actually walk around and flick balls at a screen, biggest selling app of the goddamn planet, so I think a lot of people tend to overestimate the audience and try to feel like they know what’s best.  They feel like they can tell people what the audience will buy, what they won’t going forward.  
And I think that is something that has been the bane of a lot of gaming to this point and if I had to give any advice, it would be that, to take a critical look at your audience and what you’re looking in towards.  Gaming isn’t some solitary mass with one feeling, one direction; it’s a homogenous sort of gathering of people with all sorts of various types and flavours and hobbies, things of that nature.  You can’t just log us all as one unit; you have to select what you’re going for, then you have to understand the audience of what you’re going for.  If you’re making an RPG, we don’t want, you know, World War II shooter or something.  That’s just disrespectful to the people you’re trying to get money out of and the fans will respond accordingly.  If you try to disrespect us, we just won’t buy your shit and your company goes under.
If you’re trying to lead a community or something, you have to understand not just about the fans, what the companies are looking for, they have a product that they’re trying to get out there to as many people.  And even if it’s a good product, if there’s no message behind it, the product goes away.  So you have to understand your audience, whether that’s the gamers or the industry as a whole, you need to understand it and you need to not take it for granted.  That’s my – that would be my advice.
Okay.  Is there something you would suggest to players?
My advice to players is probably to be more understanding, because at the moment the player community, despite it being as large and as mainstream as I believe it is now, they play – a lot of the smaller communities will feel that way, because their small corner of the industry isn’t massive, you know, it’s just one part of the giant thing as a whole, so a lot of people get very defensive of their products and it creates to very – a lot of misunderstandings or a lot of unneeded aggression.  
The success of the games industry as a whole is good for every player, regardless of platform.  For example, you know, Halo settling millions of dollars on XBox can only ever mean a good thing, even if all you play is card games on theme because that means there’s more industry.  There’s more eyes on it.  There’s more people focused on it.  Even if someone doesn’t like Halo, they’re like, you know, there’s a lot of money here.  We could probably put something out that could capture some of that opportunity.
So to players, that’s my thought.  Be more understanding of the community, of the players coming into it.  The industry’s growing.  You’re always having new people come into it.  You don’t want to put them off by being racist or misogynist or just generally just a toxic person.  Everybody wants to get into the game at some point and not everyone’s going to be good at the game and just default mode being, you know, rage and go away doesn’t help, so that’s my suggestion to any sort of player is try to be more understanding.  
And the industry as a whole, because it is a massive cluster-fuck of change at the moment and to players because of a similar reason, because it’s expanding and everyone has to get in at the ground floor and you want to make sure that they want to stay in that floor if you want everything to unite.
Okay.  So, we are at the end of the interview.  Is there anything you want to add that came into your mind that you didn’t know when to say or—?
Not really.  The one constant part is I just like video games.  I think – I feel like that’s the mind-set of a lot of people.  This isn’t some sort of, you know, thing; this is their life.  This is their passion, their chosen form of entertainment, for better or good, if that’s, you know, playing the game or, you know, reading reviews, watching streamers on Twitch or other websites, like I do, or if you’re actually participating in part of that community, that’s all we want.  All we want is good games.  We just want games to play.  We want to have fun with our friends, and that’s – that can’t be a bad thing, regardless of – even if games aren’t your chosen form of entertainment, if you’re a movie buff or whatever, I don’t – you know, it shouldn’t be a bad thing that people are getting enjoyment out of something else.  It’s a different game or if it’s a different entertainment medium in general, you know, people just want to enjoy their things.  So that’s my thought.
So, thank you a lot for your time and for your insights.  And if you are interested, I will send you our output after we have analysed the interviews and…
Sure, yeah.
…so I will keep your contact and I will let you know.  Thank you a lot.
Right.  I’d love to read it, and if you ever need anything, if you have more questions, feel free to let me know.
Thank you.  Goodbye.
Alright.  Have a good day.