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

Hello [anonymised], can you hear me?
Yes, I can hear you. 
Okay good.  By the way just so you know, I’m already recording the audio okay. 
Okay, yeah, no worries that’s fine. 
Perhaps when we finish if you can send me back that signed form, that’d be great, for the consent, it’s just we’re covered legally with everything; it’s a procedure.  You can just take a photo of it or whatever.  
Well listen, Miriam says hi, first of all.  Yeah, thanks a lot for helping us out with this, this is really great. 
Yeah, not at all, I’m glad to do it.
It’s always great to meet some of, well sort of meet [anonymised]’s friends, that I see on Facebook and stuff.  So what we’ll do is this, maybe I’ll just you run the procedure and the background for the interview, just as an introduction, then we can start okay.  It should take us about, roughly about an hour, if that’s okay.
Well as you know, it’s part of this European research project that we’re doing called Gaming Horizons and sort of, in a nutshell basically what we’re doing is going to different groups, be they researchers, game developers, educationists, players, policy makers all sorts of different people that are somehow involved in games, and gaming and gamification.  We’re asking them to do these interviews to find out more or less what sort of views they’ve got about games, gaming and gamification, both about themselves and their experience of what they see outside, in the world outside, in society or in different areas, education or society, commerce, whatever.  
So yeah, and this, all these interviews then will be analysed and then we’ll sort of produce some sort of views of how different people see games and gamification and maybe then produce some sort of recommendations or some scenarios about ways that games might be taken forward in different ways.  So that’s just to give you an idea of what it’s about.  
As to the interview itself, basically what we’ll do is this, in the project we’ve already sort of outlined some general themes that we’re sort of investigating, talking to various people about, so we’ll sort of follow those general themes, so I’ll take you through and ask you some questions and as I come onto one of these themes I’ll put a slide, I’ll share the screen with you and you’ll see a slide just with the name of that theme, so then we’ll talk about for a bit.  Once we’ve talked about that, at the end of that part, I’ll show you another slide which is the same but just with some like, some key words associated with that theme, these are sort of things that have come already in the project, and then we’ll look at those and see if we’ve already talked about them, I’ll maybe ask you about one of them, or if you see something that you think you want to comment in those keys words you can then talk about that, okay.  
Sure.  
So I’ll just take you through this succession of the theme and then the key works for a theme and we’ll move from one to the other and then at the end you’ll get the chance to add anything you want to add or make comments or anything.  
Okay. 
Okay, so in terms of the interview itself, basically it’s just, it’s very informal so you don’t have to worry about sort of, making it sound like a journalistic interview or a TV interview, that’s not important because we’ll be analysing the transcript.  So basically you can take as much time as you want to think about themes.  You don’t have to respond immediately and you can correct things, change things, if you want you can also choose not to talk about something, you can say, I don’t want to speak about that, if you want to, it’s up to you, okay.  And of course you can always stop and ask me for clarification or if you’ve got any doubts about what we’re talking about, you can always stop and ask me at any point.  
Okay. 
So let’s get the ball rolling, and I’m just putting up the first slide here, I’ll share my screen with you.  You should, I hope, see the slide, can you see it up there?
Yes, I can see it. 
Right, we’ll start off with just a general introduction, so what I’d like you to do to start off is just say who you are, what your name is, how old you are, what you do, what your background is and what your general experience of games is, we’re talking digital games here, okay. 
Okay, so I’m [anonymised], I’m twenty-one years old, I go to [anonymised] and I thought, you know, for work experience and jobs here and there, I’d work on filming events up and down the country sporadically.  
My gaming history I started gaming fairly young, I think my first console that I got was PlayStation 2 maybe when I was about seven or eight years old.  Then I went onto sort of PC gaming a little bit later, played Dreamscape I think that was my first sort of MMO, like big game, because everyone in my school was playing it at the time.  And then later on I started, I got the PlayStation 3, the addition to PlayStation 2, and then ever since I’ve been a PlayStation gamer.  I’ve never got an XBox.  And then around about fifteen, sixteen years old, tied in with my interests in video and photography, I got a hard core PC, you know, that sort of thing and obviously that opened up me playing much more high graphics and intensity PC games and such, and that got me into PC gaming.  I’ve been a PC gamer since then, up until now.     
More or less how often would you say you played?
Currently?
Hmm-hmm.
Currently, I probably play once every two days if I can, obviously you know, it doesn’t always happen because you never know how busy you’re going to be, but it’s usually like in the evenings, about say eight o’clock ‘til about ten o’clock.  If my friends are online I can talk to this on Discord, which is a software that allows you to talk to people whilst you’re playing games and stuff.  If my friends are online sometimes we might play a big longer, or a bit shorter, we may just talk, I don’t have to play games with them because it’s always nicer to play games with friends, I just think it’s a much nicer experience. 
Okay, so that’s something you do on a regular basis, going to Discord and chat?
Yeah, I’d say fairly regular, like I go onto Discord most evenings, or I try to anyway; you can contact friends, whether we game or not that’s just up to whether we feel like playing a game.  Someone might say, are you up for a game of, for example, Overwatch and then everyone will be, you know, I’m not feeling it right now, but it’s nice to do that.  
Okay, great.  I think that gives us a pretty good picture.  So I’ll just put up that slide with the, with those key words there and you can see-
I’m just going to go landscape because I can’t see all of it.  Okay, yeah I’m there. 
So you’ve mentioned about your experiences and how much time and what, what sort of games would you say you play?
Currently I play three sort of main games, maybe four, depending on what I’m feeling, because obviously, you know, you don’t always feel like playing one sort of game.  So I play an MMO called Guild Wars 2 and that’s a massively multiplayer online role playing game where you’re in a world with your own character, but in this world there are loads of people from all over the world pretty much and everyone’s online, so you can see everyone else and you can interact with them, and I’ve been playing that for, since 2012 actually, when it was first released, when I was playing it a lot.  Yeah, I’ve just been – like I mainly enjoyed that with friends, like up until sort of last year, but my friends stopped playing it, however I continued to play it every time a patch comes up which is roughly every two months, just because I, you know, got invested in the story and I want a continuation of that.  So that’s sort of MMO, and then sports games.  
I play FIFA, which is very popular obviously, because I enjoy football in real life, I support a team, Arsenal.
Good, very good (laughs), that’s the correct answer [anonymised].
Ah there we go.  And then, so that’s been going a long time because obviously in 2004, I think was my first FIFA game, just because I love football and I wanted to play it.  I suppose the theory behind that is, you want to sort of be at that level with your favourite players and all of that so you want to identify with that and the easiest way to do that is system gaming.  So that’s sort of why that happened and also FIFA is a great game to play with friends because you just load it up 2x2 or whatever, you know, it’s good when you’re all together in the same room.  So that’s been going on a while; and then Overwatch is a first-person shooter which I play, probably the game that I play most currently because again with friends online it’s so easy to go in a party and group up and all go in together, and I’ve been playing that since last year when the game came out.  
Then the fourth game is a game which is called Planet Coaster, I’ve been playing that since last year as well.  It’s basically just a theme part simulation game and I owned, probably close to Tycoon 1 and 2 back in the day and I really like theme parks, I like that sort of thing and creation games where you sort of just start off with a blank sandbox and then, you know, you just build whatever you want, whatever you’re feeling, which I think’s really fun and this game took, it took ten years for a new RollerCoaster Tycoon game to come out and when it finally did it was a money grab, so this other company who built the original RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 and 2 then went on to make their own IP game called Planet Coaster and it turned out to be way better than the official company making the new RollerCoaster Tycoon game, so I invested a bit of money into that, in early data and it turned out to be money well spent; and I drop into that every so often just to fill a little creative hole whenever I need to. 
Sure.  That’s interesting, so it’s interesting you mention ‘that was money well spent’, so it is something that you invest money in as well as your time and effort, and interest and so on.  
Oh definitely.  I mean the thing about gaming stations, I never like to pre-order a game because, you know, there’s incentives for you to do so, you know, you might get an extra thing or get credit, you know, you never know really what the game’s going to be like until it comes out, so I’m always sceptical of, well you know, to pre-order a game.  But in this case, with Planet Coaster, like the developers showed off loads of game play and a lot of things and promised a lot of good things about it before, like well before it even came out, that you can show things like what we’re going to do in the future with it, and to help – because it was quite, you know, not the biggest company in the world, they needed a bit of money to start funding that game and – so I bought it when it was in early output.
And then obviously I got an early copy of the game and everything and the community kind of grew bigger and bigger as people realised, oh wow, they’re actually doing something quite special here that developers aren’t really in this day and age, like they’re listening to feedback on the forums and building up the game through what their community are saying to them.  So you know, it was quite nice to see, and quite refreshing to see that kind of level of communication between the developers and the community playing the game. 
So do you think that changed your experience in some way, getting on board in the alpha stage, compared to other game experiences?
I think yeah, definitely, it was – obviously something that helps fuel your interest in a game is going online and looking at other people playing that game as well, and in the case of Planet Coaster, obviously lots of, because it’s a building game you go onto YouTube and you see people creating one-percent on their YouTube channels in the game, and you look at it and think like, oh my god how can people do that, that is just, it’s insane, like the level of detail and creativity to be able to do some of the stuff, and then you go on the credit, the game has a credit page and people talking about different stuff that they like and it starts discussions and then you start getting into some of these discussions, you may even start one yourself, and then that obviously, you know, it makes you feel like, even though it’s a single player game it makes you feel like there’s more people invested in it and more people around doing what you’re doing. 
When you feel you’re getting an inkling, an idea of what other people are doing with it through the YouTube videos and stuff. 
Yeah obviously and in that way you learn different techniques and you get inspiration and you can share inspiration with other people as well, and that definitely adds to your want to, you know, to keep playing the game I suppose. 
Sure.  Well that actually, that brings us on really, really nicely to the next general theme, okay, so we’ll just move that on; which is games and the individual.  So it seems, if I understand from what you were saying, you were talking about the way you become personally very engaged in the gaming activity, both through the game play and also interacting with other games around the game, is that an accurate summation of how you see your engagement in the game building up?
Yeah, so I’m not quite sure I understand what you’re asking. 
Yeah just whether, I was interested in this idea that what seemed to me that you seemed to become engaged in games, like both through the game play and through the sharing, communicating with others outside of the game, sharing videos and stuff, that seems to be an important part of becoming engaged in the game. 
Yeah, oh definitely, I think that an online scene and not just any online scene, a positive online scene for a game is extremely important for a game, because half the time, whatever the game is, I mean unless it’s something like FIFA and you know people are going to buy your game anyway, then it doesn’t really matter, because they’re going to sell copies.  But I think for any sort of new game, a new developer, although even sometimes big games can have bad publicity or bad, negatives online.  But in like the, I think one of the recent Call of Duty trailers came out and it had one of the biggest number of dislike views on YouTube and apparently they didn’t do very well in the sales because of it.  I think people were just getting tired of being the same, you know, recycled stuff, over and over again, that’s an example of where – it’s so extreme that backlash that the online community has, you know, been a detriment to it, to the game.  
But like if you look at any game that’s doing well it will definitely have a massive online scene, it will have discussions, it will have, you know, a large amount of people looking at YouTube, videos about it, Twitch streaming is also a big thing, because if you go onto Twitch and you look at – you go to browse, it lists in order the top games being streamed at that time, like how many viewers are looking at that game.  So you generally find stuff like MOBAs at the top where they’ve got a big sort of following, in eSports, for gaming, which can also help a game become very popular, because it’s got a good competitive scene and people want to watch it.  Because you can have a very high skill cap and that leads to sort of becoming professional in that game, and therefore, you know, tournaments and stuff, and because it’s very hard to get to that stage, people want to watch that, it’s like any sport really.  
I think the biggest one is Dota 2 where they have a tournament every year called The International.  And I actually went to a bar two years ago with a couple of friends, in London, and they had this whole bar set up as a large screen to watch this, you know, a final of this gaming tournament.  And it was quite surreal, because it’s just not an environment I expected to find myself in; people gathered round a screen in a swanky bar watching essentially a game. 
Other people playing a game, yeah. 
But like the atmosphere in there was just so encapsulating, you couldn’t help but get, you know, drawn into it and it was actually really exciting to watch in the end.  You know and obviously spending time up in London, having a few drinks with your mates, you know, that helps as well.  I’ve gone off track a little bit.
No, no, that’s fine.  Actually I was going to ask you about that because all of this really strong engagement of people in the games, and outside the games and so forth, and it’s, I think interesting sometimes from the outside that you get – I don’t know if you’ve heard people who voice some concerns about how much time people play, or dedicate, the different way they dedicate time and energy to digital games.  Have you ever come across those sorts of reactions?
I think myself, I’ve played with a few people in Amoeba, which is like a most highly skilled cap game I think I’ve ever played, because it’s built for that, it’s built for eSports, it’s built for people coming as good as you can get, and the people that got me into that – I’ve got friends now who did take it quite seriously and they were like, you know, sort of training once a day sort of thing to try and get better at it.  But it’s like, at the end of the day that was nothing that serious in comparison to, I don’t know, I watched a documentary actually not too long ago on how professionals get to the level of being in eSport and it’s like anything in life, you want to become the best of the best, it’s like working every single day, every hour, dedicating your life, your eating pattern, your routine, just so you can be the best, like even practising finger combinations in your spare time when you’re sitting on the bus or something to try and get your muscle memory to work out the best way to go about it.  
It was just so, like the documentary, I can’t remember what it was called actually, but it was so interesting to see, you know, the effect of just pixels on a screen essentially and how that just controlled peoples’ lives.  And obviously because it’s gaming you have that backlash of people who are saying it’s not a real job, or you know, like, and the way they earn money is through winning tournaments, so you’re not always guaranteed a pay cheque at the end of the day, you know so, only if you can win.  
In this documentary you had, you know, like the kids, they’re about late teens into their twenties, and you had their parents sort of, you know, backlashing and saying, why’re you spending all this time on gaming when you should be at school and starting working a job, and they try and tell these parents that, you know, this is what I want to do when I grow up, this is a job essentially.  Like the amount of money potentially I could be earning is very high, like some of these tournaments go to like, you know, ten-million, tens of millions of dollars of prize money, so it can be very profitable if you can get there, it’s just, you know, it’s the sacrifices you have to make and some of those sacrifices are pretty extreme, you know, to the extent of side-lining your parents almost.  
Okay, yeah it’s really, really interesting because it, for me it brings up that sort of level of dedication I’m thinking comparisons with things like say basketball in the US where you’ve got this very, very, very competitive atmosphere around young people trying to make it, to become pro-basketball players and I imagine something, it sounds like something like this is true in the eSports arena as well.  
What about the others that aren’t going to make it though, that’s the other side of the coin isn’t it?
Yeah, well in this documentary it did cover like, some people just go back to living their day to day lives because they just don’t, it’s either they can’t get to where they want to go or they just don’t enough dedication to get there, and they just end up sort of accepting that that’s the way it is, go back to, you know, it’s difficult to say ‘normal life’, you know, in comparison to what they wanted to do is, you know, this fairly normal way.  
It’s a shame because, I feel like this problem will slowly disappear as time goes on because I feel like eSport’s getting bigger and bigger and that obviously makes the lower tiers more profitable as well, so even if you’re, you want to become a professional gamer, but you’re not the best, of the best, you could still sort of compete and be earning money, enough to sustain yourself.  So I feel like it’s getting bigger and I feel like in the future, say in maybe twenty-thirty years’ time it will be sort of classed as a proper sport, because more people will watch it and generations grow older, that’s just what will happen I think. 
So let’s just have a look, I’m just flashing up there the next slide with those key words.  You talked a lot about the immersion and engagement in those activities and you mentioned before some of the cognitive abilities that you saw developed through these, such as memory and attention, problem-solving, is that something that you have a feeling that is developed through gameplay as well?
Oh yeah definitely, I think problem-solving is very important for some games in order to reach their audience.  I think the best thing to talk about is problem Guild Wars 2, the MMO that I play, because back in the day, like about a year ago, and then before then, me and my friends were playing this game and it sort of relies on, the whole way it works is, you know, you start as nothing, literally you go in a world, you’ve got like no money, no nothing and then just like a few skills, weapons and stuff, and then you sort of work your way up by doing quests and challenges and stuff, and you get slowly and slowly to the point where you’re one of the best sort of skilled capped level players in the game.  
Then obviously like dungeons and brains opens up to you, and then this is where the problem-solving comes in because when you go into a dungeon you’re with four other people and you can group up with them, whoever you like, so I was with my friends and we had like a five-man dungeon and essentially these dungeons are all about working out how to, like you’ll get a series of sort of mobs, which are just enemies and bosses, which are the big, you know, end game stuff, these challenges and the way it works is, you have a dungeon leader and their, and your job, is to kind of work out the best and most efficient way to go about killing these mobs and bosses, and each sort of, they’re designed so each instance has different mechanics and different ways around killing this boss, and I think that most of the fun you get out of it is, you know, finally finding that way to beat a boss and killing it, and I think the most extreme circumstance I’ve ever been in of this is, we started about at ten, a game at night and where it was five people in there and we go through all the dungeon, it was probably one of the hardest dungeons we’ve ever done, and it got to about one o’clock.
So this is three hours in and we’re finally at the final boss and it’s like a big treelike thing, it’s stomping on the ground, it has like electricity all across the floor, like how the hell are we going to do this, an hour later still not done it, and then it got to about four or five o’clock and just when you’re thinking you’re grasping it, everyone’s really tired and like, you know, it’s pretty much, we want to get to bed and – so at that stage we pretty much worked out how to do the boss, but it was so taxing that it was, you know, we just couldn’t physically pull off some of the plays, and some of the stuff requires reaction time and you know being able to sort of be in the right place at the right time, otherwise, and this is everyone, like all at the same time, otherwise it’s a wipe and everybody essentially has to restart.  So in that instance we’d had to cool it and do it all over again you know another time, but this time obviously knowing what we had to do, so we did it a lot quicker, but that was really fun at the end of it, because it was just the pure elation of finding and defeating this thing, that we’d all been working on for such a long time.  It was like that joint euphoria.
Yeah, I know what you mean, yeah.  It sounds, actually I was thinking while you were describing that, that one of the, as you can see, the other key words up there is collaboration and competition and it sounds like the collaboration is a very important part of that. 
Oh yeah. 
With problem-solving and getting engaged in what you’re doing.  
Absolutely.  I think that most games rely on either collaboration or competition because I think that that’s where you get the most excitement out of games; being able to achieve a goal with your friends that’s harder at the end, you know, it taking a long time but at the end of the day it’s all, you know, you call come together to achieve that goal, that just creates that euphoria feeling like I was describing before.
And the competition is, I just think that all stems from like, you know, the survival of man and getting one up, I mean obviously it was more extreme back then, but you know, these days there’s not really too much of that in life so in a virtual environment you can really amp up the pressure and pretty much put yourself in a world which you’re never, ever going to be in in real life, and especially with your friends, if you can beat them and get one over you sort of have bragging rights and, you know, for however long until you play your next game.  It’s just a really good feeling and if no one gets too sulky or angry about anything, it’s all a laugh in the end and you can all agree that it’s just a game, and why do you have to be mad.  
That’s really interesting you were saying, have you had the experiences where people find it harder to keep that sort of perspective that it’s just a game, do you ever see that happening?
Oh yeah, when you immersed in that environment you’re pretty much relying on just your skill alone to stop, I don’t know, it’s like, hmm, it’s hard to describe.  Because sometimes you’re relying on your skill alone to win a game or sometimes there could be something that’s completely out of your control that happens and then you’re like, you know, I could’ve won that if it wasn’t for this thing, and I suppose that’s where some of the, kind of, you know, the hot-headedness comes in when you’re like, you know, I was better, but if it wasn’t for this thing, but you know, at the end of the day – the experiences with my friends is, we’ve always, even though there’s been a bit of like rage here and there, but it’s usually, we all understand that it’s just a game and we’re all just having a bit of fun.  
I’ve never really been in the experience where someone’s, you know, totally just lost it and said like, you know, I’m leaving and I’m not your friend or whatever, like that’s never happened, so I’ve never been in that environment but I know it does happen because obviously all the YouTube videos online of people smashing controllers, you know, like throwing stuff at their monitors and stuff, which I can kind of understand how that happens, because you know, everyone’s different, but you know, I think we will just, or me and my friends are all just logical enough to know when enough is enough.  I hope that helps, and makes sense. 
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.  I was just wondering whether, you were talking about these people that get really, perhaps hot-headed and lose it a bit and go over the top, and then taking it out on their own screens and stuff, do you ever find that ever spills out into, onto Discord or other, the way people in an MMO interact with each other, does that sort of ever flame up?
Oh yeah, definitely, I think when you’re, when I’m online and I’m playing games you’ll see frequently people, especially in competitive games, I think that’s, where it’s the worst, is you see people just losing it, you know, saying like, oh such a bad team, or, like for example in Overwatch if you go into, just to quick play a game and you’re with five other people that you don’t know, and for example, you lose the game, you’ll see people like swearing in the chat and obviously it’s censored so it’s just stars, but you know what they’re saying pretty much.  Yeah you see people swearing, you see people saying in the group chat like, oh it’s such a bad team, like if it wasn’t for this team I would’ve won, and you definitely see people absolutely losing it; and also Overwatch has voice chat as well, so if you choose to you can hear what other people are saying.  
Ah okay. 
Sometimes that can be quite fun if you get people that are just, you know, they just don’t at all keep their cool and go off on one, but yeah.  I think that maybe happens when you’re playing the games. 
Do you know is that something that you need to watch, hearing other peoples’ live comments and stuff on chat while they’re playing?
Is it something I what sorry?
It that unique to that game, Overwatch, where you can actually hear peoples’ reactions as they’re playing?
Oh no, I mean most, a lot of, not all of them, but most competitive online games on PC will have an option for voice chat and text chat.  For example, a collaboration game, Guild Wars, it doesn’t have voice chat because for obvious reasons, like you’ll have a thousand people speaking in one area and you just wouldn’t be able to hear anyone, but it has text chat and it’s actually a good example of a map game of people using text chat for good because it’s like, because there’s no competition, because everyone’s sort of going towards the same goal, you’re always seeing sort of nicer stuff in the chat, and actually Guilds is a good example of one of the best games I’ve played for that, because it’s, you know, there’s no reason to get enraged or anything, because nothing ever happens to make you raged.  You may, you know, you can still like die or that sort of thing, but it’s always your own fault, like it’s never someone else’s, so there’s no reason to get raged at the chat.  But yeah.
Okay, good, one last area there is physical activity, how do you see the impact of games on physical activity?
It’s an interesting one, yeah I’ll be a bit honest here, in my teenage years I probably did less physical activity, like outside because I was gaming a bit too much.  I’ve always been very sporty all my life and when I was about thirteen I did get a, I fractured my wrist, like just below the wrist and that put me out of action of sports for quite a while, and even to this day I can’t really play like really heavy wrist activities like tennis and stuff.  But like, so that had a bit of an impact on why I didn’t do quite as much sport in my teenage years, but I feel like, yeah I didn’t do quite as much just because I could be indoors and on my computer.  
But then, you know, it’s difficult to say, you know, because I still feel like I did a lot, like I was playing football like three times a week and that sort of thing, and I’m not really the most extreme person when it comes to, you know, just leaving the outside world for games, because at the end of the day gaming for me is always a secondary activity, if I could be doing something else more productive, I would be.  So there’s that, and in recent years actually I’ve definitely sort of, you know, come to that conclusion that it is, you know, gaming is an enjoyment, it is a pastime, but it’s not like, you know, something my life revolves around at all. 
Sure.  
And since like last year I’ve been running more, so I definitely get enough exercise.  When it comes to other people I haven’t run into too many experiences where gaming has sort of totally overtaken their lives.  But I know it definitely happens, because you see online all the time, like people with, for example, in Guild Wars where, it’s a game based on how much sort of time you spend in the game, you know, how much gear you have and that sort of stuff, and you see people online with like thousands of gold and like the best item in the game and you’re like, obviously you must’ve been spending a hell of a lot of time in games to get to that stage, and obviously different games have different ways of telling when people have played a lot.  And you’re like, you’re kind of sometimes curious, so you work it out and you go onto your calculator and you’re like, okay to get this, how much time must have they spent, and you look and it’s like, how, seven hours a day, how the hell, you know, like how the hell can you spend seven hours a day playing a game, it must hurt; you know, I suppose some do.  So yeah, that’s very much my experience. 
It was interesting you mentioned there about your running, because running, jogging and so forth, that seems to be one of those areas where games has sort of been coming into that physical activity and using games and gamification to get people running as well. 
Yeah, I’ve never crossed to myself, but – are you talking like Wii sports and that sort of thing, or?
Well there’s that level, yes of Wii sports and stuff, and there’s also, I’m thinking like gaps, some sort of running apps and things are linked with watches and stuff, that they’ve actually gamified the process to try and make it into a game. 
Okay, yes, so I wasn’t quite sure what level you were speaking there, but yeah.  I do actually own an Apple Watch now, and that’s because of my running.  Like when I started a year ago I was, I had my phone on my arm, and I was sort of tracking my stats through there, and also listening to music on the go, but with the massive phone on my arm it just wasn’t comfortable and I was always finding when I was running round that I was having like irritations or it slipping and stuff like that, and I just couldn’t concentrate on what I wanted to do, was run, and sort of the aim to get better and better.
so I bought the Apple Watch because it had all the fitness functionality that I wanted and it also had the links to the iPhone and that side of social stuff as well, so for me it was the perfect purchase, I’m not saying for everyone it is, because you know, not everyone, not everyone’s lifestyle suits it, but for me it’s been great, because it’s literally, I can leave my phone at home, I can put it on my wrist, I can wirelessly play music through it, to my ears and it tracks your timing, your heart rate and everything, it gives you live updates as you go round, so I’ve definitely noticed an improvement and my pace, and for about a month I must’ve improved my pacing by about a minute per mile, so – and I honestly believe it was down to the Apple Watch because you’re always thinking about your time and you’re always thinking about how fast you’re going, and just apps and stuff like that have definitely improved my experience of exercise outside. 
Have you ever been tempted to try out one of those ones that actually make it into a game, like a gamified version?
I have actually, one of Miriam’s friends, Annie, told me about this, oh no, it must’ve – I think it was Howard actually told me about this one which is, like it puts you in the environment of, like an apocalyptic world and it kind of has sound effects and a narrative whereby you’re being chased by zombies and it’s like, obviously you know, there’s nothing behind you but if you’re listening to all of that and – because when you’re running you’re always looking forward anyway, so you don’t look what’s behind you.  I kind of, I’m interested in finding out what that would be like, just to kind of, put yourself in that environment where zombies are chasing you and like the narratives telling you, they’re getting faster, so you’ve got to run faster and, that’d be quite fun actually.  I’d be interested in trying something like that.  
Well that actually brings us on nicely to the next theme, I’ll just put up the next thing, which is different applications of games, so in this case you might say that an app like that is an application of gamification to gamify the activity of jogging, to get people more active and so forth.  Have you ever played any sort of gamified activities, or games themselves where you think, or you had the idea, or the impression, or the goal that it was something as well and in addition to the entertainment of games that had actually some sort of specific application?
So are you talking about games that sort of, that are linked to your phones by having like an app on your phone that adds your game experience?
No, in this case application is more – sorry, I’m just getting a call through here.  Sorry about that.  No in this case as in games applied to a feel, like we’re saying apply to jogging, or running, or exercise, or apply to learning or apply to training, these sort of things.  Have you ever had any experience with those sorts of games, applied to different things?
Let me think, I’m trying to figure out if I have.  
Sometimes say like in school, or in university or professional training, these sorts of things, games are used.
Yeah, well other than a pastime like when you just, like on the Tube or whatever and you’ve got a basic like, tap to jump sort of game just to pass the time, I can’t really think myself that I’ve used a game for any sort of outdoor, or to enhance the outdoor experience, and I probably have just forgotten to be honest. 
And you’ve never, like when you were at school or at uni, that none of your lecturers or teachers or anyone never used games for learning to teach different subjects or things?
I think at school, yeah it happened, you know a bit, maybe – definitely my younger days, like at prep school we had games to help teach us languages and games to help teach us – I think IT was the biggest one, because IT can be quite taxing in terms of understanding how coding works, it can be quite boring.  So stuff like you’ll have a robot on screen app and your job is to get the robot to move by putting in codes you get the robot to move and that’s, I suppose, a way in which gaming has made learning a bit more fun.  
There was also, I distinctively remember in the past, a game called, actually no, I can’t remember what it was called, but it was all about this sort of fox who was, he was a French fox and it was, you were following this fox through its story, throughout France and it was teaching you different things about the French language, I remember completing it actually, so it can’t have been that bad.  Ah yeah, although I can’t really remember it, it definitely was the narrative that pulled you through and helped you learn and made it more interesting to learn French phrases and the language.  
Yeah, at sort of high school it happened a bit, I think with maths, obviously maths is quite a good one because you can just say, oh you’ve got a scenario here, you know on the screen and I think they used like apples and oranges, just statistics, how many apples and oranges do each person get like, I don’t know, it’s a scenario where you sort of divide up apples and oranges, but sure, you know, and that was in game or something and it helps learning, but I suppose in high school you don’t really need that quite as much because you’re always committed into learning, you know, whatever, every, you need that level of engagement it just makes it a little bit more, and easier to digest.  
Okay.  So you see it almost like a sort of sugar on the pill sort of thing, that just makes the flavour of it a little bit more interesting. 
Yeah, absolutely, and I think that’s definitely the best way to describe it.  
At university I don’t think it’s really happened, because film and TV is quite visual itself, so you don’t really need anything else.  It’s all in the experience itself, and I suppose when you get to university anyway you’re doing what you love, so you’re just invested in learning that as much as you can, because you love what you’re studying.  
Right, so the motivation’s—
You don’t need anything else to enhance that experience. 
Okay, that’s very interesting.  Okay, well I’m just putting up the next slide here with some of the key words about applications of games and you mentioned there things like school and learning, serious games, the sport you mentioned earlier.  There’s also gamification, have you had any experience with that?
I feel like I’ve heard the word before, but could you remind what it means?
Well it’s actually different people see it in very different ways, but I guess the most, I suppose the standard definition is when you get game mechanics that are typical of games where they’re applied to things outside of games to try to engage people in activities.  So it might be things like the running one we were talking before, so if you’ve got things like leader boards and points and rewards, and badges, these sorts of things, where they’re applied to an activity that isn’t of itself a game.  
Right.  Hmm, well I suppose the running app that I have now is, it’s the My Running app, so it’s not really technically on the game level, but what it has is this little section of achievements and stuff, and kind of leader boards, oh actually, I’ll come onto leader boards in a second, but it’s effectively, like little medals you gain, like how long you’ve run and like your fastest times and stuff like that, and actually that can be quite useful in terms of, okay, that’s my fastest minute per mile, I’m going to try next time to get better than that, and I suppose in that way you’re internally beating yourself, to try and get better and better and in that way I suppose you could almost say like you’re playing a game with yourself. 
In terms of the competition, which I just thought of, which is quite interesting, it actually, every single Sunday it has a thing called Just Do It Sunday, where if you run you get put onto a leader board, you have to run five kilometres to qualify, but it puts you onto a leader board with everybody that’s run that five kilometres on that Sunday, and you can compare yourself throughout, how many people in the world have done this and see where you come essentially like in the world.  
So it’s almost like a virtual race you’re having, and obviously there’s no one around you when you run, but virtually when you get back and link it all to your phone you can see that, you know, you’ve essentially run with 200,000 people the same distance, on the same leader board, just on a different route, and that can be quite cool to see.  And that definitely has actually got me running on Sundays, because it’s nice to compare yourself to the world, and like every Sunday if you’ve gone up a couple of thousand places or whatever, that could be quite good to see as well.  
I suppose some people in like the top ten, they could get very competitive, so you know, that could definitely be something that I would say is gamification on a loose level. 
Yeah, definitely, okay.  Good, that’s really interesting.  Earning with games, I think we’ve mentioned, you’ve covered that quite a lot in talking about the eSports and people who now actually make a living out of playing the game apart from just, as well as making them and commercialising.  
Okay, so I think we can move on now to the next theme, general theme, which is ethical issues.  Have you had any sort of experiences or thoughts, or heard of people discussing different sorts of ethical issues connected with games and gaming?
Yeah definitely, I think quite an interesting thing to think about when it comes to this topic is if you look at a lot of eighteen rates games, and obviously they’re eighteen rated for a reason, they’ve got drugs and alcohol abuse, and this sort of stuff and, you know, if you’re eighteen and over it’s your choice to make whether you want to expose yourself to this sort of material.  But ironically it’s these sort of games you find the youngest community on, and like Call of Duty, which is an eighteen rated game, has sort of this online unwritten sort of stigma around it for being heavily populated with like twelve to thirteen year olds, they’re called Squeakers because squeakers because, you know, their voices haven’t broken yet, yeah you can hear them online screaming all the time.  
It does make a thing because they can’t have just gone into a shop and bought these games themselves, you know, I suppose when you buy them online you don’t really need identification of your age, so they could just have bought them online or downloaded them online.  So you know, it could be that, but also quite a lot of them will have their parents buying the games for them as well, which is obviously, I would say that it’s probably down to their parents whether they think their child is mature enough, but at twelve or thirteen, I think that might be a little bit too extreme to be playing a game that’s rated eighteen, for those reasons.  
You know, and, it’s like – you know, I mean I can’t really talk for myself I played my first Call of Duty at fourteen and that wasn’t through my parents buying it, that was because I was round someone else’s house and they had the game, and to be honest in, I couldn’t really see too much wrong with it, and whether you can say that it makes, it influences more people, like younger people to, like exposing them all to guns and that sort of thing, it’s hard to say, because there’s no real proof that those two things are linked.  
I actually studied this sort of thing back in GCSE, in media studies, where more panics are surrounded by games and how like events in real life are kind of sometimes put on games.  Like for example, the Columbine shooting back in the day, I think the papers sort of blamed the fact that the teenagers who instigated the shooting played a shooter game on their computers, and because that was the easiest thing at the time to blame, like all the media and stuff focused it on that rather than something like, oh their parents didn’t bring them up well, or the exposure, or how easy they could access guns at their age.  Because I don’t know, it’s almost like the media loves to blame what’s easy to blame, because they know that they’re going to get no backlash from it.
Because I mean if you look at it this way, at the end of the day, who’s going to end up buying the papers and watching the news, it’s going to be the parents of these children and it’s so much easier to blame stuff like video games and, I can’t even remember what else, but you know there’s lots of easy things just to, to blame and all the major stuff is swept under the rug, for example like, gun laws in the US, why’s that never blamed?  Because if no one had access to guns, these things just wouldn’t happen, or if their parents had been more attentive in their lives and told them what’s right and wrong, again you could argue that these things would never happen.  
So although, you know, a lot of games involve killing and guns, and violence and this sort of stuff, I think that’s more down to putting people in a world which then they can’t be exposed to in real life.  It’s, I think it’s like what Richard Dyer said, is sort of, his theory about how it creates a, gaming creates a utopian world from real life, so you immerse yourself in a world which you’re never, ever, going to find yourself in, or it’s extremely unlikely.  
So it’s a fantasy, definitely a fantasy of emitting that sense. 
Yeah, definitely.  For example like, I mean that’s probably the main reason I play FIFA, is because I enjoy football, well like playing football but I’m never going to play at the top level of football, because I know how hard it is to get there and how much that takes.  And obviously at my age like I’m never going to, you know, now get there because you have to start at a really young age, that sort of thing.  But obviously that feels, that whole, it’s essentially bridging the gap between reality and what you deem to be out of reach.  
It’s interesting what you’re saying about bridging, this idea of bridging reality between, bridging between reality and the virtual idea.  Also the same happens isn’t it with identities in the sense you were talking like before with the different MMOs and that people assuming different identities, playing out and playing with different identities.  
Yeah, I will say the thing about MMOs it’s incredibly easy to spread your own identity because the character customisation is, allows you to do that.  For example, you can play any of the five races, all of which have both genders and from there, you know, you can get your character to look pretty much exactly how you want.  So there are about ways to make the character look how you want to look and then how you customise that character with armour and dyes and colours and that sort of thing, and you can change them pretty much whenever you like.  
So pretty much you have a scenario where everyone’s in this fantasy world which they’re then going to experience, set in a, a storyline, sort of – just kind of, you know, sort of, I’m trying to find the word, a storyline that’s been encapsulated by a certain law that’s been created by the game developers.  And you’ve got a scenario where’s there’s hundreds of thousands of people who all could run into one another at any point, but every single one of those is going to look different.  So I think that that’s kind of what you asked me, and the ways people can diversify themselves to do it. 
Does that, do you think, raise any ethical issues?  Because it opens up so many different possibilities doesn’t it of behaving and reacting with people in different ways?  Do you think it has ethical implications?
I mean I think in some games it can, Guild Wars isn’t a great example because I suppose the controlled thing about it is you can never look too kind of extreme, like I don’t know, for example, like in a – because I mean the age rating it can’t allow you to do something that’s untowards.  But I suppose in something like Call of Duty, you can customise like emblems and stuff, so you can pretty much have anything you want to on your profile or any picture you kind of wanted, so whatever comes up, you know the horrible things that you can put on your profile that pretty much anyone can see because like I said, twelve year olds and thirteen year olds play that game as well.  
So yeah, like I don’t think there’s anything wrong with expressing yourself in the way that you want in gaming, just, you know, it depends on what the game developers allow you to do I suppose.  Because at the end of the day it’s all controlled through there, and it’s the game developers’ responsibility to make a game that’s appropriate for its community and its target market.  
Okay, good.  So on that point we’ll just bring up the next slide which has got the, some of key words that have come up related to ethical issues.  So things like identity and diversity you mentioned there about taking on different genders and races and things, and you mentioned the thing with violence and aggression and so forth.  What about monetisation, do you think there are ethical implications on monetisation?
I don’t think so, because at the end of the day if a game developer decides that they want to charge for a certain thing in a game, or there’s an app that has add-ons which you pay for, at the end of the day it’s the consumers’ sort of choice whether they want to pay that or not, and I just think it’s just a way of making more money and I think that it becomes the stage where it’s unfair that the developer is making you pay for exclusive content in a game, if people deem that unfair they’re just going to lose popularity and more people will stop playing that game.  So I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with it, although like I said, it’s on the bit where the game developers themselves to control what is appropriate, like what’s an appropriate level of monetisation.  
Yes, because there’s also the reverse side of that medallion if you like, is the piracy issue as well. 
Oh yes, of course. 
Which I guess is considered an ethical issue. 
So I think that’s getting better and better because every single person I know who plays games doesn’t pirate games and I’ve never pirated a game myself, because I think that games are so easily accessible to us through, just like for example, I’ve got my computer in front of me here and I’ve got two apps open, just to sort of help myself remember some things.  One’s called Steam, which you’ve probably heard it and it’s a store which has thousands and thousands of games on it, some of them free, some of them you pay for.  
But if I wanted to play any game I could think of, I could literally go on here and have a look at what sort of games are in that category and they’re usually pretty reasonably priced.  And I think that the piracy side of things only comes to it when a game is quite clearly overpriced for what it is, and loads of people want to play it, which is never really the case because if someone creates a game that everyone wants to play then they can charge a higher amount and people pay it.  
And then if someone creates a really cool game that hasn’t had a lot airtime and investment into it and it’s charged a lot, people just won’t buy it and they won’t want to play it either because there’s just no point.  So [it’s not pirated either 1:06:34] and – but yeah.  I think in the past it was a problem, but it’s not a problem now.  It’s not like the film industry, I think the film industry’s much worse than the gaming industry right now with regards to piracy, because I don’t think it’s quite as easily accessible, like if you want to watch a film it’s not quite as easily accessible to purchase something, or, because mainly because it’s so easy just to go onto sites like 123movies, just type in a movie and it’s there, like you can watch it just, you know, it happens. 
On the spot, yeah. 
It’s literally, it will take you a second to find it and watch it, so in terms of that it’s bad for the industry but in order for the industry to compete they need to make it easy for people to watch their content.  Because DVDs are still a thing, because people like to have these copies.  But they are dying out and I don’t really know, do people go out and buy DVDs, because, well especially in this country, streaming is such a big thing these days that I don’t think I’ve bought a DVD for years now to be honest.  
And actually that’s the same with games as well, I can’t really remember, I think the only thing I’ve bought in a box is Deeper, because I like have the Deepers in a line on a shelf, but it’s just something that I did, but like any game I have these days I’ll download it online.  Again because it’s so much easier and hard drive space is becoming more and more and more, internet speeds are also a big contributor to that.  You know, like it’s so fast like I have a game which is about thirty-five gigabytes, which back in, a couple of years ago, would’ve taken you may be like two or three hours to download, now it takes you fifteen minutes, so it’s not even, like a massive game and it’s so easy to just get and access without getting a physical copy. 
Right, so those things you seem to be tracing a picture where things have changed and are changing quite rapidly, and actually that could bring us on quite well to the next general them, which is games in society, okay.  So now we’re perhaps thinking in terms, sort in more general terms about whether, or how, or whether you see games, gaming as an activity, or the games themselves, gamification, as having an influence in one way or another on society, whether they be social influence, or cultural influence or those sorts of things, innovations and so forth. 
Yeah, I think the best thing to talk about in regard to that is probably virtual reality, I think virtual reality, unlike 3D, is not just a gimmick because it’s so useful for so many things.  And in the past few years virtual reality has taken off massively, and you see all the major, like gaming corporations like Sony and Microsoft, heavily investing into it, because it is something that I think in the future, people will start to see much more of.  
Like, not just in the gaming sense, where you put the headset on and you immerse yourself in the environment, like you’re actually there, which is quite big.  I’ve never tried it myself, but it’s definitely one of those things which I want to try because it’s really cool.  But just the stuff like, you know, I think it’s people like art designers who can put the headset on and they’re able to do their art, or design their buildings, or you know, create their virtual worlds in this 3D space and it’s like they’re in their living room, but in their living room they might have like the Empire State Building just sitting there in the room, like reach out and almost stroke it.  
You know, like the buildings and stuff, and for art, it’s something which can save time massively on the sort of designing process.  So in terms of that I think through gaming and the want for people to be literally in those worlds themselves, you know, and blank themselves off from reality, so yeah, so through that and through virtual reality sort of building through that, it’s also spread into other areas in real life, in peoples’ professions and making things easier for people.  
Yeah, it’s interesting you saying, you’ve mentioned art as a possible avenue that that might take, so you see the applications of games and virtual reality in art as being a future direction perhaps?
Oh yeah definitely, because I can’t, I don’t mean, I’ve never done it myself, but I’ve seen videos of people who put the virtual reality headset on and they’ve got like a virtual paintbrush in their hand and they can literally see it, like when they stick their arm out, they see their arm out with a paintbrush on the end.  And they’re like going round this 3D space and painting pictures and like colourful lines or whatever and they can literally, when they’re walking round it, they’re walking around a 3D thing that they’ve just put there, you know, in their room and they can still see their room.  But in the middle of the room there’s this thing they’ve just created, that’s something that was never before possible without virtual reality and applications, allowing them to do this.  
Okay, I’ll just put up some of those key words that have come up related to games in society, so you’ve mentioned art and games there, and some, perhaps innovations in games like virtual reality and entered reality and things, are there any sort of general cultural changes that you have seen or think will come about through games?
Yeah, I think there’s been a slight shift in the way people spend time over, like just pastime over the last ten years, I think.  Because for example for mum, and my dad, they’re not gamers at all, so the way I’ve ended up playing games has been through online communities and friends telling me about stuff, that’s pretty much what got me into it.  And the way my parents spend their time is, like in the evening they’ll be watching TV or whatever and, you know, sometimes they say to me, well especially in my teenage days, when I was playing maybe a little bit too much, they’d say like, should you be playing quite so much, you know, games and stuff.  
But then I’d throw back the argument to them, well in the evenings what’re you doing, you’re just watching TV, this is just my way of spending my free time, which you know, is fair enough.  And although that, like I probably was – they were right, they were definitely right.  But like at the end of the day I think it’s just a shift in how people are spending their free time.  If you look, like in the streets or on the Tube, you’ll see people on their phones, like playing these little touch games and stuff, spending time, whereas before they might’ve been listening to music, or perhaps they’re listening to music and playing games at the same time.  
I think that’s definitely, although because of social media and the way that’s taken off in the last ten years as well, that’s had an influence in the way people socialise in real life as well.  Like when you go into a pub or something you’ll see way more people on phones these days rather than a couple of years ago for example.  Which again, it’s a shame to see it because, you know, when I go into a pub with people, I like to put my phone away and sit down and have a good conversation rather than, you know, start tapping away or swiping away, or whatever.  Because I feel like that’s kind of the break from it, this world, when maybe ten years ago the gaming and the social online activity was the break from real life.  Whereas these days sometimes people treat talking to actual people as a break from their online life as it were. 
I see what you mean, yeah. 
Definitely for some people it’s been a shift in how long they spend on online gaming rather than real experiences.  
Sure.  
And how much they go out for example.  I mean through gaming and such, and being, or staying with my London friends online, that’s definitely, probably made me stay in more in the evenings than I usually would.  Because I could either go out sometimes, or I could go, you know what, I’m feeling quite chilled, I’m just going to stay in, go on Discord, talk to my friends, whether we go, whether we play games or not, it doesn’t really matter to me, but by definitely having that online community has made me, I suppose it’s not being bored when you stay in sometimes, it breaks it up. 
Yeah I understand perfectly what you mean, so it’s, let’s say, perhaps if I understand you rightly, it’s a sort of reframing the idea of what it is to socialise around an activity, a leisure activity, whereas it’s a bit different with games from others, like comparing them to how that compares to say going out to the pub or watching a film or whatever.  Yeah, it’s interesting.  
Okay, at this point I think, [anonymised], we can move onto the very last part, we’ve sort of covered the main themes.  We’re asking everyone we’ve interviewed if they have any particular suggestions, I think if you’re talking about the different sorts of people that are involved in games, and gaming and gamification, be they developers, it might be parents, players, policy makers, researcher, teachers, whatever; if there any specific suggestions you would make based on your experience and your ideas, your views, that you would give to them to sort of take games and gaming forward?
Wow that’s quite a tough one.   So you’re sort of asking me, like what suggestions I would give to anyone?
Yeah, anyone, if you had say a group of game developers, or a group of researchers, or a group of educators or policy makers, if you could say, look you know, I’ve seen sort of these things happen and I would think that a good way to improve things might be to do this; if there’s anything that comes to mind, it doesn’t have to be anything specific that comes to mind. 
I mean the one thing that’s just struck me is with regards to monetisation, I think just to talk about the, what I think is the best way to go about it, and the way I’ve seen people respond the best way and the most successful way to monetisation is create a game that relies solely upon your own skill and what you can put into the game itself in order to progress.  However, if you want to monetise a game, make it so it doesn’t affect anyone’s skill, so essentially pay to win, because that makes it unfair for other people, because if you do that it ends up becoming okay so, the person who has paid the most money into this game is the best player.
Whereas I think that the best way to do is, introduce monetisation methods where it just, you know, sort of improves peoples’ cosmetics and what they look like, or what they have, or where they can go, that sort of thing.  So no one is influenced or given an unfair advantage by just paying more into the game.  And obviously the game Guild Wars 2 which I’ve talked about has that in place right now, and I think it’s the best implementation of monetisation that I’ve ever seen in any game.  So that’s something that just came to me, off the top of my head. 
Okay, good.  I’ll just put the last slide here, these were some of those different groups, stakeholder groups that I mentioned before.  You can see the institutions as well that are involved, or should, or could be more involved with games and gaming, game playing. 
Yeah, I think like in regards with institutions and educators, I think games are a really good way of easing a different target market into whatever you’re trying to achieve maybe, because obviously, you know, associated with younger people a lot more, but there are quite a lot of older people who still do play games, and I think like in MMOs and stuff, you have that sort of older community.  But I just, I think because some people are stubborn to embrace gaming because they see it as kind of, a sort of a bad/good in a way, something that creates a lot of money but also has a lot of negative impacts on life in general.  But I think it’s more people embrace gaming as something that can not only be used for free time enjoyment but also for industry productivity and a way of motivating more people into just taking an interest in whatever it may be.  I think perhaps that might be a good way to get more people invested.  
Okay, so working on somehow, or working on the image of games and gaming and the marketing by the sounds of it as well. 
Yeah, definitely.  I mean like I said I think gaming, it’s one of the biggest industries in the world right now and definitely online marketing, such as, you know, like YouTube and Twitch and all this sort of stuff, I think gaming’s actually the most popular category on YouTube right now.  So yeah, I think that it is definitely getting better, but yeah just, like the way people look at it and be, just accepting gaming.  Obviously it doesn’t suit all purposes, but maybe if more people thought about it you would definitely see more engagement from people at all different level of, you know, whatever it may be.  
Good, okay great.  That’s really good.  Thanks for those thoughts.  And just to wrap it up as it were, we’d like to give you the opportunity if you’ve got any questions or any comments, either about what we’ve talked about or other things you want to mention that have come to mind, or if you’ve got any comments or thoughts about the interview itself.  
Yeah, it’s really interesting to talk about this, on this level.  Because I’ve never really done something like this before and it’s amazing just through the experiences I’ve had, I don’t call myself a hard-core gamer or I don’t sort of, like I said, I see gaming as sort of like a second, side-line thing to pass the time, for me personally.  But it’s really nice to see how much discussion it creates, just from playing games, because it also exposes you to, like I said, the online the community and this interview in general has definitely made me think about sort of, you know, ethical and social implications of playing games, and what that could mean in the future.  So yeah, I’d just like to say thank you and I’ve really enjoyed it. 
Okay, oh great, I’m really, really glad that you have.  Because it’s been really interesting for me as well, and it’s been really interesting to see some of your, get an idea of your views and the insight you have on it.  It’s also a little bit frustrating for me in this role as an interviewer, because whereas I would like to sort of stop and really talk about stuff that comes up that you mention, that really interests me and I’d like to learn more about and get a better understanding of, I can’t do that because there’s a certain limitation obviously.  So that’s the sort of downside for me.  
It’s been a really, really good interview [anonymised], and I thank you a lot for them, because we’ve got so much really good stuff there. 
Oh brilliant, I’m glad.  
It’s really, really useful stuff for us and as I said, what we’ll do is, we’ll – okay, we’ll get back to you shortly, I’ll send you a certificate of participation and stuff, and a link to the project website and whatever.  
What we will do though is let you know we’ll progressively transcribing and analysing the interviews with the different groups and stuff, and then we’ll be doing like a research report on the findings from that, and so we’ll let you know, that’ll be published or be released pretty much, if all goes to plan, but these things rarely do, around the end of summer.  Anyway we’ll just let you know when that comes out.  
Obviously just to repeat what you had in the form and stuff, that it’s all anonymous in the sense that your names and any references you make to your personal activity or identity are removed, even though the transcripts and the audio can be accessed, it’s all anonymous.  
The other thing I meant to mention is, would you like to have your name included in the list of people who are interviewed for the project, you can opt out if you want to, there’s absolutely no problem. 
Yeah, sure I don’t mind at all.  
Okay, we’ll put that in then.  And that’ll appear in the report, together with the findings about all the things that have come out of that.  Not just the interviews, but we’ve also done like an analysis of things like the European Commission’s policy for supporting games, gamification, game-based learning and stuff, so that’ll be analysed as well.  
But anyway we’ll let you know when something concrete comes out and you’ll be able to see a little bit to get a sense of how your contribution has fed into the whole process. 
Yeah, no that’ll be interesting to see actually. 
Great, well it’s been really good, thanks again for your time.  I hope we get a chance to actually physically meet up sometime, that’ll be good.