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Thank you for agreeing to be interviewed.  You know a bit about the Game Horizons project anyway, but essentially we’ve been telling everyone that it’s a European funded project that’s looking at the role of gaming, and video games in society, as cultural objects.  We’re speaking to a range of different people, you’re about one of sixty people we’re interviewing, so your voice will go into a pool of transcribed interviews and we’ll look at the kind of discourses that are going on around video games.  
We’ve largely kind of asked to speak to you due to your research, interest in video games, but I’m aware you’ve got a background in video games as well, and just feel free to draw on whatever you want.  The questions are, we’ve got, not got a set grid of questions, we’ve got some questions that cover different areas, so take this as you like.  Some people have asked, how are you defining video games, so just take it as you want, as you feel; and anything you say will be useful and will help us on the project, is that all right.  
Yeah. 
Okay, so we’re talking about the role of video gaming in society, I think we’ll just start by talking about what are your interests around gaming and your background and talking about your research interests around gaming I suppose.  
So my main research interest is in game-based learning, so I suppose what a lot of people would call ‘serious games’, but for me, very specifically it means educational games.  My background is from the games industry, I used to develop games on console platforms back in the nineties, and for me, it was a very interesting challenge to think about how you could apply the motivation that clearly players got when they played these games, to motivate people to learn things that were relevant outside of, just the gaming context itself.  
So I do a lot of work with maths games, but also sort of history based games, even sort of games which train other kinds of mental functions as well as [0:02:20], well eye-tracking games. 
Yeah, so games that have a purpose to do something in particular in relation to learning. 
Yes. 
And you mentioned, you called that ‘serious games’.
Yeah, so I think the, the definition of serious games when it started as a movement was very much any kind of game that has a primary purpose which isn’t pure entertainment, so it’s a very broad church that would incorporate, you know, games, military training games, games of change, educational games, I guess sex games, it’s a very wide area.  Whereas I think, the terminology often seems to get used just to mean educational games sometimes, in certain parts of the community.  So I prefer to call it game-based learning, because I think that’s a bit more specific.  
So it makes it clear what you’re actually talking about.  So if we’re talking about game-based learning and you mentioned entertainment and motivation, and serious games, is it largely the motivation aspect of video games that you’re most interested in?  Or do you think that’s the most important thing that video games offer to learning?
I suppose it’s, you know, it’s the offer, it’s a thing that got educationalists interested in video games right back in the 1980’s, when this kind of research began.  There’s a lovely paper, a Pacman Theory of Motivation, in the 1980’s and it’s – so that’s the offer, but I suppose my research is very interested in how you realise that offer, because I suppose, you know, the tradition of educational games or what, or once it was called edutainment, was very much – there wasn’t a very good integration of the learning content with games, so it would feel very superficial and it would be very easy for players to ignore the learning content and just play the game, the reward.  So my research is very much interested in the issue of those two things, are integrated in a way that makes it useful. 
And would it be right to say that your research is around the kind of creation and generation of those sorts of products.
Yes. 
As well as the looking at the effectiveness of them?
Absolutely, so coming from a background of the games industry, then I was very interested in building software and you know, creating an experimental prototypes to be evaluated for learning; and I think for me that’s quite important.  Certainly when I sort of came to the field prior, the previous research in the area had only been with games that were already tested and, you know, this is way before tools like Unity existed.  So people weren’t able at that stage to create their own video games very easily, and that’s where I came into it, and actually building bespoke prototypes to test some kind of theory.  That’s pretty much, my thing. 
I can take it in two directions, I’m just going to zip back to the idea of entertainment games and come back to maybe more game-based learning stuff in a bit, before I forget.  If we think about games that are, we’ll say purely made for entertainment, for people to enjoy, if we think about their kind of role in society, they’ve not been set up to make someone learn a particular thing.  Do you have any kind of opinions on their value or what they do for a player or players, as opposed to the kind of games that we’re maybe going to talk a bit more about, games that are set up for learning.  So off the shelf stuff, what do people get from that I suppose I’m saying?
I mean do you mean in terms of - well I suppose ultimately people are playing these games because they enjoy them, and that’s a pastime, it’s a very engaging pastime, which is motivating and it can induce a flow experience, because people often talk about – but is, you know, very enjoyable, it’s a very motivating pastime.  I think as time’s gone on then developers have managed to create something which is culturally relevant as well in terms of video games, you know, at the start video games were very sort of, just like a random idea somebody picked out of a hat.  Some interactions that you play with them, okay it could still be fun and interesting to play, but I think as time has gone on they’ve become much more culturally relevant, they say something about generations and the players that play them, they reference each other, they reference other kinds of art forms, I think they’ve become, you know, they have become a kind of culturally relevant media in the same way as television or anything else.  You can certainly argue that they’ve won their place there.  
And I think they’ve gone from being something which are associated just with geeks playing in their bedroom to something which pretty much everybody under a certain age plays video games at some level, whether they’re male or female.  
I think when, certainly when I first started it was quite a geeky thing.  I mean I was in the industry sort of at the beginning of PlayStation 1 era and I think the thing that really surprised me then is, is how consoles started to become about the youth culture, and you can see PlayStations in nightclubs, and that was quite surprising, it was the sort of, I think the beginning of becoming something which was much more sort of acceptable as part of abating the youth culture.  So, and I think we’ve reached a stage now where just, you know, it’s not really a problem, I mean you don’t tend to get people calling each other geeks because they’re interested in video games, everybody’s interested in some kind of video game.  People have different tastes in video games, some are more hard-core, and some are much more casual, but you know, there practically isn’t anybody out there who hasn’t at least played Candy Crush or whatever on their phone.  So it’s gone through a big transformation; I think that’s really important as part of thinking about video games. 
That idea of them becoming more incorporated in peoples’ lives, do you think that’s due to changes in technology, changes in people, what’s kind – you talked about PlayStation, when you were working with PlayStation 1 and those kind of machines becoming more widely seen, is it because of the particular type of technology and the way of playing, or?
I think it’s to do, probably with a range of things, I mean to some extent it’s being able to reach such a huge market.  I mean mobile phones, you know, everybody’s got one, so everybody can play a game on one.  I think if you go back to the old computers and PCs, not everybody had one, so it didn’t have such a bigger audience; and yeah, I forgot my thread then.  
It’s fine.  I suppose I was interested in your perceptions on the reasons for these, for the change, for the fact that they are maybe more visible in society, but─
Yeah, so I think it’s that, it’s the pervasiveness of the technology that you can actually play the games on, but also I think there is a sort of social acceptance that comes from being introduced to these things from quite an early age.  I think, you know, if you’re given a PlayStation controller, or certainly back when PlayStation came out, if you gave a PlayStation controller to somebody that was of another generation they’d just hold it in their hands and it makes no sense to them, and there’s too many buttons and it’s a real sort of problem, but you know, if somebody’s had that experience when they were five or six, or seven, then it’s not a problem for them for the rest of their life to cope with that.  
So I think you’ve got that element to it as well, and that, yeah and then that makes it socially acceptable, but it’s not something that everybody’s experienced, because not everybody’s access to the range of games, the diversity of games has increased, as I suppose the diversity of game developers has increased.  
You certainly don’t have a situation where the games industry is gender balanced, but we do certainly have, you know, prominent female designers and developers that are creating experiences that are not just targeted at that core traditional male teenage market that the industry sort of started with.  
That idea of, you’ve just mentioned the word ‘experience’ and a kind of, a game as an experience, I think is maybe something that – would you say that experience is something that links entertainment games with game-based learning?  Is it, are both examples there a similar kind of experience?  If you put aside their purpose, you’ve got an entertainment game and you’ve got a game for learning, is the experience necessarily the same of both?
Well I would step back even further and I would say that actually a role-playing game experience is extremely different to a racing game experience.  I think one of the problems with games as a researcher, is that we have this silly word ‘game’ and it just sort of encompasses everything.  If you go back to [Bickenstein 0:13:50] and his problems with defining the word ‘game’ but in a sense there isn’t necessarily a lot similar, you know, if you have to actually make parallels between Uncharted 3 and Candy Crush, it is a completely different kind of experience we call those games, but actually the interactions are completely different and the experience is completely different, and where you might play that is completely different.  
So I would say it goes further in that, you know, you could have two game-based learning games that are completely different experiences, and that’s down to the sort of, the game genre rather than – I remember thinking, you can create games for learning using all sorts of different genres, again the different kinds of learning content might be appropriate for different genres of games, but it’s not specifically the learning that makes it different, it’s the genre that makes it a different experience.  
If we maybe, to kind of help with that problem of it being so big, if we kind of think about – if you can have in your head a particular game-based learning game, or experience that you’ve been involved in, it could be one you’re involved in now, or you’ve been involved in previously.  In terms of the creation of that game and the mechanics involved in the game, are they kind of, are those mechanics pretty much transposed from a different context with game-based, with a kind of learning content as part of it?  
I’m not phrasing that very well, I suppose what I’m trying to say, what is the difference between a particular games based learning game and the kind of equivalent entertainment game?  Is it just that it’s got different content but the mechanisms are the same, or are you designing a kind of, is the design process different?
I mean a bit of both, typically with game-based learning you’re going to start with the learning content.  You’re trying to deliver, you’re trying to teach maths or English, history or whatever, that’s your starting point. 
So the starting point is the content.
So the starting point is the content and then you are typically picking a genre which is appropriate to that content, and you know, it would be – you can sort of imagine how it’s harder to teach French with Candy Crush, do you know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah.
Whereas you might be able to do something mathematical.  So it’s those kind of decisions and making sure that the core mechanics, I suppose, you know, in all games you’re typically referencing back to some other kind of game, you’re saying, well okay, I want to do something that’s a bit like Zelda, okay so I take those core mechanics from Zelda and then how do I integrate now the content that I want to put into that.  And if it doesn’t work, if you can’t do that effectively, you throw away the Zelda and you go, okay, right let’s making a racing game.  
Yeah, try something else. 
So that needs to be the starting point for a game-based learning application.  I would always advise that you try and keep the fantasy context out of it from the start, so you know, okay, it’s all right saying Zelda, but it doesn’t matter where that’s set, it doesn’t matter where in history that takes place, it’s a mathematics game.  You could just, you know, think about how you’re going to integrate that learning content in the mechanics, and then once you’ve got that working you can subsequently think about, you know, who your market is, what age group, gender, etc. and then how you make sure that you’ve got a fantasy content which is appropriate to that.  
Are games for learning, is game-based learning, is it always taking from other areas of gaming, or does game-based learning innovate in itself?
I mean, I think it’s a slightly difficult one.  I think there is the potential to innovate in game-based learning itself, you know, you could argue that, something like Sudoku is a game based all around mathematical learning.  So there possibly are puzzle genres, and I mean even potentially game, you know, there are definitely game mechanics you can have that would only work with learning content.  But typically people do, you know, in all games, it occurs, it’s such an intuitive thing, it’s, you know, it’s very hard to come up with a completely new game genre, you know, there only are so many and it’s only so often somebody comes up with one.  
So typically you are borrowing, even outside of game-based learning, you know, all games, oh okay, we’re just going to be a bit like Assassin’s Creed, it’s going to have this, and that’s the way game developers typically work and understand games, because it’s very hard to just say, oh I’ve got this completely new idea for a game, it works like this; and the truth is that’s not the way new ideas come about anyway, because they typically come about by just experimenting and gradually getting towards – I mean I suppose there’s, the classic one, something like Lemmings, you think, this is a very original concept for its time, but it wasn’t a case of the game designer just kind of sat down and went, okay I’ve got this idea and all these people – it was literally, and this is documented, you can go and look for it online, but an artist had done a bit of an animation, so it started off with just a creative process, this is quite good, then somebody’s thinking, oh hold on, maybe you, what if you could control those, what if you could this, so it’s rare in game development that somebody sits down and starts a project, or I actually think it possible, and just on paper writes out an all completely new game idea that nobody’s ever heard of before, a brand new game genre, there we go, just go and implement it.  
Game development is iterative, you put something together, that doesn’t work, you tweak it, you change it, and at the end of that process, you know, fantastic you might have a new game genre.  But the majority of games aren’t completely new genres they’re combinations of what’s gone before.  
Yeah, and that process, that kind of iterative or emergent process is true, whichever sort of game you’re kind of developing and involved in.  That’s good.  
I’m going to move on a little bit to talk about the relationship between games and the kind of priorities of research, and things that are seen as priorities for research around games.  You’re obviously involved in research around games.  Is there a kind of research around games that you feel is prioritised?  Is there stuff that’s particularly more likely to get funded?
Well I mean, so typically in serious games the money has been around sort of medical simulations and that kind of games, so there’s been a lot of research projects in those areas, because the military is quite keen to invest and I suppose in many ways it seems as a natural fit, I suppose.  If you look at America’s Army or something like that as an example, but then you’ve got lots of, sort of coming out from that, you’ve got first responder type games and things like this, so there can be quite a lot of investment in those areas, and I think that’s produced quite a lot of research and game examples.  There’s probably less in just kind of, you know, typical curriculum learning content, I guess.  You know, there has always been a market for that already, albeit not a very lucrative one historically, so perhaps the sort of need isn’t perceived as, you know, for research in those kind of areas in quite the same way.  But you certainly get research calls that are related to other areas, so I guess, one is cultural heritage related, so there is certainly an appetite for linking it with other disciplines and other areas where games can be applied to help.  
So one of the other projects we’re doing is, as I said, was to do with ADHD, so sort of medical funding, linked to the application of games for health that’s another area that’s traditionally had a reasonable amount of funding. 
So funding comes from other, what you might think of as other disciplines.
Yeah, and I would say in some ways it’s not sort of, okay let’s fund game-based learning for its own right, let’s not, you know, not funding it to simply understand what makes better game-based learning, but to apply it to another area; and that’s kind of understandable.  I suppose the other perception is that the games industry makes a lot of money, which it does, so why should they fund any kind of research into how to make a better Assassin’s Creed game when there is already a very lucrative market in producing those kinds of games. 
Other than kind of, then obviously research funding helps you do research and enables you to do the kind of research you want to do.  Are there other, have you met other barriers or other things, well essentially is there stuff going on that stops you doing the kind of research that you want to do?
Well for in educational research I’d say the biggest barrier is perception of what game-based learning should achieve.  So, you know, if you’re funded to produce an educational game then what I would say is, it’s a very naïve assumption about how you would evaluate the success of that game, is to say, well okay, do you children learn more with this game than if they’re taught the same thing in a classroom, and I think that’s sort of the default comparison that everybody thinks you need with game-based learning.  But I don’t think it bears up to much scrutiny if you think about it, because you know, is anybody really, apart from [0:25:51] suggesting that we should replace teachers with games and – so, and also I think, you know, experimentally it makes no sense.  
You’re comparing a teacher on a particular day, you know, on a particular subject with game, well a different teacher could be completely different.  So all you’re really saying is, this piece of software was better than that teacher on that day.  So to me the more interesting valuations are, you know, how does this version of this game compare to this version, and how do we create better games.  But typically that doesn’t I suppose answer the question, was this research useful at a top grant level, so people do expect you to do that, as I say, quite naïve experimental design that says, okay, yes, how did this compare to a classroom exercise.  
So it’s the methodological expectations of the people who want the research done that’s actually limiting the potential of the research.
I think so, yes.  I mean it means you spend a lot of time doing something which frankly isn’t, I don’t think it tells you anything really.  
So can you talk a little bit more, you gave a good example there of comparing different iterations of a game, what sorts of things would you want to see happening in the kind of research, or what kind of research would you want to be doing ideally, if the barriers were removed and you went, hey fund this, and they went, yes?
Okay, so for me once you take away the question, is my software better than a teacher, which I’d say, not interested really is the answer to that.  Then the interesting questions are, you know, okay so I can create four different versions of myself [0:27:49], it’s sort of AV testing, it’s being able to iterate different versions of a piece of software, try it out with different audiences and see how they compare, how they work for different audiences, it’s sort of those kind of questions that are far more interesting to me at a research level than saying, you know, this constant obsession with, is game-based learning effective; and whilst I understand the need for it to be effective, I think the ways of demonstrating that aren’t necessarily a useful application of research funding, and there’s far more use to say, well okay, how do we make game-based learning more effective than it is at the moment, and it will gradually get more effective, but the question of whether it’s ever better than a teacher or not, just to me isn’t really worth asking.  
Yes, it’s not even a, it’s not a sensible question. 
Does that expectation come because you’re in theory working in the realm of education research and education research often is wanting to compare something with a teacher?  So, is there other research in gaming that does the kind of research processes that you would be talking about there?  You know if someone, if someone is trying to test out whether, if someone is trying to test out whether a commercial game is successful, whether it’s engaging, whether it does what they want, they wouldn’t be comparing it with a teacher clearly, but the – do they go through that process of comparing different versions?
They might, and certainly, you know, in modern free to play games, very much do that, so you would have a re-testing and the way that platforms are set up these days you can literally say, well okay, I’m going to release this version of this game to half my audience, or in this territory and then get back all the information about how that’s being used.  So the analytics that are built into it to tell, and you know, that analytics could be as detailed as you like these days, you know, you can analyse how players move through the environment, you can analyse how much they spent on different items in the game, whatever you like.  
So game developers definitely do employ that on sort of free to play mobile games these days.  It’s much harder to do, say on a console game, because you typically are just trying to get that one version of the release that works for everybody and if it’s going to be put onto a Blu-Ray at the end of the day, you’re not going to produce two Blu-Rays just to test out which version is better.  So it tends to be the more mobile stuff, but having said that, that doesn’t mean they don’t look at the analytics ultimately and learn from it, you know, for future iterations, and there’s been some interesting papers published on Tomb Raider round the world.  You know, probably looked at where people died on the levels, and that’s very useful feedback and allows them to design better games in the future. 
I think for me, and that kind of analysis of a detailed game-based learning game, that’s really fascinating.  You can start to retrieve the data, okay, let’s look at how learners progressed through the learning content, what did they struggle with, what areas were causing them to give up and stop playing at that point, those kind of things are very, very useful and they allow you to create much more refined games and whilst, I suppose from a research perspective they may yield generalizable results, that you can [counter refers 0:31:43] from other projects, because games are so specific and genres are so specific, and we always have this, this need to call more games when really the learning you make from a maths game that’s based around Candy Crush is quite different to a language game based around an RPG.  So it might be quite specific to the game that you’re creating and learning, but nonetheless, it’s going to create more effective games to resolve if you could do that kind of iteration and that, maybe test them. 
We were talking then about games for education, educational games, or games for learning, and we kind of used the example of, well you used the example of a teacher and comparing; does the kind of research you do often end up assuming, or trying to result in the creation of products for schools for learning?  Or is there an interest in games for learning, kind of in themselves?  
Well I guess from a research perspective, schools, and particularly primary schools, and you can look at all of the kind of learning research, and primary schools are an excellent place to do research because kids are in the same place and with the same teacher, so they’re very accessible to researchers. Obviously there are issues around practical everyday things, but – so like any, I suppose, educational research field, we use those kind of environments as an easy way of doing the research, that doesn’t necessarily mean that their ultimate application or the best ultimate application of these things is in the classroom. 
And you know for me, what you’ve got to think about carefully is the amount of time, I mean if you look at some games, some educational games and they can be spending eighty-percent of their time doing something that’s not educational, in that educational game.  So in a classroom environment, what you’re basically saying is, well let’s, let the children spend eighty-percent of their time playing a game in the classroom.  Now you can design games where eighty-percent of their time is spent doing the learning. 
And only twenty-percent of their time is not, so I think for games to be applicable to the classroom they need to be ones that are spending more time on the learning content.  But outside of the classroom then I think that’s a bit different and it can, because there’s only a limited number of hours you’ve got in a classroom in a day, but if you’ve got a game externally that, you know, it teaches you French very, very slowly, but you’re prepared to play it for, you know, five-hundred hours then that could be a valid way of teaching outside of the classroom, but it’s not much use in the classroom.  
No, which I suppose brings up ethical kind of concerns around gaming and that I would see that in itself as an ethical concern.  If you’re giving children a game, in school where they’re meant to be doing a certain type of activity and─
And it, I mean you’ve got the Ethics of Control Groups there, so you know, often if you’re doing experimental design you want to have some kind of comparison where there is no learning content, and that, of course that’s ethical [0:35:29], because you are then saying, do this other activity and is it more ethical just to let them do their normal lessons, which becomes a sort of, you know, more of a passive control than – so the problem in research is that, if you compare a group which has an intervention with just a group which carried on and did its normal class then you’re going to get the experimental effect, with just paying attention is going to create a result.  But then if you’re getting to play just a video game, then as you say there’s ethical issues.  If you get them to play a video game that teaches something in a different domain then you might think that’s not going to affect them, but you can sometimes find, well no actually, it did and there are generalizable sort of skills that they’ve learnt there.  
So there’s a lot of problems with controls and getting good controls in a classroom environment, but this is kind of again where it’s back to that question of saying, well okay, the, does it teach question, it almost isn’t the interesting question, it’s, okay if I’ve got two versions, they’re both teaching but was that one better or was this one better and it’s the A, B testing I think you’ve got less ethical problems, in that both are trying to teach, you’re just not really sure which one’s the better one.  So yeah, I think there’s a lot of issues with that. 
We talked a bit about ethics there and talked about, I suppose we’re focusing mainly on the ethics of researching the games. When you’re designing the games or the environment, or whatever you’re designing, the experience, does – aside from researching and finding out about it, what sort of ethical considerations do you have to make?
Well certainly the age, age appropriate content, so in Europe we’ve got the PEGI rating system, which lays out quite clearly the kind of content that you can include in a game, you know seven year olds, or twelve year olds, all that kind of thing, and as long as you’re sticking to that then I think content-wise then you should be okay.  
Ethically, there are clearly other issues, I mean, you know, but I suppose the, in some ways – you know, computer games are often talked about in the same breath as addiction and there’s no doubt that the same qualities that make something, you know, engaging and motivating, it can be a Harry Potter book, it can be engaging and motivating, but you can become obsessed and you can read all the Harry Potter books one after another and it can affect your life, and you could say that was an addiction, it’s affecting your life in a negative way, because you’re keeping yourself away playing Harry Potter, but we don’t tend to (laughs).  As soon as somebody’s doing that on a video game, they’re addicted.  
Yeah, it’s a problem.  
So there are, you know, there are issues around addiction.  Now if, I’m not really aware of any reported cases of somebody being so addicted to a learning game that it’s described as a learning game addiction, and if you did, then presumably you’d be very good at the end of it.  So there are issues around video games that I suppose get talked about in a game-based learning context, I’m not entirely sure it’s a major issue, when I’ve created a game that, yeah, that all the kids get addicted to and they’ve all learnt their times-tables, by the time they’re seven.  I think, yeah, I’ll get a medal (laughs). 
So we talked a bit about, kind of what would be ideal and how you would like to maybe see research changing.  Is there a kind of direction that you think things are going in, in the area that you’re interested in?  Is there, are there growing challenges, or are there new technologies that are incorporated, or what’s the future looking like for research around video games in your area?
I would certainly say analytics are becoming a huge part of it, simply because it provided, and mobile platforms are providing a huge platform and a huge access to, to data, which again has more ethical issues associated with it.  But I think it’s that, you know, the classroom was traditionally the place, the easiest place to get access to participants and do research with educational tools.  Now you can stick something on Android platform, if you can engage with audience and get enough users playing your game then you’ve got hundreds times more data there that you can use and the ability that’s set to deploy different versions to different parts of your audience and – so I would certainly say that that’s where the future of this would go, because you know, there’s only so much you can determine with educational studies where you’ve got twenty children in each group and played it for twenty minutes a day for a week.  Once you can access thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of users, then the things you should be able to determine from that would be potentially much more interesting and much more valid as a result. 
So larger kind of user base to draw from. 
Yeah.  I mean it will bring with it its own problems in that you don’t quite know who’s playing, but I think there’s a lot of potential there for finding out, as I said, more about how we create better games rather than just obsessing this question of whether games are better than teachers.
Yeah, which is something that is maybe a silly thing to ask in the first place.  I’m conscious of the fact that we’ve just kind of gone over forty minutes, is there anything that, are there any questions that I’ve not asked you, or anything that you’ve not covered that you thought I might do, or that you think might be useful?  Or just anything you’d like to say?
Yeah, I suppose the only other perspectives I’d probably offer, it’s something that will surely come up if you discuss this with other people, but the games industry perception of, so historically if we go back, the entertainment industry that built up had a real problem, okay, it was a market, yes, it generated money to some level, but this kind of bargain bin cycle images where educational software, it wasn’t perceived as having much value, it would very quickly be in the bargain bin, and people didn’t value it and it didn’t make much money, therefore there wasn’t the ability to invest in those games, so they didn’t progress as fast as the mainstreams games industry and the two industries really separated and you had, the mainstream video games didn’t contain learning content that were doing amazing things and then this edutainment industry that was, felt very backwards.  
And I think it, you know, it left users with a very sort of, you know, educational games are bad, they feel old, they feel – so, and game developers then became very worried about being associated with it, so if somebody starts to say, hey, civilisation, that’s educational isn’t it, then the developers going, no, no, definitely not.  Assassin’s Creed, that’s educational, no, no, we’re not educational.  So you’ve still got the stigma in the games industry that anything educational is not going to make money, therefore don’t be associated with it.  And I think that’s something I’d really like to see overcome.  
I mean, all right, you’ve had things like brain training games and whilst they have been good, you know, great commercial successes in terms of money invested in them, they’re still not quite what I would like to see.  I mean I would just love to see mainstream games that have learning content in them, and acceptable that that’s a positive outcome of playing a game. I mean, if I can play a massive game and at the end of it I’ve learnt a huge amount of French, just because it’s immersed me in a world where I had to learn French, but the game was really engaging, then to me that’s just an added benefit of the game that I’ve played, and I think I would, you know, I would perceive a future where people would see that, they would just be, it wouldn’t been seen as a negative thing, it would just be seen as a great thing you can get out of playing certain games, that they contain learning content.  
But, you know, it’s transferable that isn’t trying to, it’s not trying to be didactic, it’s not trying to force itself down your throat, it’s just a natural part of what that game offers.  And I think, I think the long term user will accept that and it will be, the stigma is just a historical thing.  
That’s good.  Thank you.