Yeah, so, my name is Lynn Walsh.

I currently am the national president for the Society of Professional Journalists. I also work full-time for NBC in San Diego where I'm the executive investigative producer. I also have an investigative team and also a consumer investigative unit. My background primarily is in investigative journalism in both television, broadcast, and also online-only publications.

And I really got involved with SPJ with people that are passionate about transparency issues and also the public's access to information when it comes to public records. Then it kinda just grew from there.

We talked about this last time we talked -- I mentioned when I saw this piece from Quill about your "aha moment" on anonymous sources that we talked about. It struck me, I've heard of SPJ before but it didn't occur to me that you're on the other side sort of reaching in to the culture that I'm reaching out from.

As someone with a career more rooted in mainstream journalism, how have you sensed that the media has turned its back on providing scrutiny to either videogame industry or videogame culture?

So, I don't know if I would say they "turned their back." I just think it hasn't been a coverage priority. It's been a coverage area that they've focused on. As we talked about previously when we kind of got a pre-interview, when you're in a newsroom, there are so many different stories to cover. There are so many stories out there that are important to so many different people, and you're really constantly playing what you're going to cover with the resources that you have -- and I think, specifically, what I'm thinking of is local television news or just local news in general, which is primarily what I have worked in. You know, you're thinking about what's going to impact, total, everything. They're not really going out and covering it themselves, unless you're in L.A. or maybe New York, Miami.

Those are some, I would say, cities that probably cover more. But traditionally, around the country, you just don't see local newsrooms cover that. To me, the gaming industry, while it's not entertainment, it is a type of, I think, entertainment. Or that's how it kind of started. And so, you wouldn't necessarily see that covered on a regular basis.

What do you think would the most effective things to do to make mainstream media change with regard to this culture and industry?

Well, I think you have to look at it holistically. I was thinking of an example as I was thinking about talking to you, and we cover -- I remember, I was standing in the morning meeting in San Diego just yesterday in the NBC newsroom and all of a sudden we moved one of our crews, a reporter and a photographer, to go cover a deadly accident. Yeah, very tragic. It's very sad. But nowadays, you really think about it, why did we used to cover those? Because it impacted people's drive to work. Because it impacted how people are getting around. Well, nowadays, with technology, we use Waze, right? You don't necessarily need that. We're using other -- we're using Google Maps, we're using GPS, we're getting that information in other ways.

So then, okay, the question is, "Why do you cover it?" Yes, someone did die. Yes, it is sad. What's the impact, though, of that one person? It's important to people who know them. It's important to people out in the story. But that, to me, was an example of do we cover it? Do we mention it? I think so, but do we dedicate a lot of resources, too? I would argue not, and I think as an industry -- again, kind of speaking more for local news but I think also national news as well, we need to get away from the coverage we've always done and start really breaking out into these other areas. I absolutely think that gaming and entertainment, when you look at that, is one thing. But I don't think it's just videogames. It's the whole culture that has come up because of it. And it's not just the entertainment space that.

You know, you and I talked about virtual reality. AI. I mean, all of these things that people are living in everyday -- and, again, it's not maybe a story to those people but I think it's going to continue to flow. How are we covering these industries that will have an impact, I think, help where in the community when it comes to, possibly the justice system, individual rights. There are all these types of issues that are coming up when it comes to technology that I think we need to pay closer attention to.

Yeah, I mean, do you think there's something people in the game industry to help better make these connections to journalism?

You know, I think it's continuing to pitch stories to individuals about the gaming industry. I think that absolutely will help.

Do you mean PR people or who?

No, I mean, even just individuals. Like, I'll tell you, lots of stories we do, if it's coming from a PR company, unfortunately, we're probably almost less likely to do it now.

[Laughs.]

Before, it was the only way to get information to journalists, right? Well, nowadays, you can just message them on Facebook. You can post something or email them directly and we really want those community stories. So, if we are hearing from our community and they're saying, "This is important, this is what's happening, this is why it's important. Come, let us show you." I think you're actually a lot more likely to get coverage than if you go through a PR company.

No, absolutely. I've sensed that shift as well. There are so many other places to go.

I'm curious, too, because reading this piece that you wrote -- and I was invited to this event but I was not able to attend. But I'm curious: What made you want to go to that Airplay meeting in South Florida in 2015?

Yeah, I think for me, and, again, I was not familiar. I had heard of Gamergate and growing up had played videogames, sort of, a little. But nothing that was very much like it was something I did on a regular basis. You know, I was aware of kind of what was going on. I have brothers that were into it a little bit more than I was. So, didn't really have a lot of exposure, but to me, when I was approached, it was that they have questions about how journalism works, what journalists do, how we make decisions, the kind of things that we're thinking about when we're writing stories when we're trying to cover stories. They had questions about how different gaming bloggers and journalists were covering the industry.

So, I looked at it as an opportunity to really engage with them and engage the public with something I think is so important for journalism to do and we don't do enough to explain and kind of peel that curtain away, because it's not a secret, to keep it transparent about why we do stories about what we're doing. And also, I think it was a time just to kind of educate not only myself but also hopefully educate the people in the room about: Here's what an ethical journalist should do. Are all journalists doing that? Unfortunately, no, but here's how it should look. And if we're all doing it this way, I think you can have better coverage -- more responsible and more respectful coverage. And that, to me, was an opportunity. I really walked away, like I wrote in that piece, thinking that piece thinking, "You know what? We need to do more of this." To me, it's not just with gaming journalism, it's with a lot of different areas and a lot of different members of the public.

Yeah, I mean, you wrote in here about it being revelatory to you about people's perceptions and misperceptions about anonymous sources. I know we talked about this last time, you know, I think I asked you something about the number of people going to J-school who wind up in journalism, etc., etc. I mean, there are these maybe smaller habits that you've noticed. But bigger picture-wise, why do you think there are so many definitions of what journalism is and isn't?

Well, I think it's because -- you know, really, when you look at journalism, what it is, it kind of started because people, typically in the U.S., have a right to information. Our government was set up that way that their rights in this country is the right to free speech. You have the right to share information. It started that way and I think it kind of started with newspapers. Then, with technology now, anyone can basically write anything online, can publish it, and can make it known to the world. And I think that's a great thing.

And I think what you've seen, though, is sort of maybe it was a group of individuals that were producing news. That gradually grew and now, really, anyone is producing content that in all cases is information and in a lot of cases can be considered newsworthy.

Yeah.

So, you maybe don't have the education that has come with that of, "Okay, what comes with the responsibility of being able to publish?" And, you know, it's very simple things just on -- when you have students and college students and high-school students talking and just posting mean things about one another on Facebook to broader, where you have a blogger that might be insulting someone or targeting someone for whatever reason. And so, you kind of have this -- again, this is a wide range of what content is being produced. But at the end of the day I don't know that we've really sat down as a culture and really looked at: Okay, here is the impact of what publishing online means.

Yeah.

And that's something that journalists have been trained to think about, right? And we should be constantly thinking about: What's the harm if we do this? What can we do to minimize that harm, even though it's important that the information gets out there.

Yeah, I mean, I'm curious -- I don't know if you subscribe to this thought or not, that just things are very segmented now because increasingly now everything is online, so people can just run in these circles online and build their own bubbles. But, I mean, do you feel like -- does the general public understand what real news is?

[Pause.] So, I think the vast majority -- I don't know that they can decipher all the time.

Yeah.

I think it's sometimes very clear, right? But I do think there are times, probably maybe 75 percent of the time where it is difficult to decipher between what is a real news article and what is an opinion piece. And now, I'm always careful to say: I don't necessarily blame and think it's the public's fault. I think we as journalists and specifically as news organizations, because sometimes as an individual journalist, you don't really have a say necessarily over exactly how your story is published. But we have not done a good enough job and I think it is getting better.

But we haven't done a good enough job of making sure that we're labeling content correctly, that we're labeling who's coming on the television screen and talking properly. You know, if it's someone who ran as a presidential candidate, they shouldn't be labeled as a CNN correspondent or a CNN political contributor. To me, that's just wrong. Like, they clearly have a bias.

[Laughs.] Yeah.

So.

I was reluctant to bring this up and hate to do it here, but I have to ask you about "fake news." You wrote about how at Airplay, people didn't understand what anonymous sources were. When people voice their dismissal of the media today, what do you think they are being dismissive of? What is it that is bothering them or upsetting them the most? Is it the sourcing or are they really talking about a lack of trust? Or is it just a misunderstanding of how news gathering works?

I think people are being dismissive of the 24-hour “news” and talking heads they see on TV. I think they do value real journalism and for the most part do know it when they see it but I am not sure that will last forever and I think we as journalists need to be better about communicating and being transparent about what is news, what is opinion, who is a journalist, who is an analyst, etc. We need to let our users in and have these conversations with them. If we do not, I am afraid more and more people will not know the difference between news and opinion. I think some of this does also have to do with not understanding what journalists and news organizations do, how we gather information, where it comes from, how we determine what to use, etc. That is why I want to encourage these types of conversations more.

Yeah, that was something else I was gonna ask about, too, is because there are so many new destinations people can go to to get news, I mean, one way to ask the question is: Do you feel like editors understand what news is? But maybe the better question is just: How have you sensed what breaking news or what real news -- how that is shifted or what you've noticed at bigger, more popular outlets and how they're either distorting the meaning or changing the meaning or getting the meaning wrong. How have you sensed that shift?

Well, I think, first of all with breaking news, we've seen it -- I think everyone would probably agree that everything is breaking news now for some reason.

[Laughs.]

How that happened, why that happened, I'm not exactly sure.

Ratings, maybe? If I had to guess.

You know, I don't know, though, because when I talk to the public, they are so sick of everything being breaking news.

Hmm.

It's kind of a joke. I think if that is the reason, I think they're totally missing the mark just because I think people just don't respect it anymore. I think that is -- you know, I remember, and I do work for NBC and this is not why I'm saying this, but growing up my parents did watch NBC. And so, I remember being up in my bedroom upstairs and I would hear sort of their breaking news tune. You know, they have that thing before their show would come and they'd break into programming. That's when I would know, like, "Oh my gosh, something serious is going on.” And nowadays, I feel like if you heard that, I mean, it could be anything. It could be that the president tweeted. And so it doesn't have that same -- it doesn't change our mind or alert you like it used to. And I think that's kind of the problem.

And so, you know, like you said are they distorting the meaning, though, of breaking news? I mean, I don't think they're distorting it because I don't know that we have ever had a definition of what "breaking news" is.

Yeah.

I think news organizations haven't really looked at and said, "Okay, this is when it's breaking news. This is when it’s not." I will tell you, bizarre conversations that I am starting to hear in my own newsroom and in news rooms around the country that: "Hey, before we break into this programming, let's really think about why we're doing it. Let's think about why this is important, because if there is something that really does happen and we need people to pay attention, they're not gonna pay attention if we continue to break in with information that just is not that important."

Yeah, I mean, I've had my experiences with this. And we both have overlapped at NBC but at different outlets as far as where people get it. I've also worked more in entertainment journalism and alt-weeklies, so I don't know much about this on your side of the aisle, as it were. Can you talk about how the internet has affected the formula for local news and broadcast news?

When you say "formula," like, how we choose stories? How we produce content?

Oh, I guess, I mean both. I was thinking predominantly of choosing the stories and the playlist of them. But yeah, I'd be curious to hear about how you produce them as well, how the internet has changed both of that.

Yeah, so, I think anyone who tells you they're not looking at how a news story does -- and this is before even the internet. That's why we had "sweeps" periods four times a year, four months out of the year. We would save stories that we would think would do really well. We would keep track of those different topics that we were covering and see how they did year-to-year. Maybe a story about the homeless didn't do as well, so we wouldn't promote that the next time around, but maybe a story about dogs did do well, so we're gonna promote that next time around. And that sounds -- I mean, that's the reality. That absolutely has been happening for years. This is not anything new.

I think nowadays what you are seeing -- and actually, I think it's better, is you can literally see how many people are watching something. How many people are viewing something. How long they're staying on a page, when you talk about online. Those, to me, are metrics that are way more reliable than what we were getting with the ratings systems of people writing down diaries and sending them in -- I'm trying to remember -- a whole month of what they watched and then getting paid a small fee to do so.

So, you know, nowadays, like, I know on my team specifically, I pay very, very close attention to web traffic, to how long people are staying on a page. Really I do it to try to see: "Okay, how can I create better engagement for the viewer?" And, also, there's a lot of news out there to cover. There are a lot of important topics. So, if I see that one topic is something that the community seems to be really interested in because it is doing well online and that means that people are staying on the page and reading the story for six, seven minutes, that's a lot of engagement. I'm going to cover more of those stories.

That said, if there's a story that maybe isn't doing as well online but I still think it's very, very important -- and we have those all the time -- we will still cover it. The metrics in where I work and where I've seen at a lot of news organizations, they're not the end-all, be-all. But, yes, are we using them to try to understand what the community wants? Yes. I honestly think that is a good thing because I feel like I know my audience better now because of those metrics than I ever would have been able to just with the TV ratings.

What's an example of something you've learned through those methods?

Yeah, so, I know when I first got to NBC, I was told: "Homeless stories: No one really likes them. Everyone talks about it but there's never a solution." It was a story topic that just wasn't encouraged. But here in San Diego, it's a very important issue, as it is in many communities.

Right. Right.

And we've seen the homeless population continue to climb here at a rate higher than it's been in five, six years. We continue to cover it and what I saw online is the engagement was very, very high. So, that was something I was able to go to my boss and say: "Look, I understand that we may not be able to provide any kind of answer to any of these questions that people have, but there is interest, and people are reading and asking questions and want to know more.” So, that's something where we actually ended up beefing coverage up.

I'll give you an example on the other side: We have a nuclear plant here in Northern San Diego that was shut down several years ago, but now they're trying to decide what to do with the waste from the plant. They want to place it in containers on the beach. Very simplified version, but that's kind of the situation we're dealing with. It's a very important issue when you talk to the small number of people that are trying to explain to people, like, "Here are the concerns." And, also, trying to work with the government to find a solution that is safe for everyone involved. But, that engagement on that story? Very low. We do not get really that many views. We don't get that much engagement when we share it. But we continue to do the stories and they're tough to tell and they're tough to put together because it's a complicated issue, but we continue to do it because no one else is really covering it, and we feel it that it is an issue that people need to be aware of of what's going on, what's going to be put on their beach steps away from where there might be surfing or swimming in the water. But, like I said, it's one that doesn't have good engagement but we continue to cover.

Has TV news been hit as hard as print by the internet?

You know, as an industry, I would say we haven't. We haven't been hit as drastically. That's, I think, because we do have the visual medium. And, when you still look at -- and I don't know the stats off the top of my head, but I know people still do rely on their local TV news stations or local news specifically, whether that's radio or television, to get news on a daily basis. So, we are not being hit as hard as newspapers.

What about when it comes to hiring prospects? Most journalists I know are fairly defeated and feel their profession has become little more than a hobby, due to lack of meaningful opportunities and rapidly decreasing rates. How do the hiring prospects look in broadcast?

We are hiring. The jobs do not pay as much as they did during the good old days -- I did not work during that time either -- but there are jobs. I will say I am not sure the digital hiring is keeping up with what is needed and you do not necessarily see a commitment from TV stations to put a lot of hiring into the digital-only side. You see some, and there are some promising examples, but for the most part, we need to have more people on the digital side of TV news.

I've seen a lot of online journalists be frustrated, too, as it seems like what few jobs there are go to "personalities" with huge social media audiences they bring with them for the traffic bump. We talked about ratings a little bit, but do you feel that notion for online outlets is accurate? That there's a more pronounced interest in someone's bombast than the merits of their body of work? Is there anything similar taking place in broadcast?

I am not sure I have seen that overall. I think it depends on what publications you are going for, but for the most part, if it is a news organization and not a content or entertainment-based website, the jobs are going to solid journalists. In TV you have always had personalities, so that definitely still happens, but they have to had a solid reputation to go along with that personality otherwise it is not enough nowadays.

Yeah. But you mentioned to me there still are ways that local news could and would do better on -- we emailed a little bit about this last week, so, not to make you repeat yourself, but what are the uphill battles that you're confronting or thinking about in what you're doing?

Yeah, I kind of hinted on this a little bit earlier, but I think it's just -- sometimes there's this mentality in specifically local television news to beat your competitor. You know, you want to be there before the station across the street is there. You wanna be the first to find out who is maybe killed in that officer-involved shooting. You know, those things are important. You know the example with the traffic that I gave?

Yeah.

I think sometimes we -- technology has changed how we live our lives. And so, there are some things that people relied on news organizations. And I think this goes for newspapers as well and really news organizations in general. But there are some things that people relied on news organizations to do that they just don't rely on them as heavily for. Now, that said, if there is a terrible accident -- if there are 45 cars piled up on top of one another, that's a different story. But, if it's one accident here, one accident there, and you're really just trying to make sure people know what areas to avoid, well, maybe we shouldn't focus our attention on that. Maybe we should instead have that reporter take a day to really dive into something that's a complex issue. Or, you know, go talk to different clusters of communities that we don't cover as much so that we can really understand and spend a day with them to tell a better story.

Those are things that I don't think -- I think we say we want to do it, but we're not necessarily always putting the resources behind it to do it.

Yeah.

Sometimes that means making sacrifices and you may not have that breaking news story that your competitor has across the street. But, maybe you can tell it in a quicker way that uses less resources that then you have a better story the next day for the next day.

So, I'm trying to think. Because, basically, when we talk about videogames and journalism about videogames, there really hasn't been a track record of doing this sort of deeper diving you're mentioning. Maybe there's a couple examples here and there.

I told you recently about my experience, like, going out to Michigan and interviewing for the fellowship out there and their not really getting it. I don't know. I don't want to seem like a crybaby sort of saying there's a degree of media apathy when it comes to this industry, but I'm just sort of wondering -- you know, how do you establish this track record when, by and large, bigger outlets, like you said, it's not that they turn their backs but it just seems to be a lack of interest or an assumption that other publications are doing the work that they aren't. So, I'm not really asking for advice, but how do you establish something like that that can't seem to take root?

[Pause.] I think personally when you look at all the stories that there are to cover and all the stories that I get pitched and everything that's going on in the community I live in -- I think people wherever they live would maybe understand this: I don't think necessarily seeing a story on your local news that has to deal with the gaming industry on a regular basis is necessarily going to happen. And I don't necessarily think that's realistic because it's not -- it's like entertainment. How the box office did or what new movie is coming out is not really news, I think. When you look at it specifically from a hard news kind of standpoint and what's impacting people is not going to be something that we're covering on a regular basis, and I don't think it should be.

Right.

But I think in the broader context of technology and sort of this culture that has emerged, specifically through gaming but also, like I said, through virtual reality, through artificial intelligence, that is an area that I think we should pay closer attention to because -- and we're already seeing it -- it's going to start impacting I think almost every aspect of daily life, from the justice system. You know, an example of, if you are in a virtual reality situation and you have your person that you've created and it's not really you but it is your image and it feels like it's you and you are there feeling emotions and you are there participating in this alternative reality, what if someone assaults you there? What happens? Can that individual be charged? Are people gonna start being charged? I mean, that individual's feelings, while maybe they weren't physically harmed, emotionally they could have been. So, what happens then? I think we're seeing some of these questions come up. You know, with artificial intelligence, do robots -- do they have a right to the content they create? And that's a question that's gonna be decided at some point. So, I think there are all these larger issues that are going to impact everyone's everyday life and that's why I think we should be paying closer attention to the culture that's going on around it and what people are doing in these -- in the gaming industry and in virtual reality, just in these spheres that maybe we're not aware of.

Well, it's interesting that you bring all this up because obviously there has been, especially in recent months and maybe in the last year specifically, there's been a sharp uptick of coverage of Silicon Valley and workplace practices there. I mean, I wonder -- I don't think it's that binary, but do you feel like we're too focused on Silicon Valley? Is the media not doing a good enough job of connecting practices there with other histories or other industries?

[Pause.] Well, I think, you know, sometimes what you do see is easy, right? Like, that's an easy way to cover tech: Go to Silicon Valley and cover the tech scene just because the companies are there. Maybe you can get access. You know, it's an easy way to do it. Now, is it the best way? You know, I think it depends what stories. I mean, if you're trying to cover the companies themselves, I think it makes sense. If you're trying to cover the culture -- the culture of working in those environments, okay, maybe yes. But if you're trying to cover just the culture of people who are using this technology, no, I would not say that is the best because that's not the majority of Americans. We need to go to where the rest of the country, where people are living and using these technologies. How are they using them? What do they use them for? Why do they like them? What is their experience like?

Well, yeah, there have been these stories about misogyny in Silicon Valley and I'm sure you remember the piece about -- I think it was in the New York Times about Amazon a year or two ago. I mean, do you feel like it's still the media's job to move the needle on companies or issues like this? Do you feel like social media has a role to play? I guess, I don't know. Do you feel like when these stories come out, do they actually impact or affect change?

I mean, I think they absolutely have potential to, but I think the issue is then what people decide to do with the information they receive. So, that's always what I tell my team.

Yeah.

You know, we aren't here to necessarily create change. We are here to provide the most accurate, responsible, ethical information we can about a particular subject. Try to cover it and investigate it as well as we can, and then tell the story. And then it's up to people to do something with that information. So, I think, you know, you've seen different boycotts with certain companies. And I think that, to me, is then -- information is power. So, if we're providing the information, then if the public would like to do something with that to create change -- I mean, that, to me, is how the system works.

[Pause.] Speaking of social media, I'm curious about -- I don't know. Could you talk a little bit about just the way social media has maybe created opportunities for bad habits in journalists? Like, I know that that's a big thing that the SPJ has done is codify ethics. But how do you see social media -- I don't want to use the word "distorting," but maybe muddying the waters as far as ethics for journalists and the way that they conduct themselves?

Well, I think what we do see sometimes unfortunately is someone will say, "Oh, it's just Facebook. It's fine. It's just Twitter. It didn't really mean anything.” But actually, in a lot of cases, that means more than maybe what's going on TV, depending on who's tweeting it and what the subject matter is. So, you know, we always say it doesn't matter what format you are producing content in or you're making content available in. Your ethics bar should be just as high. I do think -- you know, is it difficult to be as responsible and as accurate and as ethical in 140 characters versus a 5,000-word piece?

[Laughs.]

I mean, it absolutely is. Right? I mean, that's the reality. Like, you can't put all of the same context that you put into even a 300-word piece that you did in a 140 characters. So, you do have to be careful about that and make sure, though, that you are at least thinking about it. Maybe you're tweeting two or three times. Maybe you're writing something, taking a screen grab, and making it an image. You know what I mean? There are ways to do it but you do have to really stop and think because the reality is -- the way social media is it's so quick, right? It allows a sometimes bite-size comment. So, how do you do it in a way that's responsible? First, is if you had 10 minutes to tell a story, you could get all sides in. Well, you should still do that same thing or attempt to find a way to attempt to do the same thing on social media.

Well, how about credibility? How do you feel social media has changed what we look for as far as what makes for a credible journalist?

[Pause.] Huh. I think sometimes I think what does happen is I think journalists do find themselves not in trouble but just in a rough spot at times because social media is a spot where you should have a personality. You know, you should be willing to share information with your followers. That's what it is. It's a social environment, right? People want to get to know you, but you also sometimes then are criticized if you over-share or share too much, that you're biased when you cover a certain topic. I mean, that's a real issue that we are seeing right now and that I do get contacted by journalists a lot who -- they are covering something that might be political, but then because of a tweet from six, seven years ago or even just two weeks ago they retweeted something that they just thought was funny that they then are criticized as being left or being right and then their article is torn apart and it's biased. It can be tough. What I always tell journalists is you have to be really, really careful and you should be. If you want to cover serious news, you have to be careful about what you're sharing online. That's just the reality of it.

Yeah, I mean, I wonder about sourcing stories as well. Because what I see frequently, at least in the games worlds, is writers will make the mistake of thinking that Facebook or Twitter is the whole entire world. [Laughs.] They almost sort of forget that there's still an offline world that is part of these communities and part of these cultures. What have you noticed along that line? Do you think -- I don't know. Have you noticed that as well? Just people seem to forget that the offline world is still there to cover?

Oh, totally. And I think because it's easy to do. So, okay, let's say you're covering, I don't know, restaurant inspections, let's just say.

Yeah.

You want a restaurant-inspection expert, so you just kind of Google and find out who might be a restaurant-inspection expert that talks about this and you email them. You don't ask for a phone conversation, you just have a couple questions, they give it to you, and then all of a sudden you're quoting them in your story. I mean, that's easy, right? But it's not responsible and it's not as ethical as it could be.

Yeah. I mean, there's a whole -- I'm sure you've heard of it: Help A Reporter Out. That resource.

Oh yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

And, you know, I've used HARO several times.

I've used it a bunch, too. [Laughs.]

Yeah. But, I get on the phone with people, right? Like, I just don't -- especially if I've never met them in person or I'm unable to meet them in person. It's important to background check people. You know, see if they really exist.

[Laughs.]

I mean, journalists have forwarded me comments about getting caught up in that. You know, you're moving fast and have a lot of stuff to produce and you get catfished. It's not okay. We can't let that happen. But absolutely, sourcing is a real issue. You know, one, working in TV is a little bit different because we really do need to have them on camera to make a story really that we can air it. You know, we are most of the time meeting the people that we are talking to. Sometimes it's just via Skype, but if it is via Skype I'm making sure the reporters are double-checking the identity. Can we verify with Google Images? With a LinkedIn profile? I mean, all that kind of stuff. You know, that stuff is very, very important, and just to take quotes from an email from someone you've never spoken to? You don't know who they are and you found them via Google search. You really want to think twice about that and really try a little bit harder to verify information.

So, I mean, I was gonna ask what gets sacrificed in sourcing things that way. But it sounds like it goes back to my question about credibility.

Yeah, I mean, you really -- I mean, have some people maybe sacrificed? I would say that's just not being as responsible as a journalist. Yes.

Yeah.

And I do think, you know, with texting -- I mean, look, it is easy. I always tell people getting on the phone? It takes time. It's hard. It can be hard to step out, especially if you're working full-time and you're maybe trying to freelance on the side or whatever it is. You're just starting your career and you're going to school full-time. It's hard to take that half-hour conversation. I get it. But it is still important to at least pick up that phone, call them, try to meet people for coffee, try to meet them in person for the interview. It also just makes the story so much better because you get to hear their voice, you get to just hear a context that you totally lose in any sort of text or email conversation.

Yeah, I mean, so this is a circuitous path to making my way back to asking about videogame stuff, but being out at Airplay and maybe -- I don't know, I think I saw somewhere that you did a Reddit AMA. I guess I'm just curious to hear your perspective on just people who get worked up about the videogame culture. Like, if I'm remembering correctly, I think that that Airplay event had bomb threats. I think you got a lot of the worst of the worst that has happened during the spikes of Gamergate. But coming into the culture, being exposed it "from the outside," what were your takeaways? What was revelatory for you to hear about? What were you surprised about? What were you not surprised to hear about? I'm just sort of peppering you with questions to get you talking about anything you might still remember or maybe still think about.

Yeah, so, when I was doing this, there were several different people that said, "Oh no, you're going to get trolled online." All this stuff. Really, I had a pleasant experience communicating with people in the gaming world. You know, there were some tweets that were just kind of inappropriate and kind of harassing, but for the most part I would say 95, 96 percent of it was very good conversations. Curious people asking really good questions. So, that was just for me personally.

But, I mean, yes, there were bomb threats at the event, which, to me, violence at any kind of event, no matter what industry or what's being discussed, where really people are just trying to have a discussion I just think is totally inappropriate and really just crosses a line. I think it really does then taint the industry and the people that are involved. I think that's the kind of thing, you know, that I really also try to tell people as I talk to them: "You know, let's try to move the conversation just towards a respectful tone.” And you'd be amazed, I think, at how far you're able to get instead of this insult after insult. And that was kind of, I think -- again, like I said, I didn't personally necessarily have that happen to me, but I was seeing it happen and I was seeing examples. You know, just as a human being, it's not good to see. I don't like to see that. We should be able to have conversations no matter what the topic is and be able to respectfully hear one another out, tell them our opinions without harassing or insulting or threatening anyone.

So, what did people want to know about then? What were they asking of you?

Yeah, so, you know, there were people that were upset about how the Gamergate controversy was covered by some of the organizations. I think Washington Post was one of the organizations that did cover it -- when you talk about mainstream. Then I think there were some clips that ended up on CNN. Kind of this was in the heat of all of it. This was --

Three years ago.

I don't know how many years ago. Three years? Okay.

Yeah.

So, there were people that were upset with how it was covered. And I think some of their concerns were valid. I think there were in some piece just a lack of understanding and/or just the individuals that were maybe asked to speak maybe didn't represent the community, which you see happen a lot across the board in news stories. And it's not just the gaming industry. It's, you know, talk about Black Lives Matter. Well, who represents Black Lives Matter? There are so many different opinions in this community, so who represents them? And as a journalist, how do you determine who you're talking to? What I explained to them is -- yes, we, as journalists could be getting a better understanding of what this community is like before allowing someone to speak for the community.

Hmm.

But I think, also, my other suggestion to them was when people would ask me questions is: Why don't you contact that reporter? I know we get contacted after a big story airs. We get contacted by people and they say, "You know, that's not been my experience." We get on the phone with those people and we hear what their experience has been like. If we find that the experience that we portrayed or the version of what we portrayed is not correct, we will do a follow-up with those individuals. I think part of the problem is, though, is that the people that were speaking out -- the question I ask them is: "Would you go on the record and talk to these journalists? Would you go on TV? Would you let them use your name or at least speak to them on the phone?" A lot were unwilling. I think sometimes that's hard, too, that if you have people that are unwilling to share their stories, that can also impact the coverage.

Yeah. I've run into that a lot with this project, where I've had people sort of threaten to sue me if I run the interview with them because they fear some sort of retribution from Gamergate or they change their mind because they just are fearful of the culture. You know, they only hear the worst things. I think the end result is just there are certain lapses in coverage or assumptions just because people aren't willing to talk for whatever reason.

Right.

That's what I've run into a lot.

Yeah, that was a common theme that I did see. And look, to me, looking at it as a journalist, that doesn't mean I'm not necessarily going to cover it. But it just makes it more difficult, and I have to get more creative, which is fine. I absolutely can do that. But then it depends, okay, then you're looking at: In the realm of all the stories that I'm covering, and if I'm talking about sex trafficking victims that are dying or immigrants who are dying as they're crossing the border. How do you weigh the different things that are going on? Not that harassment in gaming isn't important, but when you put it in the realm of everything that you're looking at, it might become less important and then it means that you're not putting as many resources.

Oh, especially today and recently.

Right. Right. Yes. And so, if you're not putting as many resources to it, it becomes more difficult to dedicate that time to be created. This is just being very realistic about what we deal with everyday. That said, one of the things I told them is: Contact your local reporter. See if they will meet with you. See if they will take the time, even if it's just coffee or 10 minutes on the phone. Try to do that. because I do think -- I mean, look, everyday when they go to work, they have to turn a story. They have to. They need content. I mean, they need to tell something. So, give them something to tell and explain to them why it's important.

I think the other thing that I also mentioned is don't make it a sob story. Make it bigger picture: Why does this matter? We're always thinking about impact. That's something a reporter's boss is gonna ask them: "Well, why does this matter?" So help them answer that question.

Do any people from that summit or since then, have they stayed in touch with you? Are people still asking you questions today?

Yeah. Absolutely. I still get asked questions and I try to answer as much as I can. Sometimes it's difficult because there are so many nuances and I'm not following it as closely, so I'm not necessarily following how the news story or the blog first was published and then how it became the second blog and the third blog.

[Laughs.]

You know, sometimes it takes time, and then it's following all the tweets and then it's looking at the Reddit thread. So, for me, it's more of a time issue that I'm just not able to dedicate as much as every question. So, sometimes, I do have to give more generic answers: "Here's how an ethical journalist would handle a situation like this.”

Well, so, yeah. To go back to the bigger picture thing, in a bigger picture sense what are the things that people are coming to you asking about or complaining about or seeking guidance or thoughts on? What are they coming to you with?

Yeah, I think probably the No. 1 thing is just feeling or questioning that the coverage of the gaming community is not fair. That's probably the No. 1 thing that I do get.

How so?

That they're painted in a way that because of some of the things that happened with Gamergate that it's this community that trolls people, that will harass people. I do think you do hear that. Right? That's a reality. That's something I cannot dispute.

Right.

But how do you change that coverage? That's where I encourage them to: "Okay, well, who can speak to why this is not true? Can you make those people available?" Contact those reporters. Contact those news organizations. So, yeah, that's probably the No. 1 thing, just that they feel coverage is unfair and that the coverage is unethical or doesn't abide by SPJ's ethics code. That's probably the No. 1 thing I hear.

Yeah, it's funny because this echoes something either you said when we spoke last or when we emailed, but you said that especially at bigger organizations, some journalists have a tendency to get a little out of touch and make those easier snap judgments or conclusions.

Yes.

So, I mean, I'll just ask you one last question which maybe you already touched on: What surprises you about the fact that more outlets don't have better, more dedicated, more nuanced coverage of the videogame industry and videogame culture?

Well, like I said, I think for me, it's just that -- and again, this is not specific to videogames, because I don't necessarily think that we're ever going to see a time where someone is covering videogames exclusively in a local newsroom. I could be wrong. I don't think we're going to see that. I think -- I mean, we don't even have people that exclusively cover police anymore. So, it's like they're covering police and city hall and the county government, which is a lot of stuff going on.

Right.

So, to think that there is going to be a videogame journalist in a mainstream media television industry, I don't know that I would see that. But I am surprised that we aren't focusing on some of these just broader tech issues. From, one, you can look at it economically. Two, how the culture is and the communities that you live in. I know there's a virtual reality arcade that's down the block from where I live, and I don't know that we've ever done a story on that. And that's something that I think is interesting. I don't know how crowded it is. I've never been inside there, but what is going on there? That's something different? That's something that maybe we'll take a look at. Let's see what it's all about. So I think it's more just that broader -- and again, and I want to say tech, but I'm not talking about covering Uber and covering what's going on inside their offices or necessarily even covering Amazon. I'm talking more about just how people interact with tech, what real people are doing with technology, with gaming, with virtual reality. Those kinds of things.

Okay. Well, I am Kate Moser. I am 33 and I live in the Seattle, Washington area.

I started in games in the '90s as a kid, pretty much like everyone else at this point. [Laughs.] That got me really interested, but I was always kind of lost for there not being much for -- I guess not necessarily just girls but it was always promoted for boys. My brother always had the systems and I always had to grab them from him.

When I moved up here there was an opportunity to be a game tester at Nintendo and it was better than what I had so I jumped at it. [Laughs.] That kind of started the long, perilous trip into videogames that I kind of both love and hate at the same time. I was there for about three years. I started as a tester, moved into editing, and worked directly with localization to edit the games and since then I have been working on and off with indie-game companies here and there, working to get into narrative design. So, that's my current status in the game industry.

I guess the best place to start is the way you started. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.]

Which is what you said in February, which is you said you wanted to talk about the "weird classism and sexism in the hiring practices of game companies." At least I was under the impression from our emails that you were speaking if not exclusively about Nintendo, you were at least talking about Nintendo. Can you elaborate on that?

Yeah. So, it's -- most of my experience is specifically Nintendo. So, in this case, I'm talking exclusively about Nintendo.

Sure.

It's so complicated. [Laughs.] There's this weird thing where especially in the testing department where people are just kind of hustled in and they're given this dream of, "You know you can get hired on full-time. You're all contractors, but that's okay because you can live the dream and you can work at Nintendo full-time and maybe be a tester or a developer or something." Everybody in QA has some bigger dream of being something else. They don't make it at Nintendo. It's just not set up in a way that allows people to move up from QA to anything else unless you know somebody.

At the time, when I started -- this was in 2010 -- there were, I'd say less than 50 women on the team in QA and there are over 200 people. So, obviously, the numbers are already kind of skewed. And then in order to even move up out of QA and into a full-time position, all of the -- anyone who had moved up in any way who was female knew another language or had kind of, like I did, moved into editing, which is just more language. [Laughs.]

Yeah.

If you don't know another language, you don't get to move into checklist. You don't get to move into the chance to become hired full-time. Yeah. I honestly cannot think of a single woman who, at the time, was not bilingual who moved up.

You had said in our emails that women could only move up to better roles or get further -- you said they had to be bilingual and willing to flirt, whereas men just needed to buddy up to get anywhere. You mentioned something about the way your days are structured that complicates this, even just the chance to interact with other people? You mentioned there's an extremely regulated break schedule?

Yeah, so, every team is on their own lunch schedule. So, say you're working on the newest Pokémon or whatever. You get lunch from 12:45 to 1:45. Every day. Everyone turns in their systems, you get up, you go to lunch, you come back. If you don't come back exactly at 1:45 or before, you're in trouble. Your breaks are always at a specific time, 15 minutes exactly. The entire department goes to break. You turn in your system, you go to break, you come back, you collect your system. It's all very regulated. They don't trust the people that they hire to not steal the information. [Laughs.] So.

Yeah.

It's a weird situation because -- I mean, you mention that the industry doesn't trust its fans, but its fans are the people they hire, and so they don't really trust their employees either. It's -- nowhere have I seen it as obvious as in the testing department where everything is like you have to sign in, you have to sign out, everybody goes at the same time.

I was going to say, it almost sounds like working retail.

[Laughs.]

But it also sounds a little bit like prison.

Yeah. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.]

Kind of. The prison aspect is the building they have is a converted warehouse that they have restructured the walls. The interiors have been taken down and built back up, like, tons of times. It's just got this weird, cold feel to it. It's very bizarre. [Laughs.]

Well, I guess it makes sense to paint more of a picture -- especially your picture of it. This is the thing obviously I'll never know, but how does being a woman in the game industry make your career harder?

I have a harder time being taken seriously.

Just in general? Or in specific contexts?

Specifically as a gamer, people will ask me my favorite game and --

Like, people you work with?

Yeah.

I've actually heard this before about Nintendo.

[Laughs.]

Yeah, from other people in different departments.

Yeah.

You're not the first to tell me that. Yeah.

[Laughs.] Yeah. Everyone's always asking, "Oh, what's your favorite game?" And so -- you know, I grew up on Pokémon. So, I'm a huge Pokémon fan. But, you know, I'm not the kind of person who memorizes --

Is it like a sincere question or is it a gatekeeping thing? Like, are they trying to get to you know from this other perspective?

It's a gatekeeping thing because they'll ask me and then they'll say, "Oh, if you have this guy at this level, what do you think is the best thing for that?" And it's like -- [Sighs.] I just want to play games. [Laughs.]

You mean you can't name Pikachu's inseam?

Yeah. That's kind of the thing. It's a weird one-upmanship that -- like, the guys do it with each other also. But it's like, if a girl can't answer, "Well, she's not a real gamer. She's just playing the part." Like, the whole sexy gamer girl thing was going on at the time with the YouTube videos and stuff and the people were just attributing all that to all girls who are in gaming.

Were there ways that -- I mean, it sounds like you're still working in games, but were there ways working at a Nintendo or working in games that made your personal life harder or more complicated?

[Pause.] Like, you mean business-wise or just hanging out day-to-day?

Day-to-day. I mean, I don't know. I've heard people say when they -- well, somebody else at Nintendo told me this, actually. [Laughs.] So, I'm not trying to collect all the Nintendo stories and compare them --

[Laughs.]

-- but, coincidentally, I remember him saying he would have to wait until a certain number of dates with a person to tell them that they work at Nintendo and convince them that they don't just play games all day.

[Laughs.]

So, I mean, I'm not only asking about romantically but were there ways that it stigmatized you in your personal life outside of work?

Not as much. Mostly because this is such a tech-centered city that it's not that big of a deal for me. It might just be that people that I hang out with don't really care that much. [Laughs.] On top of that, I was somewhat new to the city when I came here. So, I didn't have to worry. Like, most of the people I met were at Nintendo at the time. So, my experience is probably a little different than that because I didn't have to justify myself because the people I knew were basically in the same place. [Laughs.]

Right.

It's kind of cohorts in prison. Basically, like you said, it's kind of like a prison. [Laughs.]

I think we already touched on this, but you said that women are seen as less deserving of the few positions that are available. But how did you start to sense or notice this as a pattern?

It was almost immediately. Like, people openly talked about it.

You mean, like, superiors?

No.

Colleagues?

Colleagues. The department itself is kind of a giant rumor mill. Everyone's always got dirt on somebody else. It's basically high school. It would be like, "Oh, you know, this person moved up." "Well, what did she do to get it?" Like, that was always the first question: What did she do to get that job? And then it just kind of compounded from there, like, the little things that women are used to hearing and then it gets worse after that. [Laughs.] There were always rumors about so-and-so going on a date with a “red badge” -- that’s what full-time employees were called -- and then she mysteriously made checklist. Whether dates actually happened or not, I don’t know, but there was always a sense that any girl who moved up had traded something for it. And then every once in a while there were girls who seemed to buy into it or -- I’m not sure the best way to describe it because it’s one of those survival moves that women have done for centuries and I can’t really blame anyone who uses it for that, but I also don’t think they’re totally blameless. It’s just the system -- but sometimes there were girls where it seemed like they were playing the “sexy gamer” part and it made the rest of us roll our eyes at them and complain because it worked. They’d be moved up or kept on projects where their work was outshone by a girl who didn’t play the part.

For example, there was a girl who was Spanish bilingual. Beautiful girl by any standards. One of the male contractors once said she was “the kind of hot that makes you angry.” Whatever that means. And the other guys who were in the conversation just nodded along in agreement as if that made sense to them. She wasn’t amazing at testing, maybe slightly below average, but she was hired for Spanish so whatever. Everyone tests in QA whether they’re there for that or not. But looks are an asset for girls at Nintendo, and she used that. She turned her mediocre testing into a checklist position by openly flirting with the people who could make it happen. And that’s probably the most toxic thing about Nintendo’s culture. Women are shown that they have to do that to move up.

Someone had told me that -- a female former employee of a Western game company told me about a memo that was circulated saying that female employees should be unquestionably subservient to all orders from male superiors because men have been in the workplace longer than women. I think it's always such a surprising thing when I talk to people "outside" of the game bubble or game world or game industry or whatever you want to call it that there's so much -- that it's so regressive in the videogame world. I have always wondered what the influence of the Japanese origins of the game industry -- like, if that's a potential root of it in any way. I don't know and I'm trying to find people to interview about that. Do you get a sense of any of these things, you know, because Nintendo is a Japanese company and even though they have a Western branch -- I don't know. I only have an outsider's perspective, but from what I hear about Nintendo, Japan makes the decisions. But maybe I'm wrong.

No, they definitely do. It is knowing at least a little bit about that Japanese business culture where superiors are superior. Anyone up the totem pole is more knowledgeable than you. That's very much in the Japanese business system. It's absolutely a part of Nintendo's system.

But does that extend to the gendered things you're mentioning as well?

That's where it gets complicated is that I'm not sure if it's specifically the Japanese influence or -- like, we can't really blame it all on Japan.

Like, there was a guy who didn’t agree with a bug I wrote up for a 3DS game. He was trying to get me to close it even though that wasn’t his role -- it was the developers who would say if they were fixing something or not. And the testing PMs were the gatekeepers on bugs. So if it were a bad bug it wasn’t even supposed to get to the devs. When I told him I was leaving it up to the devs, his response was that I was wrong because “girls don’t see 3D as well.” You can’t blame that type of stuff on Japan.

No. No, no, and I'm not looking to -- I don't think it's any one thing. But that's something I've always wondered is because there is a lot of gating of information anyway throughout games, which I think does stem at least in part from the Japanese business culture you're saying. For the transcript's sake, I'm not at all judging it.

I'm just trying to parse and trace why things are the way they seem to be today. As you had mentioned in our email -- I don't know if it's people have gotten tone-deaf to hearing about these things, but what aspects of the things you've been through at Nintendo do you feel like you don't see discussed, that you haven't seen written about, that you feel people just accept is a reality?

Gosh, I think the weird contractor versus full-time scenario that they've got set up. Like, part of the reason people don't really move over is when contractors will apply for jobs, they can't be referred by a full-time employee.

They cannot?

They cannot. That is actually part of the full-time employee's policies, that they can't be referred. I was told this by more than one full-time employee.

Wait, why?

I don't know.

Wouldn't you want people you already hired to already recommend people?

You would think. Because I had gone for a full-time position and had asked one of my former PMs to recommend me and he's like, "I really want to but I'm not allowed to do that."

Is that a Nintendo rule? Or have you heard that about at --

No, that was specifically Nintendo. I haven't heard that anywhere else.

Interesting.

Like, that's probably a really good example of the weird murky hiring practices that they have there.

I've been a freelance journalist for about six years and I personally am painfully aware of the important distinction between contractors and full-time people. To me, for the sort of contract work I do, it almost doesn't really matter where I am. It's isolating in a different way than the way you're talking about, which is you go to an office but it sounds juvenile, it sounds cutthroat, it sounds -- I don't know. Maybe it makes more sense first to back up.

What did you think videogames were going to be like what you realized what the reality was?

It was interesting. [Laughs.] So, I've had a really conservative idea of what it was gonna be. I was like, "It's just gonna be an office job. You know, a generic office job, you go in and sure it involves videogames but there's gonna be data entry, there's gonna be bug logging."

Right, it's a job.

Yeah, it's a job. That's what I expected. What I got was a return to high school/possible prison yard. [Laughs.] It was very strange and I've worked contract jobs before and it's never been this stark of a difference between contractors and full-time employees.

What was this thing you emailed me about someone writing a message in feces on the men’s room wall?

Yeah. [Laughs.]

Because you mentioned high school, but it also sounds like preschool, too.

Yeah.

What was that? You said they wrote a message on the wall and nobody was reprimanded. What did they write on the wall? What happened?

How vulgar can I be? Can I cuss?

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, please do. It's fine.

So, the message was, "Fuck Melvin." Written in feces on the men’s bathroom wall. Melvin was one of the full-time managers at the department and he was very much a gatekeeper to full-time employment from contracting. He's one of the only people that you can go through to get what they call checklist training, which is basically just everything that games absolutely have to have done to go out. You go through this checklist and any other bug testing is, like, you try to break the game or you try to fall through a wall. [Laughs.] Everything else is more free-form, but the checklist is very a specific list of guidelines. In order to get hired on full-time, you have to have that checklist training. And in order to have that checklist training, you have to be friends with Melvin. [Laughs.] So.

You have to be friends with Melvin? Where is the management wisdom coming from? Like, is Japan aware of these types of -- I mean, it's not even minutiae, but because Nintendo is an international corporation, I just don't understand how stuff like this is able to persist. Yeah. I guess that's it.

It's so crazy to hear about things stuff like this for three years because it's like, "How is this even able to happen and be tolerated?" Especially without any repercussions, because you said nothing happened in that instance. But, like, what's up with Melvin?

That's a question I've often asked myself. [Laughs.]

Fair.

Yeah, it's this weird power dynamic where anybody who has a full-time position -- it's almost like they have absolute power over your job if you're a contractor. Like, if they don't like you, you're not coming back on that contract.

Do they feel like you're competition for them somehow?

No.

It's not that.

No, like, that would make more sense to me. Like, it'd still be crazy but it would make more sense.

But some of the stuff you mentioned, it just sounds spiteful or sloppy. You also mentioned stuff like management intentionally ignoring vegetarian lunch orders, be they for religious reasons or personal preference. Are people being petty?

I don't think it was intentional. I think it was just -- it's just one of those things where one person really wants something and so they do it and they don't think about the consequences. [Laughs.] So, in this case, one person really wanted barbecue, and so they ordered barbecue, and didn't really think about what the rest of the team was gonna need. The manager ordered the food. Anytime you have, like, full days -- I don't know if they still do this because they cut a lot of the budgeting, but anytime you were there on the weekend, they would order in lunch because the place where the building is situated, there really is nowhere you can go within the time allotted and come back in time. It's all -- it's right next to the Microsoft campus, so it's just kind of surrounded.

There really isn't anywhere else you can go other than the corner 7-Eleven, which, you're not gonna send 50 testers to the corner 7-Eleven. It's not possible. [Laughs.]

Right.

So, they would order in food and one of the managers was like, "I really want barbecue from this place." And they're like, "Okay, that's what we're gonna order." But they had at least one Muslim tester and they didn't order anything he could eat. [Laughs.] They had a few vegetarians and barbecue isn't exactly conducive to vegetarianism. Those people, I think they ate coleslaw. Like, that was their lunch. Just coleslaw. But, I mean, it's just sloppy.

Yeah. I mean, I'm sure you're aware of -- many outlets seem locked in just writing about how hellish and awful a lot of tech companies are to work for. It seems to be shaped by the types of people who rise through the ranks at tech companies and I think also at game companies -- by that, I mean they're not necessarily very adept with interpersonal skills.

Do you get a sense it's typically stuff like that? I mean, if you would go to other people at Nintendo at your level or above and did you ever talk to them about this stuff? Did they try to dismiss it or you? Did they know what you were talking about? How would they react?

I did try to go to people when I first started there. It was almost like -- like, I would get angry responses. They'd say, "Oh, did you guys think about this?" And then be like, "Well, you should just be grateful." So, it's -- it's almost like they don't want to acknowledge that there could be a problem. [Laughs.] And so, yeah. When the people couldn't eat, everyone was in the room watching -- like, we were all getting food. The guy who was Muslim who obviously can't be eating pork, he's like, "Well, is there chicken?" And they're like, "Oh yeah! There's chicken. It's in here with the pork." And he's like, "I can't eat that." [Laughs.]

Right.

And everyone saw it and nobody did anything. Like, nobody could do anything for him. Because the full-time people have so much power over whether you come back or not, whether you have a job in a week, nobody does anything. Everyone's afraid of being the nail that sticks up.

One thing I remember happening when I first started was getting a survey request from my contracting company asking for a review of the process and how I felt about the job. This was supposed to be an anonymous survey. There were multiple points during the survey where they said it was anonymous. So I called out the problems that I saw, because I was naïve and I believed in the word “anonymous.” But less than a week later I was sitting in a conference room with my contract manager asking me why I would write what I did. And I was afraid of losing my job, so I did my best to placate. Looking back, that was one of the things that I carried with me. It signalled that I couldn’t trust anyone higher up there.

That's kind of a persistent thing I've noticed in the last three years of doing these interviews, is there's this notion -- people are almost uniformly like, "I wish someone else would do something about this."

Yeah.

They don't want to be the ones -- which I completely understand, especially in the economy, with whatever's going on now.

But I am curious, because this is something most people -- it's weird, because I did an interview late last year about the restaurant world, with an activist in the service industry, and she thought it was interesting that in the game world people don't really talk about their salaries but they'll talk about all these other things. In the restaurant world, it's the other way around: They're more willing to talk about how much they make but not these types of problems.

I apologize if it's tacky to ask, but just because it's difficult to track what these jobs are really like: How much were you getting paid at Nintendo for this job?

So, the starting salary was $10 an hour, which is -- you can't even really live off of that in Seattle. Most of the people would talk about it at the lowest levels. Some of these testers are in their first corporate job. There were people whose parents dropped them off and picked them up who thought the pay was fine. And then there were the people who lived in apartments with four other roommates and counting pennies to get by. It ran the gamut.

How many --

Forty hours a week.

So, it was a full-time job but they treated you like a contractor.

Yeah. I know when they hire on in the department full-time, you go to $23 an hour. That's what it was when I was there. So, it's possible that it's changed. They've also since restructured the pay scale because they were basically bleeding people. Like, they couldn't keep testers longer than a single project.

Why do you think in the restaurant world what's discussed publicly is the opposite of in the videogame world? Or, it might be unfair to ask you to fathom a guess, so I guess the thing to ask here would be: Why do you think these types of things in videogames aren't publicly discussed more? Why doesn't the audience care more, which could help give the workforce leverage?

The thing that I think about immediately is the case where the girl discussed her salary at Nintendo and was then fired. I can’t remember the exact details, but it was hitting the news outlets a few years back. In the restaurant industry I don’t think people often get fired for saying how much they make. But in games -- and tech in general -- it’s more of a taboo.

[Sighs.] This is something games has in common with tech, which is they'll entice people -- companies like Google and eBay, they're notorious for dangling the carrot of, "Oh, you could be working for Google!" But they don't give you any benefits. They actually stipulate that you can't tell people you actually work for them because they hire you through a subcontractor. There's zero promise of them ever actually hiring you. [Laughs.] I think for tech companies it's a ploy to protect their reputations so they'll say, "We only hire the best!”

Do you think the game industry is doing that as well? Or is it something else, as far as stringing people along as contractors?

I think in their case it's the only way they can keep the knowledge in there without paying the money they need to pay to keep the people there long-term. Because there are people who would eventually demand more money for being there a long time. If they had played the politics right, they would get it. So, it's definitely not that they don't have it to pay people, but they can get away with it. Half the people that were there were barely 18 to 25. Like, that was the workforce.
And so, people who are kind of naive to the workplace don't really know how to advocate for themselves in that way. It is a revolving door. They're in for maybe six months and then they're gone.

What's the carrot being dangled? What's the highest you can hope to climb at Nintendo in USA? Treehouse?

You can get into the corporate side of it. There were quite a few people there who were students at Digipen, which is maybe two miles away from where Nintendo is located. They want to get in, and they’re told they’ll get the experience.

I mean, no one's gonna be hired today and it's like, "Well, your job is to make the new Legend of Zelda."

Yeah. [Laughs.] Where I was, since I went in as editing -- the thing is, all of their games aren't even made in the US. You're not going to be making Legend of Zelda. You have to go to Japan for that.

But the offices in the US, it's all the marketing, business strategy. Sometimes you do work on the consoles. There is some programming as far as changing things over from Japanese to English and Spanish and all of the other different languages. But most of those people, they want to be full-time QA. They want to be on the test side, they want to run projects, or just get that game experience to push themselves into another industry job. But the knowledge is so gated that you're not getting that experience.

There was an exception to some of this, which is you mentioned you noticed relatives of full-timers who work as contractors were treated differently than other contractors with no other attachments?

Yeah.

So, how does that work? Full-timers can't recommend people but relatives of full-times can apply?

Yeah. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.]

There's one case specifically where the son of one of the full-time managers in -- I believe he was in lot check, which is the next highest thing from the checklist.

Yeah, I have heard that is a coveted spot but also a limbo of its own.

Yeah. If you want to be full-time, you're more likely to be hired full-time from lot check, but it's still like, "Maybe. Maybe not." So.

I feel like we're hopping around quite a bit here, but have mapped out a horizon here that wasn't particularly welcoming or nurturing for your career. Why did you decide to leave Nintendo?

I left specifically because there wasn't any future there for me.

Yeah.

So, I was in the editing team that was about eight people. Two full-time, one department lead, and then everybody else was contract. We all did the same thing. We all edited, except for the department lead. She was the PM for editing.

Did you get insurance --

No.

-- through this job?

[Laughs.]

That's also a strong motivator to leave, as well.

Insurance wasn't a requirement at that time. Now that it's required, I'm sure that they do. But at the time they were like, "Well, we have someone we can recommend to you but we won't be providing any insurance." It's like, "Okay, I'll just not have it."

So, you're working 40 hours a week, 10 dollars an hour, and no benefits.

Yeah. [Laughs.]

There had been a position that opened up. One of the other full-time editors kind of rage-quit one day and suddenly there was a position. I sat down with the department head and said, "You know, I'd like to take on more responsibility." You know, the things that you do when you want to move up at a company. And she decided to turn that meeting into telling me I was a mean person and that she never wanted to hire me. [Laughs.]

Why?

I don't know. We were always really quiet. It was this weird silence where if you said anything wrong, you're worried you might say something that would set the PM off. So, she had decided at one point that I was mean and I'm not really sure why. From then on, it was like, I would write up a bug and it wouldn't get put through. And somebody else would write it up and it would get put through. Like, I'm not really sure what I did to set it off. [Laughs.]

Did you get a sense there was less bullshit the higher you climbed? That things were better above a certain title at the company? Or did everybody seem uniformly miserable?

Once you get into management, it sounds like where all of the bullshit kind of originates from. [Laughs.]

Interesting. How so?

I still keep in touch with people who are there and especially people in Treehouse. There's a lot of weird, "We don't want to hire women because they're not funny, unless they're cute girls from testing who might maybe be okay with editing, and then that's all right." But all of the hiring comes from those upper management positions, so they're the ones that are perpetuating these things. I didn't really have an experience with what they dealt with above me. So, I don't know if they're getting the same nonsense as, say, from Japan or -- I don't know, maybe up to Reggie [Fils-Aimé, chief operation officer of Nintendo of America]. I don't know. [Laughs.] But, like, I don't really know what's coming down from them. But at least at the department level that I was at, the managers were definitely the origin of much of the nonsense that was happening.

Why do you think this is such a shock for people? Or, I guess more specifically I could ask the inverse: Why do so many people assume making software is some sort of utopia career?

Oh, because that's what places like Google and Facebook and Apple make it sound like. Their marketing departments have made their jobs sound amazing, but nobody wants to talk about the flip side.

Well, it's ironic because you get up many tech companies, especially in Silicon Valley, they think marketing is a waste of time because the product should sell itself, which seems to be what games wants to do. But the emphasis on any individual is the player and someone who worked for Konami once remarked to me -- he thought it was pretty weird that people who play games are more well-known than the people who make games. Of course, none of them are household names.

But why do we keep buying all of this? That making videogames is some sort of miraculous haven? Or that these places still try to bill themselves as being meritocratic when obviously they're not? Like, why still in 2017 is this still a thing people believe, you think?

I don't really have an answer to that because I don't think I really know why. It feels like somebody had a PR idea one day and it stuck and everyone's just been repeating it ever since. [Laughs.] I don't know if that's accurate but that's kind of what it feels like. [Laughs.]

I'm pretty sure the word “meritocratic” was coined sarcastically, but it seems to have been pretty steadfastly embraced. But which do you think is more toxic about working in the game industry then, do you think it's the personalities or the practices?

Sometimes it's hard to divorce the personalities from the practice because a lot of the practices have originated from the personalities. Like, the people who had reached management at the levels that I was interacting with had been there for 20+ years. They've been there since Nintendo came to America, so, the practices basically came from them and it's hard to know if -- are some of these things just inherently part of becoming a big company and not really thinking about what you're doing as you're growing or is it because of somebody is deep down kind of an asshole. [Laughs.] And they just kinda spread it around. Like it's hard to know if there ever really was a reason behind it because some of it's just rote, like, the things that they do. Which is like, "Well, we've already done it this way. We've done it this way for 20 years."

That's definitely something you think of as going along with being "innovative," is the defensive response, "Well, we've always done it this way."

[Laughs.] That’s what it’s like in a lot of corporate jobs. That’s why we hear terms like “innovator” and “disruptor” coming out of tech. “It’s always been this way” is the go-to for a lot of corporate America. I can’t say it’s unique to Nintendo because I know for a fact that it’s not.

But do you have any examples of specific practices that feel like they came from assholes?

It’s more like a lack of practices, if that makes any sense? The leadership was so loathe to deal with bad behavior that it became almost practice not to. There was a guy who would randomly shoot people with a Nerf gun and thought it was hilarious. Some people like that work atmosphere, I guess, but he enjoyed doing it to people who weren’t into it. No one ever did anything to stop him. It just went on. He was definitely an asshole, because aside from that there were other things that happened. But what about the people above him? That’s where it’s hard to know if it was just bad leadership or if those people were more actively contributing to the problem. I think someone finally hid that guy’s darts because I remember it stopped for a time.

Well, but I wonder about stuff like clout in the game industry. A lot of the figures who have been the exception -- people who become synonymous with a certain series or platform, it's completely imperceptible publicly what they do with that status other than try to sell products.

But how much of that -- do you think you have to be an "asshole" to "succeed" in this business, or is it just a coincidence?

In the department I was in, you kind of had to be an asshole to succeed.

I've wondered that about myself and my own career; what if I behaved in a different way other than what I actually feel? Would that have done something for me? Would I have wound up someplace else? It's hard to tell but it does seem like that's the way to get ahead.

Yeah. I feel like that's just kind of part of our capitalist society. [Laughs.] The people who are held up as being No. 1 businessman are the people who are also assholes. [Laughs.] It's just an expression of this toxic masculinity that just becomes the goal for a lot of people.

What's the most pathetic thing you've heard or seen as an example of how people brag about working at Nintendo?

There are two guys in particular who have been testers for over 10 years there.

Full-time?

Still contractors. They are almost always on the Pokémon games. One of them is known as being a bragger and the other one is this super-sweet quiet guy. It's as opposite as you can get. [Laughs.]

Sure.

The one who's known as being a bragger, whenever somebody -- a new tester -- would sit next to him and he'd be like, "Well, I'm in a videogame." Because they named dragon tamers after the two of them in one of the Pokémon games and that was like, "Well, I'm in a videogame." [Laughs.] That's his way of promoting himself. But it's like -- you haven't gotten anything out of that. [Laughs.] You've worked on this series for so long and yet --

How old is this person?

At least in his forties. [Pause.] Yeah.

Is someone -- I don't know, I don't understand how someone works a job like that and is able to support themselves. It just doesn't seem possible.

A lot of people have roommates. They all live with other people who work there. A lot of people are on Section 8 housing, like, you're below the poverty line working there and so you have to get poverty assistance. Or they live with family. There's quite a few locals. I mean, people kind of scrape by. They do what they have to do.

It sounds like when you're in a spot like that, when you've been there for a decade, are you hoping for advancement? Do you feel like you've already "made it?" Were most of the people you worked with there -- were they find where they were or did everybody think they were going to "make it," whatever "it" is?

Like, I'm still fairly good friends with one of them who's been there for a decade and --

And to be clear, I'm not mocking them. It just seems like --

Like, what's the goal?

Yeah. Either they're in fine with it or they're in denial about something or they're completely happy.

It's like a complacency: “This is what my life has always been for the last decade and I’m comfortable. I have the things that I want and nothing needs to change." Like, some people, it takes them longer to want to change. Some people never want to change.

Right. Some people think they've already changed.

[Laughs.]

Yeah.

Like, the environment where you're successful in QA if you can stick around more than a year without getting dropped. Like, my big accomplishment when I was in QA was that I didn't have a break from one project to the next for the full year. That was my accomplishment: That I was employed for a year. [Laughs.]

Right. Right.

And people would look at me in awe like, "How did you do it?" And I'm like, "I'm not really sure." [Laughs.] I mean, that's so sad, to be like, "Well, she has really made it. She hasn't had to take a break in her employment for a year." That's so stupid. [Laughs.]

Well, I think a lot of it, too -- I mean, stupid, yeah, but it's almost so depressing if you don't laugh you cry.

Yeah. That's basically every day there. [Laughs.]

Why do you think the game industry lacks any outlet for meaning protest? For decades. Maybe even half a century at this point.

It's one of those industries where there are so many who kind of dream about it that if you get in and you hate it and you leave, there's always gonna be somebody right behind you who wants that same job who's willing to do it just for the joy of gaming. That's absolutely how they treat the contractors there: There's always gonna be somebody else.

Like they're disposable?

Yeah. They're very disposable. Because of that, because people are treated as disposable, they don't have any voice in the industry. Like, they don't have a way of saying, "Hey, this isn't right. You're not treating us fairly” because, guess what, there's gonna be somebody else who's gonna want the job and they're not gonna complain about it.

Like, that was actually one of the things about the sexual harassment that would happen in the department, where girls would be told -- guys would constantly be asking girls out and girls would say, "No, I don't really want to." But there's always another guy lined up trying to ask you out if you're a female in that department. [Laughs.] It would even extend to some of the managers. Sometimes the managers would say inappropriate things. But anytime there was a tester who would complain, guess what? They weren't back in the next project. The implication is if you complain, you're not coming back. You don't have a job anymore.

What sort of inappropriate things would they be saying?

There was one incident that I witnessed where a girl was walking away down the hallway and one of the managers leaned over and said something to the effect of, "That's a really great view." [Laughs.]

I'm rolling my eyes. It sounds like it's straight out of a cheesy training video.

I know. It sounds like a movie. It sounds really stupid.

"Things not to say."

Yeah. They actually have a fairly legendary video there as well. They do basically scenarios like that and then Wario comes out and goes, "Aughhh!" at the end of it. [Laughs.]

Okay. [Laughs.]

It's so awful that people are like, "Have you seen the video?" [Laughs.]

What was the final straw for you? I think we touched on near the end, but was there any sort of specific thing that happened where you were like, "Okay, I'm done!” Or did you just have a plan and you knew you were going to be out by a certain year? What happened?

It was mostly that conversation that I had with my immediate manager.

About you being mean?

Yeah. Where I was sitting down to say, "Hey, this is a rough time. Let's make the transition okay." She was like, "Hey, you're a terrible person." [Laughs.] I knew for sure at that point that I was never going to be hired on because she was the one who was hiring in that department. Like, she's the only person I could have gone through to get hired on and I was like, "Well, you clearly don't think I'm capable, so I'm not gonna stick around.”

Do you feel the game industry learns from its mistakes when it comes to stuff like this? Is Nintendo an outlier here or what?

I mean, if there's nobody sticking around, then there's no way to learn. Like, everybody takes that knowledge with them. So, I mean, I'm still fairly good friends with the person who did get hired and she's still dealing with nonsense even though she's hired on. Like, she's now into a new level of ridiculousness. [Laughs.]

So, yeah, I don't know. Because they recently had a bunch of people who had been there a long time in the 20+ years, they offered them all retirement packages. That manager's position was decided to never be filled. Like, they don't have a managing editor at Nintendo. They have a full-time editor who does all the work of a managing editor, but they don't have anyone who's officially managing editor.

As someone who has worked in the industry, why do you think everything about the working conditions in the game industry tends to be so unrelatable or uninteresting for the media?

I feel like gamers are still kind of portrayed in the same way that they were in the '80s. You're still the nerds with the undesirables of society. I feel like that's not sexy. That's not gonna sell papers. That's not gonna sell advertisement. It's not -- like, having that kind of stuff isn't gonna sell. And media has had such a problem funding itself that you kinda have to write the things that sell.

I mean, recently, well, it wasn't that recent but one of the things that's changing labor laws in Japan was that big suicide story where -- the woman who was working 80+ hours a week who finally just committed suicide. She couldn't handle it. That's suddenly making changes in Japan in the labor market. I kinda wonder if that is what the game industry is gonna -- like, if that's the level we have to get to before somebody goes, "We shouldn't do this anymore.”

Right. I mean, Japan, they have a specific word for that -- death by overwork. I don't think we even have that in America.

We just have heart attacks. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.] We have our meritocratic heart attacks, right.

[Laughs.]

Well, but I feel like in America the message is you have to want it. You have to keep working hard and there's never -- either after you earn a bunch of money, then you realize you can try to make things for a bunch of other people or you can pull back and try to rebalance or you can try to do things that are more philanthropic.

Yeah.

But do you think somebody has to die? Like, what has to happen in our culture to get mainstream media to cover this stuff with any scrutiny? But then I wonder if maybe that's just an outmoded way of thinking: Like, is the media even an important part of this?

There are so many things that would have to change in the culture before anybody even notices these things. Like, Gamergate is what made this kind of culture mainstream. The media's already forgotten, basically, about Gamergate but that's just threats of somebody being murdered and raped. Like, for somebody to actually do something, does somebody have to get murdered and raped? I don't know. [Laughs.]

Like, that's what it feels like sometimes. It's awful to think about, that this would have to be the level that we would get to.

What specifically? Like, what to you is the single most awful thing about your experience working at a multinational consumer electronics and videogame company?

There was a moment when the Wii U was launching when Reggie went into all of the departments and made a big speech about how great this was going to be for the company. When he came into QA he did the same speech and there was an opportunity for people to ask questions. The first question was: “Why is it so expensive?” I think the console launched at around $350 or something. I can’t remember. I don’t even think that guy came back after his project ended. It was one of those things where as soon as he said it, everyone knew his contract wouldn’t be renewed.

But that meant that the people working on the product couldn’t afford the product. That’s the kind of thing we condemn Apple for with their factories. That’s what Nike and Mattel were condemned for. This is happening under everyone’s noses in one of those most expensive regions in America, and no one gives a shit.

That stands out, but is it the worst? Who knows. I mean I have all kinds of stories.

The son of one of the red badges would come in on contract work each summer when he was on break from school, which wasn't unusual. Nintendo tended to go through a big contractor hiring spree for the summer to cover the large fall and winter releases and then just dump people as the end of the year got closer. That's how I came in and how a lot of people I knew there started. I never actually met him in the department as the teams are fairly separated by the layout of the department, but I'd heard his name before and generally knew of him having been in QA. So I recognized his name when he was brought on as a contract writer for Style Savvy. That game had a ton of text, and it took ages to get through everything for editing -- we never actually finished a first editing pass, but that's another story. In any case, that might be why he thought it would be okay to include the line, "I'm such a stupid cow!," for one of the female characters. It was found, of course, and he had to change the line. But there was nothing else done and he was back the next summer for a new contract.

There was also the time where we had to strip out racist terms from a crossword game. We were working with a localization team outside of treehouse on that one. This was a British company. But we had to get them to change both some of the hints and some of the answers in the game, which also involved having to explain to the PMs why those terms were racist and shouldn't be used in a game. These weren’t obscure terms that no one’s heard of before and therefore didn’t know were wrong. These were the kinds of things that go into movie-villain dialogue that make you think: “That’s a pretty bad guy.” And yet here we were explaining to industry professionals that it’s just not okay to say that stuff.

I come to it from a journalist's perspective. I have my struggles with my field and as this all overlaps, I was very patient last year. I pitched from late 2015 to late 2016 things about this. I approached all the places you could think of and even reluctantly gaming publications -- because I want to be free to criticize and be able to analyze patterns of oversight in that landscape.

It's hard to get people to recognize their own complicity in things and by not saying anything, that essentially becomes complicity. You're not pointing out an important issue, so are you condoning it? Like, who knows, because nobody's saying anything. Nobody wants to acknowledge that by not saying anything, they're essentially part of the problem.

[Pause.] So, why does the game not realize that they're basically alien to their own species?

[Pause.] Part of the gaming culture is being an individual. Like, you're weird to the world. You're weird to other people. Yeah. People get to like what they like and it's fine, and that's what geek and nerd culture and game culture are all kind of wrapped up in, is we're all a little bit different but everyone wants to hold onto that difference because a lot of these people grew up being told "different is bad" and then they embrace it but then they find a bunch of people who are different just like them. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.]

So, yeah, stuff like that -- the ability to be yourself is questioned because you're like, "Well, if I'm different just like this other person, what makes me unique?" It might be too much of an existential way of looking at it. That was always kind of how I was seeing the way people acted in game culture was, like, well, I feel like that's kind of where the weird one-upmanship comes from in how much you know about certain games.

I always found -- I'll admit, three years ago before I started this, I always found the term "game culture" pretty nebulous. It seemed pretty empty. Like, I've historically felt just because you find out someone else also plays videogames that it's not much of a footing for your having much else in common or much of a desire to have a conversation with them.

[Laughs.] No, I ask that question of myself every time I think about my time at Nintendo. [Laughs.] Yeah, like, why is it such an uphill battle? Why do people -- like, you can't really miss the problems that they have, at least in that department. You can't miss somebody looking at a girl's butt and saying, "Oh, I'd really like a piece of that." You can't look at that and say, "Yeah, that's normal." You know, and be okay with it. But nobody does anything, nobody says anything. It's this weird confluence of fear, like, fear of being ousted from the job -- I think some people kind of equated that with fear of being ousted from the culture and the industry. Like, some people really loved that they were testers at Nintendo. One would brag about it to their friends and -- so, it's like a fear of losing your place in that culture. Meanwhile, everyone's going, "Oh, it's not me. It's that guy." [Laughs.]

You're right. That is true.

Well, we were talking about the media not covering it. Why do you think the media doesn't cover it?

[Pause.] I wish I knew.

It's hard to see -- like, as someone who works as an editor, a question that I constantly ask myself when I read journalism pieces is, like, everything is editorialized in someway. There's not gonna be a single story that is completely unbiased because the information that you decide to include automatically biases the story one way or another. Like, you can't really make a nonjudgmental version. [Laughs.] You have to be able to promote the pros and cons, but it's such a hard way -- it's so hard. [Laughs.]

That and the simplistic mentality of, "We have to hear both sides." But it's a little more complicated with these types of things because there's multiples sides. And yet ultimately, I think, there's only one truth. It's funny because what this project has clarified for me is that videogames have benefited from the perfect storm of a lot of unfortunate circumstances, which is it's possible videogame culture became the first internet-connected consumer group and because that came about coincidentally with the time when the internet was completely imploded the media and the media did such a bad job of covering nerd and geek culture -- just all this stuff was allowed to fester for decades and decades and then, also, the media has continued to suffer and the internet has not provided a workable replacement business model.

I think the collective we has to decide on what we value, what do we want, what do we want to try to reverse course on. [Sighs.] What I have noticed in the last few months is the rise of people saying journalism is really important but not really doing anything about it. There's a lot of publications saying, "Independent journalism is really important. Please make donations." What I don't see at these publications or from those people is introspection on, "Okay, if the circumstances today for whatever reason -- the election, things before the election, whatever -- if all of that is so not okay, isn't it worth examining how these circumstances were allowed to become our reality despite what we were doing before? Like, how did we allow this to happen? What could we have done better?"

[Pause.] It was fascinating to watch the election and see people act like they were not somehow complicit in hyping something.

[Laughs.]

There's always gonna be a thing that makes videogames take a backseat, certainly the political climate distracted so many editors that I was pretty close to getting a greenlight from. But they have quotas and a dozen stories about Donald Trump every week. That's the reality. I don't know.

I feel like you're grappling with the same things that the industry as a whole is grappling with.

As you said before, all this stuff is in other creative industries.

Yeah, and it's one of those creative industries where -- I don't know if it's specifically an American thing where we think that work has to be drudgery, but if it's an industry where it look like it might be fun, then maybe you don't need to make a living wage at it. Like, that's kind of what our country sees. If you're a writer or if you're somebody who makes games or if you're someone who's an artist or makes comics or whatever, like, that sounds like fun so I guess you should just do that as a hobby is what a lot of people think. They don't realize the work that goes into it. That it's not just reading all day or pushing buttons all day. There's more to it. The fact that those parts of the economy have been devalued, it just helps open that door to people being treated as less than human.

The sad thing, too, is we don't have to dig that deep to find stuff like this. I mean, I looked up Nintendo on Glassdoor like a day or two ago.

Yeah.

Like, it's no secret. So, it must be people don't care. And I don't know. That's the thing I'm exploring.

Yeah. It's a lot of denial. People go, "Well, it's not going to happen to me. That's just one disgruntled employee who got mad because of a manager." They think it's a one-off. They don't realize that it's a pattern.

[Pause.] Yeah.

Just the everyday happenings of being in that place paints a weird picture, but it's hard to make a concise image of it without being able to say, "This happened and this happened and this happened." Like, I would come home at night and I would tell my husband what had happened that day and he wouldn't believe me that those things had happened. [Laughs.]

Yeah. That's what I was going to ask, if there's a story you feel nobody -- like, is there one story nobody believes? Like, I told a couple people about the feces things and nobody was phased.

[Laughs.]

I was so sure people were gonna be surprised by it. They were like, "Yeah, that's just a thing that happens."

I'm laughing because it's so sad. [Laughs.]

Yup.

God, like, again, it's hard to find one story that's so bizarre. [Laughs.]

I only ask because anecdotes are a good way to tease out a specific detail about a place and the culture there. I would be hard-pressed, as well, if someone asked me about places I've worked at, too. You mainly walk away with a general malaise about the whole thing.

I guess a good example of how women are treated in the department -- so, when I was in editing, the manager was female and always told us that she was a big feminist: "I'm a feminist." Like, she threw that term around like it was going out of style but -- [Laughs.] Yeah. There were two men on the editing team. Everyone else was female. They would get special treatment in the way that -- part of the contract life is that you work 10 months and two months off. Because otherwise they would have to offer you benefits and they don't want to do that. And so you have a two-month break every year. This particular guy never once took a two-month break under this manager. He was always very important to all of the projects. He didn't do anything different than anybody else did. Sometimes he did less than other people did. [Laughs.] But he was still very important to the all of the projects and therefore needed to have his contract extended and never took a break. But everybody else took a break.

When that position opened up, there was a guy who had left. He got a job writing at a different company and the manager offered him the full-time job if only he would stay, but he had been there the least amount of time. So he was actually the least experienced out of everyone on the team. So, it's things like that where they're like, "Yeah, yeah, I'm totally out to help you guys!" And then every single action is the exact opposite. I feel like that's not very helpful.

No, no. It is. There's another revolving door in all this, too, which is on the media side. Specifically on the games media. There's not really data for this, but on average people who write about games tend to try to make a go of it full-time and because the pay is so low, they last maybe about two or three years max. It means certain things just don't get covered because a certain depth of knowledge is simply missing from the pool. And in that time, my experience is the people who you think would want to get along with one another instead choose to feel territorial and almost resent people who do stuff similar to what they do because they feel they've staked some sort of claim and that they're gonna be the one -- I don't know. They act like they're self-appointed guardians of an entire medium.

[Laughs.]

It winds up just blocking a lot of stuff in the name of pettiness.

That's a creative thing, too, like, that's such a writer thing to hear. [Laughs.]

I always jokingly say, "There's plenty of nothing to go around. It's fine." [Laughs.] We aren't a threat to each other.

Because it's so hard to get into the industry, people -- everybody wants to be the next big name. Yeah.

But none of these are even household names. All of this is on some island that people have heard of and no one wants to visit.

[Laughs.] Yeah.

Well, I have one last question for you here which is the very broad question I end every interview with: What have videogames accomplished?

[Pause.] Videogames have started to establish themselves in a way that they can become a way to tell stories. To tell real stories. But it's -- the industry itself is holding it back in that regressive culture. Whenever you see a game that tells a real story, like 1979 Revolution: Black Friday -- that's the kind of thing that tells real history. It puts you into it and you can become empathetic to another culture, to somebody who has lived through something different. And I think that's what videogames have going for it, is there's a real immersive quality that you don't necessarily see in the same way in other mediums. And so I think in that sense, that's an accomplishment. But it's an accomplishment that's floundering. Like, it could go one way or it could go another.

I am the director and a teaching professor here at Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center, which is a professional graduate program that has been around going on 18 years now.

Wow.

Crazy.

That's, what, old enough to vote? What is that?

I guess it can -- yeah, it can vote. It can enroll it in the armed services. [Laughs.]

It can go to college is what it can do. [Laughs.]

There we go. It's an adult. It can be tried as an adult.

Yeah, no juvie for Carnegie Mellon.

There you go. [Laughs.]

That's a weird sentence.

[Laughs.] Sure, yeah.

I went to graduate school for my doctorate at University of Texas in Austin and was really focused around computers and storytelling, working with a professor named Sandy Stone, who's amazing. Goddess of the internet. That led to -- like, those doctoral studies were really trying to explore how computers were possibly enabling new forms of storytelling. Led to me doing interviews in the industry that was growing in Austin. So, I interviewed with -- I'm gonna date myself -- Richard Garriott, because this new thing was happening called Ultima Online.

Yeah.

Chris Roberts, because he had left Origin to start his own company called Digital Anvil and they were gonna be the first game company to make a movie, the Wing Commander stuff. [Laughs.]

Yeah.

Which, prior to the movie coming out, everybody was like, "Yeah!" And then the movie came out and everybody's like, "That wasn't a great movie."

That's a cycle that has repeated many times.

[Laughs.] I know! It's so painful.

And then I also interviewed Lloyd Walker, one of the founders of a company called Human Code that was sort of like a turnkey development house that did greenlight projects also for clients. All those interviews started as, "Let me talk to you about my dissertation," and they all led to, "Oh my gosh!" job-interview-type things. I hired on at -- I was ABD, all but dissertation, and hired into the industry at Human Code as a producer. So, I worked there. God, this was in the mid- to late-'90s. Late '90s? At Human Code, they made all kinds of -- like, they did stuff in education, they did stuff in entertainment, they did stuff in business. Like, Human Code did Michael Dell's Smart Home. [Laughs.] We did stuff for businesses. We did stuff for school districts and states. Like, Disney was a client. Hasbro was a client. So, it was a lot of fun.

I was like, "Wow, I might not need to finish my dissertation. This is awesome!" [Laughs.] Just working in the industry and coming out of academics initially where you're like, "I kinda throw my code together, I hack together what I'm trying to make. Slap some art on there so at least have some UI and aesthetics." But then get into the industry and working with programmers you're like, "Okay, what you do is magic. I can talk to you but I cannot replicate how awesome you are." Artists where you wanna buy their stuff. My biggest team was probably 90 people that I was helping manage. It was really fun -- the metaphor that kept coming to my mind was orchestration. Like, this idea of orchestrating this team to be able to do something that we couldn't do on our own. So that was just a lot of fun.

And then, the industry sorta went kaput. Well, there was the dot-com bubble and all that. A lot of us got laid off. Long story short, I took my severance and time to finish my dissertation. The whole time I had been working in the industry, I kept teaching. Like, Austin Community College had a great game program. One of the earlier ones. I was teaching there.

My dissertation advisor, Sandy, actually knew Don Marinelli and Randy Pausch, the two co-founders of the ETC here. That led to an entree that got me into this area of the country and I started as adjunct faculty and moved to being the program director and a faculty member to when Randy passed away after the last lecture and then Don retired, I stepped up as the director of the center.

Yeah, I looked at your LinkedIn. I know we talked about a little bit when we met up -- were we talking about Mike Judge?

Oh God, yes.

Am I completely fabricating that? Weren't you saying your experience with the kind of office space-type of business environments was similar to what inspired him to make that movie? Did that work experience overlap with what you just mentioned or does it predate it?

It was right in the middle. There was a time where I worked at Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Which was part of Harcourt, which was a huge company. Office Space is not funny 'cause it's a documentary. [Laughs.] That was my daily commute. Yoda could beat me down the highway. I did have a manager who really liked memos.

I'm curious to contrast what some of the non-game industry world is like against the game industry, and maybe this would be a good time to talk about that. When you started working in the game industry, how did you notice it was different or functioned differently than the rest of your experience as a professional?

What was sort of both exciting and exhausting about the game industry and my experience with some of the other -- I feel like it holds true to creative endeavors in general when you start having them be professional as opposed to hobbies and collaborative where that you have to have teams. It's not just on your own you. It's that tension like we joke, the tension between creatives and suits. The people that are really trying to develop the best product within the constraints of whatever, the budget, the client, the time frame, what you've got going on the team to the reality of, like, we've got deadlines and we've got to get this done. The money's running out. That kinda stuff. On the one hand, that's the exhausting part, was you feel like everything's falling apart and ends aren't meeting and it feels like things are unraveling.

And the exciting part was when, like, man, a team clicks and the ideas click and everybody's -- and it comes in waves it feels like. To me, I was always another -- thinking about it almost like the tides. [Laughs.] Sometimes it's out but the tide's always gonna come back in sometime.

Yeah.

And part of that being a professional is just, like, really working the design process and trying to iterate your ideas and prototype and problem-solve together as a team. So, it boiled down to good collaborative, communicative skills.

I mean, is it really that different from the rest of the working world, what you know of it?

I've had some experience -- Holt, Rinehart and Winston, not that it wasn't creative, but working in the publishing industry, there was much more fixed, like, "We know how to make a textbook. We're lined up with academic standards." There were creative moments, but at least from my perspective where my role in that company -- I was much more of a senior management role. Lots of memos. Lots of meetings. It felt more like tracking that things were on schedule and on budget. There are stuff like -- I've talked to some colleagues who've worked in the banking industries and there's a lot of creativity on Wall Street, I'm sure. [Laughs.]

Well, I ask actually in part because of Wall Street. Someone I spoke with who used to work at Failbetter and also used to work in finance told me that the game industry is more secretive than Wall Street. And I don't think there's necessarily always something sinister going on behind that veil, but as a journalist it always makes me curious. It's got to be about the nerdiest thing but I'll do things now like email people I've met through this project who, like, have worked on Fallout 3 and ask them, "Email me what your day-to-day is like." I want to know about the spreadsheets they're looking at. And we've emailed a little bit about this, the abusive practices in workplaces and I'm just always curious about what it's like. I think if you're running a program for at least some people to head off in that direction, I'm curious about what you're aware of and what you make students aware of.

Before we get into that, I was going to ask about what you got your degree in but you already said that -- what were you hoping your degree would be a path towards? Did you know?

Well, you made me think about -- thinking back, I'd been involved with SIGGRAPH and ACM. I was doing a lot of work with GDC and, I don't know, I can't remember the name of the parent company. It was CMP and then it was Think Services? I don't know. I don't know what they call themselves now. You know, the people who own GDC?

UBM, now, I think.

Yeah, there you go. It was fascinating because it was this weird thing that stuck in my mind where, like, SIGGRAPH and the computer-graphics field was created by a lot of academics and research labs, so there's this weird, "We share our best practices." And SIGGRAPH's all about, "Well, check out the latest in hair or water." Or whatever.

Yeah.

Where the game industry was sort of founded out of people who dropped out of college because who needs a degree to go make games?

[Laughs.] Well.

That flavor still feels like it's kinda there in both instances of both communities.

Yeah.

'Cause SIGGRAPH sort of looks a little askance at games maybe. Yeah. I'm speaking broadly and I'm sure somebody would, like, vilify me 'cause games are like -- you know, do they do research and all that stuff? Of course they do. Games sort of look at academics like, "Really?" [Laughs.]

Of course.

But then, I think it's grown from there. Sorry, I totally did not answer your question. [Laughs.]

No, yeah. You didn't. But I feel like that's always such a hard thing -- I did everything in my power not to become a journalist. I got my degree in music business and as you probably noticed, I do not work in the music business.

[Laughs.] Yeah, right?

But I only have a bachelor's, and I think by the time you get a doctorate or one of those higher degrees you kind of know what direction you want to go in. Is this a path you imagined going down?

No, that was really weird! The master's had preceded my doctorate's, whereas I was like, "Okay, I really like this teaching thing and I enjoy the autonomy of academics." That led to me to go into deeper studies, you know, going for a Ph.D. So, I was thinking more traditional academic at the time.

So, more like scholarly pursuits than vocation, per se.

Yeah. I was kinda just interested in digging in and, oh God, I was in communication studies. The departments I was in at both UNC for my master's and UT for my Ph.D., we went to, like, the National Communication Association and the International -- that was for the professional group with the conference and it was very academic. [Laughs.]

I just kinda staggered into as I started doing that research on computers and storytelling and talking to people in the industry -- it was a fascinating sort of moment because at the time I was like, "God, who would've ever thought I would've been sort of administrative in terms of being a producer or manager?" I would joke -- when I was at Holt, Rinehart and Winston, which became Harcourt, and then Elsevier -- I was senior manager and I'm like, "Wow, I'm a senior middle manager in a huge international corporation. What?" [Laughs.] You know? How'd that happen? So, I definitely took a couple of left turns that I wasn't expecting. My joy of teaching -- like I said, I kept teaching classes even when I was sort of more full-time industry. When the dot-com bubble happened I kind of had this moment of, "What do I really, really like?" I felt like I lucked out here at Carnegie Mellon because they're very applied, focused university. It's got an engineering heart to it where they want people to be making things, not just talking about things.

Also, there's not gonna be a teaching bubble.

Yeah, right! Oh God, yeah, right.

I don't know how to ask this question. It's not intended as a confrontational question, more sincerely curious. For a lot of people, college seems really expensive. This is the first generation I've heard of where I hear parents' plan is to not encourage their kids to go to college at all. For the students that you run into and just in general, why go to college? Why to college for videogames?

That is a good question. Yeah, because I think we're in an interesting -- oh, I'm gonna blank on this guy's name while I talk to you. There's an economist who studies -- he's famous for looking at industries that don't scale, that don't have a way to get more efficient.

Yeah.

His classic example was the string quartet. He was like, "A string quartet, you always need four people playing." So, this interesting -- he just came up with this idea that 100 years ago you paid them less, but now with the cost of living and all that, you still just need four people to do a string quartet. So, it's one of those things that's not going to in a pure capitalistic economy or society be able to scale in ways to get more efficient with costs drop, prices drop, yadda yadda yadda. He had pegged education as one of those fields. Like, classic education, you need teachers in the classroom with students to -- and that's hard to scale unless EdTech tries to build the idea of MOOCs and all that where, like, one professor and 100,000 students could possibly be one answer to that.

But there is a value, I think -- it kind of gets at the core of what we do in general, specifically, but I think just going off to college is a life-learning lesson that can put anybody in good stead. I don't necessarily think it has to be the most expensive. I think there is definitely a bubble happening where as tuitions start hitting $50,000 a year, like, what the hell? I went to the University of North Carolina way back in the '80s and I think it was, like, $600 a semester back then. [Laughs.]

Yeah. Yeah.

Now you're like, "Ooh, $50,000 a year. That's crazy." And then on top of that, going on for grad school or something. What the heck? One of the things I tell my students is an education is something nobody can take from you after you've had it.

That's true.

I'm 47, as I said, and I just paid off my loans this year.

I was about to ask.

[Laughs.] It's like, "Wow, it took me 'til my late forties, but I feel like it was worth it." And so there's that general sort of, like, your going to college is going to expand your horizons. I think all that is true and if somebody at a young age, like, 18 or so, is able to do that without college, you might not need to go to college.

Well, you mentioned, too, when I was out there that there's a lot of international students. So, clearly, there's still an appeal.

Yeah. CMU is fortunate to be known on an international level, we have students from around 27 different countries in the program. At a general level, they’re coming for a quality education from such a recognized university, particularly from a technical standpoint. At the ETC in general, there is a lot of interest from international students in learning the collaborative creative process as someone who assumes a leadership role on a team. They all have to step up and take responsibility for their roles and for working together designing and developing playable prototypes.

I don't know how old exactly these programs are, but I remember when they started to crop up because I did a story for EGM back when it was possible to do that in a single story. I wonder about the tensions in these programs where you juggle academic and practical aspects of game design, and yet a lot of these schools don't want to call themselves vocational schools. They're teaching you --

Right.

To me, there's almost an institutional crisis of identity. How do you make peace with that tension?

Well, on the one hand for me, it's sort of opening up to the fact that there's nothing wrong with vocational education 'cause that can help you get a job, which helps you pay the bills, which is an important part of living in society.

Life?

Yeah.

Yeah, I've heard of that.

It's, you know, one of those things where -- like, I talk to students, "At the very least, you want a job because you want to be able to feed yourself and have shelter. If you get lucky, you start developing a career in a field that you really like. If you get really lucky, you've found your calling, something you can't not do 'cause it means so much to you. But sometimes you just gotta, like, wait tables and pay the bills."

I waited lots of tables while I was in school because I made good money. Bartending and waiting tables is a great way to --

I think I had two or three jobs while I was in college, and I was doing a full class load.

Yeah, so you were learning a lot just by having to go through that. But, man, that can be stressful.

So, the vocational aspect, we're trying to help you think about careers as a professional masters program. It can range from -- like, distinctions we that we like to mean and we don't mean to make this sound judgmental but some places is straight-up: "We're gonna teach you the fact that you're interested in being a 3D artist. We're gonna teach you the packages: Maya, ZBrush, whatever else you care to know. We'll get you all that so you are 'certified' in those packages so somebody can hire you and you'll know how to use this software." That's valuable in and of itself, for sure.

Yeah.

But it can range a little bit more broadly to where it's like, "Well, how do you think about being somebody who wants to understand how to just work in general?" Like, communication challenges you have working with people because people can suck: whether it's your colleagues, your boss, your client might be working for, yourself. [Laughs.]

Yeah. Sometimes you suck.

[Laughs.] Right. Sometimes digging even more deeply and going, "How do you work beyond just the day-in and day-out of, 'Can I be a successful person working in an industry?' to, 'How do I help the industry grow? How do I help push the industry to do things it's never done before?" You know, where you're really dig into -- if you're making videogames, a big part of that is it's a business and you wanna make money and you wanna pay the bills, but it's also a creative endeavor. You don't just want to keep cranking out the same thing every year.

It's difficult 'cause I think I told you I want out to Uppsala University last year. I gave a talk and it was about -- I mean, I don't know. I feel like in hindsight maybe it's not the best audience for it because when you're about to graduate college, you really don't want to hear about the types of things in an industry that you would benefit from if they changed. I think when you're just out of college you're mainly thinking you want a job, not that you want to change an industry. So, I don't know. Do you feel responsible at all for planting those seeds of keeping an open eye and open mind about advocating for change?

Yeah, that's something that I felt was implicit and we try to make it much more explicit around here. It's just sorta --

How so?

How do we inspire, encourage, challenge our students and our graduates to go out and make a difference? At a high level, is the world better because you were here?

Right.

[Laughs.] But more specifically, it's like, how do you challenge -- you're at a work environment where you think there's a little bit of misogyny happening in the culture. Do you speak up or do you leave? What do you do? You know, things like -- it's rampant. Anytime companies release their diversity numbers, it's usually hard to look at if you're not a white guy.

Right. Well, sometimes, even then.

Yeah, even then it's painful to see.

Yeah.

How do we encourage them and inspire them to expect, demand, help try to make a difference on that level as well? 'Cause it's -- for me, it's the difference, being accepting of the fact that different people, different strokes, all that stuff. But it's also, like, making a difference. Pushing so that you see something better happening out of it.

It's something we try to instill in our students just through the curriculum and the types of projects we try to encourage them to tackle, through what we call "transformational experiences," where we're hoping whatever you're designing or developing, there's this goal of something that can have some sort of positive social impact on people's lives, whether that's educational or medical health or an engagement.

When you have prospective students -- I don't know, for masters, how involved the parents usually are. But, I mean, what do they typically ask of you and the program? Who's doing the most talking? Who seems the most skeptical? What antiquated notions are you still hearing?

Let's see, I think sometimes parents worry 'cause one of the things they struggle with, at least currently -- I think this will change in the next 10 or 20 years -- is for a lot of the people a generation above us a career could be 30 years at one company. Or, at least, a career within a field where you weren't hopping jobs every two years, if more. Where, like, the creative industries, particularly the game industry, a lot of people job hop. You either get laid off or that's a great way to get promoted, get a raise --

Projects end.

Yeah. When I was in Austin, I was able to triple my salary across two years by hopping jobs and getting promoted and things like that. That was -- why wouldn't you do that? [Laughs.] When it's available. Things were booming in Austin at the time.

So, that's one of the uncertainties they still ask about. You could see that they have this hope of, like, "Can you guarantee my kid'll be successful? or will get a job?" That's hard to make promises.

ROI.

Yeah. One of the fallacies of thinking about schools is it's not just a job factory. Like, when you were talking about vocational. Ideally there's some value in just the higher level thinking and critical collaborative skills they develop that hopefully will serve them lifelong. Like, everybody here's required to take improv, as you and I were talking before.

Yeah.

On the one hand, that's a great collaborative creative skillset you can develop. We're not trying to train actors or stand-up comedians. We're really trying to think about them sharing ideas. The professor who teaches it really is -- these are great creative lifelong skills. And she's like, "I think they're just good skills to have to live life.”

I think that's a valuable thing you can get out of college and that type of exposure that's less directly about a job and more about somebody who's very comfortable with the unknown, comfortable doing something they've never done before because they feel confident that they'll be able to figure it out and problem solve their way with their team or with the company. That's going to be the rest of their lives. Like, who knew five-plus years ago VR was coming back? But it's here.

I've found having taught in undergrad and graduate-level programs -- I found often that students hadn't necessarily thought about why this is a path they wanted to go down. Usually -- I mean, that's something having also taught improv myself, trying to get people to think about their choices and just get them talking and reacting and going with it.

What I found was a prevalent attitude among students is just they were there because "videogames are awesome.” I'm paraphrasing.

They like games!

[Laughs.] I don't really know what the question here is -- I don't know. Do you have a reaction to that? Do you find that that's often still the case?

No, yeah. Yeah. There's something very sexy and seductive about, "Can I do something that feels like it's fun for my job?”

Like, playing games or making movies -- creative industries and their output feels like such an engaging part of our pop cultural life.

A "cool job."

Yeah. They're like, "Oh my God, that'd be better than being a banker!" Nothing against banking.

[Laughs.]

For all the bankers in your podcast listeners out there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Most of my audience is bankers.

[Laughs.] There you go, right.

If that isn't clear when you meet me?

[Laughs.]

Bankers love me.

[Laughs.] But, getting back -- one of the things that I really try to push on, too, is -- it kinda lines up with what we talk about with improv, that will probably resonate with you: There's a difference between being fun to play with, having fun playing.

Yes.

So, if you just want to have fun playing, why don't you just go do it? If you want to try to work on being fun to play with, be someone to work with? That's a skill you can develop. I feel like it's -- this is how, at least, I try to square the cube or whatever, the fad metaphor: I feel like it's a win if I can convince someone not to come here.

Yeah, I understand what you mean.

'Cause sort of like, "We're expensive, you get a lot of out of the education, but if I can talk to you and suss out that it might be best you go do something else, then why waste the tuition or the money?”

I was gonna say, yeah, on top of everything else with student loans, there's probably nothing worse with student loans than it also representing regret.

Right. It's like, "God, I wish I'd never done that." [Laughs.]

Yeah. I wanna make it clear -- not like you're celebrating crushing dreams, but with any field and especially creative fields, even improv, when you demystify the process for people it always will -- when I was teaching improv, there would always be people week one like, "Will you teach me how to get on SNL?"

Oh, right.

It's more like, "Maybe indirectly." There's no non-pompous way of saying this, but it's more about, "Do you respect the craft? Do you enjoy the process?”

Right. And then building on your SNL idea, too, it's like, you can respect the craft and all that and if you're not in the right place at the right time with the right people that might never happen.

Yes. Absolutely.

That's a small percentage of people to get on SNL compared to all the people who aspire to be funny.

I feel like that's even similarly dating myself. I feel like there was a stretch of time where it's like, "Will you teach me to be on The Daily Show?"

[Laughs.]

I don't know that people necessarily aspire to that now. I think it's like, "Will you teach me how to have a successful YouTube channel?"

But that's something that's been interesting for me with this project, going from having written a story about all these programs to being chummy with the heads of so many of these programs now. Something that a bunch of other schools have told me is that they're envious of your approach, that I think we kind of talked about, around the edges. Which is, you mentioned to me the first time we spoke your cross-discipline approach to the program. So, for people who maybe aren't familiar with videogames and videogame academia, can you talk a little bit about the origin of that and why that is so unique?

Oh yeah. I think we're really lucky in how Carnegie-Mellon and the two founders, Randy Pausch of Last Lecture fame and Don Marinelli, Randy came out of the Carnegie-Mellon's computer-science school and Don came out of the college of fine arts and the drama school. Their intention was this true interdisciplinary program inspired in a big part by imagineering. You know, this idea of throwing a lot of people from different disciplines together to make stuff.

Right.

And so there was this initial impetus to: Can we start a program that's co-founded out of these two schools but reporting directly up to neither? So that we are independent of both, so that we didn't skew and become just tech or just art. That enables us to have an appeal to people from all over. We really do work hard to try to balance our incoming class in terms of recruiting to have a nice interdisciplinary mix. And it's truly interdisciplinary. It's not like we expect somebody to come in here and, "I'm a programmer and you're gonna teach me a little art and a little of music and I'll become a little bit of a Renaissance person." Which, some programs, that's their goal and that's totally legit.

Yeah.

But we're more interdisciplinary in that, "No, we're gonna have programmers working with artists working with designers working with musicians and creative writers and people who are interested in production." So, that mix is one of our biggest strengths and enables us to put together collaborative teams that work on these semester-long projects. Again, this discipline diversity enables them to have these sparks. Because they're coming from different backgrounds, they're not gonna see everything exactly the same. Those differences add up to, I think, a lot of innovative and creative both challenges and opportunities.

The sum is greater than its parts or whatever.

Yeah!

It's interesting because I grew up being in bands, performing here and there, but it's interesting because I wonder -- I feel like it's a stereotype, the reasons that people explain how videogames got to a place where it is so monochromatic in terms of where people were coming from and what disciplines they're interested in, immersed in, experienced in. I mean, do you feel like this is still an unusual thing? Why is it still unusual for videogames?

It's less that it's unusual -- because, well, back in the day when it was much smaller --

Like, '80s and stuff?

Yeah. I remember talking to colleagues. I wasn't directly involved. I was playing the games back then. I wasn't in the industry. It was like, if you were in Atari -- oh God, what'd they call you? I can't remember the title. It wasn't designer, it was, like, director. 'Cause you designed, you did the programming, you did the art. You did everything.

Right.

So, the games were small enough in scope and the technology -- you were fighting over bits in chips, in terms of what your design constraints were.

Right.

To now, blossoming teams of multiple hundreds and stuff. So, I think it's evolved in that way as the technology's there and the vision was there, as people just sort of -- the capabilities, like, "Oh, we could do more than one person's capable of. That means we have to pull two people in." When you have two people, there's going to be the potential for disagreement and conflict. [Laughs.] They're not always gonna see eye-to-eye.

And then, heaven forbid -- part of what gets to the monochromatic-ness of it is, I think, bureaucracy. The minute you get a lot of people together, the bureaucracy comes in and there's something innately stultifying about bureaucracy. It doesn't have to do with the people involved. It's just as an organizational structure, it does help corral thousands of people together into something but it also seems to suck out -- lowest common denominator becomes a factor in bureaucracies in some ways.

Well, it's hard to quantify for hunches.

Yeah. Exactly. And then you're big and you're trying to not be the company that's always laying people off, so you're taking safer bet because a sequel's more likely than some new IP to possibly launch, so it's like -- our pop culture is really weird. God, where? It was on music? Speaking of music. They're reaching the point where we're getting nostalgic about things that happened 10 years ago. We've kinda burned through the '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, and now we're on the 2000's?

I look at -- remember the Spider-Man movie series? That accelerated into how quickly it rebooted itself, and I think it's the period we live in now.

Yeah.

There's this interesting vibe, because I think tech in general is weird about this. What do you notice about the way tech treats, talks, and thinks about art?

[Sighs.] That is fascinating as well. Well, one of the things that I struggle with when I talk to technologists, particularly people who come out of engineering backgrounds is their inherent either, "An algorithm's gonna solve it," or, "A big data's gonna solve it.” So, they're looking for, like, technical solutions and sometimes it's less about tech and more about soft solutions. I don't mean to disparage that, but like you said, it's hard to quantify a hunch. It becomes that thing: If algorithms are your hammer, everything looks like a nail. There's a great -- are you familiar with the webcomic Xkcd?

Of course, yeah.

He did one, I think, within the last couple weeks about this directly, where some programmer sweeps in to some sociologist going, "I'll solve your hard problem with algorithms!" And six months later: "You're right! This is a hard problem!”

[Laughs.]

I just talked to some of my colleagues -- oh, God, within the last year or so, The New York Times Sunday magazine did this thing on, like, the latest in management practices. They were referencing how Google's using big data to crunch and solve how teams can work together, how to best manage teams. I was talking to some sociologists -- and the field of sociology has been studying teamwork for over a hundred years and Google's just replicating findings from years ago, but they're crowing like they discovered the newest thing ever because big data's helped them find it. This is a company that once upon a time fired all their managers because engineers don't need to be managed.

Well, once upon a time, they had a slogan, too: "Don't be evil."

I know.

Apparently there's something with that they quibbled with and got rid of.

I'm not trying to slam on Google, but -- when technology comes in, it becomes this, "Well, let's fix it with more tech or create a solution to a problem you didn't even know you had." That's where, I think, what's fascinating to me is it's equally as important when you talk to people about what's valuable in terms of what kids can get out of their education -- I'm talking even lower than, like, college. I'm thinking about, like, K-12. I think nobody disparages the idea that it would be good if they had a sense of creativity and art. Maybe I'm wrong when I say "nobody," but that's the first thing that gets cut often. It's like, "Oh, well, art classes: Cut that, because that's not helping anybody out." That helps a lot of people see the world in new and different ways.

I think both art and science and technology and what-have-you are going after similar pursuits: Going after meaning, going after solutions to what's going on and why it matters and things like that. Just 'cause their answers are different doesn't mean they're devalued one way or the other. It's an interesting balancing act that I think people need to strike.

It's interesting, too, because the higher you go up at tech companies, the more they think of themselves as artists.

Right.

I wonder -- do you feel like there's something disingenuous about the way the people in tech think of themselves as artists?

A little bit 'cause sometimes I think they conflate art with, "I'm pursuing my passions and that's art."

Right.

I think intention kind of matters. Like, there's that great little web series -- who runs it? I think TechCrunch runs it. It's "Judah vs. the Machines". It's Judah Friedlander, the comedian, doing --

For some reason I assumed it would be him. There's not a lot of Judah's in the world.

I know. A recent one was him challenging a machine that had been trained to draw in the style of any artist. And so, he went head-to-head with the machine to draw a sketch of a nude model. Then they brought in an art professor evaluate both of them. It was just funny because Judah won. Even though his sketch looked more sketchy, it was just like, "There's a sensuality, there's this, there's that." His comment about the machine's drawing was really fascinating. It was something like, "There's a lack of connection to reality to this drawing." I think that gets at sometimes what -- particularly Silicon Valley, there's a lack of connection to reality. [Laughs.]

Right. I think it's -- you think about the creative process and the first stroke is so important. But, I guess, tech side steps that and they show you what the line is going to be. I think there's almost a desire to skip something. I don't know what. I guess it's not unusual that you see it a lot in games because I think you see it a lot everywhere in our entertainment.

We have our students -- all of our students go through creativity workshops. Really focused around -- like, one of the activities is, "We're giving you two pieces of paper and a pencil." They get randomly assigned two words, like, "Happy sad." With abstraction -- because some of our students are artists, so they could easily draw somebody smiling and somebody looking sad. But, just, "With more abstract shapes and shading, try to draw us a drawing that you think, 'this is sad and this is happy.'"

Then, what's fascinating is if you step back and you put your drawings up in front of the room and the class goes -- they vote and go, "Okay, half the class thinks this is sad and half the class thinks this." So, then you get this wonderful moment of frisson around, I think, the internal struggle for communication. Where you're like, "Obviously this is my sad drawing." Like, "You can say it's your sad drawing, but over half the class misidentified it as your happy drawing. So, that says something about what you're trying. Somehow you didn't quite capture what you were trying to express." The programmers struggle 'cause they're like, "Well, this is all subjective.”

You know. I was like, "When you start talking about people's interpretations of meaning in whatever language, art, it's inevitable and it doesn't mean there's a right or wrong and it's gotten completely relative." But there is that wonderful challenge of just trying to be artistic where you're just trying to express yourself. So, you're putting yourself out there and you might fall flat on your face. That can be embarrassing. You know this out of improv, it's like, one of the best ways to get at greater truths of our struggles together is when you're vulnerable. You're putting yourself out there in a way that might not work. That's when you're doing creative work. If you know exactly what you're doing and why, you're not doing anything creative.

When I was out there, you had told me a little bit about the emphasis for personal accountability for students on teams.

Right.

We had talked about this frequent transparent feedback process to push to make sure people are good people and that other people want to work with them and they want to be around them. Was that approach a reaction to something or where the wisdom for implementing that coming from?

I think it came -- when they initially set up the program, Don and Randy, they went around in the industry just talking to people. A big -- I think I told you this -- they went and they visited Electronic Arts, they visited Disney, they visited Pixar, Microsoft. A variety of companies. [President of Pixar] Ed Catmull was the one who encouraged them to have everybody take improv. Ed Catmull from Pixar, back in the day. I don't know, now he's head of Disney Studios? Blah, blah, blah. He and [John Lasseter, chief creative officer of Pixar]. His reasoning was because it gets everybody on the same playing field together, as opposed to feeling like, "Well, I'm the smartest person in the room," or, "My algorithms or my art or my brilliance means I'm the most important person on the team." It's more about checking your ego at the door and realizing that -- it's visceral when you're onstage together in improv, if things aren't working well.

Yeah.

And, can be as visceral when you're on a team just trying to make something separately and we hope that translates. It came from that, this idea of, like, "This is only gonna work if we're working well together." And then we tried to build on that a little bit. You know, because improv can sometimes be daunting to students. They thought it was fun because they were stressed, but it was fun. Or they just thought it was scary. Like, we work really hard to give it some remediation around that to help try to hammer home some of the storytelling components that are really useful anytime you're trying to think of an experience, but also just the idea, the creative and collaborative components of that.

I mean, it all -- improv, as I told you before and we talked about, it began as a series of therapeutic exercises, especially to help socialize younger people.

Boy, do we need it. No. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.] You and I? Yeah, why not.

But, I don't know. I feel like we've been exploring a lot of abstractions from this stuff as it pertains to videogames, not that needs to be the only thing we talk about, but how do you find these different approaches and having interdisciplinary teams and exposing them to stuff like improv -- how do you find that helps benefit the medium?

Yeah, one of the things I think helps in terms of the medium and the field -- like, Jesse Schell, one of our faculty here, one of our professors who's a game designer and actually has a studio, Schell Games, likes to say that one of the best ways to make better games is to have interests that aren't games.

'Cause if all you know are games, you're just gonna keep making games that are already out there.

It's funny and true. There's a great book about improv by Mick Napier who runs the Annoyance --

Ah!

-- which is a place that a lot of people who are famous today also went through. In that book, he writes about how -- 'cause I think that same tunnel vision happen, and there's just this passage in this book. It's a very thin book, it's maybe 80 pages. Near the end, it's like: "To be a good improviser, you should also go outside and do stuff that isn't improv."

So, that's a weird way -- that's weird because I think one of our strongest things is getting students to believe that that's important, so they have a life and live a life and have interests that they can pull into games as opposed to just love games. You know, because games are fun and it's like, "I like games. I like playing Madden! I wanna make Madden!" I'm like, "All right. They'll hire you." [Laughs.] You know?

Yeah. [Pause.] So, I don't know. Neil Druckmann went through your program.

Yes. He was one of our alums.

Do you -- I'm not asking so much for gossip about Neil, but I guess I'm curious what do new graduates tell you they wish they knew about before they got in the industry? Are there specific things they report back that they were blindsided by or unprepared for?

Couple things that are hard for us, 'cause we're a two-year project. Projects run for a semester and we're full-semester, so 15 weeks with a week of finals. So, sometimes our students are in that 16th week finishing. [Laughs.] Couple things that come up is working on super-large projects, you know, like our biggest projects are maybe a dozen-student teams. So, sometimes they'll end up at a company like an EA or one of Activision's studios and be like, "Wow, I'm working on a codebase that hundreds of people are touching. It took me three months just to get up to speed." That type of level of complexity in terms of how many people and the scope, it's hard for us to replicate. And then a weird thing that comes out is because the speed of that, like, our problems get really great at problem solving and they're good at prototyping, but it's hard to get at -- when I was in the industry, I can't remember the aphorism. I'll mangle yet another thing. But, you know, 90 percent is polish? It's like, you've done it, and just keep working on it. Keep plussing it up. It's something that's hard to replicate in a 15-week semester. You know? [Laughs.] Particularly if they have a client -- and sometimes the challenges, to a degree, is it took them five weeks to get on the same page with the client so they really are working on something that they've been bashing on for 10 weeks, not 15. Yeah.

So, it's great in that regard but we always struggle with, like, "How do we help them understand that?" Because then we come back and they're like -- there's some students, they get so hooked on the rapid prototyping they're like, "Man, I'm still working on the same game and I've been out for three years."

Yeah.

That's unusual. And I was like, "Ooh, welcome to the world." You know?

I mean, is Neil an aspirational figure for incoming students?

A lot of people have heard of Neil.

'Cause he similarly climbed over there, too. I don't remember where he entered at, but I know it wasn't where is he now.

No, he's been very successful. Building on the natural talent he had. Man, he's great. As an alum, he speaks highly of his time here. And not the only alum. As somebody who knows improv, that's one of the major things our alums talk about as having been so important to their careers in the game industry and the creative industries, the things they learn through improv.

They've put out more games than Uncharted, and I think it's clear -- I mean, I talked to him last year and we did talk a little bit about how -- basically I talked to him about how even though it's clear that that series tries to broaden what games like that are able to do, it's still another game where you're running around and shooting and jumping and killing people. I guess I just wonder: Is it quixotic to even suggest that games on that scale are even able to change?

That's, like, getting back to our other question, when you're working on games of that scale, it's like, the business side of the equation is like, "Let's make as safe of a bet as we can."

I'm not knocking him or them at all, it's just interesting. He sort of had a rationalization that these are exciting games. But for a medium to be as young as it is, I feel like there's often a mentality that -- one of my interviewees said in the past that we're just trying to solve genres rather than branch out.

Yeah, 'cause that gets back to what we were just talking about: If what you really, really like about games is just games, solving genres is one strategy. It's like, "Man, how do I make the perfect first-person shooter? Or the over-the-shoulder adventure open-world experience?" 'Cause League of Legends isn't gonna be the end-all, be-all of MOBAs. Something's gonna come along eventually that's gonna eclipse it.

So, there's that type of expertise and passion into that. But I find it more fascinating -- and this is where the whole enabling of digital distribution at least gives me hope that the work that they do at, say, Double Fine that push a little more weirdly at boundaries. If you can get something out there that really tickles an itch that people more entrenched in the game industry don't realize consumers may have, that I think is where it's going to expand. A lot of people talk about it in verbs: "We just need more verbs in our game." Those verbs are gonna come by having -- to me, I passionately believe it's gonna come by having more diversity in the teams and the designers and the people who did it. If it's a whole bunch of white guys who have only ever made first-person shooters, you're gonna get a lot more first-person shooters.

[Laughs.] Yeah. I think about -- I don't know if Chris Crawford coined that "verbs" thing, but I think about it at least once or twice a week. I mean, I still hear something that dates back that long to when Chris was talking about Chris, which is videogames are obsessed with movies. I'm sure you remember the time where it felt like "interactive movies" or "convergence" or all these '90s buzzwords were the future. It's interesting that I guess relatively speaking it hasn't taken that long for cross-interdisciplinary mentalities to come to bear.

But, I mean, are there other disciplines that you think have really low-hanging fruits that videogames can digest nutrients of?

I think the one -- we talk about it a lot, just because of the background we have in improv. Which, initially, was just about creativity at a high level and collaboration more functionally. But, I feel like games has more resonance with performance than it does with cinema. Just the live aspect of performance, I think not just improv but the idea of thinking about when you're trying to script, post, have some sort of evening live. It ranges from some of the experiments they have where the audience is more engaged. But there was always that sort of feeling of ephemerality around performance where whether it's onstage or it's a music concert where you had to be there. You had to be a part of it and that's where you really got the juice and the specialness of that experience. I think there's something there about thinking about -- you know, because that predates cinema.

Yeah.

So, I think there's this wealth of experience around performance and theater that I think games could benefit from. You're seeing it a lot. Like, a lot's happening in New York City, a lot's happening in some of the bigger cities that have both the game industry and strong theater industry where, you know, theatrical games are happening. Some of the work Nicholas Fortugno is doing and Eric Zimmerman. Like, Heather Kelley, who we have here is very interested in that as well.

I think there's something to that. I don't know if you've played the game Rust. I haven't. But in the last week, I interviewed Jason Rohrer and I interviewed -- well, he comes more from a D&D background and basically doesn't play games anymore. Except for, well, both of these people lauded the game Rust, which has a strong performance aspect to it. So, I think there's something to it. Do you think there's a case to be made that games might be better served not imitating other mediums, just sort of being their own thing?

Well, yeah, totally. Like, I listened to what you did with Frank and I think he makes some really good points and I've seen other people make it much more eloquently than I will with you. [Laughs.]

That's fine.

Just, the medium needs to find itself first and foremost, because it's such a unique -- Frank would go so far as to say, you know, one thing to think about is it's not a medium. It's something different.

Yeah, I think there's a dissonance around thinking about it and the cultural aspects of this stuff as well, because you look at the surface and it's so rooted in technology and it's so visually impressive now that it almost doesn't compute for people that it's relatively young.

[Laughs.] Yeah.

Like you said, your program is old enough now to go off to college. Like, this stuff is not as old as we think it is and yet -- I don't know. People will ask, "Okay, well, this is all it can be." Like, when I talk to -- I've interviewed a couple of teenagers. I don't know how many genres of games you feel there are, but some 12 and 13-year-olds I talked to, they told me, "Oh, there's only three genres of games."

Okay. Wow, yeah. Well, it's so funny, just coming from an academic background. [Laughs.] And man, do they love to get things all termified. To really parse what a game is, or not, which can go on, and then even more specifically, to dig into how to label types and genres of games and how they overlap and intersect and possibly merit being called a new genre from all the mixing.

Yeah, writers and critics. Labels. People want to stake their claim and that's their contribution. But it's like, well, this is still soft tissue here. It's still figuring itself out. But something I don't think I've really heard people talk about is: Has the obsession with the movie industry impacted academia's approach to this stuff?

I think it could. because there's this idea, there's a strong cinematic bent to a lot of programs, just because building on that sort of history of how academia handled cinema, in terms of your classic programs of UCLA, USC, their history is, "Man, George Lucas went through there. Steven Spielberg went through there. Spike Lee went through NYU." You know?

Yeah.

And so they have that very focused as a training ground. Again, this gets at an earlier question of -- the idea of how do you square the circle of being just a vocational program. Like, what is your theoretical conceptual belief in what makes for good cinema or makes for good games and how does that underscore or highlighted through your curriculum so that you're helping teach and train a group of people to think about games in ways that you hope will go out and make new and different ones. I'm a huge fan of Tracy Fullerton both personally and in the work that she's done at USC and I sort of compliment her on a lot of the games that come out of there from both her and her students. I feel like they have a lot of soul. That's something she really dives into, this empathic ability of encouraging her students to explore on that deep level through mechanics and experience.

I feel like a lot of the higher profile games, even if you were to explain Walden to somebody who doesn't care about games -- I mean, they might scoff a little, but I bet they would be intrigued.

Yeah. You know, like, "That's it? Well, I guess I'll try it."

But, I don't know. What do you notice about the students who pass through your program? I know you have "non-games" people also make games.

Right.

What have you observed about the way they make games versus "games" people?

Yeah, one of the things -- like we were talking about before, not only is a strength of ours that interdisciplinary approach, it's also the breadth of what we try to explore. So, I bet it's half of our students who are really passionate about games and the other half fall across a variety of fields. Some are straight-up tech, they wanna work on Microsoft, Google, or Apple. Or some of them are more Hollywood, they wanna work at Pixar or animation digital-effect houses. Some are going themed, they want to work at Disney Imagineering or Universal Parks. That range really helps them get at some essential characteristics of design that Jesse really underscores well, I think, in his classes about how in the end it's the experience you want; you're designing for a person to have.

Whether they're playing a game or riding a ride or doing something with a kiosk. You know, as a user, a guest, or a player, you're designing an experience you hope they have. Through design, if you're doing it well, they'll have some sort of experience within the realm of what you were trying to communicate.

I think that resonates so that it becomes: Well, how do you bring spatial elements that you have to deal with if you're in a room or onstage into life experiences in different, new ways? 'Cause you've thought about space in different ways than somebody who's just like -- like, one of the things that just fascinates me is when you look at, and I've seen some really good studies on just exploring game levels in terms of how they're designed but also how they tried to situate them aesthetically in terms of world-building. 'Cause sometimes you're like, "Man, I'm running down another hall." Chris Crawford, we were talking about him.

Yeah.

I still love that talk he gave years ago. It wasn't his dragons talk, but it was around that time where he was just talking about: Man, games take out all the most exciting stuff and make them cutscenes and the boring shit is walking around trying to find your way out of a building. [Laughs.] Which, in normal life, you don't struggle to try to find your way out of a building. [Laughs.]

No, yeah. It's funny because I think of that often. I was just playing Quantum Break, I think, for Xbox One? Something to know about me is I'm perpetually three or four years behind whatever is out.

[Laughs.] Right?

So, I was playing through it and I was like, "Why is this the part they're letting me play and why is that the part I watch?"

Right? Exactly.

It's weird how much that still pops up.

I don't know. I mean, I guess I'm curious to ask: How do you hope videogames change or branch out, personally? Like, what would you like to see games try to tackle or do?

Couple things. One, I am a believer of the transformational aspects. Like, they can have some sort of positive social impact on our daily lives. Seeing them do that more both strategically where it's like, okay, if you're somebody who wants to quit smoking, this game is gonna help you quit smoking. Or you're trying to improve your academic abilities in math. These are just some simple examples. Strategically, they've been designed well enough both in terms of their intrinsic and implicit values but then they transfer out so that it doesn't just get locked in. You know, there's been a lot of studies around these brain training games where it's like, "Wow, yeah, brain training games are great for helping you improve on playing brain training games!” You know? [Laughs.] I'm not sure they do much else.

[Laughs.]

But I think there's a sophistication to what you can do with gameplay mechanics, again, getting at the idea of verbs to where there is some transfer-ability out into our worlds and lives. And then, this other thing -- these are kind of related, but getting at that expressively in a Paolo Pedercini sense of how can games express things in new and exciting ways that allow us from a simulation perspective of that sense of, "Oh, I feel like I've experienced somebody else's shoes or some other perspective as a player," to a more abstract but emotive, expressive sense of, "It allowed me to understand issues. It allowed me to understand the world and opened my eyes in ways just because I had to engage. The agency I had in the experience allowed me to understand something that wouldn't work as well in a book or a documentary."

Yeah. Well, I mean, people talk a lot about VR as -- I think, honestly, they talk about it as sort of a Band-Aid approach to accomplishing some of that. I would maintain it's more the human intent behind it rather than the hardware output. But I guess just to shift gears and we've talked about a lot of different aspects, but I'd be curious to talk about the media side of things. I don't know how often you go to "the sites," the enthusiast game sites or what you notice about mainstream coverage of the games industry and culture. What do you notice the media never digs in that you wish they would? Like, what's stuff you'd like to read more about if you could?

I think a couple things. I'm not just trying to compliment you, but digging things like a more sophisticated understanding of the history and its relation to our culture. You know, how it's situated in there is something I think you're starting to see with work like what you're doing and some other -- like, I think Tom Bissell did some good stuff. There's a new book out called Bit by Bit that kind of tries to do something similar, but I've just started reading so I can't speak to it in detail.

Yeah, I haven't even heard of it.

I heard about it recently and wanted to check it out and now that the semester's over I'm like, "Whew, I can do some other stuff." [Laughs.] And then -- so, that, I think has only been scratched at and I think there's a lot there. Like, what we try to do with Well Played is this idea of side-stepping. Even now, games are a good buggaboo of saying, "Games are evil. They're causing kids to be more violent, more antisocial, yadda yadda yadda." And sort of just saying, "Well, games are valuable: Now, why?" Like, let's accept that they are valuable. As an experience. As a medium. You know, just the act of playing them can be valuable and then really trying to dig into that is something that I think could be done even more.

And similarly, who said it? I think it was John Oliver, years ago, when he was talking about something. He was like, "The best way to be successful at evil is to be boring."

Yeah. That was FCC and net neutrality.

Yeah. It stuck with me 'cause I was like -- it was right around the time Gamergate was so hot and I was talking to a lot of colleagues who were going, "Man, the game industry is the worst industry in the world." I was like, "Really? 'Cause Gamergate, don't get me wrong. It had all kinds of ugliness all around it and there's misogyny and there's the shit that went down. Some of it was criminal for sure."

Right.

"But are they really -- they were so loud and so noisy. What's the quiet, boring part of this?"

Yeah.

The diversity numbers are part of that. It's like, "Wow, we're still sort of struggling. There's not many women in the industry." And then if you're like, "What about Hispanics and African-Americans in the industry feeling like they've got a role and a place?" 'Cause I saw this recent post on Wired about this woman kind of going, "Hey, man, don't hire women if you can't retain them. If you're not willing -- if all you're willing to do is try to recruit women but then you're not willing to try to adapt your culture to actually be a place where they feel like they belong then you're wasting everybody's time."

I mean, I don't know necessarily that media is "the solution" to these types of things. That happens to be my chosen tool. I think I talked a little about it, because I tell everyone about how it seems to be impossible to get traction writing about some of these evils because I think the way it typically falls down is it's too focused about human beings for some of the more enthusiast sites and a lot more mainstream places assume the enthusiast sites are doing the digging --

Right, I see what you're saying. Yeah.

Yeah, I can go on and on and on with my saga and travails of trying to get traction on this, but what do you feel are the "boring evils" of the game industry?

A little bit around diversity, a little bit about how it's entrenched in a larger culture that has all kinds of issues around sexism, racism. Oh yeah. They're like, "Games is the worst industry," and I'm like, "Have you looked at Wall Street's numbers? Have you looked at Hollywood's numbers? Have you looked at VC numbers? I think 99 percent of all VC funding goes to white guys." You know, so it's like, "Woah, it's endemic and it's systemic." That's so hard to get people to grasp because it feels unfair.

Yeah, I mean, I find it interesting because there's constant stories these last few months about, you know, Uber and whoever else was taking their turn with the exposés last year. For some reason, just, videogames are not allowed at this sort of table.

Oh, right. Yeah.

Like I told you about how I was up for that journalism fellowship in Ann Arbor and they felt like mainstream coverage of videogames -- first off, the interview started with the committee telling me they know nothing about videogames, but they were still dubious about my position that there isn't suitable, sufficient coverage. They felt like, "Well, Gamergate was covered and so was gamification." They saw stories on them sometimes so they felt the media was doing a good job. But it sounds like --

Yeah, that gets at -- to me, it conjoins with the question you're asking about what parents worry about. It's sort of like that weird devaluing. The way we sort of describe it a lot of times is we're a mutt. And if you're somebody who believes in purebred dogs and how they're superior 'cause you can blah blah buh blah, you're gonna look down on mutts. And that kinda comes at us in terms of -- I think videogames are a mutt. It's a conglomeration of different fields coming together to make something -- programming, engineering, with art and design and music. I'm not even getting them all together. So, there's definitely a mongrel-ness about videogames that helps people devalue it.

Yeah.

Regardless, you know, 'cause I love it because if you get into the science of mutts, there's -- health for your dogs and I was like, "Okay, I'm gonna really push this metaphor."

[Laughs.] Go for it.

So I think there's some vigor for that type of mongrel-ness of the videogame industry. Like, people are learning and doing new and exciting things that I think -- that's where I think the media can help explore that better. But it's easy to devaluate and just go, "Eh, games aren't important."

Well, they're a leisure activity and yet movie box office numbers are reported on as news.

Right.

You know, on, like, broadcast TV. But it's totally true. You mentioned Tom Bissell. We had drinks last year and he told me working -- you know, he's working on Gears of War games and other games. He said, basically, working on those major, major games, you take all the problems of making software and you multiply them by all the problems of making movies. You know, I think even if it's from a muckraking perspective, I would just think there's so much more to write about that more mainstream places are already writing about in peripheral industries.

Right.

I mean, I'm not saying it's the most important thing in the world. Especially now with everything else going on in the world. It's just -- you know, I wonder if that's really going to be the catalyst for change. I kind of doubt it.

Yeah, I don't know if it's going to be the catalyst but at least, maybe, there's at least the hope of some really good digging that gets beyond your Variety-style coverage of Hollywood to some things. But -- like, it's not the end-all, be-all. On the one hand it's like -- not to buy into the frivolity, but on the one hand you're just making games, but on the other hand I was talking to a colleague who comes out of the theater. He had this interesting perspective where he feels like entertainment is one of the higher order things of being civilized. You know, in a civilization where you think about ways that people want to spend their "free time," these are ways to lift people up or encourage and inspire people to do more or at the very least make them laugh when things are hard. There's a positive way to look at it. The negative way is, like, "Well, you're distracting people from their real problems." [Laughs.]

[Laughs.] My entire career, that's what people have told me. The upside of what I'm doing. I'm like, "Yeah, but I'm not curing cancer exactly."

[Laughs.] Yeah, right?

I don't know that I've saved a life. A lot of people tell me, they read this project and they get PTSD.

[Laughs.] There you go.

[Laughs.] So I don't know if that's helping or not.

Yeah, sure, totally.

You mentioned John Oliver and -- I don't know. We mentioned Neil Druckmann and I guess Naughty Dog ran into stuff like this but you wrote in your email to me that there's a lot of potentially unfair pressure put on people who make games from media and fans. I mean, it's probably really difficult to prep students for what to do in those situations. But you also made the point that most game developers have no training or practice in public relations. So, I mean, does this sort of stuff get talked about? Because it feels like if you go off what's written about -- it seems like videogames are the most fulfilling and toxic endeavor.

[Laughs.]

[Laughs.]

It's like there's nothing in between. I mean, do you talk about this with students? Do you tell them how to damage control? Is that even academia's role?

We don't talk about -- that's really interesting. When we were talking about things that we might not necessarily address, when we talk about scope and stuff.

Yeah.

But we talk a little bit about marketing from a communications perspective. We don't dig into, "Oh my God: You're being attacked, how do you handle it? What's your PR solution?" We do talk a bit about social-media etiquette, just in terms of trying to help them understand as they start trying to develop as creative professionals ways to make the most of that. Because social media can really be a boon for you as somebody who's a small indie developer. Like, I think you just naturally have the aptitude for it, but another group of our alums -- we called them the Kyles, Kyle Gabler and Kyle Gray -- while they were here, pitched a project that was called the Experimental Gameplay Project at the time. It was just gonna be this little, "Well, we're gonna try to put rapid prototyping into a mechanic a week. Go!" One of the mechanics was this weird physics thing that became Tower of Goo which became World of Goo. But those guys play and they loved having fun with the media. They used that positively to their advantage. Like, the media just -- I think they had such a good attitude and not snarky but just playful, but they had this knack for getting interviews and getting attention. And so, like, we talk about ways to try to leverage social media and connections in a positive way. It is sort of a harder -- we haven't had as much attention given towards that because social media makes people, you know, as fans, "Oh, I'm linked to Neil Druckmann," for instance. Or whoever. Or Beyoncé. "I'm following her, so she knows! She replied to my tweet! Oh my God!" You know, "Me and Beyoncé are besties!"

[Laughs.] Yeah. Yeah.

So there is that weird sort of feeling that social media allows. There was a great article, I think it was on Kotaku, about the weird thing happening with streamers between YouTube and Twitch because their fans feel so close to them 'cause they're looking at them and watching them. They start feeling like they like them. [Laughs.]

Yeah.

The thread through that article was one guy had a fan show up. He's based in the states here and he had some fan from Japan, like, fly here and just knock on his door in the middle of the night. We're like, "Woah!" So, that negative backfiring of people start feeling too close or they're all up in your business day-in and day-out, you do have to start either, one, developing some armor so when somebody tells you you're awful -- and it can skew as far as Gamergate, where they're doxxing you and just telling you the worst things in the world on social media -- to what happened with No Man's Sky. Yeah, No Man's Sky ended up having such amazing hype and intention to a small little company. And the game didn't quite live up to the hype initially and they kinda went into silence mode and that just caused the fan base to go bananas. I think everybody felt self-righteously justified to tell them off because they didn't quite deliver what they felt like they had been promised. You know, how do you handle that? Woof!

It's weird because, yeah, I feel like this stuff has changed. Like we mentioned, there seems to be: "It's the most important use of your time. It's the most important medium." It's tons of drama. Somehow it's eclipsed what it originally was.

Yeah.

Which was play.

It's play. It's frivolous. It's sort of nonsense.

Yeah, I mean. I don't know. There's a lot of self-seriousness and staking claim and territory. Something you had mentioned that you wish the industry -- you think it can do better discussing the range of games that come out and connect with people. Like, you mentioned casual mobile, which is ironic because in all the press releases I get, the industry certainly claims revenue generated from those games as part of the industry and yet -- I don't know. I remember one of the first interviews I did for this, I talked to Laralyn McWilliams and she talked about how GDC when Myst came out, everyone was scoffing at how, like, "It isn't a game. No one will want it." And yet, it had just sold crazy-good.

Right.

Why do you think this is a pattern that keeps repeating itself even for something so young as games are.

I'm gonna go broad. [Laughs.]

Sure, that’s fine.

There's this entire thing that I always like to jokingly call "the arrogance." There's something about us humans that like to find somebody that we can look down on. [Laughs.] And it can range from, like, an academic setting. It's like, "MIT is better than CMU. CMU is better than MIT. Stanford says they're better than both of us. The Ivies say they're better than us." I think it can get inverted, like, 'cause you'd say, "Well, the Ivies, that's the top of the crop." But some community colleges look down on the Ivies 'cause community colleges are affordable and people get jobs and they actually get a good education and don't go into debt and blah blah buh blah blah. All -- so it's just weird. And Brenda Romero just gave this great talk about how her whole career she's always felt like she wasn't legit 'cause she's like, "I'm not making it, whatever it is. And it might be AAA or it might be VR or whatever." She's like, "You feel like people are looking down on you because you're not making 'real games,' you're just doing this little hobby mobile thing." Or -- like her tabletop game. This is what she was talking about. Then she's like, "But then, when I talk to some people, they feel like they've sold out and they're just making AAA games." They're not as legit as her, who's a true designer doing exactly what she wants by making tabletop games on her own. The point of her talk is, like: Why do we do this to each other? Why do keep doing this where we're always looking down on each other and besmirching each other? I think part of it just gets down to human nature and how we like to clique and all that. But what's great about human nature is we can actually rise above. [Laughs.] You know, we're just a little considerate and a little thoughtful. And so, I don't think it's ever gonna go away go away. Because you see it in happening in movies. You know, is it a legit movie or is it just a flick or is it a waste of your money? You know, is that serious TV or is that a guilty pleasure?

Happens in journalism, too.

Right!

I had asked Frank this question, so you might have seen it. I was asking about early filmmakers when they started making films, they were coming at their work with ideas out of the newspaper, theater, and their lives. As film got more established, film-school degrees started to become available. I know we talked a lot about CMU and cross-pollination of mediums and disciplines. How do you feel the availability of filmmakers getting those degrees changed film? Is that something you're trying to emulate? Or any of the other disciplines you're involved in?

Yeah, like, I'm gonna get back to what you were saying earlier. On the one hand, yes, I think there's some emulation going on and some sort of resonance. It's similar. Like, it's creative endeavor, it's an industry. At the same time, it needs to start standing on its own two feet as whatever it is, medium, field. And what I think academics enable to have happen is two, maybe three-fold. Like, I had a really great talk with Celia Pearce. I think she's at Northeastern currently --

Yeah.

-- and been a part of IndieCade for forever.

She called me "the Clay Shirky of videogames."

There you go. Not too bad there.

[Laughs.]

So, what she was getting at was this idea of how much academics has helped support indie and some of their biggest experiments. A lot of indie developers tend to have academic jobs or side jobs that enable them to have more freedom. I think that gets at this overarching, like, academics ideally have more time to explore ideas that might not be successful. So, yeah. So that freedom enables them to push at boundaries in ways that industry is never going to be able to do well.

Right. I mean, at the bigger studios there's almost, like, an odometer that turns over as soon as a project is done. They have to start working on the next thing. There's very little -- like, Greg Zeschuk, formerly of BioWare told me he remembers working on games in the '90s and they used to go on vacation when a project was done. [Laughs.] That doesn't happen anymore.

Yeah, I know. And so, there's that. I think in the same way we some of the best ways to make new, unique, interesting games/gameplay is, like, pulling new perspectives in. Academics can be a new perspective. I think there's fruitful conversation to be had across those disciplines. And again, there's the trick of getting people to move past the arrogance where, you know, it's easy to look down on academics because we're in the ivory tower and we tend to verbify too many things. [Laughs.] And vice versa, academics going, like, "Let me come in and solve your problem with algorithms." Or, you know, a research study that proves how to make things.

[Laughs.] Well, this'll be my last question.

Promises, promises. [Laughs.]

Well, no. Yeah. Maybe. Last on the record. [Pause.] What do you think videogames have accomplished?

At a high, like, overall?

Yeah, however you want to interpret it. It's intentionally broad and vague and wherever you wanna go with it.

Okay. I think videogames have helped accomplish either re-legitimization or a growing legitimization of the value of play in our lives.

Yeah.

'Cause for a while there, particularly with the industrialization of our cultures, play was frivolous and you're gonna get to work, you're gonna work, and work's very much like being on a -- you know, you're on the line.

Yeah. Yeah, much like videogames, the concept of teenagers and childhood is a relatively modern or new thing.

Yeah. So, I think there's something there. So, it's getting people to really seriously address, look at -- or more seriously look at how we shouldn't lose that sort of creative, open playfulness in our culture and our society. It's enabling adults, because it used to be - I mean, I'm in my forties and once upon a time that'd been like, "You're in your forties and you're playing games? What the hell, man! Grow up!"

Yeah.

I've heard many people say this: Any day somebody dies who's never played games, somebody is born who's always gonna play games. Yeah, exactly. So, you're starting to see people -- they don't look down on the fact that they're continuing playing games and that's part of their life. My game-playing has changed. You know, I used to be able to put in hours and I would happily do that. Now it's just a little busier and I squeeze it in more across the day as opposed to dedicated 10-hour session. You know, I think that's a broadening of what's out there in terms of what we can play. There's some great games that are minute-type, bite-size experiences and there are great games that are like a five-course meal.

Yeah.

And so I think that that's something I think games have done really really well because both in terms of just in and of itself it's fun to play a game, but what they've helped I think as well and kind of building on that idea of play is getting at how creative -- I think creativity and curiosity are a big part of what's satisfying about being alive. Being able to explore things you don't understand or a problem. Games allow you to inherently explore things.

And, so, like, that's actually something I think transfers into life. Like, game players are more open problem solvers 'cause they're like, "Well, I'll try it again. I'll try this. I'll try that. I'll try this." And, like, Constance Steinkuehler had this great -- years ago, just talking about -- she did a lot of work in World of Warcraft just going, "A lot of time, guild players inherently enact the scientific method as they try to explore strategies for how to play the game better.” I was like, "Damn, that's right!" I hadn't envisioned it in that way. But that type of -- I think something that's really powerful about games is the agency you get in there. You feel like your decisions matter. Like, what you're doing matters and I think that's something that a lot of people strive for and hope for in their lives. Like, are we doing something that matters? [Laughs.] That's something that games give people to think about just by playing them.

Sure. My full name is Jack Jamie Ward. I'm 50 years old. I'm as old as Star Trek, which says a lot about my geekiness. I'm coming from Halifax, Nova Scotia, specifically Lakeside, a small community just off of Halifax, Nova Scotia in Canada on the East Coast.

I'm connecting through videogames, I think, because most sort of speculative fiction and geek culture intersect together through story, through radio drama, which is my big thing -- or modern audio drama. All that gets reflected in videogames.

For almost 14 years now I've been running a weekly podcast called The Sonic Society. Before that I ran another show called Shadowlands. Shadowlands featured old-time radio, which is often called OTR shows. Then, I wanted to go and see what was being made that was brand new. And so, there was modern old-time, which is now modern audio drama. So, for over five hundred episodes now, we've been able to showcase over a hundred different producers, directors, including myself. I also write and produce and have been doing so for well over 16 years. Actually, I wrote a script 30 years ago that I got a chance to produce as well. So, I've worked with probably a couple hundred actors, I've written over 90 plays on my own, I'm still producing a number of series as well as this. I also have another podcast called The Electric Vicuña Podcast, which is a collection of my original productions, under the banner of Electric Vicuña, the name of our company. I've won a couple of awards as a scriptwriter and as a producer of radio drama, Mark Time Awards and the Ogle Awards and such.

I mean, would you describe yourself as -- as far as your knowledge level of the history of radio dramas or audio dramas, would you say that you're an aficionado? Would you call yourself a casual historian or a fan? How would you characterize yourself in your awareness of the form and its history?

I'd say all three. I've read a number of books on the history. I was a huge fan of spoken word. Ever since I was a child, my parents brought me up on old-time radio drama through LPs, which are those overly sized CDs that nobody plays anymore. I also ended up being a speaker in a number of podcast conventions and other places, introducing people to the history of radio drama all the way to modern audio drama. So, I've had the opportunity to be able to speak as a specialist in this field, which has been really exciting for me. And to meet people and to write for professional radio-drama companies, as well, and have some of my work professionally produced on top of that and for sale.

So, I think I've had a chance to experience -- and I've done a number of interviews with top radio drama producers of today: Dirk Maggs, Jerry Robbins, Angelo Pennetta come to mind right off the top of the bat. They're very well known in the audio-drama field for creating all kinds of really exciting works.

When I emailed you, I guess like I said it was April or March? [Laughs.]

[Laughs.]

You know, when I contacted you about, "You know, do you want to have a conversation kind of about videogames?," what ran through your head?

Well, I was excited about videogames. I play them casually more often than not. One of my ex-girlfriends was the first one to buy me an actual PS3 or PlayStation 3.

Yeah.

I ended up re-introducing myself to that kind of console gaming. I played a lot of computer games and I enjoy playing on the computer, but now I'm just really enjoying console games. So, I found that I didn't like playing online because of some of the cultural aspects that happen on the online game. I prefer the story. Being a writer, I love story. Things like Uncharted just took my heart. I can't wait to finish 4. [Laughs.] I can’t bring myself to finish Nathan Drake’s story quite yet. I appreciate a lot of sandbox games too. I love the Fallout series, of course, and Skyrim, and The Last of Us. There's a number of games that are really long-playing games that I enjoy playing. But what really excited me, too, is I started playing things like BioShock and I realized, "Oh, you can pick up this recorder and listen to it?" And the same thing with Fallout.

So, there were these sort of mini radio dramas that were going all the way through it and I thought, "Somebody has a real love of the genre as much as I do." I mean, it's in Fallout they have "The Adventures of Herbert 'Daring' Dashwood." [Laughs.] Right? And those are mini audio dramas that people have loved and would love to see more of. I notice online, everyone's sort of saying, "Is anybody making any BioShock audio dramas? Is anyone making Borderlands 2?" I noticed there's one that Halo has put out: “The Hunt.” So, it's exciting to see that kind of crossover happen.

I just finished a transcript earlier this week with a literary critic who I interviewed who has started to write about videogames. He and I hit on this thing about the perception that maybe people who make videogames are big fans of other mediums but may not have a deep understanding of how they work to emulate, for example, film. Do you have a sense that the same type of thing is happening with radio dramas or audio dramas when they're presented in a game like Fallout or BioShock?

Well, I created a little audio essay because I was fascinated about how audio drama works on a deep level. In my little audio essay I started looking at various dimensions of audio because in the audio-drama world there's a massive split right now between people who sorta see audio drama from the old-time radio perspective of almost like staged dramas that are done auditorily, right? So, the idea of doing a live stage performance or that kind of feeling to people on the other side who say, "No, no, no, no. We want movies without pictures. We wanna have that large scale." I used to call it the difference between the minimalists in audio drama who just want the simple sound effects to the "every blade of grass" people who want to hear every blade of grass that you go across. And it's fascinating because it really does seem to be the videogame generation that is really excited -- and the people who grew up with, like, movies as their main focus, but especially videogames are really visual and they want that kind of full-scaped, 3D-sound, visual aspect in audio drama. Production, production, production is most important for them.

Right. But when you're playing games and see these audio-drama aspects pop up and play out, do you sense they are paying homage to specific approaches, styles, and philosophies of audio drama? Or does it feel like a tacked-on unspooling of clunky narrative they didn't know how else to put in the game? Or something else entirely?

I think I personally see two different flavors in audio drama in videogames: the sentimental and the practical. Sentimentalized audio drama flavor in videogames is either appealing to the setting of the story -- much like the theater showing the temperance movement in Red Dead Redemption or to a half-remembered past in the writer’s life like the “Dashwood” radio dramas from Fallout 3. They are obviously reflecting back on the 1950’s OTR that the writers either remember personally, or like me, remember their parents sharing those classic dramas.

You mentioned before that you're not that interested in playing online due to -- you called it "the cultural aspect." What types of things are you referring to?

Well, I mean, there's two aspects. The one thing is you do get a lot of sort of cross-chatter insults that happen between people. I'm just not there for that kind of thing.

Yeah.

Being a teacher and a parent, I don't want to get back into the whole swearing back and forth and causing all that kind of stuff. I found that almost stressful. [Laughs.] I could enjoy shooting people up if I was doing it by myself. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.]

The other aspect is I'm not a big fan of -- because I'm so story-driven, I'm not a big fan of playing games like Halo or Metal Gear as much, or Call of Duty, or something where oftentimes when you're playing online, it's sort of shoot and then respawn and then shoot and then respawn. I like a destination to go to. And that's not just in videogames. It's my whole life, right? If I'm gonna go for a walk, I find it much more enjoyable if I find a place that I need to go to do it. [Laughs.] Than just going around in circles. So.

Just to start at a very broad point, what is your perception of videogames and the videogame industry? It sounds like you're aware of a lot of games, but from where you sit, when someone says "videogames" or "the videogame industry," what does that make you think of or feel?

There's a number of things going on in the videogame industry. I'm on the side of being kind of concerned about the Anita Sarkeesian sort of look at videogames because I often see that when you slice apart stories in very specific ways and look at them -- I went through university, I did my undergraduate in English and I am an English teacher, so I'm very aware of being able to see critical analysis in a very number of different ways. So, feminist criticism is not something I'm unaware of. I appreciate it. But I also say, "There is a time to take a look at that and step back and look away from it. And, there's a time to say, "Okay, but the story has to be first and foremost. If the story is interrupted because you're trying to facilitate a number of things or work against a number of things that you see as being a problem, then the story is hurt and you don't end up doing a better product in the end."

So, while I appreciate looking at the videogame industry and saying, "Well, is there sexism going on? Is there too much violence on?" I'm not sure that you can make those arguments that the violence is self-perpetuating violence in society. I mean, if that were the case, Japan would be the most violent society in the world. [Laughs.] And they're far less than the U.S. and less than Canada and we're pretty good. So, I have trouble making those kinds of quick analysis.

Yeah.

So, I see, oftentimes, people sort of coming from the good place of wanting to be able to do social causes but oftentimes sort of causing harm in creativity. And I'm all about creativity. If you want to do a really cool radio, I have a friend who does LEAP audio, and it's all LGBTQ stories. And I think that's awesome. That's what's needed in the radio-drama community. We don't have somebody out there doing that. So, I act for him as well, and he acts for me in many of my things. But on the same level, I don't necessarily say, "Well, he's doing right and this other person is doing wrong."

Find the source of that great story and reach to it and fulfill it and don't necessarily have to follow through with anybody else's ideas of what makes a good story, what makes a good character. If it's gonna work, you'll find out from your audience if it works or doesn't.

I want to dive into -- not Sarkeesian specifically, but the audience reaction and things that sparked from there. I think what might be useful is before we get further: From your point of view, obviously, your focus is more radio than videogames, but I'd be curious to hear what you feel is the usefulness in contrasting one medium's history and specifics to another. Obviously, 1:1 comparisons are not gonna be useful per se but I think that they can give hints or offer glimpses ways things might pan out or the ways they might not pan out. But I just sort of want to anticipate people reading this and being like, "Well, this is a broken metaphor from the outset." Do you agree? Is it a broken metaphor? Or how is this not a broken metaphor?

I mean, I try to tell my students -- I try to show them that all story is interconnected in the way that it has to be told. You have to have a hook -- even essays, I go through the whole process of, "You need a hook in an essay. Well, you need a hook in a movie. Well, you need a hook in a story. Well, you need a hook in a radio drama. You need a hook in a game."

The way we take in story as human beings tends to be pretty clearly cut as to what we find effective. Now, you can cookie cutter for sure, but you still have to follow the basic good storytelling procedures.

There's an interesting variety -- I did a radio drama called Blue Defender, which was a superhero that I created. One of my fans said, "Could I make an animation of this?" I said, "Sure! That sounds great." So, he made an animation of it and I watched the animation and put it on YouTube and I went, "Wow! This is so slow."

[Laughs.]

The reason was is because radio drama depends on dialog so much, that the visuals got in the way. I could have gone back and cut out almost half the dialog that I put in my radio drama and then gave it to him and the animation would have been that much more exciting. So, there is that aspect where it's more about how do you change the medium? I do adaptations of books, for example, for other companies and for myself, and it's kind of like you rip off the front cover and then you go through all the stuff and you rearrange the pages and mark off a whole bunch of stuff and then try to find the kernel of the story within to do it. Those stories are there. It's how you tell it in the medium which makes a really big difference.

One other thing, if you don't mind.

Sure.

I have students who sit there and say, "Well, radio drama isn't that important. I'm a visual person." I'll say radio drama is more visual than anything you've got. And they'll be like, "That's not true." Yeah, it is. I'll explain it to you this way: Radio drama is the most intimate of mediums because it's just you and the sounds in your head and you making the pictures. You're the closest thing you can to your imagination when you're doing radio drama. It's right there. You're not even outside, reading.

Yeah, I was gonna say, some of the earliest videogames are not that different from what you're talking about in that they're just words but the difference is radio is just sound, but the earliest games were just reading those words.

Yes, exactly! I say, "Here's an experiment for you: Go watch your favorite television show and turn off the sound and see how much of it you can take in." Now go watch your favorite television show and turn it around but leave the sound up so you can't see the picture. How much of the show do you understand?" We get more from the sound than we do from the pictures in that way. We get more of the integrity of the story. So, when you get things like BioShock and Fallout, sort of adding to the story by these audio clips, they know very clearly that these audio clips create a much richer, deeper background to the story world than they would if they had a pile of different text because people would skip through that. I mean, Skyrim does that to a certain degree with the books, but I talk to a lot of people who play Skyrim and they go, "Nah, I haven't read all the books.” [Laughs.]

I don't. Do you?

No, and I'm a reader!

[Laughs.]

But, I mean, more people will listen to those radio clips that come up because they can play along and still listen while they're playing BioShock, so.

Well, first up, I wanted to mention because you had mentioned before we started -- thank you for using the term "radio drama," but you said actually the correct terminology is "audio drama." In talking about contrasting videogames and your specialty, I mentioned that one of these points of contentions in videogames and talking about a point of comparison is people are saying, "Oh, we shouldn't even call them videogames anymore. We should just call them 'games.'" When did that start to happen in radio dramas where people were saying, "Oh, we should just call it audio dramas?"

Well, people wanted to identify differences between radio drama, old-radio drama and modern-radio drama. That was a big thing for people to try identify between. But then, also, there was this other big push. It was like, "Well, we gotta call it something different because people don't know what audio drama is. They know what radio drama is and think that's old, but we want to get people excited about the fact that there's this huge resurgence with technology of audio drama." And there is. There's literally thousands and thousands and maybe hundreds of thousands of hours of listening that's out there that people can get a contact to.

So, people were throwing around different ideas -- I tried things like "sonic cinema," right? But, again, people went, "Oh, we don't like the idea of 'cinema' because that's suggests that it's movies." Well, movies for the mind? Pulp radio. Pulp audio. There's a whole bunch of different ideas of audio theater. So, people were -- and they still play around with those things, but I think for the most part people have settled upon "modern audio drama" or "audio drama" and "old-time radio" or "radio drama" between the two different sort of Golden Age of radio and the current age of modern audio drama.

So, I mean, when we're contrasting these two time periods -- obviously, today, we live in a very different era. What I remember learning about in college in the history of media, airwaves were considered sacred and advertising on the airwaves would be unthinkable. What changed? [Laughs.]

Well, what happened was the Golden Age of radio drama was not really very long. It's about 20, 30 years in the length of things and then television popped in. That very quickly killed much of the radio drama and most of the money went into television, so most radio companies went for the really cheap content. Playing the same music over and over again, which is -- you know, I still get that when I go work out every morning at the gym. [Laughs.] It drives me crazy: "I just heard these five songs for the last four days. Please stop playing them! I can't take it! Isn’t there an article in the Geneva Convention against this?”

So, there’s always been audio drama, even with television gutting the best days. We had that Golden Age and then we got into the Silver Age, which took us into the '60s and '70s and '80s. There are many people who are modern audio drama enthusiasts who really got excited in the Silver Age. And there were two different shows that got everyone excited in the Silver Age. For most people from England and Canada, one was The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. For me, I remember the Silver Age in the '80s, and I listened to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I'm like, "This is amazing." For most people in the United States, the Silver Age began with the radio drama Star Wars that was written and produced. It was fascinating because George Lucas gave his old university rights to do the radio-drama Star Wars for a dollar. He gave them all the music. They actually fundraised, to get money from the government as well. Mark Hamill signed on. They got Anthony Daniels, and then a whole slew of other people to play different characters. Then they took the George Lucas script and they extended it so they had -- for those Star Wars fans -- you could listen to effectively 15 episodes of A New Hope, which are all half an hour episodes, so suddenly your Star Wars goes from a two-hour movie to a 6.5-hour serialized season. People loved it. So, they went back and they did The Empire Strikes Back. They had less funding so they had fewer episodes. Then they had even less funding for Return of the Jedi. They didn't even have Mark Hamill back for that. They only ended up doing six episodes, so it really was ending up being the size of the movie. But it was a huge explosion of ideas for people. I have friends of mine who have used that model and have done their own radio drama like The Planet of the Apes and extending from all the movies and creating their own fan-fiction version by taking those movies and adding even stories from comics that that they read, original novels that have a different take. All these various source material allows someone to create a long-form audio-drama series. It's fun to see people weave together these serials long before they were popular to do them on Netflix. It allows writers to be as creative as they wish.

I understand your saying the Golden Age didn’t last that long, but could you talk a bit about how people came around to the airwaves maybe not being so sacred. Did TV have something to do with that?

Well, it has a lot to do with where the money went. Money went into developing television dramas and out of radio dramas. For a while you’d see a couple of shows that would actually overlap. Have Gun Will Travel and Dragnet I think were two examples of that. They ran both series on both mediums. But the lure of the visual is a whole lot easier for people to relax to. Radio drama is not for the lazy-minded. Eventually the sponsorship fell out of the radio dramas and they moved pretty much exclusively to television. Radio drama is not as cheap as playing a record that was already donated to the station. It’s certainly not as cheap as having a single DJ either. Some stations began playing the old time radio series late at night because the content was already made, and up into the ‘70s there were a few shows -- mostly anthology series of the strange that kept the torch alive. CBS Radio Mystery Theater hosted by the incredible actor E.G. Marshall played all the way through the ‘70s until ‘82, and Zero Hour by one of my own spiritual mentors, Rod Serling, had a brief run for a year and a bit in the ‘70s. Other nations like Britain never lost their love of audio drama. In the seventies and eighties, the CBC had some awesome shows like Nightfall and Vanishing Point. But all of them seemed to be anthology-based so people could miss one week and not be lost.

The core reason that I reached out to you is to talk about audience for radio dramas. I know this is a very broad thing, but what was the audience like for the Golden Age of radio dramas or the Silver Age of radio dramas?

That's a good question. I don't have numbers off the top of my head but, I mean, everybody listened to radio at the time. You figure that out after the big panic when Orson Welles did War of the Worlds and it just swept across the country, this idea that, "Oh my God, we're being invaded by martians right now!" [Laughs.] It's interesting how that happened where there were, like, two stations and people were sick of what was going on one station, flipped over, and they listened to War of the Worlds not realizing it was just a drama and thinking, "Oh my God, it's real!" The panic was real. I mean, there's no -- it's been overblown through the years. There were no actual deaths that we know of that were reported.

Right.

But people were fleeing New York. People were leaving the city. People were absolutely terrified that something was literally happening.

So, from the Golden Age, how long did it take for people like Orson Welles to test the limits of the medium?

Oh, he was going at it from the very beginning. He was a very young man and working very hard. He -- there's a very funny story where he used to work several different jobs because he had a great voice. So, he hired his own ambulance and drove from one studio, like, NBC over to CBS, back and forth, with the sirens running so he could get there on time. You couldn't do that nowadays. It would be entirely illegal.

[Laughs.]

But he just hired an ambulance, ran the sirens to get to where he would go. And he did a lot of this because he wanted to fund his theater company, like, his live theater company as well. But he enjoyed creating classics, and so he did a lot of writing and producing. He worked as The Shadow for many years, of course, and then got into doing his own work of The Mercury theater on the Air and The Campbell Playhouse, which were his two things that got him involved in War of the Worlds. To this day, a lot of people sort of count him as the king of radio drama.

Was he unusual, though? Were there others at that time who were unsung heroes doing similar testing of the medium?

Oh, absolutely! There's a number of people that were really incredible writers. Arch Oboler was a phenomenal force in Radio Drama. He wrote some of the best psychological thrillers. So popular were his plays that he got his own bi-line show Arch Oboler Presents. Also, Lucille Fletcher was very famous for her show Sorry, Wrong Number which is perhaps one of the greatest tales of suspense terror on radio ever made. Some of her stuff was later redone for The Twilight Zone. Rod Serling, like so many others, got his start on radio drama as well.

Yup.

He started working on radio, too. So, that's what happened, when radio went to television, most of those shows ended up changing into television. All the variety comedy shows, the Jack Benny shows. A lot of the great vaudeville people started -- went from stage to radio to television.

Amos and Andy, yeah.

Amos and Andy, Burns and Allen, Dean Martin. Martin and Lewis.

Right. Right.

So, there's a ton of people who did very, very well. Of course, Abbott and Costello, their whole "Who's on First?" became really famous when it hit radio.

So, I mean, yeah, pretty much everybody listened to radio. But among those audiences and to contrast it against games, what did those audiences seem to want? Did they write in to shows or stations? If so, what did those notes say?

Oh, absolutely! In fact, a lot of -- there was such a variety. It was like early television in the fact that they started slow and they started with a couple of dramas and then they realized, "Wow, we could do things like sell stuff to kids." So, Superman, for example -- a lot of people don't realize but Superman, the radio drama [The Adventures of Superman] created a number of things that we later used in Superman. For example, kryptonite was created from the radio drama. So, there's -- and they started saying things like, "Well, we can sell box-top things off of cereals for kids. We can get kids to be able to buy Wheaties." I always loved -- I think it was Dick Tracy show, where they had the sound of guns firing off. Like, huge howitzer guns. It was like, "That's the sound of the guns!" And it was -- the suggestion of this particular cereal was exploded from cannons. It was the "only cereal made from guns." Right? [Laughs.] But it was a big selling point for kids at the time. Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, The Lone Ranger, The Green Hornet, The Blue Beetle. There's a lot of kids shows that they had that were a lot of fun that they could sell these kinds of products. So, they had shows for every age, pretty much for every genre.

One of the things I was wondering about was whether there's precedent for the entitled audience behavior that in the case of videogames extends beyond having a product that works. Like, a good correlate is would be: Would people critique Little Orphan Annie based solely on the quality of microphones they used and whether each syllable was enunciated correctly?

[Laughs.] No, I think this was -- we were at the very beginning of an audience that wasn't as sophisticated as it is today. I mean, you and I -- and many people like the students I teach, they've absorbed hundreds of times of more stories by the time they've gotten to grade 10 or grade 9, high school than any of those people did with radio drama. I mean, a lot of people read dime-store novels and stuff like that, but, still, reading is a longer process. Once you get into the high level of media, which begins with radio drama, where you can absorb six or seven stories a night if you have it off in the background -- that starts creating this huge backlog of stories that are in people’s heads and that's where the criticism comes, like, "Oh, yeah, I've heard this one before." This is how it's gonna happen." People start making those kinds of really sharp criticisms in that way.

I think there's one interesting aspect, too, that radio drama had, old-time radio drama had that we have a problem with videogames now: It's this -- when radio was playing, everybody listened to it. Even if it was Superman, it was still in the living room and mum was in the kitchen or dad was reading a paper or dad was in the kitchen and mum was reading the paper. Whatever it was that they were doing, but they were with the family and it was a shared kind of entertainment experience. So, you could talk about that with everybody in your family. But nowadays, everything is so portable and everything is so customizable, I'm not sure that most parents really know what their kids are playing, let alone what they're listening to. Like, it was the same thing back in the day where I was talking to a music teacher. I said, "You know, how different is the music today compared to back?" She said, "The big difference is that parents have no idea what their kids are listening to.”

Yeah, I mean, I've seen and maybe you've seen written about the rise of bowling alleys was another thing that drove a wedge in at least American families, that there began to be this divide as far as what kids were doing to entertain themselves and parents losing track of it.

Right. That makes sense.

Yeah, I mean -- so, you're saying, though, that there wasn't a lot of harsh criticism in the early days of radio drama?

No, I think that they were careful. I think that in and of itself, most of the early days of radio drama were driven by the metrics of money. So, they didn't want to really do a lot of things to insult people. Even when War of the Worlds came out, the apology tour went on forever for Orson Welles.

Yeah.

He went on live on film and apologized to everybody. A lot of people say that was practiced, and he loved the entertainment. The fact of the matter is is that those were the expectations. People didn't want to be shocked in the same way. They didn't want to go beyond the pale of what they considered to be bad taste.

That's interesting, that apologizing thing. This was a question I have -- I don't know if you'll have anything that will leap immediately to mind, but I did want to ask how you feel about tech industries and CEOs differ from business leaders and the industries of radio's heyday?

That's a good question. I mean, I'll have to think about -- I mean I think the democratizing influence of social media has everyone rocked right now. One outraged listener or viewer now can marshall hundreds even thousands of angry citizens. We’re seeing that now for both better and worse in Hollywood, comedy. All the entertainment industries. In radio drama the power was in the sponsor’s hands, and if they were offended, they would cancel an entire show even without customer feedback. Companies were far more worried about reputation in the day of radio drama, whereas a corporation will do more of a calculation as to how much money they will make from the outrage. If a sponsor left in the old days of radio drama, there was a scramble to find a new one.

Yeah.

The sponsors -- if you go onto YouTube, there's a great little audio of Orson Welles just blistering, angry about a sponsor because he's had to deal with it for many, many years. There tends to be more of a -- at least in the videogame industry there tends to be more self-funded that way, because it's direct sales, right? So, it's more like the difference between HBO and network television. [Laughs.] People who wanna buy this stuff are willing to put the money down and so therefore it's a little more -- you have to spend more time self-censoring as to where you want to go and how limited you want to have your audience.

Now, one of the things I did was I said, "Well, wait a minute. In modern audio drama, we don't have a ratings system." So, I said, "Why don't we create a ratings system that works just like we do for movies?" So I sat down with a couple of people and we thought it out and we came up with the audio-drama rating system, which I can send you a link for.

Sure.

It's not a requirement, but I thought, "Hey, I've got students and parents that are asking what they can listen to. If an audio-drama company adopts this, then at least they have a bit of an idea of what to expect for their kids."

Yeah.

And I often say to people who say, "Well, should I put a lot of swearing in my radio drama or a lot of sex?" I say, "Just be aware that you are probably gonna limit your audience a little bit because there still are people who are older who love listening to this stuff and they could be turned off very quickly by those good-old fashioned four-letter Anglo-Saxon words.”

Yeah.

"That describe bodily functions." Right? [Laughs.]

Yeah, many of them can be used as verbs but are also nouns.

Exactly, that's right. [Laughs.]

I mean, this is another far-flung question: Do you see roots or seeds for things like clickbait journalism today in the start of radio's day?

I think -- it's interesting because the very beginning of radio was like the very beginning of podcasting, which was very experimental, not very -- like, you could set up your own radio station and three people around the block could hear you. That kind of thing. And that kind of happened a little bit with podcasting. And now, as people see money come in, well, that's where you see more standards, you see more requirements, you see more things that come in. I think that's what's kind of happening in the media world right now. I think the Gamergate is like this push back of saying, "Okay, we're tired of being the kids on the other side of the fence. We want to start having real media analysis of the videogames that are going on." I have to say mea culpa because I remember back in the '90s when I first started teaching and I had a student, he was saying, "You know, videogames could end up being just as engaging as movies." I went, "No, they couldn't!"

Of course I was growing up on Space Invaders and Pac-Man. I was like, "There's no way these are going to be as engaging as a movie." Which, they probably are now anyway. [Laughs.] But he's right. I mean, now, there's so many games with great cutscenes and stuff like that, that engagement, it's not surprising that now a massive release of a very famous game makes more money than many massive releases of movies.

Talking about Gamergate and Sarkeesian and feminism in games, is there an analogue in radio for the feminist movement in games today?

Huh. Well, there are a -- yeah. There's a lot of feminism. This is a big discussion we have back and forth in audio drama, too, because that spills over, right? Social issues spill over in every media. You can't escape them. So, the social issues of feminism are absolutely spilling over into audio drama and there's these big conversations of, "Well, why did you make this character male? Couldn't you have made this character female? Why is this character white?" I'll say, "Well, I didn't notice that the character was anything because it's radio drama." [Laughs.] "He could have been any color, for all I know." But there's that question of, "Well, what does a white person sound like? What does a black person sound like? What does a Chinese person? Do we have somehow our own biases of what we expect people to sound like based on their ethnicity?" So, it's a huge question that people -- and I think it's healthy. I think it's healthy to have these kinds of questions. I think it's never -- it stops being healthy when people start saying, "You're doing something wrong based upon what I think should be right.” That's when things start becoming -- you know, they start falling off the truck and becoming a real issue. And we’re seeing that push back in universities right now. People are getting upset that there’s a uniformity of opinion. I’m against that. I love diversity, and that means there’s as much room for all kinds of stories in the Internet. No need to throttle any perspectives out.

There are some really great female audio-drama producers out there. Gwendolyn Jensen-Woodard comes to mind. Alexa Chipman comes to mind. Sarah Golding, and the amazing Tanja Milojevic, who I consider to be the queen of modern audio drama. They all have really strong female voices in their writing and they do great work. I'd like to see more because just like videogames, the thought of radio drama tends to be more a boy's club. There's a lot more men that are creating radio drama than there are women, and I'd like to see more parity.

I'd like to see more parity of stories, too.

Yeah.

But we're not there yet.

Well, wait, were there things from radio’s history or coverage of it that resemble modern clickbait journalism?

One of the problems with making direct comparisons between today and the days of radio drama is how little information we have and how centralized so many of those decisions were made compared to how they’re done today. It’s almost like asking for people to give specific details as to how clickbait occurrences happen in movie theaters. It’s rare because most theaters are owned by large organizations, and the distribution model is so regressive that punitive measures against theaters are really harsh. Back in the days of radio drama you had two networks, and later three -- ABC came in in the ‘40s -- so most everything was very measured in their releases. They also didn’t get clear understandings about how to market in the same way we do now -- which really didn’t get started until the eighties. The most click-baity you’re going to get is during the war years when they were trying to use propaganda to whip up support for war bonds and the like. Can you imagine today someone telling you that going out to buy goods like tires, eggs, milk, sugar and the like was doing your patriotic duty? The famous War of the Worlds scare was such a shock because people literally had no consideration that what they were hearing wasn’t an actual live news broadcast. The public had a level of trust in their government that the modern age wouldn’t understand. They were marketing kids to become junior G-men: Telling them how cool they would be to work for the government and for the betterment of their community. It’s almost unimaginable to consider people talking like that today.

Today, when I think of mainstream radio, one model that comes to mind are the shock jockey or people who are typically trying to appeal to more gendered audiences. We’re more focused on what divides us as a nation as opposed to what united us which was all the discussion in the days of old time radio. Even if you think of something like NPR, you get a very specific style and mode of thinking that’s carefully carved out for a specific audience.

Yup.

I don't know if you have a comment on that or a thought on that.

Well, it's true, and even more so in modern audio drama. We’re doing our best to carve out niche audiences. Again, I'm -- I do listen to some NPR. I'm more of a CBC listener because I'm up in Canada and I grew up with CBC.

Sure.

CBC's been pretty good at being able to get both male and female voices and all perspectives, but you look back and you realize that some of the superstars that were there were mostly men and it's not because they didn't have phenomenal women, it's because there were less of them in radio.

So, there's some really great female voices on CBC that I really appreciate. Anna Maria Tremonti, for example, who does the daily sort of CBC show called The Current. She's one of the best reporters I know. She's one of the best interviewers who really get into the story. And there's a real sense of understanding of social issues in the CBC. So, you'll hear a real diverse group of people and they try to keep it as diverse as possible. So, it's valuable, but, again, we're also getting that pushback. Now, just recently I read an article about people saying, "I can't even sell a television show idea if it's not based on some other ethnicity other than my own experiences of being a white person growing up in Canada." And they're saying, "Well, we want a Canadian experience." The person says, "I was born here. I'm Canadian!" Again, those conversations are healthy as long as they don't end up narrowing the story playing field. To me, it's all about story. My beginning and ending thing is a story. You got a great story? I don't care where it comes from, who your main characters are, I want to listen to it because I think great story is universal.

To circle back to one of the things that made me reach out to you, the entitled fandom or audience knowing better -- are you saying that it really doesn't have roots that go back all the way to the Golden Age of radio dramas? That this came later?

Well, there are fans of old-time radio -- I mean, they had their own conventions of collectors and stuff like that. They'll spend time, just like any other fandom, sort of enjoying their niche and arguing back and forth: "What was the best one?" "Well, it was Lights Out!" "No it wasn't, it was Suspense!" [Laughs.] And they'll go back and forth arguing which show was the greatest show.

So, but I mean, what's fascinating to me is that it's kind of come full circle because fan audio has been really popular. I mean, my show became extremely popular after I produced the first Firefly radio drama fanfiction. So, after the series ended and we were all anxious for more series, I thought, "Okay, well, I kind of want to do a fanfiction, but so many people are doing Doctor Who and so many people are doing Star Trek and Star Wars. I want to do something different." And I loved Firefly, so I created a six-episode series called "Old Wounds."

Yeah.

It became super-popular among all sorts of people who had never listened to audio drama before. So, it was a way to bring people into audio drama. I think in many ways, those fans -- those people involved in fandom from television or from movies are looking for crossovers to be able to continue with their thrill of stuff.

I'm curious about another type of crossover. You mentioned fans being really passionate and enthused with one another. What we see in modern times, at least in videogames, although it extends elsewhere and outward, is people reaching out to the creator. So, you can think of Stephen King's Misery as a fictionalized version of it, but I think Sherlock Holmes is one of the first instances I've been able to find, at least, where Arthur Conan Doyle ended -- he killed off Sherlock Holmes and he was assaulted on the street. I read one account that he was called a "brute" on the street.

[Laughs.] Oh, 19th century. Don't you just love the way that they insult somebody? "He called him a brute? A brute! Really!"

But I saw it, too, that there was an actress on As The World Turns who was punched in front of a Lord and Taylor store for something her character did.

Yeah.

Was there anything like that in the Golden Age or Silver Age of radio dramas?

I'll tell you, they were really worried about certain things like that. For example, The Lone Ranger was really, really a very popular radio-drama series.

Yeah.

The guy who wrote it, he actually ended up writing The Green Hornet, too, by the way, so he basically wanted another Lone Ranger but he put him in modern age. Instead of having a horse, he had the car, the Black Beauty.

So, what happened was the actor who played the Lone Ranger died -- not during the show itself but during the run of the show. I think he got hit by a car. And they were terrified of the outcry from the kids. They were terrified of the outcry of the parents. So, what they ended up doing was hastily writing a show where he and Tonto were in a massive battle and he was badly injured and couldn't speak. So, Tonto ran the show for several episodes and several weeks, where he moved him back and forth and he was testing out his voice but it wasn't quite right. And because they didn't have reruns back then, they could slowly move a brand new actor into the Lone Ranger position. Even though his voice was different, nobody remembered. So, they didn't have that big fallout that happens.

I think they were concerned that they had such a group of fans that that would make such a difference.

Yeah. I mean, what were they afraid of?

I think they were afraid of kids, first of all, being really upset about the fact that Lone Ranger died. They didn't want to have that kind of conversation about, "Well, he's not the Lone Ranger." 'Cause they spent that time creating it. I think they were also concerned, very much, about the bottom line. If somebody just came in and played the Lone Ranger and it was an entirely different voice, kids wouldn't buy into it and that would be it and they would turn out, turn off, and go to do something else.

There’s another great Superman story about how some guy figured out that the KKK were using a series of codes to contact each other across the country. They guy took his information -- basically their entire code book -- to the FBI who told him they didn’t care. They had bigger fish to fry. Somehow that guy got a hold of the writers of Superman and they wrote a story around Superman breaking up the KKK. The put in the real codes and made it public putting the KKK back and effectively almost out of business. Another instance where Superman saves the day.

For audiences, I don't really know that we need to conform to this binary, but did they want more artfulness or adventure out of their radio dramas in the earlier days?

That's a good point. I think, again, there's such a variety of everything. You have suspense, which was a little slower paced and much more tense. But then you also had Escape, which was all about an adventure, exciting, pulse-pounding. You had Bold Venture, which was Bogie and Bacall redoing their African themed movies on radio dramas. So, a lot of people were looking for a way to extend their movie experience into the radio-drama realm.

And so, you'd often find things that were really popular in the movies done on the radio dramas. in fact, they had a show very specifically designed Lux Radio theater, where they were selling Lux soap. Where, Lux Theater would do, "Okay, here is The Wizard of Oz radio drama." And they would bring in the main actors to come in and do The Wizard of Oz and they would do a shortened hour-long version of that so that they could sell that to the movies. So, people would go listen to that and go, "I want to see that in the theater." And they'd go see it.

Can you talk to me a little bit about the evolution of different radio houses, as it were? I'm curious -- well, if you could talk about that and just organizationally, how various personalities began to evolve and interact with each other?

Well, I think in the early days of radio drama, it was people like the Orson Welles and the Arch Obolers and the Anthony Bouchers that were able to sort of call their own shots and make their own shows because they became super-popular. Not so much the producers but the voices behind the microphones that were the ones that got people's attention, so people wanted to hear from them more. That's why the Jack Bennys were doing so well, because not only were they producers but they also were the main voice. So, they could go anywhere and if they needed to change networks they could. So, that kind of popularity worked well.

Once the Golden Age was over and we got into the Silver Age, then we're looking at far more independent companies that are putting together radio-drama stuff like Tower Records and Lion Records and some record companies were putting out kids' versions of radio drama on records that people could listen to. A lot of comic books were done. A lot of those were done to try to direct sell the audio.

Once you got off the radio and the public airwaves, then it was much more niche. Take a look at now -- move even further to modern day and you've got Big Finish. They've got a number of different products that they do but they're mostly known for doing the Doctor Who radio dramas. The official ones. They've been given the go-ahead by BBC, so what ends up happening is you'll have one of the Doctor who's on television retire and a year later, he's on radio dramas. So, you can continue the stories of the Doctor Whos that you love to hear on radio drama stories that you've never of before.I know David Tennant right now and Catherine Tate have just released a couple of different brand-new radio dramas in their characters that they had during their time of Doctor Who and fans are eating it up. Blake's 7. They just released some more Blake's 7, which was a big science-fiction show in England at the time, and Survivors.

So, there's a lot of that you'll find. Again, that's where fandom comes in. Fans demand those things that they loved in their childhood. So, they're saying, "How can we get more Space: 1889? Well, we could make an audio drama because it doesn't cost nearly as much." Or, "How can could we get more Star Trek now that Star Trek's off the air?" Well, suddenly, we have a ton of different Star Treks that come out: Giant Gnome Productions and Darker Projects had three or four different Star Treks that came out. There was a ton of people that did their own Star Trek versions. In fact, many people, that's how they got started doing radio dramas was because they were super-fans, they started by doing these audio dramas. There's a Buffy Between the Lines. There's an Angel audio drama out there. So, there's a lot of those things that were the huge fan ones and that got actors involved -- anime was another great one, because there's such a big fandom for anime there's a lot of people who have taken manga and made it into audio drama.

In the Golden Age and the Silver Age, was it sexy to be on the radio? Were they celebrities of their day?

The Golden Age, absolutely. In fact, most of those people were already famous actors in the movies. Or they became famous actors in the movies. That's what they did.

In the Silver Age, not so much. You would have more B-class actors doing the odd audio drama. It really -- there wasn't the money in the Silver Age the same as there was. There was a couple -- CBS Radio Mystery Theater had E. G. Marshall and Tom Bosley. William Shatner was in an episode of Zero Hour. Heck, Leonard Nimoy put some money into his own audio drama series. A lot of actors who weren’t hot on the big screen or television for one reason or another tried to get more work even developing their own shows in radio drama. You’d be surprised at how many people out there love it. Stephen King has said many times he loves radio drama. Neil Gaiman has had several scripts written for the medium and produced. J. Michael Straczynski from Babylon 5 and many other shows fame loved radio drama.

Nowadays, there will be some people that will put some cash into hiring actors that have cachet. Carl Amari did so with The Twilight Zone Radio Dramas starring Stacy Keach as the narrator. But that's a very expensive game. Here in Canada, I was looking at hiring professional actors to do some of my audio dramas, and when I first started they were saying, "Well, it's about 75-95 an hour for a baseline actor for four hours." I was like, "Well, you know what? I can swing that. I won't make any money doing it, but I can swing that." Because I usually have to have four to six actors if you're going to do a regular series.

But then, about eight years ago, nine years ago, they changed -- the union changed and they made audio drama costs the same as cartoon voice overs. I was like, "Then we're dead. There's no way we can hire actors that we're gonna have to pay $2,000, $4,000 a day." If I were selling my product, because it's a niche market for audio drama, I'd be lucky to get a couple of hundred bucks. [Laughs.]

Do you think that's something the average listener is aware of or knows?

I think the average listener knows that if they've listened to radio drama for any length of time. There's always the big conversation, like, "How can we make radio drama viable for people?" There's some companies that do it. Colonial Radio Theater does it and they make fantastic work and they're always producing. But I’m pretty sure that they and Jim French Productions, and Radio Repertory Company of America are not pulling down anything like television or movie profits.

Colonial Radio has literally hundreds of programs out there, most of them written by Jerry Robbins. I boggles the mind. Dirk Maggs does it, but, again, he gets his stuff on the BBC. The Truth podcast does it, but again, they get their stuff out on NPR. So, oftentimes those people who are making a lot of money end up doing so because they have connections to radio. Radio never went away and if they have a chance to be able to play it on the radio, then people are gonna wanna buy it afterwards. I know there's K.C. Wayland, is one of those outliers who has made an okay amount from doing a show on zombies. It came out -- you know, basically the same time as The Walking Dead. I would say it came out before The Walking Dead, to be honest. And I mean the comics of The Walking Dead. It's called They're Alive. There's a lot of audio-drama companies that try to do fundraisers and he did a very successful Kickstarter campaign for another We’re Alive: Lock Down. And because of that, he was able to get some really good voices, some really good studio time, and he's got a really strong fan base because of that. There's also an interesting crossover from audio books, too. There's a lot of audio-book people that dabble in radio drama, often. It's not really radio drama as much as it's multicast voicing. Right? So, they'll have different people doing the voices or they'll throw in the odd sound effect. I don't see that as really radio drama. I see that as storytelling, more narrative than play acting. But people like Scott Sigler, he came a best-selling author based upon his podcast of audio fiction with music and some sound effects and the dramatic readings.

In the Golden and Silver Age of radio drama, were people such big fans that they were doing their own versions of fan-fic in those days?

I honestly think that -- I mean, I was on another podcast and I was told that there was some conventions that actually happened before Star Trek conventions, but I think, really, Star Trek was the creation of the modern fan-fiction explosion -- unless you’re going back to Mr. Skygack from Mars, and I don’t recommend it. I think it really took a long time for us to be conditioned to be fan fiction addicts. I mean, kids would always play their own versions of cops and robbers and cowboys and Indians and all that kind of stuff, but adults tended back then -- it was like, "Okay, you're no longer a kid anymore. Go out and get a job." So, we're now in this very weird stage where people in their twenties are going through their second kind of childhood. And people that are my age and your age and stuff like that -- I remember when I first got married, my mother said, "Oh good, you're no longer Peter Pan." [Laughs.] I sort of sat there and I thought, "What does she mean by that?" But that was her society, that she grew up saying, "It's time to put away childish things. It's time to stop thinking of yourself as a person who will never grow up.”

We stopped that because -- we stopped that effectively because we knew there was money in it, right? [Laughs.] There's money in reselling and having people dress up and do cosplay. There's money in having people go back to their favorite stories. I mean, they're gonna do H.R. Pufnstuf again, for crying out loud. I mean, there's gotta be money there or people wouldn't keep going back to the same places to mine. And that just wasn't in the case. Back in the old days of Golden Age of radio drama, the closest you got to that kind of stuff was classic stories. People knew the class stories of Robin Hood and King Arthur and The Musketeers and those kind of adventure stories, so they loved those types of adaptations. But they didn't really spend an awful lot of time creating versions off of that because they wanted to hear those actual versions.

So, not to hammer on entitlement too much but you talk about back then and obviously one of the bigger things that has changed -- although I think we still like our class stories, as digital culture has risen, is it digital culture that has made us more entitled or is this just something humans have always done when they're presented with a nice, free service?

I'd like to think that humans have always done this. As I've gotten older, I really do see a change in my students. I really do see -- I mean, I started teaching in '97. I'm an early adopter. I'm not in any way, shape, or form a Luddite. I was also a computer consultant for many years and I still am creating software now. But in '95 I was working as a computer consultant then. So, I love technology.

But I've also seen that in many ways we're moving away from this society which I used to say was citizen-based, where we understood that there were times that things are important to us and there are times that other people have to shine as well and that we have to work together as a community to do stuff, to this time of consumerism where, "I want what I want all the time when I want it." And I'm noticing that even with my staff-member friends. I've got staff in my own department who are in their twenties and they don't have anywhere near the broad understanding that I had in my twenties about stuff. They're very, very niche-oriented. When I used to call them on it, they get snarky and they say, "Well, I'm too young for that. Why would I ever be interested in that?" And I say, "Because if you understand the larger scope of all these things, you can see where those connections are." Not to mention, if you're ever going to sell the prospect of, like, Shakespeare to students, you gotta be able to recognize that not everything new is the only things worth listening to or reading to or whatever. That there's real value in understanding how this whole thing works.

So, why does something being free today seem to take the pride out of consumption?

It's a good question. I think there's actually -- when it comes to audio dramas, there's a lot of people that get really angry at the suggestion that anybody would charge. They feel there is this requirement that audio dramas should be free.

Right.

To me, I'm in the middle. I'm an omnivore about everything, really. [Laughs.] I appreciate those people who are trying to make something out of it and selling it and I appreciate those other people who are saying, "No, I'm learning this process, too, and I just love it and I'm going to make it for free." I had this friend, he didn't watch TV. He got up at 4 in the morning, worked three different jobs, and everyday he just makes audio drama because he loved it and he loved sharing it with people. Bill Hollweg was the real deal.

Yeah.

So, there are people out there who really don't understand the process that it goes into to be able to create audio drama and just will grab whatever's free and just devour it. And then there's other people that are out there that have an understanding, a deeper appreciation for the medium and go, "Oh my God. I can't wait to hear Dead Ahead. I love that comic. I can't wait to hear how they do it." And they charge for it, but they still bought it, because they knew of the quality that it came from.

So, you're gonna get that kind of dichotomy, but I think just like there's a huge push in music -- you know, the music industry's had to change big time because of people just taking a whole bunch of stuff that was for sale and giving for free. Now that big question is: How do you make this medium viable for somebody?

I mean, I just saw an article this week -- Roger Daltrey saying there is no such thing as the music industry, even, anymore.

Yeah.

I can send you that.

I'd love to see that.

Normally I ask people this about videogames, but given your focus, I'll tweak it. This is intentionally broad: What have radio dramas or audio dramas accomplished?

I think audio dramas -- I teach it to my students and I think audio dramas are really the best storytelling you can get to without going back to talking around a fire. Because I think -- they did an interesting little study where, and I don't know where the link is. I can't find it anymore. But they put somebody -- hooked somebody up to a brain scan and they saw what they were doing, what the brain was doing when they were watching TV. Which, was basically nothing at all. Because, you know, you're fed all the images, you're fed all the sound, you're just taking it in. There's not a lot of things going on. And then they connected it to somebody who was reading and there was a lot going on, lighting up in the brain, which was awesome because people were reading the words and they're trying to imagine the sounds and the tastes and all the different figure of languages going on. And then they hooked somebody up with radio drama and it's off the scale because suddenly you sit there and you hear a sound and you're building the entire world on that sound.

If you're walking -- you know, if you're in a radio drama and you hear crickets, you automatically know time of day, where it takes place, all that kind of stuff that's going on in the background. Little bit of light wind can also tell you something as well. If somebody sits there and says, "John, what are you doing?" And you hear the click sound of a gun, you're picturing all that stuff in your head. So, a simple sound effect really builds these kinds of connection in your head and you become a really thinking, analytical person when you start listening to radio dramas.

I've also said -- I tell my students all the time, I say, "Okay, if you don't think radio dramas are really effective, I want you to go to Midnight Radio Theater and I want you to go and listen to The Woman in the Basement.” I also say this to my older students, because there are some adult-themed stuff in this show, "But I want you to do this in your bedroom and I want you to have your cell phone off and I want you to have all your lights off. I just want you to listen to this and have nothing else on."

I've had students come back to me and go, "Couldn't do it. I watch horror all the time. I couldn't go through with that show. It was too terrifying." And that's just because, just like in comics -- comics has closure. We have all these little frames, and our brain creates closure between one frame to another. Radio drama creates the best closure. Like we always said: Nothing is scarier than what you imagine in your head. Those slasher films you watch are never as scary as the suspense that they create in those suspenseful films of horror and terror because of the psychological aspects of your brain that make a difference. So, radio drama, and what we can do with voice has that incredible power of telling stories more viscerally and more visually than any other medium, I think.

Sure, my name's Raj Patel. I'm 44. I'm from Austin, Texas.

Now, in terms of experience being a journalist-activist, basically activism is what I've been doing for a very long. Effectively since I was five and wanted to raise money to end hunger and rented out my toys as a way of contributing to famine relief in Africa. The most popular toy, of course, was a mechanical electrical game where you -- sort of like Space Invaders but lower rent. The journalism and the writing part is the way that I found to be able to do that activism in ways that I feel like I have something to contribute. But, I mean, I've been involved in protests like the World Trade Organization protest in 1999 in Seattle, protested against the World Bank, protested against nuclear arms, fascism. I see it as part of the duty and privilege of growing up with the life that I've had that I get to stand up with people who have not had those privileges and get to be schooled by them, too.

That's my sort of potted background, if you like. But tell me -- ask me more specific things and I can give you a better set of answers.

Yeah, sure. That's a good place to start. We're just setting down a baseline for readers here.

I don't know if you've seen this, but Wikipedia calls you -- I guess they're citing it from another source that isn't online -- "the rockstar of social justice writing." Do you feel that that's fair to say? Or is that laying it on a bit thick? [Laughs.]

I think that that's Wikipedia doing what it does.

[Laughs.]

[Laughs.] It gets to one of the questions that I've been reflecting on a lot since you asked it, which was: What is it for videogames to arrive?

Right.

The reason I want to jump to that is because when one thinks -- what is it for Wikipedia to say something? Well, you know, it is what it is. It's claims that come and titles that we occasionally get and improved upon by a bunch of contributors and then it ends up on a website and gets recycled in other new ways, and all at once we're sort of skeptical and understand the context of it. It can either take on bigger importance or become trivial. And that -- it's a context of understanding: Well, Wikipedia says this so what do you make of that?

When you ask the question, "Well, what is it for videogames to arrive?," you have to have a similar kind of answer: Well, arrive for whom? I was trying to come up with a sort of analogy of, "Well, what is it for jazz to arrive, for example?" Jazz is what it is. There are millions of people around the world who think it has arrived. It is absolutely legitimate and fabulous and wonderful and can make our world bigger. But, you know, unlike videogames it's not massively lucrative. But it has its aficionados and it has its incredible literature and amazing practitioners and its stars and its failures. What is it for jazz to arrive when in many ways it's already there? I guess the question about Wikipedia is also a question about context, which is also a question about jazz, which is also a question about videogames.

[Laughs.] Everything is everything is everything is everything.

Well, yeah, but it's specifically about -- I think context does matter.

Oh, I absolutely agree. And I was asking mainly, ironically, for some context on you. [Laughs.]

I guess to preface, obviously I sent you over a couple of Rorschach-type questions.

Yeah.

And I think something that is similar and sort of the reason we got introduced is by way of Saru, when I asked her who was helpful to her cause of swaying or changing public opinion and scrutiny on food supply. You call it in the subtitle of one of your books a "hidden battle." I guess just as a starting point, I'm curious what the pushback and journey was to getting gatekeepers to care about food and food supply in the way you were writing about it?

That, in a sense, it's still an ongoing battle. The hidden battles and the rest of the title was "for the world food system" is still a work of education for me. I still -- I was at a conference of food-system funders just a few weeks ago and I had to sort of live in the fact that the food system is not just a supply chain. It's not. The food system isn't about farmers on one end and consumers on the other. It's about a whole system of things that make certain things possible and other things impossible. So, it's about laws, it's about resources, it's about power, it's about governance, it's about political imagination, it's about union organizing, it's about tastes and fast tastes have changed, about marketing, a bunch of other things. That isn't the supply chain. Those things are hidden.

And so, when I talk about the hidden battles of the world food system, part of the struggle has been educating not just funders but thought leaders of various kind and pushing back against the constraints of governments, which is very much organized along the supply chain. So, part of the ongoing work -- and I think that you're going to be banging your head up against this as well -- is precisely around getting people to think outside the confines of the coders are over here and the people with the repetitive strain injury from their thumbs are over there and that's the link.

[Laughs.]

It's a much bigger ecosystem. It's still hard to talk about. It's easier to talk about now for me than it was a decade ago partly because of people like Saru and partly because there's a lot of noise coming from lots of different places around food and social change. And so, that makes it a little easier to be able to say, "Well, if you're worried about or are interested in thinking about labor in the food system, then look at this process outside of McDonald's fast food." And people are much readier to be able to see that.

But I'm not seeing the same stuff happening in the same way around gaming and around technology even though, for example, there are huge conflicts with some of the inputs that go into electronics. I was just hearing about on the BBC about some atrocities that were happening in the Democratic Republic of Congo around some of the places where some of the rarer metals that go into the consoles that people will buying for Christmas are sourced. Those conflicts are absolutely vicious and horrible and bloody and murderous, but they're not politically or clearly articulated as being part of the electronics complex. So people ultimately understand them as, "Oh, it's those Africans at it again.” Rather than understanding how it is that we're complicit in fueling that conflict.

Mmhmm. I think when we spoke however long ago it was, you mentioned stuff like that is just really far outside the type of conversations that you'll see in, like, an IGN or on a typical games site.

Mmhmm.

I don't know if you have any insight into this, but why is it -- is it just that maybe the media isn't a good ally in addressing these sort of social issues from those perspectives? Is it because videogames aren't "good enough" to make people in other pockets of the media care about these things? What do you think that means that that stuff can't seem to get penetration there?

Well, in a sense, I don't want to put words into IGN's mouth but I imagine that their response would be the same as, say, the Food Network's is when you start raising issues of child labor in food supply which is, "Yeah, you know, that makes us feel really bad. That's not really what we do. What we do is celebrate the joy of eating with celebrity chefs and thought leaders and the beauty of cooking. You're coming to us with a story about children dying so that these ingredients can be made cheap. That's not really our game."

[Laughs.]

"And why should it be? We're the Food Network. We're not the Child Poverty Network. That's somewhere else."

That's absolutely accurate. I actually interviewed a co-founder of IGN and, in fact, just posted it last week. That is, more or less, their position. But, you know, with this sort of reporting that I'm doing, I'm not expecting an IGN to be interested but I've had this saga and have pitched about 30 human-rights publications and I get the feeling they're getting an allergic reaction solely because I'm mentioning the word "videogames." They'll write about corresponding topics in other industries.

That's so interesting. I mean, did you get a chance to look at that John Lanchester piece?

I did, yeah. It was a few weeks back, but yes.

I mean, I loved the way that he frames right at the beginning how the mainstream media ignores gaming and the gamers return the favor by being desperately apolitical.

[Laughs.]

That line really captured it for me. There's a two-way sense of animosity. It's not just a bourgeois, "Oh, the children play their sort." And it's actually frustrated young men. Basically, that's it.

As opposed to understanding that this is a billion-dollar industry -- I have to say it does rather boggle my imagination that there's not as much attention paid to some of this. But I think in part it's because while everyone has their iPhones, it's not so that everyone is playing the same game on it and so it's much easier to write about Apple than it is about the software that feels so ethereal. Whereas there's physicality to -- there was a lovely piece in The Guardian recently about someone who managed to get Foxconn factory by desperately needing the bathroom. I don't know if you saw that a couple of days ago. It was a masterpiece.

But what was interesting about it was he has the material kind of arrangements that look like barracks and look like strange prison-camp conditions that are much more material that therefore -- that are a step in the manufacture of something that everyone has. Whereas, with a game, it feels much more divorced from the physical world because it's platform-independent in many ways.

Yeah, I mean, you said it was "dematerialized." There's sort of always been a disconnect with this stuff in the sense that it's never been real, but it exists on these same screens that frequently we hear or read about all these other topics about other areas of the world we all live in.

Yeah.

I think obviously one of the questions that maybe I will just blatantly ask: Is it naive? Is it wise to seek comparisons to other industries for progress like this? I feel like it must have been easier to get people to care about food because everybody eats.

Yeah.

But is there anything the game industry can learn from the sort of stuff you write about and whether it's possible there?

Well, I'm not sure that the game industry has -- I think there's much more to think about in terms, as you asked earlier on, the hurdles to communication about understanding. It may feel like the code is just the code and it can float in the cloud, but the cloud isn't actually made of cloud. It's made of very material things. It involves very material operations of power all being made to use certain kinds of things in order for the material world can flourish. I think part of your mission is to try and rematerialize the cloud and to actually show some of these chains of exploitation that make it possible for someone to pay $60 for a game and disappear into it for several days.

Right.

That's a hard thing to show. It's much easier just to show the game.

[Laughs.]

That's why people -- that's why there is this sort of flourishing literature about it. But, you know, I think the struggle is to actually have these stories that connect the material conditions of production.

Well, but what do you think? Is there a line or maybe a context, like you said? Where is it fair and unfair to compare the game industry to the food industry?

It's interesting. I mean, of course the purchase of Whole Foods by Amazon lends that particular question a very interesting and contemporary slant, right?

Well, and you had to know I was going to ask you about that about as well. [Laughs.]

Well, but insofar as Amazon is recognizing that it can't -- that actually retail does involve physical things. Whereas in the game industry, games don't have to fight to maintain its position as a venue where you can buy and sell second-hand games despite writing that Microsoft wanted very much to end retail's involvement because as far as Microsoft was involved, the sort of sociality of hanging out at a GameStop was not a part of the product. That actually what they were selling was just the game, whereas what gamers wanted was much more the sort of social experience of going down to GameStop or wherever it was to buy and sell and trade and feel like the economy was partly theirs.

But that seems to me to be the sort of point of disjuncture, really. Food needs retail. That's how it gets to you. Whereas -- although consolidation has always been part of the food system and just three or four, or four large companies that were the world's largest grain traders. Some of those companies are 100 years old. But consolidation and concentration in the food industry is all over the place. In Stuffed and Starved, I write about the supply chain that's like an hourglass. It's wide and the bottom and narrow in the middle and wide on top.

Right.

That sort of picture of supply chain kind of works, I imagine, with games companies. But I imagine the bigger players there are the distributors as well, insofar as a game company wants to control everything from input to output and profit probably as much as possible. That's a trend that we certainly see through the supply-chain consolidation that's happening in the food industry. With a certain amount of coders being hired on contractual bases and insofar as externalities in the production of consoles and what-have-you can be squeezed you and insofar as workers are disposable in the manufacture of consoles and the manufacture of electronic equipment. That's something that companies tend not to give a shit about. And that's very familiar to the food system.

But, you know, I think that there is a lot further to go in making that analogy work because at the end of the day, when you buy a game, it's not going to -- you're not actually going to have anything to hold in your hand.

Yeah, I mean, similarly, when you talk about people giving a shit or not giving a shit. With the ongoing work you're doing, maybe you can talk about the evolution of this or how this has shifted. Can you talk about the biggest headaches there have been in terms of getting the average food audience -- whatever that would even be -- to care about the things you're writing about and trying to raise awareness of?

The biggest thing has been around dissuading people who care, for example, about animal welfare or about pesticide issues to give a shit about the people who are most directly affected by that, which is the humans who are in the fields being sprayed by these pesticides or workers in the foodservice industry or in the world of meat production, for example, who tend to be the worst paid people in food economy or people in the economy in general and who can be people of color. It's just really interesting that people can -- before I started writing there was a lot of concern around organic food, for example. Everyone wanted -- this whole organic food thing is this very individualistic craze where, "My body is a temple and I don't want strange things coming in to pollute this temple but I don't really care if they pollute other people's' temples because that's why I'm paying top dollars. I don't really care."

The big argument for organic food is not about occasionally being exposed to certain kinds of pesticide but rather to make sure that workers in the field are not routinely being exposed to things that will kill them and have demonstrated birth defects in their children. It's just -- that thing will really remain very, very hard to get people to give a shit about when it comes to organic food, for example.

Yeah, I mean, I may be misremembering, but if I recall, in Saru's most recent book she writes about slavery with tomato-picking. Do you know what I'm talking about?

I do, yeah. And it is modern-day slavery. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Southern Florida have campaigned against the kinds of behaviors that were prosecuted under the laws that ended slavery in the United States. So, it's not even sort of an analogue to slavery, or it's not like slavery. It was prosecuted as slavery. And people were in incredible and horrific conditions there. But, you know, at some level, horrific conditions in fields and in factories is one thing but I still boggle at the idea that people who like organic who see themselves as painted as a virtue that organic allows. Even they have a meticulous resistance to the idea that organic is not just about them.

That's one of the most interesting points at which the gamer culture kind of disconnects from the rest of reality, which is that gamer culture, sure, it has its modes of sociality and people get together and will shout insults at each other as they capture the flag or whatever it is they do. But in general, it's a very sort of individual pursuit with tightly regulated ways in which you can socialize with other people. You know, there's this lovely line in Ready Player One where one of the lead characters goes into one of these silver mills and just as he's killing someone who's there, their response is this line of one of the immigrant workers saying, "Don't kill me. This is my living." And that's why I enjoyed Ready Player One, because it did have this, all of a sudden, a way of bringing workers into the story who were then invisibilized, who were invisibilized in the normal production of the consoles. But there they are farming gold in order for richer players to be able to buy things and level up. Have you read Ready Player One?

I have not, but I'm very familiar with it.

Oh, it's very much in the vein of your research, and it's a rollicking read. I think Steven Spielberg is making the film of it that's coming out this year.

He is. That's right.

What it's all about adds grist to your mill.

Well, it's interesting because when I talked to Saru, she told me that Yelp tends to remove anything pointing to labor issues and that Zagat's doesn't touch on the ways restaurants treat their workers. How did there get to be more meaningful channels of protest for the restaurant and food world? Because that's something the videogame world really doesn't have.

Um, unions. The answer is unions. It's always unions. One of the wisest lines I heard is that workers organize unions and, in fact, the opposite is the case. It's unions organize workers. And insofar as workers in the game industries have been ignored by unions, it's unsurprising that their stories don't get told. And in part, it's because if you look at the coder ethos, the old and bright individual fighting against ignorance and darkness, producing pure genius embodied in code, that means that unionizing among the graduate tech workers is just very hard.

Something I do wonder about, sort of the way labor has coalesced in the games industry is how much of that has to do with the industry sort of being an export from Japan decades ago. I'm curious just from your research, do you see ways that the game industry behaves today that is indicative of Japan decades ago?

That's a great question. I never really thought about it that way. But Japan decades ago still had a very interesting, vibrant Communist party. There's -- Japan decades ago, in Japan, was both this domain of security and for men, certainly, a certain kind of camaraderie and homosociality that allowed people to believe that there was a place for them in the world and that the state was working for them just as they worked for the state or the company or whatever it was. And so I'm not sure that gamers feel that. I mean, I don't feel that. I'm not sure. I'm not there. I guess I'm struggling to see the connection. But tell me more. What do you see as -- where do you get that coming from?

[Laughs.] It's a good question. It's a question that I've had for a long time. It's something I've tried to research and find people who are knowledgeable about it, people who have worked in the East and gone to the West as the industry got established. It's something that a lot of people tend to say, "Oh, that's a very good point. There probably is something to that." But I think just the notion of Japanese business culture is so nebulous that it tends to, on this scale that the game industry is at now, it tends to just echo like typical corporations carry themselves and the way they behave. It's hard to distinguish what the differences might be.

I just know -- I'll give you an example. And I don't think this has anything to do with Japan. But I'm continuing to research cycles of abuses in labor in the game industry and I've been digging through Westlaw, I've been digging through Lexis Advance the last few weeks, and I really can't find any litigation on the books. I'm starting to suspect that might be because employment contracts have mandatory arbitration clauses.

Oh, interesting.

And I don't think there's anything necessarily Japanese about that, but there is definitely this time-honored notion of tradition or just "this is the way things are done." But that's even further confusing to distinguish because that's true of a lot of tech, as well, which may also come from Japan. So, that's at least where this is coming from. But I just have questions. [Laughs.] I don't have any answers.

Yeah. That's definitely something. That's something to ponder. I mean, whether it's Japanese or not, it may also just reflect the billionaires' distaste for labor and hippies' distaste for labor. A lot of the way --

Oh, you mean, like, the hacker movement as an outgrowth of --

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Interesting. Do you mean "labor" or laborers?

No, I mean organized labor in general.

Yeah.

When one thinks of the '70s counterculture movement, it's not really stitched up with organized labor unions in any meaningful way. In fact, to be countercultural in San Francisco was not really to ally yourself with a labor movement so much as to strike your own individualist path. So, you know, but here I'm clutching at straws. I don't have as firm a grasp on this as I'd like.

That's okay. It's interesting.

The thing that you reminded me of, though, was about not about labor culture but gamer culture. Particularly, in Korea. I mean, I'm not sure whether you'll get to travel as part of this project but the kinds of gamer culture that I've seen in Korea, and to some extent in China and Japan, are quite overwhelming. I wonder whether -- this is pure speculation, but I do think that there's an element to which the design of modern cities and the systematic exclusion of green space for recreation means that it's much more thinkable to end up spending one's days in darkened rooms playing on screens next to rows of other people doing the same thing rather than being outdoors. Of course, now, this isn't to say that there aren't physical activities that many people in Asia do. But I do think that when urban architecture really militates against being outside -- and, you know, this is not just about air pollution issues in China, but just about lack of green spaces in many Asian cities. But then, all of a sudden, that's a kind of gentle push or a shove towards gaming indoors. But, again, this is just me making it up. I don't know this to be the case.

But it seems to be much more thinkable to do that because why would you go outside and scar your lung tissue when you could be indoors and doing something else?

[Laughs.] I can sort of get you a little back on script here. I remember when we spoke last -- hopefully you'll remember what you meant -- but you mentioned that you saw a similarity between videogames and the slow-food movement?

Yeah.

I had in my notes a direct quote from you, which is you called the slow-food movement "a circle jerk of olive oils."

Olive oil, that's right. Yes.

[Laughs.]

So here's the thing. I mean, what I like about the slow-food movement is that they understood that actually eating good food was pleasurable and that they were very serious about making sure that everyone got to eat good food. And so, their mission was to make sure that workers making that food would have quality wages and two hours of lunch break to be able to go ahead and eat that food together. And that's what I would imagine would be the kind of thing that would be the analogue in the gaming world, which is, look, everyone -- well, not everyone loves to game. But gaming is at its best, it's pleasurable and a social activity and it's something that people can and should do together, enjoy together. But with slow food, there's an organization that's like, "Well, everyone needs to eat and so we have to make sure that everyone gets to eat well." In the gaming world, it's not necessarily the case that everyone needs to game. It's not true that everyone needs to play Call of Duty and so what we need to do is organize for a society where everyone gets to play Call of Duty. So, that's where the analogy might work but then doesn't. It is about this question of need.

But “need” and “pleasure” next to each other, I mean, that's why I like the slow-food movement. It takes this idea of pleasure that a certain community has and runs with it and says, "Here's what needs to happen in the world so that everyone gets to do it." And that mode of understanding how food works and how the world works is something I don't see in the gaming world at all.

Yeah. I mean, when I emailed you over those questions, you emailed back -- you mentioned that the online culture around videogames can be "strange, odd, and a little threatening." I think people are -- I mean, I'm gonna be assuming what I think you mean by threatening. I'd be curious to hear you talk a little bit about how you find it strange and odd. How is that?

Well, it's just -- in general, online culture. I mean, my exposure to this is just "the comment field," where I'll write something and then there'll be a million people -- my direct experience experience with this, of course, is appearing on a TV show and then all of a sudden people deciding I was the messiah or the antichrist. and just being subject to a strange world of trolling that was utterly beyond my control. I mean, it's very odd just to be able to navigate a world of comments. It's a very particular kind of way of needing to pay attention, where you're always -- I'm shit at doing this with social media in general, where you have to be facile with checking your social media and then jumping back again and not checking it and then checking it again and then trying to get some work done. But no, you can't because now someone's taken your post and trolling you in one way or another. The trolling is something I find unusual and strange in terms of human social interaction because I like to see people when they insult me.

[Laughs.]

As opposed to having this sort of bizarre relationship where they're invisible. I just -- that doesn't do it for me. So, there's that and I struggle with that. This is just sort of about trolling in general, but it's also about the sexism of online culture, which bothers me to no end. I just don't like it at all.

Yeah.

You know, it's fucked up. I don't enjoy being exposed to it. Because every time you have to fight it. I can see why that kind of culture just drives -- perpetuates a certain kind of patriarchy.

Are there nuances of game --

Oh, of course there are.

No, no, no. I mean nuances of the gaming culture that the mainstream understood better, I was going to say.

Oh, absolutely. I think that there's a lot in -- BioShock is the game that really showed me what it was that gaming could do, and in part because I've read Ayn Rand and I don't particularly think she's as amazing as lots of Americans do. And so it was very interesting to see that world subverted in ways that were really just really creative and thoughtful and deep. And so, I think that the mainstream culture doesn't get that videogames can be very powerful in terms of social critiques. I mean, I haven't gotten very far with Papers, Please, but I'm already enjoying it.

Oh yeah.

Thanks for recommending it. I look forward to playing it when I actually have some time to that, which will be on a plane this week. [Laughs.] But, you know, I think there's a lot there. I mean, I think insofar as videogames aren't just about blowing things up. We talked last time about That Dragon, Cancer.

Right.

I saw A Monster Calls, and I thought that there was some very powerful parallels between that movie and the book that it was based on that I read after it and That Dragon, Cancer. I think that there's power and very deeply felt and very profoundly communicated emotion that the mainstream tends to dismiss, but God forbid that I needed to recommend these kinds of things to other people. But I certainly would recommend A Monster Calls and That Dragon, Cancer because both of them in various ways are about a particular disease and the suffering that it causes and the sort of transcendence one can find through coming out the other side, and people don't talk about videogames that way. But they should. Or they should understand that not all videogames are about Call of Duty.

Right. And I think that's something that inside the culture people don't understand, that people outside, that's all they really know of them.

Mmm.

More broadly, then, what aspects of the hive mind on the internet as far as journalists and consumers of journalism online confounds you the most?

Well, you know, one can talk about the political economy that you've mentioned, right, where it's just impossible to give editors to give a shit because they have such a low opinion of their readers. But, you know, the things -- and this is just about the crisis of journalism, in general, with the rise of the listicle and that sort of minimal level of journalism, there doesn't appear to be the sort of courage one would hope for among commissioning editors to find or imagine that there's an audience that would be ready to read something that's sophisticated and long about the gaming industry other than biographies of -- oh, Christ. What's his name that invented -- at Square-Enix. You know, the Japanese legend who invented Mario, for example. I can't remember his name.

Miyamoto, yeah.

Miyamoto. That's right. Other than those kinds of long-form "this is where he grew up and these are the influences, growing up in Japan, this, that, and the other," I'm stunned the extent to which editors and the journalists that they commission and then audiences have set their bars very low. So, the curiosity about labor, for example, is squashed, even though, as far as I know, people with jobs tend to labor. You know, I think a part of the issue is around communicating in the political culture online of being able to find things where you're able to make the -- just to be able to incite empathy between people. And that's hard to know. As you write this book, the struggle is going to be to find people who will embody one or more sides of your story. I think we talked about this last time.

Yeah.

But, you know, I think that there are ways of pulling deep political and economic lessons out of the human-interest sidebar. And, unfortunately, the book that you're about to write is sort of trapped between those two places: between being the human-interest sidebar and the deep work of political economy that everyone needs to read to understand.

Well, and I mean, on top of that, and as you know and as you've written about, all industries tend to gatekeep certain types of knowledge. I'd be interested to hear you talk about questions you feel remain unasked about the food industry. Are there questions that you feel are unasked about the game industry, though, too? They might be the same questions. I don't know.

You know, one of the interesting and just really something to find out questions in the food industry is about the extent to which speculation shapes food prices. The power that bankers have over everything. I think that in the game industry, while finance is very powerful, it has less of a role in shaping the way that people go about their business than other forces. I mean, that's not entirely true. The fact that Amazon has been able to hemorrhage money for decades and Wall Street has not turned against them and has not driven its stock into the mud has been largely because Jeff Bezos has a silver tongue and that he can talk financiers into understanding what it is that he's doing and the very long game that he's playing. But when it comes to the gaming industry, in general, I imagine that Sony and Microsoft and whoever else are able to make pitches to their investors and the investors will sort of nod their heads gamely and give them as much cash as they need in order to be able to return on a five-year cycle. Which, to be honest, a five-year investment cycle isn't a bad -- that's a big chunk of time in finance.

Right.

So, you know, I think that there may some dissimilarities there. But, you know, for me, I think that the questions that don't get asked is, "Where does all this material stuff come from? Where does the energy come from? Where does the tantalum and what else-have-you in these consoles, where is that being manufactured? Who suffered in order for them to be part of your phone?" And those kinds of questions don't get asked even though as we speak, our words are being transmitted through the ether and are being -- we're touching the stuff in order for us to have this conversation, and yet, of course, it's so much in the background and why should we care? It is a naturalized part of our environment now. But why shouldn't we? Why shouldn't we care? Why should we enforce ignorance upon ourselves about this sort of thing when, again, the irony is that in a second we'll stop talking, I'll listen to the radio and hear about people dying in the Congo and they'll be dying over fights in order for us to have the plumbing that we need in order to have the conversations that we need. And so, in a very deep way, of course, it does matter. And it takes work for us to forget. Undoing that work is hard. But that's the topic you have at hand.

At least in America, maybe elsewhere, do you think -- I guess I'm just thinking back on Rockefeller's day. Were we just as ignorant as far as where our stuff is coming from in those days? I mean, has that changed? Our awareness?

Yeah, I think so. I mean, when one thinks -- one of the classics of early 20th-century literature is Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, which you may have been forced to read as a young man in a U.S. high school.

[Laughs.] I was forced to read it, but I also think of this project as being in that vein but about another industry.

Well, so, Upton Sinclair -- so, this may or may not be good news, then. He said that he aimed for America's heart and hit it in the stomach.

Right.

Yeah. And he was pointing to the condition of workers and he ends his magnificent book with the words of a street recruiter shouting about how socialism in Chicago is possible and one day socialism will come and Chicago will be ours, America will be ours. And, of course, that is yet to happen despite many people's belief in the inherent socialism of Barack Obama. But the effect to American consumers was much more about, "Oh my God, there's basically poop in meat!" But no one gives a shit that there's blood on their cell phone. I'm forgetting the name of a campaign that worked a little while and shamed some cell-phone manufacturers into behaving a little better. The fact is, actually, no one particularly cares that there's blood on their cell phone. So, you know, there is a struggle ahead. And, you know, I think that in the Rockefeller's era, there was a struggle then, too, that people didn't really know where their food came from. In fact, it's been in Britain for certain classes, they never knew where their food came from.

What is the difference between a Jeff Bezos or even, to use a more recent example -- the head of an Uber and a Rockefeller? What seems to have shifted in that century in between?

Not much. I think certainly the Rockefellers were shit-scared of Communists. They were deeply, deeply troubled by the potential rise of Communism in a way that these days you don't see Travis Kalanick living in mortal fear of the rise of the Red Menace. And instead, they're much more worried about -- you know, although you do see occasional sort of flashes of concern from the billionaires about what's going to happen with the preppers. I don't know if you saw it, there was a very interesting that the New Yorker put out, about the new billionaire class of people preparing for doomsday in Silicon Valley. You know, there is a certain constellation among those folks that in the event of bad things happening, they ought to perhaps spare a thought for workers and that's why there's sort of an interesting push among Silicon Valley types for a minimum wage and for an income grant and a way of protecting themselves from the turmoil that deep inequality would provoke. But I see it, I think, a little bit different from the Rockefellers. I mean, the Rockefellers were just, "No, capitalism is much better than socialism and that's what we need."

[Laughs.] Another thing that obviously occurred in the century in between is the rise of the internet. I'd be curious to hear you talk about how you feel the internet has impacted or stymied activism? Are we replacing narcissism with progress?

I've seen the internet being very useful for activists, for example, in South Africa where everyone's on WhatsApp and it can be -- the minute, for example, there's a fire in shack settlements, the word will go out on WhatsApp and you can get people mobilized very, very quickly. And people in shack settlements there will check Facebook maybe once a day at the local library and just sort of check in with one another. But, you know, the physical infrastructure is limited and people's phones are not smart phones. They're not checking it all the time. But I don't think that -- I mean, I do think that social media in general is not the sort of thing you need to be doing if you want to be happy.

[Laughs.]

But if you want to get activism done, then there are ways in which the internet can be very useful. But, you know, I don't spend any time at all on Facebook and I'll be on Twitter maybe five minutes every couple of days. But I'm happier that way and I know I am because when activism needs to happen, I'll get it through text message or a phone call or something like that rather than something that requires a great deal of attention in which I'm engaging in the kind of exchange of information that gets to make other people much richer. But I think that the internet can be useful. I think it's a tool and as long as -- and communication technology is useful. But it also can overstate and distort what's happening. The Arab Spring -- I mean, a lot of the interesting things that happened in the Arab Spring happened in factories where people weren't really on Facebook and they weren't in Tahrir Square but they were rising up against their bosses, for example. That stuff was done in Arabic without someone's Facebook there to document. And so, then, it became much less visible to us over here. But, you know, I think insofar as social media can facilitate organizing, it's great, but insofar as it substitutes for organizing, it's awful. So you know, I think the answer is organizing is much better for activism than imagining that we can just substitute for it by just making sure that everyone's on the same Facebook page or likes the same Facebook page.

[Laughs.] You wrote in Stuffed and Starved, and at least this true of confectionary, that there's "an emphasis on utility to everyone except the consumer.” Is this true of all industries, to an extent?

I think that consumers in the gaming industry have a bit more say over the products that they're buying in part because it's not clear that playing Call of Duty is going to be as bad for your blood sugar and for your health as chomping down on a bar of candy. With levels of -- in the food world, with ultra-processed food in general being associated with poor health, it's certainly the case that that's much harder to evade than the choice that pays or not $60 for a game.

Yeah, that's the No. 1 thing you'll see people say as a way of protesting in the game industry, at least as a consumer, that they'll "vote with their dollars." Is that actually an effective way of being heard or making any sort of impact? Won't their money just be replaced by somebody else's money who will buy it?

I think boycotts can work in very limited circumstances when there's lots of other things going on. I mean, for example, me boycotting World of Warcraft makes no difference at all. I have boycotted World of Warcraft and clearly no one gives a shit about that. Why not?

[Laughs.]

Well, because, it's not a very well-organized protest. It's not the sort of thing that comes also with a bunch of demands about why I'm boycotting World of Warcraft. Is it that I want orcs to be better treated and represented?

[Laughs.]

Unless there's a good bunch of organizing, then merely withholding my cash is no signal at all. So, you know, there does need to be much more in terms of specific demands and specific asks. and offline demands and engagements in which boycotts matter. There's a lovely theory of things that Archbishop Desmond Tutu was keen that people do when people were asking, "Well, surely if we boycott South African oranges in the times of Apartheid, we're just hurting workers in South Africa."

He goes, "No, no, no. If you just boycott and do nothing else, then you aren't getting us very far. But if you're educating one another and you're going to protests and if you're standing outside the South African embassy and if you're making Apartheid and white supremacy unacceptable, then the boycott matters and it's part of something bigger. But merely voting with your dollars doesn't matter at all."

Yeah, I guess it goes back to what you said about the tendency in game culture for individuals to be apolitical, which I think is changing to a certain extent.

Well, I'll ask you this one final question, which is intentionally broad and something I'll ask you because you are familiar with videogames: What do you feel videogames have accomplished?

It's an interesting question. They've certainly managed to turn themselves into a vast and highly lucrative business and they've created news way for imagining and seeing the world and imagining it different. At their very best, they can offer new ways for people to connect with one another in ways that are unexpected and joyful. And I think that they've offered ways for people to find one another who may not have been able to do that.

But I also think that they've also prepared joys that in some way and cultures of individualism and have attenuated our sense of the physical and the real into simply auditory and visual stimuli when the world is much richer than all of that. So, you know, I think that there are victories good and bad. I mean, I see the potential of things like augmented reality being very rich. I think that there is stuff that remains to be tapped in the world of videogames.

But I do think that videogames matter. It does need to be hitched to more political sensibilities, and part of the accomplishment of videogames is to almost be free of all of it. I mean, the most -- [Laughs.] I was just thinking about the politics of the first videogame I played cooperatively. It was, of course, about killing Nazis. Wolfenstein came with its ready-made bad guys of of course the Nazis. There was always that political subtext that made it okay to do something that was at that time still pretty weird, when you're going around the dungeon and it looks like your actions are causing the death of something. That's a weird -- is it okay to be doing this? Back in the day when we were playing those games on some PCs, the 486s on a very slow network.

But, you know, I'm looking forward to better politics coming out of the videogame industry and accompanying the videogame industry. I wouldn't actually expect the industry itself to do that. I think it comes on activism.

Yeah, my name is Robin Hauser, formerly known as Robin Hauser Reynolds. I don't know if this matters or why it matters, but I'm 53, I think. I can't remember if I'm 52 or 53. [Laughs.] I'm 53. I work out of Tiburon, California. So, I'm in Marin County right north of San Francisco.

Boy, let's see. I am not a techie. I do have an MBA. An international MBA and I've worked in, actually, finance many years ago. I've also been a professional photographer and in the last seven years I've become a documentary filmmaker and I'm director-producer of a film that's had pretty wide exposure called Code: Debugging the Gender Gap. That really is my only experience with the tech world, but it got me really -- I had some pretty intimate exposure to the tech world through making that film. Now I'm making a film called Bias, which is about unconscious bias and how it affects us socially and in the workplace and specifically in the workplace how it affects the way that we hire, fund, and promote or pay equally or not pay equally. So, that's pretty much it in a nutshell.

That's perfect. Given the variety of your background and what you've done, can you talk a little about the catalyst for you to make your first movie?

Sure. My daughter was studying computer science in college and she was one of just a few women in the class of 35 people in computer science. She began to call home; for the first time in her academic career, she began to express a little bit of concern about her ability to succeed in a certain subject field. She would call home saying, "I don't know, mom. It's weird. I feel like I don't belong. I'm failing." It turned out she was getting a "B." But she really had this sense that most of the people in the class -- most of them, men -- knew a lot more about it than she did. She was always expected to partner with the one other woman in the class. I mean, there were quite a few things that were difficult for her. She hasn't had enough perspective from that experience to, I think, realize why she was feeling like she didn't fit into the tech world, but it was an interesting thing that made me look into, "Well, this is weird. Is this just sexism? What's going on?"

Meanwhile, my very good friend since college and producer on that film project, on Code: Debugging the Gender Gap, Staci Hartman, has three daughters. Her eldest daughter was working at Snapchat at the time. So, that was an interesting insight into what corporate culture is like in some start-ups. And so, the two of us decided that this would be an interesting subject. It also was in our backyard, pretty much. We both live in the Bay Area and so we decided to look into what was happening in the tech world: Why there were so few women and people of color in tech. There are so many jobs. Right now, there's over 650,000 unfilled computer science-related jobs in the U.S. That number will -- could even be double by the year 2020.

So, it's crazy.

Yeah.

And they're good-paying jobs.

Before, a few minutes ago, you mentioned that you had a sense that videogame culture or videogame industry may be contributing to some of the gap. I've wondered about this myself, what that relationship is like between the game industry and broader tech industry. Do you get a sense -- are there ethics that have cross-pollinated? How can we even tell? Have you gotten a sense of that?

Yeah, I mean, I think that -- look, from a really young age and from the beginning as videogames came into the world, it seemed as though they were marketed toward boys. I mean, if you go all the way back to just Pong, it's not to say that girls don't like Pong, but from Pong sort of forward and you think about most of the more popular videogames, they've all been violent, aggressive. They've objectified women. They've been strongly marketed toward boys and men.

And so, therefore, a lot of them -- there are incentives to find cheats, to find ways around it, find ways to get to advancement within the game. And all of these things lead to a basic understanding, or at least a familiarity, with coding and with the computer-science infrastructure, the basis of these videogames.

And so, I think that by the time you get to college, if you haven't been exposed to computer science in schools -- as we know, it's not mandatory in the United States. Many schools don't even offer it and a lot of schools have it as an elective maybe your junior year at high school.

By the time you get to college, if a woman wants to study computer science, she's pretty much entering with very little knowledge and she's gotta take the prerequisite 101 course and hoping that she can just figure out what it is and see if she likes it or not then. Whereas men are entering with a foundation, practically, with a base. Typically a man that's interesting in studying computer science in college has been playing videogames for the last, probably, at least 10 years. He has familiarity with that and has had more exposure to all this.

So, I think it's possible that the gaming industry has contributed to this because when you take your first entry level course in college, immediately women realize that the men in the class know a lot more this than they do. So, they feel intimidated and it contributes to their feeling like they don't belong.

I know that in the game industry, some of the companies that have been singled out or caught for especially toxic practices -- many of them have reportedly turned things around to be surprisingly supportive and progressive. I think I've heard another criticism of that, which is this mentality of a willingness to burn anyone out.

I guess this is true of both games and tech, but why do you think tech companies make an effort to hire but not necessarily retain diverse talent?

[Pause.] I don't think they're even making an effort to hire, to be honest with you. I think it's all they know that they should be doing this. I think they know that it's something that, "Oh, gosh, we gotta do it." But I'm telling you that when even Evan Spiegel at Snapchat or Ed Williams and Biz Stone at Twitter -- Facebook. When you think about any of those founders and when they started those companies, the last thing on their mind when they started out it as a group of five or six people was, "Oh, boy, we better add diversity. We better get a woman and a person of color, or a few of them." It's just the last thing that was on their mind. They hired their friends. They hired their buddies. They hired -- it was like-me bias and they grabbed whoever they could because they were scrambling and it was busy and they didn't have, as they would say probably, the luxury of time to worry about diversity.

They also obviously didn't understand the value of what diversity could bring their company. If you say it to people like that, now that they're established, the argument to say, "Hey, you're gonna have a better -- studies show you'll have a greater ROI if you have more women on your board or if you have more diversity on your workforce." These companies are swimming in money. That's not even really an incentive. So, then you have to approach them by saying, "Look, it's just the right thing to do. It's the right thing to do for society."

And so I think there are some founders out there who are passionate about this. I think of some people who really care about this and know the benefit to it. Stewart Butterfield at Slack is somebody who is, I think, really talks the walk and walks the talk. He really is devoted to it.

But I also think you have a lot of companies that say, "Oh, for crying out loud. Just hire a head of D&I." And then when they have this person in place, they come in and they say, "Well, this is what you're gonna have to do. This is how you have to restructure hiring. These are the procedures you have to implement." They're not willing to do that. They just want to sort of check the box by saying, "All right, we've got a head of diversity and inclusion now, let's move on." But think about it: Nobody gets fired over the fact that they haven't hired for diversity even if that's their goal. Right? Nobody's head rolls. There's no consequences to not doing it.

Yeah, that was something I wanted to ask about -- what biases you sensed in the initiatives or the individuals who are chosen as the vessels for that kind of change.

[Pause.] Bias in those that are actually trying to make the change or bias in the founders of the companies?

Oh, that's a good distinction. Yeah, I guess, are there biases that you sense in both those posts?

Well, I think that the implicit biases that are going on -- that's why I'm so fascinated not just by latent bias, because we all know that we're biased in some ways, right? We like to hire from the schools that we came from and we know that we are biased toward a certain type of -- you know, I like Japanese food better than I like Chinese food, for whatever reason. I'm biased towards golden retrievers because it's the dog that I grew up with.

So, I mean, I think that we know -- we're familiar with some of our outward biases although we don't always want to admit them or even get to where we really recognize them. But for certain can't see our -- we have an inability psychologically and physiologically to be able to find our own unconscious biases. We can see bias in other people but we cannot recognize them in ourselves. And so, that's a really -- that's what fascinates me. What's happening here? Are we doing this overtly or is it implicit? It tends to be really implicit.

For instance -- I'm just gonna give you an example: A black man walks into an elevator and a white mother might grab the hand of her child and just pull them a little bit closer to her. She might grab her purse a little bit tighter. She might suddenly put her hand on her purse. These are things that, you know, that black people see and sense all the time. I go for a run in the evening and if two black men are walking toward me and it's the evening or even if it's a couple guys in a hoodie, I'm not quite sure about it, I might change sides of the street. Do I know exactly that those are harmful people? No. But my unconscious biases show me that that could be danger and therefore I'm gonna -- you know, if it was two women, would I do that? No, likely not. I'd run right by them, It's interesting, these things.

Now, what's happening directly in, say, Silicon Valley? A lot of what's happening is like-me bias.

Right.

In other words, somebody walks in -- if I'm hiring and someone walks in and she went to University of California, Berkeley, she grew up in either Newport Beach, California or the Bay Area somewhere. She's a runner. We like the same music. Cool. That's a slam dunk. I don't need to check her references, I don't need to check anything else. I want to hire her because I'm comfortable with her. She's like me.

And I might not give that candidate who went to, you know, Elon University or Griffin Atlanta -- may or may not be the same race as me but someone who likes cats and doesn't exercise a whole lot. Already, I've got some implicit biases I don't -- I can't relate to her as easily because she's not like me. I bring certain judgments along with that. So, whether I think I'm being fair to both candidates, I'm already given the woman that came from UC Berkeley who is like me a huge advantage. I might even ask her different questions.

And so, this happens all the time. It's the easiest to hire people that are like us. But what we do by doing that is we create this incredibly homogeneous society or workforce. As Judith Williams say, we create the "cocoon of yes" around us. And so, when you think about it from a business sense, that's a horrible thing to have. It's horrible to have people that all think like me because if it's gonna make a board meeting go a lot faster, it's gonna make any meeting go faster 'cause everybody's like, "Yeah, yeah! Sounds good, sounds good!"

Right.

But we have this incredibly narrow perspective, then. And we're not really thinking outside the box. So, we're not going to create products that serve a greater breadth of humanity. We're not going to think about -- you know, this is why some of the biggest marketing blunders and some of the biggest mistakes in society have happened.

Think about something as simple as the Apple Store in New York City. When they first designed it, it was a group of male architects and they were really cool and everything was glass and open and cool and they built this beautiful staircase that went upstairs. Glass staircase. And nobody stopped to think that a woman wearing a dress or a skirt isn't gonna walk up a glass staircase.

Right.

So, they had to change it and make the steps opaque. But had there been a woman on that team, clearly she would have said, "Wait a second, guys: Have you thought about this? We gotta put some sort of -- we gotta make it obscure somehow." [Laughs.]

[Laughs.]

Or, you know, there's so many situations like that. You've heard about how the tracking system couldn't track women with visual tracking.

You mention Clippy in the movie.

Right.

Or Clipster, or whatever his name is. You know who I mean.

Clippy. Yeah. Clippy was creepy toward women, right? And in that case, what was so shocking about it was that even when they did a focus group -- they spent, what?

$100,000, yeah.

On a focus group. And because the guys couldn't see it for themselves, they threw the whole thing away. It's crazy.

I mean, yeah. Is that a thing you sense, though? Are there incompatible biases when approaching diversity from founders to people who are tasked with spearheading those initiatives? How do those biases differ or contrast?

Well, I mean, I think the issue is if someone has decided, "Okay, our boardroom looks pretty white. You know, we have less than 10 percent female engineers. We better change things around. We better get some more diversity here." And they hire someone to run diversity -- I can tell you that I've talked to many people who have been the head of diversity and inclusion at companies that have left after six months because they can't actually get anything done from within the company. And they -- [Laughs.]

There's a classic comment -- a man named Leslie Miley was at Twitter. When he was at Twitter, he's a senior engineer. He's an African-American man. As an engineer, obviously a very smart man. And he was in a meeting and they were talking and he said -- this was maybe, six, seven years ago. He said, "Listen, we need to have an initiative. We need to get more diversity in here. It's just terrible. I mean, I look around and there's nobody who looks like me here."

And so the head of HR, a woman, said to him, "I absolutely agree. We are all for getting diversity, but we're not gonna lower our standards." [Pause.] Now, just think about that comment. [Laughs.] While it might've been something that everybody thinks, would you ever -- I mean, it's like saying -- the thought that she even correlated diversity with lower standards is an implicit bias.

Right.

And that was hugely offensive to Leslie Miley. It would be offensive to a woman, right? And so, that's the type of thing where people think, "Oh my God, that could've been me that said that." I get what she's saying. It doesn't sound so horrible when you think of it 'cause what you're thinking is, "Yeah, but we shouldn't lower our standards just to get diversity in here." But the assumption that by bringing in diversity it would equate to having to lower your qualifications or the criteria --

Are there types of outreach you think or you wish tech would be better at? For example, I've noticed when interpreting the word "diversity," you don't really see tech reach out to people at the lower end of the income spectrum.

There's huge bias about education.

Yeah.

Tech is bad at it. I was doing a screening of Code in person at Microsoft and somebody from the engineering department had the guts to stand up and said -- because they knew that the head of HR was at that particular screening -- and he said, "You know, hey, look: I challenge us to also get beyond just poaching from other companies." He said, "We don't even hire from colleges. We just poach from other companies."

[Laughs.]

He said, "We can't continue to do that."

I can name companies whose initiative is, "Well, the three founders came from Dartmouth, Stanford, and Harvard, so we only hire from those three."

Right.

And they think they're helping by doing that. They think they're giving back, they're being loyal to their alma mater. But think about who you hurt while in your mind you're helping somebody else. That's something that Mahzarin Banaji, the co-founder of the Implicit Association Test at Harvard, talks a lot about, which is that sometimes we hurt people by who we're helping. Because you could have somebody that's just as smart come out of Smith University, come out of a school that we've never even heard of maybe. Right?

Or a community college or anywhere.

Come out of a community college, come out of Penn State.

Yeah.

But if we're not even willing to give that opportunity to them, then how do we ever know?

How do you feel people like Sheryl Sandberg have advanced or inhibited the conversation around diversity in tech?

Well, I mean, I think originally Sheryl Sandberg -- you know, she got a lot of criticism when wrote Lean In.

Yeah.

Because unfortunately that was her own blind spot, her own bias, is that she just made this blanket assumption from the beginning that everybody could afford to go to university. So, that book, when I read it, I was like, "Oh my God. Tell me something I don't know."

[Laughs.]

No, seriously. I don't mean to sound any other way than -- I kept saying, "Duh. Yeah. Why is everybody making such a big hype about this? I get it. This is who I am. I get this." I thought, "Well, good for her for putting it out there but this is kind of boring me because I am agreeing with everything she's saying.

Right.

Okay, but good on her for writing it, right? But then I began to realize that she was marginalizing this entire audience of people who were seriously offended by her assumption that just anybody can get into Brown or Harvard or Stanford or go to one of these universities. Penn. You know, how do you even get into the room to lean in in the first place? And that's what Sheryl Sandberg overlooked unfortunately. You know, we can't always think about everybody. I mean, we need to try to, but I think it's a near impossibility for us to always think about everybody. But we're never gonna be able to think about everybody unless we have other people in the room. You have to have other people in the room.

No, I think this is related. Something that I see as quite prevalent among tech and games is this sort of dogged tenacity in pretending that those areas are meritocracies. Many of these companies, as I'm sure you know, including tech, are as ruthless as the finance world. So why do people still cling to that belief, you think?

[Pause.] Well, because it makes them feel better about themselves.

[Laughs.]

I mean, truly.

No, I would agree.

I think that people want to believe that tech is a meritocracy. That's what they all want to believe, but it is just absolutely, absolutely garbage. I mean, you hear Tracy Chou say that in Code. She says, "You know, tech holds itself to the standard that they're a meritocracy but there's absolutely no way that they are." Because the kid -- if you played lacrosse and you went to Brown, and you're looking to hire and you're a new start-up, I'm sorry but the kid who played hockey or lacrosse or whatever from any top university that walks in the door is gonna have an advantage because you can relate to that guy. That's why you look at places like Goldman Sachs and look at Wall Street and see -- there's some crazy thing if you find out how many of them were lacrosse players.

[Laughs.]

You know? Because they take care of their own. I get it. I get it. I would love to hire out of UC Berkeley. I mean, I understand that. But the problem is what are we doing -- what are we creating by doing that? You know? We're creating environments like Silicon Valley. The fact that -- I don't know if you followed, but I'm sure you did. The whole Uber thing lately.

Oh yeah. For the last eight, 10 months, yeah.

Yeah. So, the fact that [David Bonderman, Uber board member and partner at private equity firm] TPG who is in a boardroom -- now, the guy is 72 years old and having a father that's about to turn 75 I understand that this is all new to them and they feel like they're walking through a minefield. They never know what they're gonna say that's -- "How did that offend anybody? Can't they just take a joke?"

Right, right, right.

But when you're the subject of a joke, when you're -- I don't care if you're Arianna Huffington or you're Sally Joe, that worked her derrière off to get finally in the door of a company, she's got her first job in finance or something. We all, being a woman, suffer from the same thing, which is manterrupting, mansplaining, not being heard in meetings. This, "What do you mean, can't you take a joke?" This -- but imagine how absurd this is. If I understand the story correctly, he's in the boardroom in a special board meeting for Uber trying to figure out how to repair their reputation. Arianna Huffington is talking about getting more women on the board and Bonderman says, "Well, one thing we know for sure is that with more new women we're going to have a lot more talking.” And he interrupts Arianna to say that. I mean, it's crazy. He's like, "What'd I do? What'd I do?" But what I love about this is that he then steps down from the board of Uber because society is not tolerating this anymore.

Yeah. Yeah.

We're just not gonna accept it anymore.

Something that I wonder about and do reporting on is there isn't the same type of scrutiny on these types of things at videogame companies as there are in tech. Last year I spoke to -- I can't say the name of the company but I spoke to a female employee of a pretty major game studio. They have offices all over the world, though this occurred in the West. They circulated a memo basically telling female employees to -- I think the phrase was something like to always be obediently subservient to all male superiors because "men have been in the workplace longer." I don't know that you'll necessarily have an answer to this, but I'm curious why these types of abuses and practices don't merit the same types of coverage as an Uber?

Well, first of all, I think because that many more people use Uber than -- you know, the word Uber is even becoming like Kleenex, right?

[Laughs.] Yes.

So, I think that it is just such a big name that I think that that's why it commands more attention. But, you know, Gamergate was a big deal. Or maybe I just thought it was a big deal because I was in the middle of editing Code at the time. I'm not quite sure.

Yeah.

But I think it's simply a fact that you have a much wider audience and a much wider user base and different ages.

Than Uber?

Oh, absolutely. Think about Uber. My 79-year-old parents are using it and so are my 20-year-old kids. So, when you have -- that's an age span of 50 years of people that are using Uber, whereas how many people are gaming? I think you have a much narrower range of people using.

I don't know. People always talk about it in terms of revenue. Depending on how you want to crunch the numbers, I think it comes to about $100B. But I always speculate that has more to do with the cost of the products than the amount of people buying them. But even still, there does seem to be something that prevents from these stories -- I think Gamergate is an exception and even then, I don't think it's as widely known as many people think it is. It was responsible in part for getting a certain culture on certain radars, but then was discarded as an influence. I mean, do you think it just comes down to broader user base of tech in general rather than videogames specifically?

Well, I think what it takes for people to make a stink and get it out there about anything is it takes anger. It takes motivation from somebody to say, "Enough of this." Whoever -- if it's just a small group of like-minded people that are using these games, then nobody's gonna rock the boat because nobody cares as much, right? So, I think that that's why. Gamergate was a much bigger thing because it involved a woman that came out and said something about it. If you think about it, why did Uber -- how was that uncovered? It's when Susan Fowler said, "Enough already! This is what's really going on in there!"

And so, I think that -- you know, I don't know the gaming industry well enough to know, but my sense of it is that there's a big group that's a big moneymaker, but of like-minded people. And there's not really a social-good aspect to it, so you don't have people saying, "Hey, we need more videogames!" I mean, we did have a certain population saying this, but for our young girls, or we need something that's not as sexist. Because how does -- it probably affects society? We've heard that there are links to violence in videogames and everything, but I think there are probably more pressing societal issues, and so those are commanding more attention.

Right. Well, especially in the last year or so as well. Similarly, though, how do you wish the media did a better job of covering systemic problems in tech? [Pause.]

Well, I think the media has been doing a great job of it, lately. A much better job, anyway.

Yeah.

I think that -- yeah. I think they're doing a much better job because this is why Uber was exposed, right? But what I really think it is is social media. I think it's social media that is doing a good job. But I flew through Helsinki yesterday and I picked up the Financial Times. So, a British newspaper, on the front had David Bonderman and the whole Uber story. And so, about the sexist comment in the boardroom. Now, to think that that's going on in the U.K., that they're putting it on? Interestingly enough -- I need to check the headlines of papers around here, but I don't know that that was a front-page thing. [Laughs.] Because we're so used to Silicon Valley being sexist. It was probably on the third or fourth page in a smaller article that they talked about it.

Right.

Here's the Financial Times. I mean, yes, there was the horrible fire that they had on the tower. There's all this stuff, the terrorism that they're having, and still the head of the Financial Times yesterday -- okay, it was a Sunday -- was about David Bonderman and what happened at Uber. So, to me, that's really interesting, yeah. Anyway. So I think the press -- I think that we need to continue to put pressure on the press. But I think now that we have social media, I don't think the press can really ignore what's going on, the plight of it, and people are saying, "Enough already. I'm not gonna put up with this.”

I mean, do you think social media, does it move the needle on these types of things more than media? Or --

Absolutely.

You think so?

I do. I mean, my point of view is absolutely. Think about this: Think about the fact that even how it's changed, say, customer relations, marketing, anything. I have a pair of skis and they had sort of faulty bindings, but the bindings were preset on these skis, okay?

Sure.

Last winter, twice I nearly killed myself on these skis. So, I called Head and I said, "Hey, by the way, I want a refund on these things. I nearly killed myself. I love the skis, but you put factory bindings on them and I can't take the bindings off, so this is garbage."

And they come back and said, "Gee, that's funny. You're the only one that's complained about that."

And I said, "Well, that's funny. The stores around here in Utah are telling me that I'm not the first one to complain about it."

"Well, sorry, we really can't help you. You already bought the skis. You've already skied on them."

I said, "That's fine. I just want you to know that I will never buy Head skis again. I'm disappointed in this and I'm sure you won't mind too much if I post this to my social-media network."

Immediately they got back to me and they're like, "Hang on a second! Hang on a second! Actually, send them back to us, we'll send you a coupon for the payment for the UPS. Send it back to us, we'll you a different pair of skis with a different binding."

Why? Because they are terrified of anybody posting anything negative on social media about their products. Because they know how that could go viral and cause all sorts of issues. So, yeah. I mean, I think social media has totally changed the needle. This is how Susan Fowler's story came out. If Susan Fowler came out and she told, first of all -- okay, so, she comes out of Uber and has had all of these unbelievable sexist experiences at Uber that, you know, sometimes they're so bad I bet people wouldn't necessarily believe them, right?

Right.

So, if she had just talked about it at a cocktail party to one or two friends, if she talked about it over a beer or something with some friends, or with something that would've gone within her circle, maybe -- or if somebody said, "Oh, I know somebody that writes for the Wall Street Journal. Maybe you could talk to them." She tells the story, the guy at the Wall Street Journal is like, "Oh, shit. I'm under deadline for some other thing. I'm sorry. Can't do it." Okay? There goes her opportunity. She moves on with her new job. But the fact that she could write a blog and just post it to LinkedIn, post it to Facebook, post it wherever she wants and it gets viral and before you know it, you've got several hundred thousand readers on it, and that kind of pressure is what made Travis [Kalanick, Uber founder and former CEO] have to actually take this seriously. It is really what made all of Uber kind of have this big shake-up. It's all because of social media.

Do you notice any sort of commonality among people who are able to rock the boat in such a way?

[Pause.] Well, it's brave. They -- yeah. It's not their first job, No. 1. Like, I have a 23-year-old daughter who's working in finance. Now, she probably knows well enough never to talk to me directly. I mean, she would if it was really bad. But if she was feeling little microaggressions, she knows that I'd be all over her to quit or to move companies or to go marching into HR and let them know about it. So, she's probably careful with me.

But, is a 22-year-old a 22-year-old who feels like they are so lucky to have their first job -- and especially women, right? 'Cause women tend to be different from men in that we aren't quite as confident in being able to maintain our position in a company for advancement or anything. Right? It's just our nature. We're less confident than men, typically. So, is she -- is a 22, 23, 25-year-old going to be willing to say, "Screw this! I'm going to write something and post it out there!"? No. Because she's afraid of how she's gonna pay her rent if she loses that job, who else will hire her, what are the repercussions of being an outspoken woman? So, it seems to me like a lot of the people that have come out, whether it's Tracy Chou or Susan Fowler or any of these women that I can't remember the name of -- the woman that did it for Gamergate -- are women that have been in the workforce long enough and they've also gotten to the point where they're confident in their abilities to program, to analyze, whatever their job is. They're probably in their thirties. They've gotten to a point where they're saying, "Enough is enough. I gotta do something." So, they're brave. I think that -- they're brave and they've gotten to a point where they feel confident enough to stand up.

Similarly, what commonalities do you notice about female-first organizations?

Well, when you talk to someone like Ann Miura-Ko, who started Floodgate, she's a co-founder of Floodgate. So, if I ask her about dealing with being a woman in the VC world and tolerating corporate culture -- her response to me is, "I created this corporate culture. I had to actually set my own company and define the way that the workplace environment is gonna as a female founder, with a male founder also, in order to make sure that it was a safe place for women to work.” So, she doesn't have a problem with workplace culture because she started her own company.

That -- [Laughs.] So, I think that women -- now, the interesting thing that I've talked to a lot of women about who run their own company is -- I've heard this story a million times. So, let's say there's a female founder and she hires a head of engineering that's a man. Head of engineering is coming to this meeting because he needs to understand how the infrastructure works so that he can design some architecture for the engineering system. So, is he really a much lower person in the company. He might be -- whatever, senior engineer, right? But he's the man in the room and so when he's meeting with two other men, their eyes, when they ask a question, go to the man. Go to her head of engineering. She's the CEO of the company. So, she will redirect them and she'll answer the questions. And, again, they ask a question and they address it towards him. These are just little things that men might not even know they're doing.

I noticed this a little bit in your documentary as well, but there can be this mentality among female-first organizations of almost a "let's beat the men at their own game" or -- are you familiar with Bridesmaids or Samantha Bee's show? That kind of approach?

Well, I know Samantha Bee -- I don't her personally. But I'm not sure I know exactly what you're talking about.

Well, your documentary gets a little into brogrammers and I'm just curious in general about instances of women using the same maxims and benchmarks of either carrying themselves or talking about what they do that are very similar to men, including toxic ones.

Well, I think it comes from a frustration of living with these microaggressions within the workplace of just being a woman. But I don't know any -- I mean, that would be my guess of where it comes from. You finally get fed up. You finally say, "Enough of this.” That's really what it is. It is these microaggressions. But I think there are too many women that are in a job where they're feeling this every single day and they do nothing about it 'cause they're afraid. Afraid to speak up. They're afraid to lose their job. That's what worries me.

I was doing some reading about this over the weekend and I get a sense that hard data doesn't necessarily help female founders get funded. Like, I'm citing First Round 10 Year Project, which said that companies with a female founder performed 63 percent better than investments with all-male founding teams.

Right. Right right.

Even with knowledge like that, from what I've seen, it seems like female founders still have a harder time getting funded. I don't know if your research bears that out as well, but it would be interesting to hear you talk about. Is that what you've seen as well?

Absolutely.

Why is that?

Absolutely. Women have a much harder time getting funded. This is -- we're covering this in Bias documentary.

Yeah.

We're covering a lot of this. We've actually done and filmed some pitches in VC. Yeah, where does it come from? It comes from unconscious bias, I think. Men -- when you talk to VCs, some of them are just blatantly sexist. Right? I mean, I have talked to a couple people and I don't have them on camera, of course, but there clearly are men that are like, "Why would I hire a woman when she's either just gonna go get pregnant and then I'm paying for her to be off work, or I've found women to be not as reliable because they need to go pick up their kids or do whatever."

Now, think about this: If a man takes off a Thursday afternoon to go coach little league with his son or to take his daughter to Indian princess or something, everybody in the room is like, "Aw, how sweet! What a great dad!" If a woman takes off a Thursday afternoon to go do something with her children, it's, "Boy, I hope she gets her work done! I don't know, didn't she do that two weeks ago? Not sure she can handle that promotion!"

I mean, it's even just the assumption that if somebody isn't at their desk. If a man isn't at their desk -- there was a study done about this that I thought was fascinating. If a man's not at his desk, the assumption is he's in a business meeting: "Oh, he must be traveling for work. Oh, he must be in a meeting." If a woman's not at her desk: "Oh, she must be somewhere with her kids.”

So, just that in itself, when you're thinking about who can handle the next job?

"Steven's leaving. We gotta find somebody to take his place. Who can take Steven's managerial spot? Well, what about Sally? She's been really good."

"Ah, but Sally's husband just took a big job. He's gonna be traveling. She's got young kids. She probably -- that's probably gonna be too much travel for her. She probably doesn't want it."

"Yeah, you're right. What about Michael?"

Poor Sally didn't even get a voice. She didn't even know they mentioned her for that job. She didn't even get to decide for herself, whether she wanted it or not. And the sad thing about it is if you go back to these men, they feel like they did the right thing. They felt like they were being considerate to Sally. Right? I mean, they really think, like, "Well, what do you mean? We were thinking about her! We knew that her husband took a job, we knew that she has young kids. We made the assumption that -- we didn't want to put that pressure on her."

They didn't ask her. Those kind of things happen all the time. That's why a lot of this is well-intended. There's not always malicious intent.

I think there is some truth to it when people blame the patriarchy in criticizing tech, but there's definitely a lot of discrimination by women against women. Who else do you feel can be complicit in these types of dynamics that keeps diversity down or keeps women down specifically?

[Pause.] Women can be hard on women. And studies show that women are hard on women.

Yeah.

You know, I think that there's this -- I'm hopeful that millennials aren't like that and I believe that they're changing and I hope that as they climb the corporate ladder they continue to be supportive of other women. My feeling is that this happens because as we climb in the workplace, there are fewer and fewer job opportunities, room for advancement, and we know that only one of us is gonna get to that C-suite. We know that only one of us is gonna get into the boardroom, if at all. And so the corporate structure as-is pretty much plots us against ourselves. Right? I mean, it creates this environment where women automatically have to feel competitive with other women, which is really too bad. We know -- think about how many times you hear in a workplace, "Oh, he's a really good guy. He's a really good guy." How nice for men that being just a good guy is enough to get them that job.

[Laughs.]

I mean, women have to work a lot harder than that. That's not enough for us.

In Code, obviously, you talk a lot about coding. Maybe this is too much of a crystal-ball question, but there's a big push for algorithms and machine learning and deep learning. I don't know if you have a sense of -- how do you think women might be ultimately affected when coding skills are monocropped, or everyone has it and it's long in the tooth and no longer prestigious?

Yeah, so, we're covering this for Bias documentary, which I'm really interested in.

Yeah.

The problem is -- the fascinating thing is how bias works its way into AI.

So, if you say, "Okay, we're going to get rid of our unconscious biases and people that have biases have brains, then if you have a brain you have bias." It's protectionary. There are reasons for it. Okay, then maybe the answer is AI. So, let's get rid of the brain and then maybe we could actually get over our own biases."

But what they're finding is that bias is working its way into AI. It works its way -- the way machines learn, I mean, it works its way in really quickly. So, just to take some completely rudimentary kind of example, but, this is one that I'm repeating from I think it was Leslie Miley that told me. Let's just say that I've got a bot in front of me, and I say, "Hey, show me a picture of a hot chick."

[Laughs.]

And the computer shows a steaming breast of chicken that's just come out of the oven.

"No, no, no. Show me a picture of a really sexy woman."

So, the computer now equates "sexy" with "hot" with "chick." Right?

Yeah.

So, maybe you say, "No, no, show me a picture of a really hot woman."

Then it shows of a woman who's sweating.

"No! Show me a picture of a hot woman with big tits."

So now, the way the computer is learning through your acclimation to all this is the computer learned -- and you're like, "Yeah! That's what I wanna see. That's great!”

So, then, suddenly the word -- any of the words that you used: "female," woman," "chick," "hot," "tits." All of those words come together and so the computer is learning that when you associate "woman," suddenly there is "woman means big tits."

But this is happening with antisemitic things -- it was Tay bot.

Yeah, I was gonna mention Tay.

Yeah, Tay bot is a great example of how within just a matter of weeks they had to take it off because it was incredibly racist. I mean, it was horrible. It's crazy, isn't it?

Like I said, it's probably a crystal-ball question, but: Do you have a sense of when there is a more level playing field, everyone knows how to code, do you think coding is gonna go back to being seen as "women's work?" Much in the way that punch cards were discussed and thought of?

No, I don't think so. I don't think so. But -- no. Because I don't think there's such a thing. I think the whole point is that we're trying to get away from "woman's work." Right? Like what the heck does "women's work" mean?

Right.

[Sighs.] I don't think so. But hopefully -- as we say in the films, I think that we need to get to a point where we change the stereotype. We have more role models. We have more women in leadership, women in science, and then a young girl that might be five years old and then gets into kindergarten where she takes a coding class where she's as good at it as anybody else, like, they start playing around with CSS or something. I mean, in a perfect world, it's incorporated into many of the different curriculum in many different classes and then it's just an obvious thing and then the boys don't feel differently about a woman that's good at a computer game or that is interested in studying science.

And so, society just begins to accept that this is the norm. I think that that's gonna change. Nothing is gonna change in the workplace until we get the numbers closer to 50/50. Because it's just like when you think about, sort of, the bullying effect. If you have one woman in a group of men, or if you have one transgender person or one person with a different sexual orientation than the norm, then that person is always gonna be the minority and always gonna be the one that's vulnerable to being teased or to being subjected to what's deemed as appropriate and acceptable by the majority.

Until it's 50/50, guys are gonna sit there and put their feet up and make sexist jokes. People like David Bonderman is gonna be able to say -- cut off an incredibly brilliant high-achieving woman like Arianna Huffington and crack that sexist joke, which he thinks is just a joke, which is not because it's based on stereotypes. If there were 50 percent women in that boardroom, I bet you anything he would never have said that.

Well, I have just two more questions for you here.

Yeah.

How do you feel enabling narcissism and antisocial behaviors for the trade-off of financial success -- how do you feel that is shaping technology?

[Sighs.] Yeah, I think it's a problem. When you're trying to convince -- typically if I'm speaking about the importance of diversity, if I talk about money, people look up from their iPhones. [Laughs.] Right? Guys begin to care about this thing, about this issue. Typically in telling something, I always tell people, "If you want me to speak on a panel and you want people to come into the room, do not put the word 'woman' in the title. Don't put the word 'diversity' in the title. Say something like 'the secrets of financial success.'" [Laughs.] You know?

Yeah.

Find a different way to make -- because men don't think it applies to them when you're talking about femtech or when you're talking about diversity. They don't think it applies to them. So, you know, that's like, "Let's meet during this session about inclusion and diversity because I can skip that."

So, as long as there's so much money and there's no actual -- you know, this is why I've never believed in quotas but I'm starting to wonder if they aren't the answer, honestly. I'm beginning to believe that in terms of this, if we can't get 50 percent women in the boardroom, then maybe we need to mandate that it has to be. Then we'll be able to see the effects that it has on companies.

How do you think that coding schools could be better regulated?

I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I think the problem is just we don't have enough teachers and everything else. I don't know anything about regulating. But I do think that there must be some sort of a credential for teachers for computer science.

Sure.

But the truth is we just need more.

Right. So, my name is Jason Rohrer. I'm 39 years old. I live with my spouse and three kids here in Davis, California.

I've been making videogames pretty much full-time for about 10 to 12 years, depending on how you count it. I made 18 games during that time. I'm currently working on my 19th game right now. And the question is why I make videogames?

[Laughs.] Not in an accusatory way.

[Laughs.] Yeah, so.

I didn't realize this until we started emailing again, but you've been making games for as long as I've been writing about them.

Yeah, it's been --

I remember emailing you. I don't remember if you remember me emailing you way back in the day.

Well, yeah, when I searched my email, my email archive doesn't go back that far because I switched computers. Back then I think I was actually -- I didn't use webmail, I actually was downloading my email with some email client, right? It's on a hard drive. So, anyway, when I searched for you I couldn't find that stuff so I don't remember. [Laughs.] That was before webmail.

So, yeah, why am I making games? It's in part because -- I mean, to quote Tommy from Team Meat, "I make videogames because I can." [Laughs.] But yeah, as somebody who is both sort of like somewhat an artistic person or someone who is interested in the arts or someone who has always been drawing or making music or making little films or working on little creative projects over the course of my life -- you know, I ran a record label in college, I used to publish a zine when I was in high school, and I was always drawing stuff or trying to figure out art stuff or at least absorbing and exploring the arts, I was more interested in the arts than most people I know. But also I was someone who was kind of engineering and scientifically minded and went off to study computer science and learned how to program and became what I think to this day is a pretty good programmer after years of doing it and getting better and better at it. So, good at programming, good at inventing and engineering things, good at figuring things out -- so those two things kinda wed together in videogames as sort of, like, looking back at my life as this obvious choice. They are both artistic creative kinda things and yet at the same time, they're working -- they're operas made out of bridges, I think Frank Lantz says. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.]

So, you know, they can, unlike a novel, which can be good or bad or it doesn't work or this novel sucks or it fails as a novel, videogames can actually fail in a very rigorous sense, right? In a very provable sense in that they can not function as programs.

They can also fail in another sense, which is sort of a mathematical sense. They can have an imbalance in them that's provable using game theory or Nash equilibriums or something, where it's like, "This game has this degenerate strategy, and here we can prove why this degenerate strategy is present." [Laughs.] So, you have these two very rigorous, technical levels where they can fail, right? They have this weird combination of -- when I look at the current game that I'm working on, it's just mind-bogglingly complicated, the engineering aspect of it. I've been working on that part of it for about two years. The coding. The server. The data formats. The way all the files are stored and the way they're loaded and all this kind of stuff.

This is --

-- One Hour One Life, yes. And so, this is, in a lot of ways in terms of the code and -- it's sort of a tendency, right? To take on a little bit more audacious things each time, and so this is one the most complicated code things. [Laughs.] It has a real-time server, where none of my games have had that before, and just all these other aspects to it. Content management system that can manage up to 10,000 objects and all these different sprites and pieces of graphics and sounds and everything. Mind-bogglingly, at this point, it all works. [Laughs.] I'm looking at this thing that I'm cobbling together piece-by-piece, up close to each piece over the course of, you know, two years. And from afar, if I step back from the thing, I have no idea really how any of it's working or -- it's like, "I guess it's working! Wow, it all works!" And if I zero in one little piece, I can remember how that little piece works and maybe fix something about it, whatever. When I step up to, like, the 10,000 view it's like, "This is this really crazily complicated thing that magically is working."

Yeah.

And the same, when I look back at some of my older games, I'm like, "I don't know how I figured out how to actually engineer this thing. But look, it works! It still works!" Those two aspects -- those are two things that I'm pretty good at or at least have interest in, you know, this creative stuff and this engineering stuff and where else but in videogames do those things wed as solidly as they do in games? [Laughs.] So, you know, the editor that I made for One Hour One Life and the server and everything else -- I mean, in terms of engineering complexity, it rivals any other piece of software. It rivals Photoshop or a web browser or whatever in terms of its complexity. As an engineering project, it's one of the most complex things there is, right?

I don't know -- this is connective tissue with that. I don't know that I really see people talk about this, but after you finish making one game, why make another one?

[Pause.] [Laughs.] In my case --

Are you gonna say, "Because I can?"

No, no. In my case, the answer is very simple and that's because I'm supporting myself and my family financially with my work. [Laughs.]

That's fair.

No, but, I mean, it's a really important point. And aside from just being a flippant kind of answer, it's -- you know, if you look at my career, I've made 18 games in 12 years and a lot of people go, "Wow, that's quite a lot of games!" Jonathan Blow has made two during that time. [Laughs.]

Right.

But I'm not knocking Jonathan or really comparing him to me because his games are on a different scale in some ways. But, there's also the fact that his first game was a big financial hit, right? So that gives you a certain amount of breathing room and a certain amount of time to say, "You know, I'm gonna spend six or seven years on my next game." Or, successful indie game designer disease, when you make a million dollars on your first game, you never make another game. [Laughs.]

I've got a bunch of friends that that is essentially the pattern. Or, you know -- eight or nine years later, their next game comes out. So, there's this looming financial pressure on me and I think that even though people like to draw this line between doing good work or doing commercially successful work or "not everything has to be sold, you can give things away for free and it can still be a valuable thing," I think this is an important point where the rubber hits the road in terms of the quality of what you're making and how many people it's actually touching and benefiting and how many people are sort of moved by it or connected to it -- how many people are willing to actually take money out of their wallet for it is kind of the only place where you have to face reality. [Laughs.] It's like, "Ooh, Passage is such an important game." That's what people say, right? But, nope. It's not good enough for people to really actually pay for it.

And, I don't know, I'm really trying to judge the quality of what I'm doing. If I just put it out there and a bunch of people download it and talk about it or whatever and a lot of people say it's great but it's kinda wishy-washy, right? When I look at -- when I compare the quality of two things that I made and one thing's way more financially successful than another thing that I made, it's like, "Well, maybe that thing in someway is objectively better." Because there were this many more people who were like, 'Woah, I really love that idea. I really love this and I heard about it from my friends and they said it was amazing and I was finally convinced to take out $15," or however many -- even if it's $1, to go through this extra action to reach this thing. And so, yeah, I think that that driving force for me, where it's like -- this is my full-time job. I am supporting my family doing this. This other pressure has not only made me more prolific, because it's like, "Well, after I'm done with the game I can't spend three years doing something else or traveling the world or whatever."

Searching for inspiration.

Yeah, it's like, "I gotta make something else and it has to be good." And on top of that, yeah, it's really made me reach in terms of what I'm taking on and how good the things are that I'm making. I think my games have gotten progressively better and better and better over the course of 18 games in part because of this pressure.

I mean, I don't know how you describe your games. I'm sure you've seen the way that they've been written about. It's rare. Isn't it rare to be doing what you're doing? As far as being able to support yourself and a family and doing it full-time?

[Pause.] I don't know.

I don't have a sense of it.

Like, yeah, in terms of -- if I look back at the history of the 12 years that I've been involved in the scene, maybe it feels rare now? But there was a time when it felt like I was the only person who wasn't a millionaire.

[Laughs.]

Still, when I think back about the people that I know in the indie scene, it's like -- out of the people I've met over the years, one by one, they each made a game and became millionaires. So, and now, a lot of them are superstars? Phil Fish slept on my couch back in the day. [Laughs.]

Did you sell the couch? [Laughs.]

[Laughs.] That's how crazy it is.

[Laughs.]

It's like -- I've slept at Phil's place when I was visiting up in Montreal. And, you know, then slowly, he makes this game and it becomes this gigantic hit and he becomes this -- you know, Jonathan Blow, as well. I was in communication with him before Braid. I knew Edmund before Super Meat Boy and before Indie Game: The Movie.

Yeah.

And so, those are just a few examples of people who are publicly known to be millionaires just because of the number of copies that they've sold. But there are just so many other people that I've interacted with over the years and it's like, "Woah! Your life has totally changed! Well, here I am still struggling away."

I think there's another dichotomy, as well. And I don't know if this is as true anymore or if you even care to comment on it, but I remember with the rise of all the people you mentioned, there started to become this division somehow of games with huge budgets are directly in competition with games that don't. That these "smaller" games are "more artistic" or are "more interesting." I'm sure you're aware of huge huge budget games -- do you feel like even those games say something about the human condition?

The really big budget games?

Yeah.

I guess, yeah, there was a -- I've been talking about this with some friends recently, but there was this time where -- I mean, I'm still kind of a holdout for AAA. I'm, like, keeping a flame burning for it, right? I mean, I've been playing what you might call AAA games or mainstream big-budget games my entire life.

Do you ever think about these distinctions that we make, when they're all just videogames?

No, I don't think that's strange at all. We do that for movies, right? I mean, there's the Blair Witch Project and there's Inception, right? There's Memento and there's Inception. They're by the same director, but the way they're produced and the system that made them is totally different. So, I feel like maybe we don't make that distinction for music as much because --

Anymore.

Well, you can talk about indie rock or whatever but yeah. I don't know. I guess most of those indie bands, if they make a good-sounding record are going to the same studio that --

[Laughs.]

-- they're going to the same recording studio and using the same equipment.

Yeah.

So, the way Memento is made and the way Inception is made and the process behind it are very different.

Well, but you're a holdout for --

Yeah, I've been playing AAA games my whole life. Super Mario Bros. was a AAA game and Zelda was, right? Throughout my childhood and teen years I bought pretty much every videogame console that came out, one after the other, and sold the last one to buy the next one. All the way up to PlayStation 3 is kinda where I got off the train mostly, but I still keep an eye out for something happening in AAA that's interesting. Over the past 10 years, I'd say, there were a bunch of things where it's like, "Woah! People from the Looking Glass school of game design are doing something cool here." Or, "We're getting away from cutscenes and we're kinda still doing something of human interest." You know, things like BioShock or Far Cry 2. Or things like The Last of Us or things like Dishonored.

There are these little glimmers of hope that, yeah, some of the stuff that's going on in and the experimental stuff that's going on in the indie scene -- I know for a fact because I know some of the people who made some of those games that they are inspired by what's going on in the indie scene. They're sick of just big linear games with cutscenes and so on. They're trying to figure out how to do more interesting things and weave human-condition stuff through it. So, they're very aware of -- I don't know, the quest or whatever to improve the way human and artistic things are treated in games. They were doing work that I felt was really good important steps forward in those things. But I kinda -- if I look back at the last five to seven years or so, I'm like, "Woah! What happened?" [Laughs.] It's been, like, four years since The Last of Us. And if I look at all the games that have come out since then, there's not really very much in AAA that I would want to feel like I had to play for the reason I felt like I had to play The Last of Us. The Last of Us felt like it was on the cutting edge of this emotionally evocative story-game genre kind of thing where you're gonna see the very best of voice acting and writing and emotional tone throughout this thing that videogames had ever seen. You just couldn't really not play it, I felt like, for someone who's interested in the artistic future of videogames. And I felt like you couldn't not play BioShock, right? [Laughs.] Back when it came out. You couldn't not play. Here's a game that's a critique of Randian objectivism. I mean, like, okay, we actually have a game that's a critique of Randian objectivism. I really feel like what has come out in the last four years that you can even give a string of garblegook -- [Laughs.] Right?

Yeah.

It just feels like that reaching that used to be done in AAA isn't really being done. If you look at the numbers, it's like, well, you know, The Last of Us, BioShock, Far Cry 2 -- they weren't gigantic hits. The landscape has changed so much and maybe some of these studios got burnt a little bit by how much it cost to make some of these things because it's risky. I mean, Far Cry 2 was a crazy experiment and in a lot of ways the experiment completely failed. They had very big plans for how these characters were gonna be interactive, how they -- the non-player characters -- were gonna move in the environment and do things. They had to basically cut all that for budget and development time reasons and end up with these characters standing stock stiff in cafés waiting to talk to you. [Laughs.]

You know, so, it's like all that stuff, that crazy experimental stuff we're hoping they're gonna be doing, we imagine AAA trying to do -- LMNO, that Steven Spielberg worked on and consulted for? I mean, they were crazily audacious in terms of what they were trying to achieve and it's like a couple years into research and development and it's like, "We can't keep throwing money at this thing." These are hard problems. And so I think that that those rays of hope in AAA have kinda been left by the wayside and we're onto Assassin's Creed 6 or whatever. [Laughs.]

Oh, I think there's been more than that. [Laughs.]

Whatever. Yeah. [Laughs.] And also, yeah, the idea that one thing that we should be pushing for is -- I hate to use the industry term but -- "new IP." Like, the new IP is important. The Last of Us is new, right? It's not a sequel to anything. That's important. And when I look at the year-end list of best games of the year in the AAA space and so on, all I'm seeing is This Game 4, This Game 3, This Game 2, at least. Or sometimes they stop giving them numbers, right?

Right.

The Witcher: Wild Hunt, isn't that The Witcher 3 or something?

Yes, it might be one of DLCs.

Or 4?

I don't think they're up to 4.

But anyway, yeah, I feel like that -- yeah. I don't see as much hope there. I haven't felt -- my kid finally saved up his own money, his 14-year-old son, and bought a PS4. But up until three weeks ago, we did not have one. Or an Xbox whatever it is. An Xbox One? Like, there's just nothing. I don't need it. I'm just waiting. I'm like, "I'm gonna wait to buy it until there's some game I have to play." That has not happened for either of those systems.

Do you feel like -- it just seems so nebulous to split it up between larger companies and smaller groups of individuals. Do you feel that the smaller groups of people of individuals, say, in "your" camp, do you feel like they've picked up that slack in terms of that reaching for games?

Oh, not as much as I would want them to. [Laughs.]

'Cause that's the thing. I feel like there's just as much creative conservatism taking place there.

Yeah, no, I agree. I don't --

I feel like 10, 12 years ago when we were both getting started -- which of course was an extension of all the years that came before, I just feel like it isn't nostalgia. I do feel like there was more reaching 10 years ago, five years ago.

Yeah. It's hard to tell. I mean, what are these watermarks in the indie scene that were really reaching? Obviously, I guess we'd say Braid was reaching.

Sure.

Was Fez reaching? It was very innovative and it was very beautiful. I guess in a lot of ways there are things about Fez that are reaching. Once you get into this world is that you're in and what this character is figuring out and there's all these crazy things embedded in the game with all these secret alphabets and all this other stuff. You know, that is pretty much the work of a mad genius. [Laughs.]

Yeah. That is accurate.

Other touchstones from the golden era --

[Laughs.] "Golden era."

-- of "AAA indie games" as Chris Hecker likes to call it are World of Goo. I mean, World of Goo is pretty frickin' amazing and cool and kind of with it and interesting. It's got a little edge to it and so on. But, you know, it's not like completely over-the-top reaching. The creator was a relatively inspired individual and he slipped a bunch of little cool things in there in terms of the way it all feels and this kind of creepy overtone to the whole thing. So, anyway. When I look back, those are the things that are standing out to me, right? Or if we go back even further, you talk about, like, Aquaria. [Laughs.]

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Or, you know, I don't know, Cave Story, if you want to count something like that that was kind of outsider art.

And it keeps coming back, so I think it's fair to count it.

[Laughs.] It's almost like outsider art in the indie scene, right? It's like, lone Japanese man toiling away for decades or whatever before releasing this thing. So, yeah, and today, there have been -- I'd say the stuff that Davey Wreden has been doing with Stanley Parable and The Beginner's Guide are just crazily audacious, right? [Laughs.]

Yeah. Yeah.

But that is the only, I guess I feel like -- and maybe there's a few other walking-simulator games that I've avoided feeling that I didn't hear about. But none of them have risen to the level where everyone I know is talking about them the way that his stuff has in terms of game designers and --

Yeah. That might be a byproduct of just how increasingly splintered all of these scenes are becoming.

You know, I felt like I had to play Edith Finch because it was sorta the game of the hour that everyone's talking about. I know the people who worked on it.

Yeah.

It does reach in some pretty crazy ways in a couple of places.

It's definitely a little different.

Yeah. Yeah. And so -- but, yeah, I don't know. I guess I feel like, yeah, these games are relatively far and few between. And the things that -- I don't know. As a videogame designer, the things that are more interesting for me are, like, what's going on with League of Legends or what's going on with Rust. It's because these things are actually -- I don't know. On their face, League of Legends isn't reaching. Rust isn't reaching. It's a very simple survival game in a post-apocalyptic situation. League of Legends is, like, a 5 versus 5 MOBA with these crazy superhero fantasy characters. But, the actual aesthetic experience of those two games is so rich and so emotionally rich and it kinda puts all this other stuff that's intentionally on the surface emotional and evocative and artistic to shame. Like, the kinds of things that Rust puts you through? The kinds of situations you end up in? And the kinds of arguments you have with other players and the kind of weird little human interactions that you have with them? They're unprecedented.

If we actually want to talk about this, Rust is kind of what Far Cry 2 wanted to be. [Laughs.]

Yeah, that's accurate.

I mean, there's times where -- I haven't played Rust in a while, but there were times back when I played it where I'd have this interaction with somebody else or some other group of people and of course it's a real interaction. They're real other people, first of all. But what we're interacting about and negotiating about, actually, is something very real because it's real time invested and real in-game resources that are at stake. Real lives that are in the balance. And the threats that are being made are real. And the wheedling that happens and trying to figure a way around it or trying to outsmart this person in this situation or trying to detect whether they're lying or not -- you've got L.A. Noire right in there, too. [Laughs.]

You got all of 'em.

So it's like, this game, obviously, no one in terms of people talking about the artistic future of games is even thinking about something like Rust. But at the same time, it creates one of the richest, most artistic kind of humanistic aesthetic experiences that I've ever had with a game. Yet, it's a bunch of nude guys running around with their foreskin flapping around in the wind, right? [Laughs.]

Well, I'm not surprised to hear you say that. Probably my favorite games of yours are the ones I'll never get to play. You probably know which ones I'm referencing, like Chain World and --

Oh, right. A Game for Someone.

I would just be interested to hear you talk about -- because I feel like people forget this, that the real world can be a component of a digital artifact. I mean, do you feel like people get tunnel vision and it doesn't really occur to them as something they can draw inspiration from? Or, why does that inspire you?

Yeah, well, I think we have this idea of this sort of artwork as this very self-contained thing. If we look at the artworks that we know about from other established mediums that have been successful in terms of artistic endeavor, they're all single-player experiences. [Laughs.] It's like, you go and you look at the painting or you go and you watch the movie or you put on the headphones and listen to the music or you go and sit in the concert and listen to the music. Right?

Right.

Or you go and look at the sculpture. You go and walk around in the building. And so -- and for a lot of them, there is some take-home version of it. Like, you go and buy this Blu-Ray edition of this movie and you bring it home in this little box and the entire work is in the box, right? Or, the record album, you take this piece of vinyl and there it is, the entire album, and it's in this cardboard sleeve and that's it, right? Like, I could toss it to you! [Laughs.]

Yeah. It's real.

And you would have the whole thing, right? And so I think that that's the model that we're going forward with and that's why most of the things that we've talked about, even in this conversation in terms of artistically audacious things are single-player things, right? There's something kinda muddier, messier, less clear about multiplayer things because there's so many other ingredients that get thrown in. [Laughs.] While I've described these amazing, almost very real experiences with Rust and these other players, there have been just as many times when somebody in broken English is walking up saying, "Friend! Friend! Friend! Friend! Friend!" and then killing me. Right? [Laughs.]

[Laughs.]

So, it's this kinda crazy mixed bag. It's like the happenings of the '60s or something.

That's exactly what I was thinking about.

It's like, you never know who's gonna show up and what kinda crazy thing is gonna transpire. Sometimes it'll be amazing. It'll be, "Woah! What just happened? This was this amazing thing that just happened!" And other times it'll kinda just flounder. [Laughs.] So I think these very tidy, sort of self-contained single-player works are more controllable by the author. They more seem like the direct product of one person's vision and so on. Therefore, it's more easy to judge them on those terms than it is to judge some kind of, "How I felt playing in the League of Legends championship on national TV." [Laughs.] Like, what was that aesthetic experience like? Not that I've ever done that, but if I did, I'm sure it would be a pretty crazy aesthetic experience.

That was something I was gonna say, too. I know that's something I feel when I play your games, and it's rare. I don't know how often you feel this, but when you play games made by smaller teams, very often, it doesn't feel like you are connecting with the people who made them. I guess I don't know what the question is, but do you ever feel that? Are there ways you wished videogames in general were more honest?

Yeah. I guess there's still this tendency even among smaller teams and independent studios and whatever you wanna call them to -- I don't know, fluff up your thing with these tropes that seem very conservative or lazy. [Laughs.] Like, there's gonna be these characters that we make up and there's gonna be this concept art for these characters and they just feel very contrived and very reminiscent of other videogame characters that have come before or other sort of comic book or maybe storybook characters or something. There's this distance that's placed between us and the people. What you're saying is there's this distance that's placed between us and the people that created this work because they put up this barrier with these tropes, essentially, I guess.

You feel that, too, though? That's not just me?

Yeah. I mean, I do. I don't know if -- [Laughs.] We take Jonathan Blow as an example, right?

Sure.

We look at Braid. Braid does not -- aside from the game design tropes that are present like, "Ooh, this level looks like Donkey Kong or this level reminds me of something from Mario. The way these goombas move or these cannons or something." In terms of the other stuff, like the character of Tim? [Laughs.] Those aren't tropes. It's like, there's this little guy -- Mario for the future in a business suit with his hair dyed orange. [Laughs.] It's not a character or an archetype that we recognize. It's not a "pick one crayon out of the box and use it" kind of way of -- and even the way the goombas look or the way the little pink rabbits and the other elements in the game, this is coming from a pretty unique point of view. Even though I know Jonathan personally, do I feel like he's really coming through this thing in a personal way? Not necessarily, but it's still a very unique point of view that clearly came out of his head, right? If you look at The Witness, The Witness is obviously very lush and beautifully kind of crafted garden-island. But at the same time it's a very cold --

I was going to say, it's almost sterile.

Yeah, it's a very sterile-feeling place.

Yeah.

There's no signs of life. Nothing else moves except mechanical things on the island. There's no little bunny rabbits hiding in the corners jumping around or anything. [Laughs.] Everything's very still. It's frozen in time almost. Yet it's very unique. No one's gonna play that game and be like, "Yeah, I've played tons of things that are just like this." It's really odd. Even the fact that you're dealing with these panels is a really odd design choice and really like, "Woah. There's gonna be hundreds of these?"

And your reward for doing the work is doing more work, immediately.

[Laughs.] Yeah. And I think both Braid and that game, because they're so unique and so strange, I think they do feel like things -- I know Jonathan personally and I feel like they are things that came out of him and could have only have come out of him and represent his point of view and represent who he is in some ways even though it's not some character in there that represents his mother or something.

So, yeah, I think that part of the way forward in terms of being able to connect better with these creators and so on is to let them kind of reach into their own strange directions and not be afraid to. You can't play The Beginner's Guide and not feel like it came out of Davey. [Laughs.] He's screaming at you during part of the game. [Laughs.] It's like, he literally is screaming at you. He's there. He's in there.

You mentioned that there's too much tribalism in games, when we were emailing. What sort of work do you think deserves more celebration?

[Laughs.] Good work. Good work.

Well, but --

No, but I think that's something that is kind of being lost in all this tribalism stuff, right? It's like, if we're trying to look out and look for somebody either who we think is marginalized just as doing the right thing or -- some of it feels like this noble quest to help find people who are marginalized and lift their work into attention where it's not getting the attention that it should get because it's interesting.

Yeah.

Like, "Ooh, here's this interesting work from this interesting point of view and we've never seen a game like this before and this person is worth talking about and their work is worth looking at. Let's seek these people out and find out where they're hiding or where they're being ignored."

But some of the tribalism feels like, "Let me seek you, uplift and promote and seek out only work of people who are like me or in my tribe."

I'm more interested in the good work from wherever it's coming from and judging the work on its own merits. I guess a lot of people think that's code, right?

No. It literally just means --

It's code for only paying attention to games made by white males, right? Or something.

But all the games that we've talked about in this conversation, sadly, maybe, were made by white males. Every game we've mentioned has been made by white males. [Laughs.] So it's like, that's an elephant in the living room and I don't know. There's all these things that come in -- all these difficulties and obstacles that may cause that and all sorts of cultural biases that may cause that.

Yeah.

But on the ground, if we're talking about these really big kind of touchstone things, it's like -- people are talking Edith Finch and Ian Bogost's article was knocking it, "And here we have a game that's actually about a female character." Some white male professor can't knock this game! [Laughs.] But it's a game that's made by -- some of the primary creators on it were white men.

They were. Yes they are.

And I'm not allowed to, of course -- God, I'm going to get roasted if you print any of this stuff. I'm not allowed to talk about it because I'm a white man, right? But this is not a problem unique to games. If you look at American Film Institute's list of top 100 directors of all time, there's one woman on the list: Sofia Coppola, who happens to be the daughter of another white male film director. [Laughs.]

And, so, you know, videogames, I guess, have even more obstacles. Because not only do you have to have this creative drive and be able to get through all the challenges and whatever that are standing in your way to actually create something, which is true of any kind of creative endeavor -- film as well -- you also have to kind of master this whole engineering thing, which historically has been a male-dominated -- when I was studying computer science in school, in engineering classes, there was a hundred guys and 10 girls or something. So, you know, that -- you've got all these historically male-dominated things or -- I don't know what the reason is. Maybe it isn't for historical reasons. We don't really know. But all these factors conspire and make videogames even worse. Brenda Hathaway had this famous slide she used to put up where she'd be like, "Here's a shot at a GDC show floor with this crowd of thousands of people walking up the escalators." And then she'd put two little red circles on the screen: "These are the women in this picture." She was making a point that if you're going to be a woman in games, get ready to be the only one in the room. Like, that is what it's like. She's been doing it for 30 years. She's been the only woman in the room in most places that she was at throughout her career.

I just feel like in our quest to solve this problem, which is this problem that we feel like it is a problem. When we walk around at GDC -- and I don't know that when Brenda was talking about it, maybe she was more just talking about it as, "This is the experience that I had as a woman in this industry.” I don't think she was necessarily saying, "This is a problem! We need to go out of our way to highlight women that are doing good work." I think she was saying, "Get ready!" I think, in part, the next generation is coming up and it has more gender diversity in it and in her talk she was addressing these young women who are thinking about a career in games and telling them what they had to get ready for.

And so I think that -- I don't know. I just feel like there's a lot of bluster about this issue and there's not really any progress being made. You can't just seek out somebody just because of some trait completely unassociated with the quality of their work and say, "Well, this work is good!" Well, but if you actually play the work and it's not good, that's kind of a problem, right? So, it's like, I think -- and as these tides rise and swell over time, I think that the quality of the work is this thing that remains. And so, you're not really solving the problem and it kinda just -- people are just gonna move on if the quality of the work isn't there. They're not gonna keep -- a lot of these celebrities that became celebrities in our world that were celebrities for these diversity reasons have kinda ebbed and flowed. They kinda stopped making games after their one game that got them the attention or whatever. I don't know.

I suppose it's exacerbated by something else you mentioned. You told me you feel there's something fundamental standing in the way of games that were seeing wide mainstream adoption. I think the way you phrased it was, "There's no barrier that will eventually someday be broken down." Can you tell me a little about that? And also, what was your process for realizing that? Because that's something I think about daily.

Right, right. Well, I think that ties into the thing we just talked about.

Right.

People think the reason that -- one of these barriers is lack of diversity in the points of view of the people that are making the games. In that, when the outside world looks at videogames, they see these big brutish space marines or whatever that is clearly a white engineering male point of view. And that outside of games, we have much more content diversity in terms of all these different movie genres and things that are aimed at different movie audiences.

That people from outside of games look and see this very stunted medium for a lack of diversity and that the diversity quest is gonna save us, right? Just like before the diversity quest, maybe there was this quest to improve the artistic merits of the things that we're making or improve the content quality of whatever, and that was going to somehow save us.

That's something I was going to ask you, yeah.

By "save us," I mean get us the red carpet from the flashbulbs and the primetime television award show. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.] Yeah.

I think that none of these things are going to save us and that isn't necessarily an apocalyptic kind of proclamation. I mean, what's going to save the fine art world? It's a very niche thing that's mostly ignored. I mean, there's no award show on primetime television. There's no red carpet -- I mean, they have their own little red carpet, but they're pathetic compared to the Oscars.

Right.

Yet, there's still this viable subculture and world. There's things that rise and fall. Works of importance. Historical records. All those kinds of things. Just like there is in the world of fly fishing or there is in the world of skateboarding. [Laughs.] Or there is in the world of any activity that a subset of the population is interested in. Or the world of poker. Or whatever it is, has a world where there's experts and critics and people can do deep and people can spend their lifetime working on it and thinking about it and arguing about it and whatever. That's kind of all it needs to be, right?

So, for videogames, I think this primary thing that's standing in their way is the fundamental difficulty of consuming them. Because unlike other leisure things that fit into our leisure time like books which you can read on the beach or movies you can watch on the weekend with your friends or music you can listen to while you're driving or even going to an art museum where you wander around with your friends on a Saturday afternoon and it's kind of like a social event, it's something you can do in your off time to relax to unwind. To just sit back and experience something. Videogames demand that you try and that you put effort into them. Even the walking simulators. Even the games that are not games. Even the games that have excised challenge from their design palettes still require your input, require you to at least try to walk around, at least make some decisions about what you're going to do next, at least keep pushing the forward button. [Laughs.] Right?

Yeah.

And that amount of effort that's demanded of the player. Or, for the better games, the games that are actually compelling and are worth playing, that really will make -- I feel like if you actually took someone from outside of games and said, "No, no, no! Games are worth your time!" And then you set them down with this walking simulator, they're going to say, because they're not aware of the history of game design and the sort of punk move that the walking simulator is, they're gonna be like, "What's the point of this? What's the point? It doesn't matter where I go or what I do? I just walk and listen to this?"

[Laughs.]

We as game designers go, "Whoo! That's an interesting move." [Laughs.]

Yeah.

But it's not like that suddenly solves the problem. And, "Oh, this game's not difficult, so everybody can play it. Even Roger Ebert might be able to play this." Because he would play and be like, "This is the worst thing. Why am I even doing this?”

They understand that if they're being asked to do something, what they're doing has to have consequence. And so, completely removing the difficulty doesn't solve the problem. So clearly, there still needs to be difficulty or else what you're doing doesn't have consequence, and then you've got a work that's fundamentally difficult to consume and therefore doesn't fit into most people's mainstream ideas of a leisure time entertainment relaxation.

That's exactly what I was going to say. No matter how hard or easy these games become, they're still a leisure activity which usually invites skepticism as far as taking them seriously or digging deeper. You said games get no respect culturally, which I have my experiences with as a journalist trying to cross-pollinate more coverage that isn't strictly about products. I recently had the experience -- I was up for a journalism fellowship from this project. [Laughs.]

I sat down at this big foreboding table. I was interviewing by 12 or 13 other big-deal journalists gatekeepers of that world. From where they sit -- I mean, up top, they said, "We know nothing at all about videogames." I said, "Yeah, that's fine. I expected that." But from where they sit, videogames are a single-story space in that Gamergate. They said, "Oh, Gamergate has been written about a lot. Isn't that enough?" Or, also, gamification.

Yeah. [Laughs].

I'm serious. Beyond that, they just I guess don't see the point of writing about videogames. I mean, I always will point to labor issues in the gaming industry as there a reason to be more scrutiny or more awareness. I'll try to come down on the humanitarian side. But I don't know what your experiences have been with reaching this conclusion, that videogames being like Rodney Dangerfield.

[Laughs.]

Are there things you would like to see more coverage of? Or do you not even expect that anymore?

Well, okay, so -- yeah, I guess there still remains the issue that even if you got someone through the challenge barriers. One of these outsider people, one of these journalist gatekeepers that you're talking about. Even if you got them through one of these barriers, what games would you show them?

And not be somewhat -- where there'd be no moments where you're cringing a little bit.

Or embarrassed.

Yeah. "I think you should look at this, but actually, now that I see you playing it I'm like, 'Oh God, I shouldn't have showed them this one.'"

Yeah.

And so, that list is a very, very, very short list if it has any games on it at all. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.]

Even if I start to think, "Well, would I have shown them The Stanley Parable? Maybe. I don't know. Ooh, even for something like that..." You know? I definitely wouldn't have shown them The Beginner's Guide. They wouldn't even understand. There's things that -- it's like someone who's never read a novel before. Would I hand them Pale Fire or Lolita? No. Probably not. [Laughs.]

Right.

But that's an example where, with The Beginner's Guide, I feel like we're able to acknowledge that we have a niche world and it's okay for us to go really deep for people who are in this world. The Beginner's Guide is not a game that's gonna appeal to people who don't play games. But it is a really deep, sophisticated work with complexities and things you could argue about and things you could write papers about if you wanted to and try to figure out what he's really trying to say and all that kinda stuff. All the hallmarks of a great novel or something are in there. Of course, but, like Ulysses or some other crazy novels that are really meant for novel aficionados, it's really only for people who are deep into games. [Laughs.] Maybe it's even only for game designers.

[Laughs.] And so, yeah, I guess there's kinda these two different problems.

One is that even if you convince these mainstream people that they should at least acknowledge the world of games, when they peep in at it, they see the same stuff they've always seen. [Laughs.] Which is this big, bombastic male-power fantasies and very childish, very simplistic stories. Even the things that aren't male-power fantasies are, like, childrens' storybooks in terms of their complexity of content and so on or --

-- or YA at best, which is not a knock against either.

[Laughs.]

It's just where it's at.

Yeah. And so, you know, even if they peep in, that's what they're gonna see on the surface level. So, if you improve that, at least they see -- like, if they peep in at the world at poker. Because, like, think about it. The mainstream journalism world periodically does a story about poker. And they peep in at poker and they're like, "Oh my God! Look at this world, it's amazing. This is crazy what these people are doing in here." They're not looking and being like, "Eh, this looks kinda dumb." [Laughs.]

They're like, "Look at that photograph of a table covered with millions of dollars and twenties." Nobody can look at that stack of money and not be like, "Oh, wow, there's something interesting going on here," at least. [Laughs.] When you look at the spatial expressions or you interview Annie Duke about what it was like to play against her brother in a championship tournament it's like, "Okay, yes. Mainstream is not gonna cover poker every week in a weekly column." I guess, yes, poker is on ESPN or whatever, but it's not on primetime television. It's this thing that's always gonna be somewhat niche. People who really understand it and care about it are really deep into it and there's books about it and whole magazines about it and whole websites and whole conventions about it. But the mainstream, at least when they peep in, they're like, "There's something pretty amazing going on in the poker world. I don't know how to play poker and most of my readers don't either, but they're gonna wanna hear about this. When we write about it, it's gonna sound pretty cool." [Laughs.]

You know? And so I guess we can get to the point where, yes, we're always niche. But when you look in at it from the outside, it at least looks like something amazing is going on there.

[Laughs.]

And so, I don't think we're there yet because everything is just so on the nose. Everything is so -- for the most part, except for a few rare exceptions. So there's that issue.

Then, the other issue is are we going deep enough for us to excel and thrive and develop as this niche culture? I don't think we're doing that, either. It's like we're stuck in the middle of this, "Ooh, we're trying to make a game that's gonna appeal to the mainstream, so we dumb it all down and make it real simple and remove all the difficulty and sand off all these details that would be of interest to aficionados, and at the same time not really getting our content in order so that if someone looks in at it it doesn't look embarrassing." [Laughs.] So, I think we're kinda juggling these two things and to our detriment. At my point at my career -- for many years I quested for, I wouldn't say, mainstream recognition or getting respect, but quested for making games -- like, I have all these other people in my life who don't play games. Most people in my life don't play games. Most of them are really, really interested in movies, television, music, theater, art, fine art. All different sorts of things. I can go to them and talk to them about the latest, most audacious thing that's happening in film or whatever and they're interested in talking about it or if they haven't heard of the film, they'll watch it with me and discuss it with me and argue about it with me.

Yeah.

These people are not at all -- I really had the gumption to say, "You really need to play this game." They're like, "Oh, I do I have to?" [Laughs.]

[Laughs.]

"Just do it for me. Just do it for me. Please please." But I don't even have that gumption anymore, but over many -- for the early part of my career, I was trying to make games that those people would somehow get something out of. It's like we're stuck in the middle of this, "Ooh, we're trying to make a game that's gonna appeal to the mainstream, so we dumb it all down and make it real simple and remove all the difficulty and sand off all these details that would be of interest to aficionados, and at the same time not really getting our content in order so that if someone looks in at it it doesn't look embarrassing." [Laughs.] So, I think we're kinda juggling these two things and to our detriment. At my point at my career -- for many years I quested for, I wouldn't say, mainstream recognition or getting respect, but quested for making games -- like, I have all these other people in my life who don't play games. Most people in my life don't play games. Most of them are really, really interested in movies, television, music, theater, art, fine art. All different sorts of things. I can go to them and talk to them about the latest, most audacious thing that's happening in film or whatever and they're interested in talking about it or if they haven't heard of the film, they'll watch it with me and discuss it with me and argue about it with me.

Yeah.

These people are not at all -- I really had the gumption to say, "You really need to play this game." They're like, "Oh, I do I have to?" [Laughs.]

[Laughs.]

"Just do it for me. Just do it for me. Please please." But I don't even have that gumption anymore, but over many -- for the early part of my career, I was trying to make games that those people would somehow get something out of.

And my wife was this primary test subject for a lot of my early game design sketches. She would be player No. 1 and quietly, if she couldn't figure it out and couldn't play it, then there's something wrong with the way it was designed. So, I was really trying to figure out -- one example is a game I made for The Escapist. It's called Idealism. So, it's a little game sketch made in GameMaker in one week. And it's a shooter where you aim with the mouse and you move around with WASD, and there's enemies coming at you and bullets coming at you and you're aiming and dodging the bullets while shooting at the same time. And those types of games, essentially two-stick shooters or mouse-keyboard shooters are usually really hard. Anybody who doesn't have game skills is gonna struggle and feel frustrated and stop. And I was like, "I wanna make a game that has those elements in it but that my wife can actually play right off the bat without any particular training or effort or frustration on her part.”

And so, the solution I came up with is whenever you're not moving, time freezes. [Laughs.] And only when you fire a bullet or when you move, the enemies all start moving as well. It's kinda like Matrix bullet time or something.

Right. Or Superhot.

And sure enough, she could play this. That was sort of one of my litmus tests: All these games I'm making, she has to be able to play. I'm not gonna make something that has reflex difficulty in it that's gonna be beyond her abilities as a strident non-gamer. [Laughs.] But I don't know. I feel like I haven't been doing that. She hasn't really played Inside a Star-Filled Sky, The Castle Doctrine, Sleep is Death, Cordial Minuet, One Hour One Life -- you know, these things that I'm working on more recently. And I'm not even worried about that. I'm not even going to these relatives and different people in my life and saying, "Please try this game. See what you think of it." It doesn't matter anymore because I've realized that quest is never going to be achieved. [Laughs.]

Maybe not in our lifetimes, yeah.

Well, yeah. So, trying to continue to make games for those people -- what for? They're not playing them anyway. [Laughs.]

That's what I was wondering about. From a media perspective, reflective of the thing you're talking about -- the more mainstream outlets, it seems like it's perpetually 101 introductory stuff. It's almost always like a "Minecraft exists" type of article. And then on the more enthusiast sites, there are so many more assumptions being made about the people reading it. There's almost nothing in between. I mean, is it weird that videogames get as much attention as they do, then? [Laughs.]

[Sighs.]

You know what I mean? I just mean in general. I mean, you said videogames are bigger than fountain pens but they're smaller than poker. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.] Right.

To follow your framing, which I would absolutely agree with, maybe it's a little odd, then, that they get as much attention as they do across the board, then, is what I'm saying.

Yeah. I mean, the championship for poker is broadcast to most people's homes on television or at least in past years it has been on some cable channel.

Sure.

So that kind of, at least for the time being -- and maybe we're getting to that point with League of Legends or something. [Laughs.] But for the time being, that sort of transcends the importance of videogames. Of course, there's absolutely nothing about fountain pens on any cable channel that I've ever seen. [Laughs.] Although, there's a completely thriving subculture and there's dozens of blogs and all sorts of online stores and forums.

I'm sure there's a Reddit or something.

Yeah. There's definitely a Reddit about pens and some subreddits. And so, yeah, while videogames have gotten a great deal of attention -- the fact that you're talking to me is sort of a product of that trend, right? Here's this guy, Jason Rohrer, he made this little game Passage and a lot of people liked it and mainstream journalism at the time was really gung-ho about talking about games or maybe it was just the young generation of new reporters who had weaseled their way into these media rooms at these outlets were bound and determined to finally bring their favorite hobby to light. I don't know. [Laughs.]

Yeah.

But, anyway, for whatever reason there was all this coverage and there was interest -- there was something going on in games. There's this whole indie scene and games are still making a lot of money and they always have and maybe something cool is happening here. I don't know exactly why but suddenly I'm with this six-page spread in Esquire, right? [Laughs.] You're like, "Why would Esquire want to devote six pages and all these photographs and all this time, effort, and money to some dude making videogames?" But that wasn't that unusual at the time. There were profiles of videogame makers in The New Yorker. Will Wright and Cliff Bleszinski. Tom Bissell was writing regularly for mainstream outlets about videogames. And so -- there was Newsweek. Some magazines seemed to have weekly things about, like, little game reviews or --

Yeah, what was the thing we just mentioned before we started about seven years ago?

Oh, I don't know how to pronounce the guy's name. N'Gai Croal?

Yeah. N'Gai Croal. That's right.

[Laughs.] But anyway, I think he was brought on at Newsweek and was, like, maybe writing about videogames every week?

Yeah. Who, like many of the other names you mentioned have switched over into consulting on making games or making games like Tom Bissell.

Right. Right. So -- [Sighs.] The question about why videogames have gotten the attention? I think in part because it's hard to ignore the money.

It's roughly 10 times the size of the NFL, if you include mobile and all the other ancillary markets.

Yeah, or, people compare how much money Call of Duty has made to how much money Avatar made or whatever. But --

But you had said in our emails that those numbers don't necessarily reflect audience size but the fact that they're expensive to buy.

[Laughs.] Yeah. Yeah. It's, like, $60 to buy Call of Duty and it's $10 to go see Avatar.

It might be, like, $100 with all the extra DLC and stuff.

Well, not only that but -- well, yeah. It's not counting that.

So, $100 a pop versus $12 a pop.

Yeah. And there's some famous tale about when Gone with the Wind came out in England, enough tickets were sold for everyone in the country to see it twice. [Laughs.]

You know, so, when we look at the history of the box-office take of movies, even that is a little misleading because the ticket prices have changed over time. And so, cultural penetration and stuff -- so, yeah, I think most of what -- [Sighs.] I don't know. There's also a tech story. Like, people look at videogames. There is a tech aspect to them that when people peep in beyond the cover of the boxes and the titles and the graphics that are shown on the boxes, if they actually peep in on what's happening on the screen, there's some pretty amazing stuff happening on the screen. Seeing, essentially, something with more visual fidelity than a Pixar movie kind of happening in real time where you can spin the camera around and move around inside of it at your will, there is a gee-whiz element to it. I mean, there has been tons of coverage of Oculus Rift for a similar reason. People are not looking into Oculus Rift and writing about it like crazy in mainstream media because they see any compelling content there. It's just because of a gee-whiz tech --

The novelty.

Yeah. This is kind of real now. This actually exists. You can step into a virtual world. I don't know. I'm wondering how if we actually compare volume how mainstream coverage of pornography and the porn industry --

Yeah.

It's not like there's no coverage. I mean, they do cover -- I don't know. They do sometimes get interviews, almost like as a gag or something or as a curiosity kind of piece.

Yeah.

Talking about what's going on at the AVN Awards or whatever as a curiosity piece. So, and, you know, if you actually go back in time to the '70s, I think Roger Ebert did review porn movies. [Laughs.]

Didn't he famously say porn will never be art?

Maybe he did.

I'm kidding.

[Laughs.]

I don't think he did. But he co-wrote that movie with Russ Meyer, so that doesn't surprise me.

Oh, yeah, I think that's true. I think he may have even mentions that in his review. But he either reviews behind Behind the Green Door or Deep Throat or The Devil in Miss Jones or something. One of those --

Yeah.

Back in those days, those movies were coming to mainstream theaters. [Laughs.]

Well, you're saying they merited inclusion despite the perceived social desirability aspects, which videogames also suffered from early on.

[Sighs.] Yeah. I mean --

Which, you laugh but --

Yeah, but if we compare the last 10 years and the fleeting interest in the mainstream of videogames to the way pornography was being treated in the 1970's where it's like this up and coming thing. These young hip kids were doing the stuff. They were supposedly breaking ground and pushing boundaries and doing kind of cool, innovative stuff. But if you actually peeped in at it, it was garbage. [Laughs.] It was garbage.

I mean, like, none of those movies stand -- I mean, like, Behind the Green Door or whatever is supposed to be this edgy, art, avant garde thing? But it's just -- I mean, I've not actually seen that one in particular. But some of the older ones that I have seen are just ridiculous. [Laughs.] They're really poor quality compared to any of the mainstream films that were coming out at the time.

Right.

Exhibiting very shallow understanding of filmmaking concepts and capabilities. It's like some guy got his hands on a cheap camera and he thought he could be a filmmaker, basically.

Why not? Well, that's interesting because I think that overlaps with another chunk of questions that I had for you. I completely forgot about that, how people in pornography -- why is there this obsession in videogames, or there has been, with videogames being art. I forgot that pornography --

[Laughs.]

-- also had that same aim. [Laughs.] I mean, I understand it's a pursuit for some sort of legitimacy. But to me it always seemed kind of odd because even in the art world, people can't agree on what is art. [Laughs.]

Right.

So, what is the implied goal?

[Laughs.]

What are we really trying to achieve?

[Sighs.] Yeah. Obviously the definition of art is a thorny topic. I don't really want to --

No, I'm not interested in that.

I don't think that's really that important. But I think people know what they mean when they say that. When we say that pornography is not art or that these people making it are not artists, we know what we mean and don't really need to go into definitions or say, "Well, why not? Isn't everything art?" You know? That kinda stuff. You know, the sort of fundamental long-term merit of what they're doing versus the more utilitarian purpose of the thing. Where, if you look at a slot machine as a very core utilitarian purpose, which is to keep you entertained while it takes money from you. And so, we can say, "Well, is it art, though? Is a slot machine art?"

We'll argue in the devil's advocate, "Of course it is! It's a human creation!" You know, all the reasons that it could be seen as art. But that doesn't change its primary purpose, its reason for existence, the motivation of the creator, or any of those things. And so, if we look at pornography as having a very specific motivation and a very utilitarian purpose, then it doesn't align itself with this sort of more esoteric high-minded non-utilitarian purposes that we think of as an artist being driven to make a work of art for.

And so, and for videogames the same thing. Especially if we go back to the arcade machines, I mean, very much so, where it's like this game is designed to get you hooked and take quarters from you. And if it doesn't do that, it fails. It's a failed product. It's not, "Ooh! What is this game trying to say?"

Yeah.

It's not a good game and it's taken out of the arcade. It's gonna be removed.

Yeah. Yeah.

And so, at the same time, the people who invest their lives in making these things come to some point where they start to think about their greater purpose in the world and so on. I think they sort of are inspired by the idea of art and being an artist and this sort of higher purpose to what you're doing. And so, for the pornographers, as well, I think that they are -- [Laughs.]

[Laughs.]

We can giggle about it but --

No, it just comes up a lot. It comes up more than you might expect or maybe it wouldn't surprise you, just how often pornography gets compared to videogames in these interviews. They have a shared PR problem --

Yeah, I gave an entire talk about this about six years ago.

Yeah.

It was called "Game and Other Four-Letter Words," and the two other four-letter words I was implying -- I never used the two words in the talk -- were "porn" and "drug." Right?

Right.

And the similarities between the way these things are consumed, the way they're thought about culturally, the way that kinds of sort of prurient interest aspects of them and the sort of specialty stores you need to go to to get them. Even the fact that you often stay up late at night alone with them. [Laughs.]

Right.

Which is true, I'm assuming, for drugs and also for pornography, right?

I'm assuming. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.] I'm just saying, I've never stayed up way too late doing drugs.

[Laughs.] Yes, you stay up until a respectable hour doing drugs.

[Laughs.] You know, where you're just completely strung out and then -- I'm assuming that that happens. I've definitely stayed up way too late playing videogames.

Yeah.

Where it's, like, embarrassing.

Well, it's irresponsible and embarrassing.

[Laughs.] Yeah.

It impedes your other basic responsibilities.

Yeah, where you go to bed with your tail between your legs and your spouse is like, "What time is it?" And you're like, "It's late."

"Just go to sleep."

"You don't want to know.”

I don't know if we mentioned here or if you mentioned up top, but as someone who has had their videogames exhibited in museums -- I mean, this is sort of what rekindled our conversations was I had just interviewed Erica Gangsei at SFMOMA last week. I've talked to several museums that have included videogames. Do these entities, do they act like they're St. Peter? Like they're going to anoint you with legitimacy? In your dealings with them, is this stuff even acknowledged, this sort of friction?

[Laughs.]

Or is it more like an e-vite where they're just like, "Hey, come on in."

Oh --

I mean, it doesn't have to be that binary.

Yeah, yeah. That world is messy in its own right. [Laughs.]

Yes it is.

So, you've got the fine-art world, which is continuing to function as far as I can tell. I mean, when I go to New York City and go to Chelsea galleries, I mean, they're still there. They're still functioning. Their doors are not boarded up. They're still selling very expensive pieces to collectors and there's still Christie's and Sotheby's having these crazy auctions for tens of millions of dollars for obscure or collectible or less obscure pieces of art. Some of the pieces that go for crazy amounts of money are pieces that the public, if they were shown a photograph of, wouldn't even recognize. And so, clearly this is totally niche but it's still, as far as I can tell, self-sustaining and relatively vibrant because there's enough very wealthy people collecting art to make it keep going. Right? That's all you need in that case.

And, in the museum world, on the other hand, is, from what I can tell speaking to the curators that I've worked with and so on, is in this somewhat panicked state of, "We're not getting people coming." [Laughs.]

I mean, I feel like an asshole because I'll ask people in places like that why in the age of the listicle why are museums still relevant to people. Not in an accusatory way, but just in a -- I do think that they are receding for a lot of, at least, younger people. Why is that a thing they need to go and experience?

Right. So, I think the sad truth about why a lot of these places are making exhibits of videogames is trying to get younger people in the doors.

Like a transactional kind of --

Yeah. Like, you know, "Young people are interested in videogames. Let's do something about videogames! What are we gonna do? Oh, I don't know, well, we have to do something with some artistic merit. Huh." And then they look around and, like, see some indie games that are a little bit more artistically interesting or see some guy like me who's like, "Well, this guy is at least grappling with some of the stuff that some of our artists might normally grapple with."

[Laughs.]

"Why don't we do something about this guy? Then maybe we'll get some kids coming into the museum!"

I've seen the directors of these places sometimes being like, "Oh, this is so great! We had three kids in here yesterday!" [Laughs.] And then you have the opening where the patrons of the museum come and it's all a bunch of white hair and they're like, "Well, we don't play videogames but we find them very fascinating. I'm so glad to meet you." That kind of thing. [Laughs.]

Yeah.

So, I think that, yeah, it's partially just this desperate gasp. [Laughs.]

I mean, like I said, I've interviewed several of these places and I don't know that I've really broadcast what my feelings are about it. But that does seem to be what telegraphs. Yeah.

I don't know. It's also just, like, while these are clearly culturally relevant things and we should be paying attention to what's going on and figuring out what's interesting and happening out in here -- but, yet again, that's kind of strange because all the things that they're showing for the most part are commercial work when they're showing videogames.

Correct.

And so that's a very odd place for them to be going, where it's like, "You can come in here into this museum and play this thing and then you can go home and buy it for $12.95."

You can buy it at the gift shop. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.] You get exactly the same thing. It's not a print. [Laughs.]

Right.

And so, and maybe a couple museums have film festivals or something, but that's kind of the equivalent of what it is. Or "TV night" or -- [Laughs.]

Yeah. Yeah yeah.

Or a thing where they're showing a Tom Clancy retrospective, where it's all these Tom Clancy novels on display and ephemera from his life and whatever. They don't need to be in there. There's no reason to put Tom Clancy novels in there. They are their own thing. Or maybe Tom Clancy's too pop, right? Like a [Vladimir] Nabokov retrospective, right? [Laughs.] The guy's been dead -- Nabokov's been dead for, like, almost 40 years. Isn't it about time we had a museum retrospective of his life and work? But -- well, he's a novelist, you can just go read the book. You don't need to come to the museum to see it.

So, but you're not saying these museums treat you like they're christening you or they're giving you legitimacy they didn't have before?

Yeah, no, I didn't really feel that. I didn't feel like they were saying, "Aren't you lucky to be recognized in this way?" Yeah.

I'm not implying that they do, it's just that -- when I reached out to you a few weeks ago with some questions about MOMA, I was thinking about how people who are not on either side of our aisle, people who are consumers or just regular folks who don't make games or who don't write about them, I think they see the six-page spread in Esquire or a piece in The New York Times or your being on NPR or being in MOMA and think -- I don't know. I guess I'm curious what type of assumptions do you find people make about you because of your time occupying those channels?

[Laughs.]

Like, do people draw conclusions because --

Well, so, okay. There's two different camps in terms of people's reactions to those kinds of things.

Yeah.

The first is, of course, the target audience for all these outlets is the mainstream. Just everyday ordinary people who probably don't play videogames. If you pick any average ordinary adult person out in a crowd of people, yes, I know everybody plays videogames because they all play Candy Crush or whatever.

Candy Crush. Yeah.

[Laughs.] But they don't play any of the things that we're talking about.

Yeah.

And if you ask them if they play videogames, they instantly say, "No."

Correct.

And they say, "Really? You don't play any videogames?"

"Oh, yes, well I do have Angry Birds on my phone and I play it when I'm waiting in line or something."

So, they don't identify as gamers. They don't think of themselves as gamers. As far as they're concerned, they don't play games, and then until they're reminded that they actually do, then they acknowledge that they do but kind of begrudgingly. The idea that the entire world is filled with gamers, everyone is playing games, this is a huge phenomenon -- [Laughs.] This is kind of a --

"We win!"

[Laughs.] Yeah, not really.

Yeah.

My cab driver has Angry Birds on his phone. He does not play -- [Laughs.] He has never even heard of Far Cry 2. [Laughs.] Never even heard of it! He doesn't know what it is.

[Laughs.] Yeah.

Anyway. So, those people, very often their only real brush with videogames aside from Angry Birds on their phone is: "Oh my God! I think I recognize you! I think I read about you in that in-flight magazine!" Or: "You know what? I've seen this thing on Netflix, Indie Game: The Movie. That was something about videogames. I watched it!”

Like, Indie Game: The Movie is actually the biggest kind of thrust culturally that videogames have ever had because pretty much whenever I mention to anybody that I make games, they mention, "I saw this -- oh, you make independent videogames? Yeah, I saw this something on Netflix about that."

I'm like, "Indie Game: The Movie?"

They're like, "Yup!"

I'm like, "I know those guys."

"Really?”

Of course I know those guys! I should know them, right? As far as they're concerned, it's not even surprising that I know those guys because --

Yeah, because there's gotta be like, what, 10 people who make games, right?

[Laughs.] Right.

[Laughs.]

It's funny. If I mention that I know the guys in Indie Game: The Movie, that's far more impressive to people in the game industry. [Laughs.]

This is true.

Because they're like, "Really! You talk to Phil Fish?"

So, anyway, "Oh, I heard you about on NPR," or, "Oh, I read about this show," or whatever, right? I mean, that kind of stuff dramatically -- that's the thing that they're aware of in terms of your work or whatever.

Yeah.

That mainstream coverage does reach them. They do read it, right? But none of them are actually pushed after exposure to that coverage to actually go and play any of the games, right? To the point where I could sit there and have a nationwide 10-minute story run about me on NPR today on To The Best of Our Knowledge or whatever. I know that nationwide this ran today, probably a million people heard it or something? [Laughs.]

Sure.

And go to my website and look at my little web counter and see zero upticks over the normal baseline noise level of traffic.

Yeah. But you said they definitely don't buy them, also.

Well, but they're not even visiting the website. Of course they're not gonna buy them. Yeah, this is not a sales uptick. This is a visitors uptick.

That's what I'm saying, yeah.

Yeah. And during that whole museum show thing with the Wellesley Museum --

Last year?

Yeah, last year there were, like, you know, maybe 10 articles in Art News and Boston Globe and this big media outlet and that big media outlet -- New Yorker, whatever. Anytime one of those came out or during the entire museum show in general, I looked at the month that the show ran and the month that it opened and whatever and sales numbers, visitor numbers, the graphs are just flat, right?

"Oh, there's a bump in the graph! What's that from?" Oh, that's because somebody in some videogaming forum mentioned one of my games in passing. [Laughs.]

And there's a big spike in sales that day. But the fact that I have a museum show, the fact that the New Yorker just wrote about me is flat. [Laughs.] That makes a flat graph.

Right.

Much bigger was this obscure little forum post. [Laughs.] So, that's that side of it.

The other side of it, of course, is how does the game industry or other independent game designers or whatever react to this kind of mainstream coverage. Obviously, it could almost should go without saying that that is kind of negative. It's like -- my reputation precedes me, all sorts of tall tales exist about me.

Your reputation? What is your reputation?

Well, for people -- I'm this guy who lives in a cabin with no electricity and never washes his hair. [Laughs.]

That's not my perception of you.

No, but there's these legends circulating. "He grows all his own food and he never wears shoes. His kids are naked all the time."

Yeah.

So, anyway, that's the sort of larger than life thing, which I'm assuming is true for the guys who were in Indie Game: The Movie in the main version of it. That once that happens to you and -- like, look what it did to Phil Fish. I mean, I'm no where near what has happened to him, but anytime my name is brought up, all this kind of baggage from this coverage is kind of wheeled out. "Isn't it that hippie dude? Isn't it that guy who never washes? Oh, that guy is disgusting."

Whatever it is, I'm not really hurt by it. I think it's funny or whatever. But when I meet someone in person, it's mostly -- is it because of the games I made? Not really. It's not like, "Woah, that's Jason Rohrer!" It's more because of this coverage. And so, yeah, the coverage has kind of swamped everything else.

Hmm.

How many articles have these game people read about me? For whatever reason, I was in the right place at the right time and kind of got showered with all these different opportunities to be the centerpiece of some story.

Yeah.

And it was actually interesting -- it's as much, at least back when this was happening. So, the Esquire piece happened in 2008, which is nine years ago. The interest was as much in the games I was making and equal parts interest in this crazy kind of experimental lifestyle that we were living, which was kind of on the cusp of this whole green -- it almost pre-dates the green movement or whatever.

Right.

All concerned about global warming. I don't think An Inconvenient Truth had even come out or whatever. Or maybe it came out right around that time.

And so, you know, we had been doing that kind of stuff or experimenting with those kinds of minimal impact lifestyle or voluntary simplicity or trying to figure out how to maximize our family budget to reduce the amount of time we were working jobs that we didn't like. All these kind of life questions for quite a while and sort of had -- at the time there was a lot of interest in that. We actually, after the Esquire piece, we had calls from documentary crews and television shows and stuff that just wanted to come -- just about our lifestyle. Not about my games. Just, "Can we come in and follow you for a day with cameras just to see how you do thing? We're doing this piece about such and such for 20/20 or whatever about simplicity or whatever."

We actually turned some of those down because it felt too much like being in a fishbowl.

Yeah.

But most of the bigger kinda mainstream pieces around that time did definitely touch on those aspects of our lifestyle, did want a photograph of me on my weird bike, did want to see our laundry line in a photograph. [Laughs.] I think there's multiple public documents showing our laundry hanging on our line. [Laughs.] It's in Indie Game: The Movie Special Edition and I think it almost made it into the in-flight magazine. Like, some picture of us out by our laundry. [Laughs.]

"Oh my gosh! They have laundry on the line! These are like Amish people or something!"

So you're saying --

[Laughs.]

[Laughs.] But you're saying, as far as from the videogame side, that sort of exposure -- I mean, I guess you said it already. It hasn't really moved the needle. I'm trying to figure out what that means. Is it just another side of the same thing we've already discussed as far as this stuff isn't as mainstream as it thinks it is?

[Sighs.] Yeah. Yeah.

Which is not a new thought for me. It's just --

So, obviously, as a creative person who's trying to make a living from their creations, when opportunity comes for that kind of mainstream coverage, it's like, "Woah, we got a reporter from The New York Times on the line!" Right?

Yeah.

The business sense in your mind says, "Jump at that! Oh my gosh, yes! That's amazing that this is happening."

I felt that way in sort of a business sense or in a "keep myself afloat creatively" sense for a long time. Would jump at it and bend over backwards to facilitate all these different things happening. I think that in the ways that that actually panned out was all because of the reaction that the people in the game world had to that coverage more than any kind of mainstream broadening of my audience.

I think I've had similar experience, where this project was written about by USA Today and -- [Laughs.] I was asked similar questions to what I was asking you in our emails earlier this month, which is people being like, "What did that do for you?"

I think I wrote a very similar response to what you wrote me a few weeks ago, which was, "Well, not much.”

So, the people in games Twitter or in the games world will sometimes be reading USA Today and say, "Woah, there's an article about our favorite thing and there's this guy that's speaking," and that gets posted in Reddit or whatever and that is the place where it's like, well, this may actually generate some something that will translate into some additional advancement of your career.

Who knows though, yeah.

Yeah. But, yeah. It's a very sort of minor note. I mean, for me, if I can get a story on Kotaku, that's a much much bigger deal in terms of me financially and supporting my family and advancing my career than being on NPR, even though Kotaku readership is way smaller than NPR or even being in The New Yorker.

Well, you had mentioned that you don't really read too much writing about videogames yourself. I don't know if that's an accurate summing up of what you said, but if it is, why is that? Or what was your process of receding from that like?

[Laughs.]

Which, again, is not an unusual thing.

[Laughs.] Yeah.

It's just interesting to hear be discussed.

I guess I used to read more about videogames. I don't know. I guess I just kinda felt like over time the stuff that was being written wasn't that relevant to me anymore.

Yeah.

I used to spend -- maybe part of it was as I was climbing up the bottom rungs of the ladder as a designer in terms of understanding this medium and what we're trying to do, I was kind of lapping up everything that I could.

Right.

A lot of early coverage of things like Braid was very design-focused. When people went deep -- I don't know. Do you remember a guy named Iroquois Pliskin?

I know what the names are stolen from, but is that their real name?

No, it wasn't his real name. I can't remember what site he wrote for. It wasn't The Brainy Gamer. There was one site called The Brainy Gamer and there was another site called -- I can't remember.

I would remember a name like Iroquois Pliskin but, no offense to them, I don't remember that individual.

[Laughs.] Iroquois Pliskin. Right right. But, like, "Oh, this guy has really deep insights into Braid and what it might be about philosophically and so on." It felt important to read. I don't know. And then I guess like that sort of game blogosphere has changed so many times over that keeping track of who's currently writing about games or who's written their big exit. [Laughs.]

There's always a big exit. [Laughs.]

How many big exits are like, "You know, it's finally come to this: I decided I'm leaving games." And then they keep writing about games for a while.

"I'm still gone, you guys, but check this out."

[Laughs.] So, you know, I've seen those big exits and returns over and over from certain people. It's just like, I don't know. There's so much turnover. I don't think there's that much money in writing about games.

There is not, no.

I think that's one of the driving factors. So, yeah, keeping up with or keeping track of who to read -- and then on top of that, even if you find somebody that you feel like you should read, I don't know. These pieces are just these giant walls of text.

This is true.

It takes a long time to read this stuff and if you actually wanted to keep up with this person who's writing every week and writing this giant wall of text -- also this gonzo element of all of this where, "We're gonna go really deep." I don't know if it's called new journalism or what it's called where you go real deep into your childhood story about you and your brother in the basement kind of thing.

[Laughs.]

Yeah, that's new game journalism, right? Isn't that it?

I think it's just called --

Where you have a real perspective and you're not an objective -- you're bringing your whole self in, the story of --

I guess the sediment on it has settled and it's just called experiential writing because it's not really journalism.

Right, right. But I think it ties back into Hunter S. Thompson or something.

Yes, yeah.

In terms of lineage, the lineage of, "Hey, I'm not gonna take myself out of this piece that I'm writing. I'm gonna write about it from the point of view of me getting off the airplane onto the tarmac and what the heat felt like, whatever, and how hungry I was." [Laughs.]

Anyway, so, that kinda stuff? I don't know. I guess there's not much value in that for me. I'm not just looking to fill time with reading. I'm looking to have an interesting, rich reading experience as much as I'm looking for, I don't know, very concise, condensed, thought-provoking arguments about something. I don't know. I don't really have a good answer.

No, no, no. That's fine.

I'm also really busy making games and I've also got three kids. I kind of hold the record in the game industry for most kids, I think. [Laughs.] I don't think -- I've never met anyone else. I've met very few people who have even one kid.

I think you're prolific in a number of ways.

[Laughs.] But three kids is not prolific outside of the world of games.

I know, I know, I know.

But I think of most of the people I know in the games, they have one or no kids. The vast majority have no kids, even if they're the same age as me. There's one other guy I know who has two kids. [Laughs.]

I think you mentioned something a while back -- I did re-read a bunch of the articles you're talking about that mention your lifestyle. Many of them described you as "at the forefront of art and indie games." But a detail that leaped out at me from one of the articles was that you used to work in the advertising world at some point? Is that right?

Yeah, so. [Laughs.] Yeah. Well, just as part of my game career.

It sounded like a brief stint, from what I read.

No, I never actually got paid. [Laughs.]

Well, I was just going to ask if there were ways the videogame world seemed similar to you to the advertising world.

Well, so, that was because I was this superstar indie-game designer that was written up in Esquire and these other places around that time. I was getting calls and inquiries from people in the mainstream all across the board. From stuff inside the game industry like, "Hey, you wanna come work on this Spielberg game?" To, "Hey, we're in the advertising world and we're really interested in getting into videogame-based advertising or tying videogames into ad campaigns." Or something like that. To different people like literary representation agencies who wanted to represent me to the literary world and help me get books written or I don't know what or get movies made? Who knows what. All these people were calling and trying to figure out a way to leverage me somehow.

And so, I was still, at that point in time, had not made any games that were commercially successfully. I had not even tried selling any at that point. I had made -- the whole thing with The Escapist was, "Hey, maybe I can make money by getting these games commissioned by The Escapist, one a month?" That ended up being -- literally, I think the non-disclosure agreement has expired, I'm pretty sure, if there was one. [Laughs.] So, it was literally $250 per game. [Laughs.]

Wow.

That was the small deal with the bonus based on traffic. Right? However many downloaded the game, if I get this many thousands I get an extra $100 or whatever. But I never got any of those bonus payments because I never attracted that much traffic. Right.

And so, I think I could have taken the $400 per game or the $250 per game with the traffic bonus or something. I think I took -- I spent a week making this thing. [Laughs.] I may have the numbers a little fuzzy, but the order of magnitude is correct. It's a couple hundred dollars.

And so, that was an attempt to support my family from games.

Yeah.

And then, I saw a couple years later some people selling smaller games on Steam or even on their own website and making a decent living, some of my friends. Not necessarily becoming millionaires with super-high polished things for HDTVs on Xbox 360 but VVVVVV. [Laughs.] "Oh, wait, you can put it on your website and make $30,000 from selling directly to your fans? Maybe I can do that, too."

And so I finally graduated to that point, but in the meantime there, I was exploring all these different things. I was consulting for EA for the Spielberg thing. I was consulting for a bunch of other little companies along the way here and there. And then also this advertising guy called me and was like, "We're a big advertising production company and we pitch to Y&R and all these ad agencies to produce campaigns. They're not just magazine campaigns or television campaigns, they're sometimes multimedia, weird alternative-reality kind of things."

One of the things that I pitched for was Campbell Soup, Michelle Obama, and backyard gardens? [Laughs.]

Sure.

Campbell Soup sensed this opportunity because Michelle Obama was tearing out part of the White House lawn and putting a garden in and trying to get everyone -- that was one of her early missions as first lady, I guess, was healthy food and eating more vegetables and growing some of your own food and so on.

And so, there's all these pictures out in a dress with a shovel digging around the garden. [Laughs.] So, anyway, there I am in the Y&R offices in New York City with some people who have been working their whole career in the ad industry, in a meeting with them, trying to come up with some ideas for this Campbell Soup -- [Laughs.] I mean, what does Campbell Soup have to do with backyard gardening? It seems like Campbell Soup would not want you to have a backyard garden. But somehow, they were wanting to hand out tomato seeds with every can of soup? [Laughs.] I don't know. Anyway, they wanted some kind of videogame element to this. I was tasked --

All of this sounds incredibly surreal, by the way.

[Laughs.] Yes.

I can't imagine what that was like, being there.

So, and it didn't have to be a videogame. I was like, "I don't think videogames fit for most of these things. Maybe some sort of real-world game or alternative reality game is a better fit or something."

Yeah.

I think I pitched some kind of underground Fight Club-esque secret gardening thing? [Laughs.]

Sure.

A guerrilla gardening kind of game where there's cryptic posters posted around cities and people meet in some disused warehouse. Was this before or after -- because I know you made a game also inspired by gardening? Was this before or after that?

Yeah, this was way after that. Yeah.

So, these strange kinds of tasks. Another task was, "Here's this song that this Dutch DJ had produced and we want to make some kind of videogame to go along with it. Either a music videogame or something. Come up with a videogame to go along with this song."

None of those things really panned out or the pitch didn't get accepted or whatever. It's like, well, when that happens, you don't get any money. [Laughs.] So, I pitched a couple of different things and nothing panned out. But that? The fact that I did that is also one of these lingering legends about me.

Like, "The dude also sold out and worked for the ad agencies!" [Laughs.]

I was going to ask whether anyone accused you of selling out. I think you have to be paid to sell out.

You don't have to be paid to sell out.

Yeah.

At the time, I was just trying to figure out how to bring in money for my family.

I don't know. Nobody who has to pay bills uses that phrase.

[Laughs.] Well, anyway, on top of it, it was really interesting.

Well, but I think in a way that's an insight into the way the mainstream views videogames? But I'm not sure quite what that was. I mean, do you feel like you learned something like that through those experiences?

Yeah, and they were almost for the same reasons that I was suggesting that museums might be interested in showing videogames for penetrating new demographics. It's like, what was it? There was one example thing they had worked on, which was this Doritos haunted house. [Laughs.]

All right.

It's literally some app for the a phone that is a spooky kind of scary game where you go down hallways and are jump scared by things. The whole thing is sponsored by Doritos, or there's bowls of Doritos sitting on counters in parts of the haunted house or whatever.

[Laughs.] Sure.

Maybe there's some code on the back of some Doritos bags to unlock new things in the game. You know, this kind of thing. But just, like, this Doritos haunted house was a free game and it was a relatively huge hit in the advertising world in terms of, "All these kids downloaded and played it around Halloween." [Laughs.]

Yeah.

It's basically a way to tap into some of that eyeball market share that might otherwise be wasted on Angry Birds as far as they're concerned.

It's interesting because there's some of that same impulse in what has helped bring videogames into museums, like you said. But what I've noticed is people don't like when you assert that or even suggest it. There's almost this notion of -- the fact that videogames are inside those buildings is supposed to be "good enough." There's this weird gatekeeping on, like, legitimacy that takes place where you're not allowed to criticize or ask certain questions or wonder what are ways videogames could maybe integrated more respectfully or more thoughtfully. Why do you think there's that notion that videogames can have "enough" legitimacy?

[Laughs.]

Do you know what I'm talking about?

I definitely feel like for me and my career and so on, it did matter to me personally that the MOMA has this permanent collection and they're acquiring 14 videogames into it and one of my games, Passage, is in it. Like, that -- in terms of legitimacy or whatever to other people I don't really know how to measure whether that actually works. [Laughs.]

Sure.

But for me as a creator, it's like -- it's separate from, like, I talked before about the business concerns and the lack of traffic bump when this kind of stuff happens. But it's still an affirmation that I did something good that at least some people appreciate or can understand. And so, that has been good for me. I'm not complaining about any of that.

And having that museum show, as well, it's like, "Woah! I have made 18 games, I guess that's enough for a mid-career retrospective." If I look back on these and they're collected in this way, people have recognized them and come together to at least acknowledge that something I did here was good. It's kind of like, I don't know. You could say that you're operating in this bubble where as long as you think it's good it's good and it doesn't really matter what other people think but I don't ever feel that way.

Yeah.

I have inklings that what I'm doing is good or suspect that, "Ooh, this is gonna be cool. People are really gonna like this." Or whatever. Or, "This is really clever." But if people don't get it or understand it, I feel somewhat disappointed. In some of the games that I've made that were more audacious or reached more, like Between, I did feel somewhat disappointed that more people didn't get it or understand it or appreciate it. And so, it kinda felt like it misses. The point is not to make something for myself. I mean, by the time I'm done working on this thing I'm not gonna want to play it anymore. [Laughs.]

No. You've lived it for so long.

Yeah, yeah. And so, it is for other people and so, hopefully, it reaches them and touches them and these kinds of things -- being included in MOMA or having the show -- are signs that that has happened. And I have had other signs that that's happened. It's like, "Oh, this number of people shelled out money to play this game and they posted on the forums about it for 11 months or whatever. It clearly touched them and it was important to them and it was good to them." So, that's good, too. Another measure there.

But I don't know. It's just nice for me as a creator to have a more long-term record of what I did. Like, videogames are so fleeting and ephemeral. It's like, Passage doesn't even work on the iPhone anymore. It doesn't on Linux/Mac OS anymore. [Laughs.] The fact that I've got this little book that was published as part of the exhibit at Wellesley College, it's like a little scrapbook. Or I've got a couple magazines sitting here on the shelf. I know, like, that Esquire is in the archives of every library around the country. It's this record that existed that I did something. [Laughs.]

Yeah, I understand.

That, to me, is good. In terms of legitimacy? [Pause.] I guess, yeah, as a creator, maybe there is some feeling like, "Oh, yes, even these sophisticated art-world people see something valuable in what I've done. These people have really lived through a lot, seen a lot, they're jaded and relatively skeptical and cynical about all this kinda stuff probably because they've seen so much and are interfacing with some pretty sophisticated work on a daily basis and so on. If they see my stuff and can say, 'This is worthy of comparison to this other stuff that we're showing here, this is sophisticated for us to even want to consider it and to think about it and talk about it and argue about it and write about it,'" then I think that that does help me gauge the quality of my work.

It's like, "Oh yeah, I guess all that sophisticated stuff that I felt like I was putting in there and all that effort I put in that direction, it holds water. It stands up to scrutiny. These people are scrutinizing it from this point of view that is a pretty sophisticated point of view and it passes muster." [Laughs.]

I find it interesting, your answer to my question when I emailed you again. I had no assumptions about it and I mentioned it to Erica [Gangsei, head of interpretive media] at SFMOMA, just your experiences of having your work there didn't necessarily translate into sales or uptick in traffic.

I find that surprising and interesting and she didn't even blink an eye.

Where, just to contrast, I'm assuming that if you're an artist in the fine-arts world and you have a mid-career retrospective at a major -- I mean, Wellesley College is not a major museum. But a mid-career retrospective at some big museum or you're included in a permanent collection or something that probably has an impact in terms of the value of your work, right? And how financially successful you could be, going forward.

Right.

And being in Art News and having a write-up in Art News in the fine-art world probably does translate into some collectors calling.

And I think it all has something to do with who you are in that position. That is, what communities you're in and the ways you're able to leverage that. Like, it's not necessarily going to have an equal impact on everyone who is included in those walls.

Right. But, you know, my work is not -- even if an art collector reads about something in Art News, they can tell by the way that the work is described that it's not collectible. [Laughs.]

Yes.

They're not gonna call me and say, "Can I have one of your originals?" Original what? [Laughs.] I think that's just sort of understood.

Right.

So, I don't know.

Similarly, I don't know how much you think on this, but something that I thought about in prepping for this was this post you had made about Castle Doctrine a few years ago, "Why Rampant Sales are Bad for Players". Does that ring a bell?

Yes. [Laughs.] One of my most famous articles.

I was gonna say, I don't know how notorious or infamous or memorable it was for you in hindsight. These things don't always linger for the people who put them out.

Yeah, writing that article was way bigger for me than being on NPR. [Laughs.]

Man. I don't know. How do you feel about that? That's such an odd but true but I find kinda sad statement that a thing like that is likely to be more of a lightning rod than something with much huger reach.

Right. Well, yeah. I'm still joking about that point, basically.

I agree, though. I think you're right.

But that is a huge -- [Laughs.] I didn't do that on purpose, necessarily. I was trying to explain why Castle Doctrine wasn't gonna go on sale, because I had made up my mind that it was not gonna go on sale. Which is still a legendary thing about that game. Anytime I'm mentioned, people are like, "Just wait for Castle Doctrine to go on sale instead of buying this new game." People still joke about that or poke or prod me about it or whatever. People who were into The Castle Doctrine feel like the game died because it never went on sale.

But I find that that happens on these games sites, where it's astounding to them that creators will stick up for themselves and be like, "Hey, what I create has value and you can take it or leave it." Like, that's sort of seen as an amazing position to take.

Well, yeah. I don't know. I wasn't exactly taking that position.

No, I know. But that's the way it's often taken.

But, yeah. I mean, that article -- that is actually one of the most viable paths forward in terms of PR for somebody who doesn't have a PR budget. [Laughs.] It's somehow figuring out something to say that gets everyone riled up. [Laughs.] I didn't do that on purpose. I've tried to do it since unsuccessfully, if I'm actually trying.

Yeah.

The other thing that really worked for The Castle Doctrine was this "Steal Real Money"contest, which I was laughing my head off as I came up with it and composed the text on the page and so on. But the idea -- even the title, "Steal Real Money?" [Laughs.] Or giving away my famous dog club, right, as one of the prizes? As I put this website together I was like, "Oh, people are just gonna go crazy over this." [Laughs.]

They certainly did. If I look at coverage of The Castle Doctrine, and I can go and look and, like, "Wow, there were 25 or 30 articles written all over the web about that 'Steal Real Money' contest and then 25 or 30 articles written all over the web later on about Castle Doctrine never going on sale and why sales are bad for your fans and there's still some of the graphics that were composed as part of those articles with Gabe Newell with a crown on his head and dollar bills floating around him still come up in Google image searches." [Laughs.] I didn't compose that image, but someone who was covering what I was saying did. It's iconic.

I think the world "entitlement" gets thrown around too casually when referring to the audiences for videogames. But, what struck you as maybe something beyond that in the responses or the ways that was received?

Yeah, I don't know that the article was -- yeah, maybe. I guess the article was somewhat received negatively by players. But I think most of the churnalists -- journalists who ever covering it were saying, "Yeah, he's got a point. By God, he's right. I've got 300 unplayed games in my library." Part of what motivated me is I saw a couple stories around that time about people ashamedly posting pictures of their library with how many of their games that they had purchased over the past three years were unplayed. And so, you know, that just feels weird to me. Do I want all these people buying my game and not playing it? I guess I get a dollar each out of them or $5 each out of them or whatever the sale price was.

But, still, it's like -- I don't know. It's like, no! I want people playing it. [Laughs.] I don't just want them to hand me money by accident.

[Laughs.]

It's like, I don't know. Should I put a story on NPR where at the end of the story I ask for people to mail donations to me and give my address, knowing that the people who listen to NPR don't play my games? That'd be a way to make money, maybe, if I snuck that into the end of the interview if I was live. [Laughs.]

Yeah, it's almost like in a way making the games gets in the way of your soliciting money.

Yeah, so, anyway, whatever. It's like, I want people to play my games. I want people who shell out money for this thing to have made a decision to do it. A conscious decision that, "Yes, this game is for me. Yes I want to play it."

The other thing is people who don't really research your game and come in and play it and they don't really have the motivation to stick with it because they don't have that much invested in it. So, it changes the way you have to design the game. Like, if I was designing free games to be played on Kongregate or some Flash website, like, the way you design the game has to be very different because as some wise designer once put it, "Lolcats are just one click away." [Laughs.]

So, the way that the game engages, the way that it pulls you in, the way that it tutorializes itself to you and introduces and the way it doesn't confuse you and it doesn't leave you feeling frustrated and so on have to be tailored in a certain way depending on how much the audience has invested going in and how difficult or easy it is for them to get away from it. And if somebody has spent $16 or whatever it is on your game, they're not going to do that without watching the trailer, reading some reviews, understanding, looking in the forums to see what people are complaining about, understanding the dynamics, if it's The Castle Doctrine, "Well, how many people are still playing this thing?" All those things are mandated by the price. [Laughs.] Where, if it's in some kind of flash sale and it's a spur of the moment decision and they buy it without thinking about it because they heard about it from somebody and it's not even their type of game, they're much more likely to have a negative experience with it, much more likely to not get through the sort of more difficulty beginning parts. I don't want to make games that are full and loaded down with all sorts of hand-holding and so on just to make sure we don't lose any single player.

Yeah.

Like, I want to be able to make a game that's a little bit experiencing at first or has confusion or frustration as part of its core aesthetics if that's merited. Like, in One Hour One Life, the game I'm working on right now, there's no tutorial aside from a little thing that comes up on the screen and explains the controls and the controls are dead simple. It's like, "Left mouse button for almost everything." That's the instruction. [Laughs.] "Right mouse button for these three special things." And that is the only explanation that you get. Not only that, you're born into the game as a helpless baby who literally can't do anything except walk around. Like, you go to try and eat. You're starving to death currently, there's a thing on the screen saying, "You're starving starving starving." You go to a berry bush, click on it, nothing happens. You go to some tool on the ground, you click on it, nothing happens. You go over to the fire and click on it, nothing happens. You go to a piece of clothing, click on it, nothing happens.

[Laughs.]

And then you die. Then you die.

Yeah.

Then, "What just happened? I couldn't do anything. What the hell is going on here? What kind of game is this? What kind of beginning experience is this?" There's a thing that says, "Get reborn." Okay, I get reborn. I know I can't click on anything, so what? So, this time, I walk up to this parent and they pick me up. Okay, now I'm being picked up. Oh, wait, now I'm hungry anymore because I'm being held by my mother. Okay, hmm. No I try clicking. Oh, I jumped out of her arms. What if I run away now that I'm full? Oh, I still can't click on anything. Now I died again.

[Laughs.]

I died in 30 seconds again. What? I didn't even do anything.

Yeah, yeah.

So, this next time, I'll try it again. I'm reborn, now I stick with my mother. She sets me down periodically to do things. Now she's feeding me some berries. Oh, she can feed me. Can I go pick the berries? No, I can't. Wait, why can't I pick the berries? Okay, well, I guess I better stick around her and -- and then something happens to her and she dies. Then I'm standing there by myself. Now what? I try and do anything. I can'd do anything. I die.

You know, so, that experience is really important. It's this experience of being confused and this experience of trying to figure stuff out and realizing that your efforts are being frustrated by the fact that you are a helpless baby and you are actually helpless. Like, I want you to have that experience of, "I'm trying to do something but nothing's working. I know what I wanna do but I can't do it." [Laughs.]

That would be the death knell of some game that either was free or extremely cheap or bought on an impulse buy to be cast away if it wasn't immediately interesting and so on. But to anybody who's paid, I don't know what the price is gonna be, $15, $20 or whatever they're gonna end up paying for it, it's gonna be like, "Yes, I know what this game is like. I've researched it. I'm gonna be a helpless baby at the beginning or, even if I don't understand that, I'm gonna try and figure this out because I've got $20 on the line." Although, maybe with Steam's easy refund policy that's gonna subvert that.

But anyway, the point is you have a captive audience a little bit more. You have a little bit more latitude to do interesting things design-wise, to not hold their hand as much. To give it a "you can discover it on your own" kind of feeling. The Castle Doctrine did that as well. It just kinda throws you down into this house construction where you kinda experiment. You're feeling your way through the way you can construct the house and the only way you figure out whether the house is working or not is to test it by putting your own neck on the line and making a mistake and losing everything. [Laughs.] Like, beginning players, they spent a half-hour working on a house and they lose everything because of a careless mistake. That is everybody's first experience with The Castle Doctrine. That's the experience I want you to have. It was designed that way. It's designed to make you kick yourself. It's designed to make you feel frustrated at your own folly. That's the core aesthetic experience and I want to be able to design a game with that experience in mind and do everything in my power to give you that experience without sitting here saying, "What are the masses going to think of this who bought it casually and I need to hook them somehow?"

What have videogames accomplished?

[Pause.] What have they accomplished? [Laughs.] Oh. [Pause.] Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I guess because I look at them as a creative endeavor and an artistic kind of endeavor, I guess they're sort outside the realm of accomplishment. That's what makes them what they are. Whereas the -- oh, I'm trying to think of the pneumatic pump that has accomplished better clean-water delivery or something for humanity. [Laughs.] Or the MRI machine has accomplished this or that. Or this invention of this particular technique or tool accomplished this thing in the real world that's very concrete. So, yeah, I feel like videogames are sort of outside of that realm. It's like, "What did Bob Dylan accomplish?" Really, at the end of the day, what did the man do?

[Laughs.]

He made some great music. That's it. It's kind of its own accomplishment. I think that videogames hopefully at their best, even when they don't reach the mainstream, which they may not necessarily ever do -- and even when they accept they have this niche kind of thing, that they're gonna appeal to these aficionados and so on, I think that being really good at what they are is the main thing that they will accomplish. I think there's still a long ways to go, both from a design point of view and from a theming cultural content point of view in refining this form and figuring out games and figuring out game design and understanding what we're doing and all those things.

So, yeah. I think that there have been some games that have been really good. I think there have been very few games that are really good on all the axes that they could be good.

I would agree.

I think that we are gonna keep getting better at doing that and there are going to eventually be games that are really, really good on all the axes that they could and should be good. Simultaneously. [Laughs.] I mean, we're not even necessarily sure what that looks like. We're not sure how those pieces fit together or what the balance of them is gonna be. And so, like, you could look at something like The Last of Us and say, "Well, it's still kinda cutscene-heavy, isn't it?" [Laughs.]

Right. Still running around shooting stuff.

You're still running around shooting stuff and there's a little bit too much of that. And then on top of that, it's like kinda cutscene-heavy. Those scenes aren't really interactive in the way that they feel like they should be. That doesn't feel like quite the right balance even though it's doing a lot of things right and it's a high water mark in terms of AAA games that are about something. So, it's like, "Okay, yeah. These are steps in the right direction."

I hope that the games I've been making are a little contributory steps in that direction as well. I hope. And I'm trying to make my games better along every axis simultaneously as I can figure out how to do that myself, given my own capabilities and my own resources. So, yeah, I think in terms of what games are accomplishing, I mean, it has to be this self-contained self-definition of accomplishment that is true for any non-utilitarian endeavor. [Laughs.]

Okay. So, my name's David Fox. I'm 64, almost 65.

And I've been involved in the game industry since the late 1970's. So, that's close to 40 years, and I was one of the first people hired for Lucasfilm Games back in 1982, and was there for 10 years.

Yeah. I've seen that you're either employee No. 3 or No. 6.

I guess I was No. 3, but sometimes I say No. 2.

I saw that also.

I was the second outside employee hired. There was a guy hired to run the group, then a guy transferred from the computer division -- which was our parent group -- into games. And then I was hired. So, I'll just leave it at three.

I was hired as a game designer programmer. I don't know who started this, whether Atari came to Lucas -- they already had a relationship because Atari had licensed Star Wars for the arcade.

So they'd already been working together for a few years. And what I understand is that Atari gave Lucasfilm a million dollars as seed money for this new games group with the idea that they would get right of first refusal. It was a given that we would be doing this development on Atari computers. The idea was that we'd do something first for the VCS 2600 and we pretty soon said, "You know, that's really gonna be limiting. Let's go for the 5200/Atari 800." And they agreed, and that's where we focused our energies.

I know you're working on a project now, but I got the impression from our emails that you don't really think about the game industry anymore?

Yeah. I mean, I feel like I'm kind of peripheral to it.

Yeah. Why do you feel that way?

I mean, I was definitely in it back in the '80s and maybe early '90s and then just kinda got sidetracked into doing other stuff. Maybe emotionally there was definitely still a connection.
But I pretty much missed what was happening in the games industry in the '90s and a lot of the 2000's. And since I never really went back to work in a large company, it was always from kind of an outsider point of view. I mean, I still had friends who were involved throughout the whole thing, so followed along with them to some degree.

The direction I was much more interested in than home gaming -- and this was even before I went to Lucas -- was much more location-based entertainment. The idea of a large-scope interactive Disneyland, where everything was immersive. This was before VR, though there already were flight simulators and -- did you ever read the book Dream Park? Ever hear of that book? Dream Park was by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes. Their idea of an environment where -- I guess the closest thing I've seen to this in a movie would probably be Hunger Games, except there you could die. [Laughs.] And in Dreampark everything was simulated. Also, I guess, Orson Scott Card has a whole bit about this level of gaming in Ender's Game.

Oh, sure.

That was kind of the intent for me. Really what Orson Scott Card wrote about was the idea of a game that knew you enough to actually help you grow and change and be different in some way. So, the idea wasn't just for fun, it was also to feel like you've gone through something transforming.

Yeah.

Back in the early '90s I was talking about lucid dreaming as something that's analogous, where you have a very real experience while you're asleep but you're still conscious. If you have a monster come at you, you could actually transform the monster or overcome the monster in the same way you would if you're playing an adventure game. When you wake up, you'd feel like you had accomplished something huge and you felt really different, transformed. And that was kind of my impetus for getting into gaming to begin with, looking to create more of a transformational kind of experience. So, in the early '90s, I was still at Lucasfilm and we ended up doing this location-based entertainment project, Mirage, which was kind of why I originally joined the company, with the hope that that would happen.

I got to work on Mirage for a couple years, but unfortunately at the time the tech was just too expensive for even a theme park and the project got shut down. After having a taste of that kind of immersion I just had a hard time going back to doing 2D adventure games. [Laughs.]

Mirage was a partnership between Lucasfilm and Hughes Simulation -- they did all the professional flight simulators for the airlines and military. They did the hardware, projectors, and a lot of the programming and we did the physical design and the game design part of it and it was really cool. Like I said, it was really immersive. You're in this two-seat cockpit -- more like a small room -- with a huge window in front of you that was 120-degree field of view and of partially wrapped around. It was being driven by three video projectors that were seamlessly integrated so you didn't see the line where they connected, where their images touched, and that combined image was bouncing off a collimating mirror so that your eyes are focusing at infinity instead of, like, five feet away. It wasn't 3D. There was no motion. But you still had the feeling that you're flying through these vast landscapes. I basically designed a game that was essentially Rescue on Fractalus! on steroids, you know, mountainous terrain and canyons, but it was in the Star Wars universe. It was just very cool. Multiplayer. There were other pods. The idea were there would be eight of these pods playing together or 16 people, two in a pod. One would be the gunner, and the other the pilot. After doing that and actually experiencing it, it was just kind of like -- yeah, I just couldn't picture going back to doing home games at the time.

This may not sound exciting to talk about, but I'm curious to hear about the beginnings of game projects and how that has changed over the years. What were the beginnings of projects like in those days? How did you decide what you were going to do and what was that process like?

Well, let me talk about our first two projects -- my game, which turned out to be Rescue on Fractalus! and David Levine's game, which ended up being Ballblazer. Initially we were told to do kind of experimental games. The idea was that these were throwaway games. There was no time limit to come up with something interesting. And if it was good, we would take it through to marketing and production to sell, and if not we would just toss it and start over. The idea was to start on a learning curve to get to know each other, get to know the process, get to see what we could do to push state of the art.

Peter Langston, our employee No. 1, was hired to be the manager of the group. His background was much more in the area of research and he was known for his PSL -- his initials -- tapes. They were magnetic computer tapes that made the rounds to all the colleges to play on their Unix machines. They were mostly text-based games that he wrote. The computer division itself was pretty much a research group. So, that was kind of the orientation of our group. We were a research games group inside the computer division, which was a research group inside of Lucasfilm, which was a film company.

We wanted to see what we could do to push the state of the art. Peter intentionally did not hire people with any experience in large computer game companies. For example, he didn't go to Atari and hire people who made arcade games, or he didn't go to Parker Bros. or Williams or some other arcade company. He wanted people who were doing games, were interested in games, but hadn't been spoiled by some corporate culture that kind of pre-established how we would look at the whole problem. So we built the culture up from scratch from within the computer division, which already had that research bent.

Yeah.

So, for the first two games there really was more of a research feel to it and experimenting and trying to see what we can do to see something different. I was really lucky to end up with Loren Carpenter from the computer division as my officemate for my first three or four months, until they had our own space ready to go. I had met Loren a year earlier when I was doing research for my Computer Animation Primer book when I got to talk to Loren and others from the computer division. This was, again, a year before the games group was started. That might have been part of why I ended up with a job -- I already had a connection with them, so it was easy to make the phone call and get an early interview. And the way I heard about it was from a member of our computer center. My wife, Annie, and I had this non-profit public access microcomputer center in Marin and people would come to rent time on our microcomputers. That's where I got my experience programming games, by converting games for other companies, like Adventure International, who would pay us a royalty for the conversion -- for example, converting the game from the Radio Shack TRS-80 to the Apple II.

Yeah.

And so one of our members who worked at ILM -- Industrial Light and Magic -- said, "Hey! Did you hear there's going to be a new games group starting at Lucasfilm?"

I had already met Ed Catmull, the head of the computer division, while working on Computer Animation Primer, so I called him up and said, "I would really like to get a job there doing games." He introduced me to Peter and a few months later, I got the job.

So, because I was office mates with Loren Carpenter and Loren was the guy who came up with the first 3D flight through a fractal environment in a movie, he was essentially Mr. Fractal. He was the fractal whiz. And pretty soon after I started I said, "Hey, is it possible that we could do some kind of fractals on an Atari computer?" His first response was laughter. He said “No, you couldn't do that.”

And then he started thinking about it and said, "Well, maybe there is a way to do something." Nothing close to what he would do on a high-end computer. On those, it's not real time. You're taking hours to render each frame and here we had to do something on a tiny microcomputer at a fast enough frame rate to actually get motion. So, a huge difference but he knew the concept enough to figure out what we could get away with. We loaned him an Atari 800, a book on assembly language, he taught himself 6502 Assembly and came up with a demo in two days. [Laughs.] And that was the core of the game. We were able to build a game around that proof of concept.

If we're talking about initial resistance to fractals and things like imagined or real obstacles to making stuff, what about the more sort of VR things or AR things you were talking about before? Where did those initiatives come from?

You mean from me?

Yeah, or within the company.

It wasn't anything in the company. This was the reason that I got into computers to begin with. Six years earlier I was brainstorming what I wanted to do next and this was the long-term vision, an interactive Disneyland and I realized, "Okay, if this is where I want to end up, I better learn about computers and games.”

I didn't want to open an arcade. That didn't seem like the right direction: "So how about if we do something that's more educational?" My wife was a teacher so we figured that would be a much better match with our interests and abilities. So, that's what we did. Through that, I taught myself programming and learned about writing games and then decided to write that book on computer animation which became this perfect match-up to get the Lucasfilm job because not only did it give me an entree into talking to the whizzes at the Lucasfilm Computer Division, but because of the Atari 800 connection -- the second half of the book was a tutorial on doing animation on an Atari 800. So I had this manuscript when I walked into my interview with Peter and said, "Here's what I've been doing for the last year, writing this book on how to do animation and programming games on the Atari 800."

I couldn't have done anything better if I had a magic mirror into the future. Plus the fact that I already had Lucasfilm's blessing on the book because they basically gave us a bunch of photos -- including Loren's first film on doing fractal flybys, Vol Libre. He gave me the film and I ended up putting frames in each corner of the pages so you can flip through the book and see his movie in motion like a flipbook. I was already someone they knew. So that was really cool.

When I first started working there I told Peter, "This was my dream, doing an interactive Disneyland."

And he said, "That's cool, but for now we're gonna be doing home computer games."

And then a few years later, as we were transitioning from more of a research group into more of a production group, Peter ended up leaving after Steve Arnold came on. Steve was our general manager for most of the time I was there, and he really loved the idea of location-based immersive entertainment. And he had been involved with a friend of his, Jordan Weisman. He did the Virtual Worlds Entertainment and Battletech. So he said, "Yeah, that sounds really cool. Let's focus on what we're doing now but maybe at some point we can do that."

So by 1990, we had grown from a small group of a few of us to 15 and then to 60 and by that point it was getting harder and harder for Steve to manage everybody. It was a very flat management structure.

Everyone was basically reporting to him. He asked me to give up doing games for a year and be the director of operations and help build up more of a hierarchy in management, so we actually had different heads of different groups who could then manage their departments -- a head of the art department who could manage all the artists and have a head of product support and one for QA, and I took over managing the programmers and designers, along with the new department heads, and it was really different than what I had been doing.

Yeah.

And I think I did okay. But I wasn't loving it very much. It took me out of the creative process for one, I wasn't really creating anymore.

Well, you stick around at a place long enough and these are the sorts of things that end up happening.

Yeah.

What were the challenges of that beyond wanting to get back to being creative yourself? What do you remember?

Well, the first part was that when he asked me to do this he said, "Do it for a year and at the end of the year then we'll do a location-based entertainment project.”

Yeah.

So I was like, "Okay, I can suffer through this to live my dreams." He was true to his word and I ended up hiring Lucy Bradshaw as my replacement and then got to go off and do this other project for two years. Lucy ended up as the senior vice president and general manager at Maxis.

Right.

But she loved managing at that level. That was much more the kind of thing she wanted to do.

For me, it was really problem-solving: "Where do we need more structure?" I worked with Steve. I mean, he didn't say, "Go off and do this on your own." It was a lot of talking about how to make this happen. We already had the collaborative culture in place at Lucasfilm, or at least our group: When we hired somebody into a specific area, everyone else who was already hired as a peer would interview that person. And there'd be this consensus about whether thumbs up or thumbs down, whether we felt it was a match, and then at the time Steve Arnold would have final say about whether to pick up that person or not. We would give recommendations and he would make the choice.

We knew we had to hire a bunch more programmers, specifically SCUMM programmers for the graphic adventures we were doing. That was part of my job, to work with HR at Lucasfilm to find a bunch of people who were young and brilliant and funny and could work together inside of our culture.

It was in that process where I hired Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman and those are probably the two that most people would know at this point. There were two batches of -- we called them SCUMMlets, and we had a one- or two-week SCUMM university training where Ron Gilbert would teach them the ins and outs of SCUMM programming and we'd watch what they were doing and the project leaders would then get their picks of which of these SCUMMlets they wanted working on their projects and in what roles.

That's how Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer ended up working with Ron on Monkey Island.

Right.

As the company came to be more formalized and grew, how did that shift the beginning of game projects? You mentioned with Ballblazer and Fractalus how those were born of a more experimental mindset, but was that always the case at Lucas? Or more specifically, do you remember examples of how the beginnings of projects changed after the company had released more games?

Most projects were driven by the game designers/project leaders. The designer would come up with a 1-2 page concept document and pass it around to the other designers. We’d all talk about it, and if there was consensus that it sounded like a good idea, they’d be given the go ahead to take it future, maybe into a 10-20 page design doc. After another review or two, it would move forward to being a planned game. Often we’d come up with several concept docs to see which one had the best response.

Other times, a project would be offered to us project leaders, and we’d have the option to say yes or no. Two I was involved with were Labyrinth and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, both Lucasfilm film productions that we had the option to adapt into films.

In the case of Maniac Mansion, that was Ron Gilbert’s and Gary Winnick’s concept, which they eventually invited me onto to do the SCUMM scripting.

Well, I ask in part because I’m just curious how the industry came to resemble more what we see today with a certain aversion to creative risks. I think it’s always tempting to ‘blame the suits,’ but I remember stories about Sierra before Cedant acquired it, where Ken Williams would call, like, Al Lowe into his office and say, ‘Hey, make a cowboy game!’

I think that’s pretty much how it was during the time I was there. We’d either come up with an idea on our own, or collaborate with another designer or artist. The decision was based on the peer review process, not by some marketing guy who ran focus groups trying to figure out if it would sell. This may have totally changed after I left, though. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, where most of the games that came out of LucasArts were Star Wars-based, I’d guess their freedom to create was greatly curtailed.

Well, so, you've mentioned a lot of names so far, and I don't necessarily want to dwell on the well-known ones. But with George Lucas, sometimes it's a little absurd to think that George Lucas and Monkey Island are somehow related even though it’s right there in the name of the company. I've read all sorts of accounts about this, but how closely was George Lucas involved with the games group?

Uh, pretty much not. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.]

I mean, clearly, he was involved on some level because he gave the thumbs up to the games group, and he would get ongoing reports from Steve Arnold. But I think Steve Arnold knew that George -- and this is apparent from how much he hung around us, which was pretty much not at all -- was doing this more for his vision of the future and that gaming and films were kind of on this convergent course, an intersection where games would be very film-like and you couldn't really tell the difference. I think he just wanted that knowhow inside of the company. I mean, he was doing a bunch of stuff which was very experimental. That was kind of his reason to do games. He was also very interested in education and wanted a part of bringing games to learning. The only two games that he had any input on, really, were the first two games we did. He came in --

In the early '80s?

Yeah, really, just Ballblazer and Rescue. And he came in while we were in pre-beta and I demoed Rescue to him and Dave Levine demoed Ballblazer and had a 20-minute sit down with him talking about the game and him giving us feedback. It was hugely valuable for me because out of that came a couple of really key things that ended up in the game, which probably made the game way more memorable than just a flight game.

One was the Jaggi monster pop-up idea and the other was making sure that there was a fire button -- two things. [Laughs.] At least the fire button probably would have happened through some other means, through testing and seeing how people liked it. But the idea of adding this level of tension of not knowing when this pilot you're trying to rescue was actually going to be a pilot or a monster -- that just totally transformed the game. People still write to me describing the first time they played the game when a Jaggi monster popped up and what their reaction was, because it was kept hidden. It wasn't in the documentation. It wasn't in the marketing material. Other than word of mouth, people generally didn't know about it. We also made sure it didn't happen for the first few hours of gameplay.

That's an interesting point. That kinda makes sense, that Lucas would see the games group as a way to have skin in the game or to also see it as research for what might be ahead for what he's doing. I mean, you were there for about 10 years. Did you get a sense of how the games, through osmosis, impacted him or the things Lucas was doing in general?

Not too much. For the time that I was at LucasArts -- I was there for the first eight years -- we weren't allowed to do Star Wars games. So there really wasn't a full docket to let us use that. The first Star Wars game I got to do was for the Mirage project. That was a different space. I think part of it or most of it was, at least up to that point, that Star Wars had already been licensed to other companies. Atari had an exclusive license for arcade. Parker Bros. had the exclusive license for home entertainment. And at the time, initially, it was like the Atari VCS system. I think there were a few other ones that might have gotten licensed. But, you know it was always, pay us X millions of dollars -- whatever it was. That was guaranteed income. Where, if he had to pay for production and also assume the risk of whether it would sell or not -- probably from a financial point of view it didn't make a lot of sense.

And that totally changed in the '90s and beyond that, where it eventually almost pretty much the only thing that they did at LucasArts.

Yeah. That's possibly what a lot of people mainly remember, that Lucas made a lot of games and then over the course of the '90s they became very reliant on Star Wars projects. I think, in fairness, people do remember more than that. There were a lot of non-Star Wars games in the '90s that just ended up being canceled or were unsuccessful. Obviously you weren't there, but what changed about the market and the way LucasArts did business where Star Wars started to become the focus?

I'm not sure. Some speculation was that I think they saw how much more money they were making from the initial Star Wars games that we were releasing and it just seemed like a much better bet to do a big Star Wars game than to do Day of the Tentacle or something, which was totally created from our own IP or our own ideas.

Yeah.

I think our graphic-adventure games -- my understanding was that while they were popular within the graphic-adventure audience, that was limited. And as the games started becoming more and more expensive -- the production values had been getting higher and higher and the cost to do them kept on going up -- I don't think they were getting enough of a return on their investment in terms of sales. So, I think that's why in 2004 or 2005 or whatever, that's when they started killing a bunch of their adventure game projects. So, I think it was basically just ROI. It was very much, by that point, run like a business. They had to make a profit.

There was also a lot of changes of direction -- every few years they would hire a new head of LucasArts. People generally lasted two to three years in that position and then, for whatever reason, either George would change his mind about what he wanted or the person left -- I don't know exactly. And the directions would keep on shifting. Sometimes they'd say, "We have to do more Star Wars stuff. We have to do this." When the first trilogy came out -- the films one, two, and three, however you want to call it -- I'm sure that's part of the focus to, you know, put all the energy in the company towards building up this license again. That might have been why they were doing a lot more Star Wars games then. I also understand that later on I think they were doing a couple of the really large Star Wars games and George was much more involved with the story and the whole concept to the point that he might have made changes to the designs in a way that really hugely impacted the production schedule and costs.

I know that you were not there for that transition, but this is something that I am curious in general about. Were teams happy with the projects that they were being given to do if, like you, they had not really signed on to do a lot of Star Wars games but they found out that's what their job had become?

Yeah, I'm not sure. I came to the company because I wanted to do Star Wars games and was really disappointed after I got there that we couldn't because the licenses were gone. Rescue on Fractalus! was supposed to be a Star Wars game when I first conceived of it. I kind of wanted to capture the feeling of being in an X-wing and speeding through an environment. But in retrospect, it was a huge benefit to us to not have that as part of it because we didn't have it as a crutch. We were forced to be creative on our own.

Right.

And because we weren't doing Star Wars, George wasn't really interested in what we were doing. We did do a couple of film-based games in the '80s. One was Labyrinth, which was a Lucasfilm production, and the other was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. And in both cases, we were mostly on our own -- other than wanting to keep as close to the story as possible, no one said, "No, you can't do that. That's not okay." We actually had a meeting with George and Steven Spielberg before we started Indy, we asked them, "How far could we go off story if we wanted to? Could we kill Indy?"

[Laughs.]

They said, "Yeah, do whatever you want."

Really.

Yeah. A lot of freedom.

Is that just because those are Lucas properties? I always would expect in a branded thing where you're working in someone else's world, you'd be falling under a lot more scrutiny.

Yeah. And that's for sure the case. One of the functions that the games group had early on was to review the games that Lucas had licensed to other companies, to make sure that they matched the Star Wars universe. I remember looking at a couple of games and saying, "No, this doesn't make sense and this should change and that should change." But -- I guess Steven Spielberg was a gamer and he was much happier to help us push it in different directions. In fact, he wanted us to take it to other countries and other continents, way bigger than we could actually do. So, he was happy for us to push it out.

Do you remember an instance where you, within the group, decided or defined the rules of what was going too far with Indiana Jones? Obviously for a LucasArts game, to kill the main character is unusual. But do you remember cases where you decided to pull yourselves back a bit on Indy?

Not too much. Because we were on a tight schedule, we had three project leader designers on that game. We had Noah Falstein, Ron Gilbert, and myself. So, each of us had slightly different or in some cases majorly different senses of humor and where we wanted to take it. Ron was trying to go much more flip and tongue-in-check. Noah was trying to be maybe a little closer to the story. There was one instance where Ron wrote the end-game sequence where you're trying to leave with the grail cup and there's this earthquake and everything goes to hell. His dialog was really funny tongue-in-cheek stuff. I thought it was placeholder because it was so irreverent.

At the same time, Noah was writing dialog which was closer to the movie.

He said, "Okay, here's the dialog."

I said, "Wait a second. Ron already had his here."

I said, "Ron, this is placeholder, right?"

He says, "No. I didn't mean this to be placeholder. This is what I want to have in the game."

So you had two very divergent ways to communicate that ending, with one being fairly serious and one being very tongue-in-cheek. They both wanted theirs in and they both had reasons.

So, my solution was to randomly choose one or the other. They both double-checked my random-number selection process to make sure it was evenly random and so it could go one way or the other. They're both in there. But, other than that, I think -- we've definitely kept it funnier in a lot of ways than the film was. There was a lot more Lucasfilm Games irreverence happening throughout the game.

You mentioned that there was some turnover of heads of production or people spearheading vision. Why was there so much turnover with that? That was during the '90s?

Yeah, so, that was after I left.

Yeah, I thought so. I hate to ask you questions about after you left.

Yeah. I don't know. I know for sure it was sometimes a George decision that changed the direction. Like, "We need to focus more on this. We need to focus more on that." There was a period from 2008 to 2010 when Darrell Rodriguez was the president. He loved the old games. He loved the history of the company. Around that time we hit the 25th anniversary of LucasArts and we ended up doing this company meeting where myself and 10 other Lucasfilm Games members from the early '80s gave a presentation to the whole company to talk about the roots, where we came from, what was happening in the '80s, what the games were, what our directive had been. For a lot of the people -- some of the people hadn't been born at the time that we started working on Lucasfilm Games. [Laughs.] We asked how many people are under 25 years old and 30 people raised their hands. So, they had no idea why things were done the way they were for whatever part of the culture stayed there with the company for all those years. So that was really interesting.

Darrell was also really interested in reviving or re-releasing some of the old games. I think that was during the period they did a relaunch of Monkey Island, maybe the first two games, with higher res graphics. All that was happening then, and I was actually talking to them about the idea of doing a new version of Rescue on Fractalus! using current technology. That was going really well and then he got fired. [Laughs.] They brought in someone else and they closed all the projects for all the classic stuff and it all stopped. I think a lot of it amounted to George changing his mind, that he wanted to go in a different direction.

You've been in the industry since the '70s, and I am curious about the advent of the enthusiast press and also there just being more and more media outlets doing press on videogames. How did the process of the company getting involved with doing games -- how did that change things at the company and with productions? Or did it not change anything?

I don't think so. I know there were some stories that came out right when we first started up the Games Group and I think we went quiet and the next PR really was around the launch of the first two games. They kinda did that pretty big. We ended up doing kind of a press conference at Lucasfilm. There was one of the screening rooms we had there, which maybe holds 150 people, and it was filled up with reporters and film cameras and we all had some media training so we could talk to them. We did a couple of videos which I actually have on my website, which were shown using footage from the two games and we placed an audio soundtrack on top of it. I think after that, it was more press-release based. We were always at the shows like CES and that changed to other shows. But, no, it really wasn't until -- Maniac Mansion was the first game that we published ourselves. Up until that point, all the games were published through a partner like Epyx or Activision or some other company. So that was probably when we took it over ourselves.

So, I may have gleaned from our conversation a bit and looking at your website and résumé, but why did you choose to leave Lucas?

It was after the two years I was working on this Mirage project. Steve Arnold was a huge proponent for doing it. He was our champion, really. He was the one who got it launched. He ended up leaving to go work for Bill Gates. There wasn't anyone inside of upper management who was passionate about what we were doing. That, combined with some realities about what the costs were gonna be to actually produce the whole system, I think there was this surprise that happened when we actually sat down with Hughes about what the cost would be, how to price these things out. We were coming from a film-company point of view, where it's all based on actual production. They were coming from a defense-contractor point of view, where everything in the whole company is included in some way or another. [Laughs.] Lucasfilm decided to just close down the project and sign it over to Hughes and let them try to sell it themselves. I don't know whether that hurt the project because the Lucasfilm name wasn't attached to it anymore or they just couldn't find anyone who would actually pay that kind of money to install these systems.

But it closed down. So, when our group closed down, I left. At the time, I said, "Well, should I try to go back to games, to LucasArts from this separate group?" Like I said, it just felt like I couldn't go back to that. Not after a taste of fully immersive entertainment.

Well, you had said, you went and worked on other projects much more geared towards kids. I think you said you were interested in ways that games can sort of be more of an experience than a diversion. Am I misremembering? Didn't you work on a multimedia game with Neal Stephenson shortly after this time?

Yeah, that was a game that I worked on that never actually got completed. We went through the design process and early production.

Well, he had something like that happen recently, which I assume you heard about?

Yeah, was that the thing with the sword-fighting?

Yeah, it was the sword-fighting Kickstarter thing. They worked on it for two years and decided it wasn't fun.

Ah. So, this game, he had this idea and I was trying to turn it to game design and it just kind of -- I just couldn't get it to happen and I ended up leaving the project by choice. Then I heard afterwards that they just couldn't make it happen. They couldn't solve it. They couldn't get it to happen, either, so I guess it wasn't just me.

Yeah.

I loved working with him. He was great. It was just too abstract as a concept.

What did you notice was different about the way someone like Neal Stephenson -- someone outside the game industry -- approached making games?

I think, from his point of view, he had this idea which was really much more of a story and we were trying to figure out how to turn that into a game. It could have been a screenplay, almost. Maybe the direction we took was not the right approach, but -- I mean, I also had experience working with author Orson Scott Card. That was really fun. He was hired as a creative advisor for several projects. He actually wrote the insult sword-fighting text for Monkey Island. He worked with me on the Mirage project, where I'd have the concept for the game and he would write up a two- or three-page scenario describing a family going to this theme park and playing this game, what it would be like, in a great story way. He was really fun to bounce ideas off of. A really creative guy. And then for Labyrinth, we spent a week in London brainstorming with Douglas Adams on the game. because he was friends with Jim Henson, who was the producer of the movie. That was really crazy. I got to work with some really high-powered and brilliantly creative individuals. The trick is that in most cases they weren't game players, so we had to be the ones who could take their concepts and their ideas and throw away the ones that just weren't practical or weren't gonna be fun and find the ones that were and work together on those.

Do any of these unfeasible ideas from a Stephenson or an Adams or even a Card still stick out in your mind from this period of time? You say they weren’t necessarily game players, but what did you glean they felt or thought was really important to games or that they thought would be fun for people playing games and why?

Not really. It was more the point of view that wasn’t workable. Filmmakers, for example, often think very linearly, and that doesn’t work in a game where the player doesn’t want to fill totally constrained from making their own choices and decisions. Or on the other end, they’d want to open up the game so much, with so many branching possibilities that it would have been impossible to complete creating the game in the same century.

But that's all interesting because some of the stuff from the '90s, there were other games by other companies. I don't know if these names will sound familiar to you, but there was a game called The Dark Eye and another called I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. It seemed like there were more attempts at bridging gaps within games to other mediums. Is it just me who feels like that's a much more rare thing now?

Yeah. I think part of it was -- especially in the '90s, CD-ROMs were now available and so the amount of --

There was a whole arts scene around the CD-ROM in the '90s.

Yeah. Yeah.

Peter Gabriel.

Right. Right. Now you have enough storage where you can actually put much more content and everyone thought this was the next big thing. When this happened, there were a lot of filmmakers and producers who got involved with doing stuff like this that couldn't really crack the interactive part. As I said, they were linear storytellers and they just couldn't make the leap, and then the whole thing kinda collapsed in the end.

That was Lucas was hoping to get intel on, right? The way games can impact storytelling or to make them more film-like?

Yeah, I think so. To bring both in, the high production values but keep it interactive. You really need the game background and experience to know what could work and what doesn't work and I think it's really tough to make the leap. The only one I know who did a really good job with that would be Hal Barwood, who was at LucasArts for a number of years. He was a film director and writer before. He was a friend of George's. But he also taught himself Assembly language and was doing Apple II games on his own. He ended up becoming this advisor for us early in the '80s and then he just ended up joining us as a game designer and project leader. He could speak both languages. He understood games and he understood films. I think that was hugely rare, someone who could do both equally well.

Do you feel that's still rare?

I do think it’s rare. You have to be a brilliant storyteller, and also be a big game player or game designer. Maybe it’s two different parts of the brain? I’m sure there are others… I know there are a lot of game designers who really want to be filmmakers, but maybe it’s rare for it to go in the other direction -- unless they’re just trying to cash in on games, and not a true lover of them.

What seems weird to you about the game industry and what it has become? Or, to put it another way, what'd you imagine the game industry in 2015 would look like when you were first getting started?

When I was first getting started, I thought we would have this full-blown interactive Disneyland vibe in 15 to 20 years. Clearly I was way off on that. We don't have it yet.

It's interesting to see how we thought VR was the big thing in 1992 and that it just totally died back then because, again, it was a combination of too expensive and too clunky. Now there's a resurgence. I think this time there's a much better chance it's gonna go more mainstream. But there's still some major issues to solve in terms of motion sickness, for one. [Laughs.] I can't do most of them myself just because it makes me sick after a short time depending on how the game is structured. But I think that's going to continue to evolve. It may take another 20 or 30 years, I don't know, until we have that kind of environmental gaming with either doing an AR-type overlay with headwear that gives you 3D overlays with perfect registration. I went to Universal Studios last December and -- it's the one in Florida, where I got to go to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter.

Is that the one with the bar where you get the candy beer?

Oh yeah, you can get the butter beer.

Yes. I believe I've been there.

Yes, so, it's a huge environment with all the streets and everything. I don't know if you've been there in the last year or two, the last few years?

Uh, maybe it was two or three years ago. Yeah.

There are two whole different areas now. There's the Hogwarts/Hogsmeade area and there's also the Diagon Alley area, which is the London-centric one. Both are just brilliant. Really, really impressive. I started thinking about how you could do an AR-type experience there where you're wearing some kind of headset and can see ghosts and magical creatures, and if you're carrying a wand, you can cast a spell and actually see the bolt of energy firing across to wherever you're aiming it out and have amazing things happen in this great environment. So all the 3D environment structure is already there, but all the interactive stuff would be through your headset and some portable or wireless computer.

Do you get a sense that this sort of whimsy you're talking about, do we see less of that from industry videogames nowadays?

Mmm, you're probably asking the wrong person since I don't play many games. [Laughs.] I really haven't played much in the way of adventure games for a while, so I'm probably out of it.

Well, it makes sense. You did live that life for quite a while.

Yeah, but even then I didn't play a whole lot of outside games. Every once in awhile I'd find a game that some people would say, "You have to play this." I'd play through and, you know, spend 40 hours or whatever until I got through it or seen enough to understand what it had to offer. But one of the reasons I don't do it is I know that it would be a huge time suck for me where I'd end up compulsively trying to finish the whole thing. [Laughs.] I don't have time for that right now.

I think I saw on your LinkedIn that you joined the Producers Guild of America a few years ago? Is that right?

Yeah.

What do organizations like those that are further away from the game industry, what is their perception of videogames and the game industry? Or does it not really come up in your conversations with them?

Joining the Producers Guild came about because a couple of friends of mine who were in the game industry joined. They basically said, "Hey, you can get free screeners. You can go to screenings. This is the season now where I'm getting all these DVDs in the mail of current movies that I get to watch at home so I can vote for the Academy Awards." Plus I can go to movies for free and I always like that and there are all these screenings that are happening for the last few months. I can some at Skywalker Ranch and some at ILM. This happened all the time when I worked for Lucasfilm, and I really missed them. The best screenings are when they have the film’s producer or the director there, talking about it and answering questions after we’ve watched the film. There's this New Media part of the Producers Guild, which is specifically for digital media and interactive media. It has different standards than having to have produced a film. There aren't a whole lot of New Media members yet. There are more here in the Bay Area, and if I were looking for jobs, it would probably be a great way to network. But that's not something I'm looking for. We have meetings and can talk about relevant issues, or they might demo new, breaking technology. Not working at a company, I don't have the water-cooler talk that you would when you're going out to lunch with people all the time. So, it's a great way to connect with other people in the industry.

But the question was: Who would be interested in this other than someone who came from a Lucasfilm or LucasArts, who already had the experience of being inside the industry and would still like to have their connection to the film industry. So, yeah, I'm enjoying it but I think it's probably not going to have this widespread interest to people who either are already at a large company like Electronic Arts, why would there even be a reason to join this unless you loved movies to the point where you want to go to screenings and get screeners?

Before we got started I briefly mentioned Gamergate, which you didn't really react to. Have you heard of --

I did hear about it and I did read some stuff about it and I could read enough to know that emotions were really high on both sides. I'm definitely on the side that any kind of misogynistic attitudes should be eliminated and that women game designers and women -- any position that a guy has in the industry should be open, with gender making no difference. I wish there were a lot more women game designers out there so we'd have a broader variety of games.

Given your experience with the industry since the '70s and '80s, did you ever hear any notions about that sort of attitude being prevalent or did you ever run into it?

Not too much. In fact, back when I was director of operations, I was specifically looking for an even number of men and women that we were hiring for positions. And we did, as much as we could. We hired women SCUMMlets as well as men. And across the other areas in art and other departments -- there weren't many women programmers. I think they just weren't available. So, I think Lucas tends to be a pretty open company. Or at least it was at the time I was there.

Do you remember anything about the audience in those days being very aggressive or angry or some of the things you see a little bit more today?

No, I don't think so. I mean, I'm pretty much like, "What the fuck? What's going on with these people?" You know, my wife is a game designer. She's done game design, too. We often collaborate on projects and we have different takes on things, but we know each other's strengths and weaknesses. We really work well together. We got to work together on some Disney projects. We actually designed together some interactive experiences for a couple of the Asia Disney parks. One of them actually got implemented. And so, that was the closest I got to doing an interactive Disney thing, was actually to do one. [Laughs.]

I might be missing some of the point of it. If the point is that women shouldn't be doing this, I'm like, "Huh? I don't get this." I live in Marin County. It's probably one of the most liberal counties in the country. And that's where Lucasfilm was based, in San Francisco, which is probably even more liberal. We're essentially in a bubble, so seeing all this anger and negativity, it's like, "Where is this coming from?" It's really hard for me to relate to it because it's so far from my daily point of view and consciousness. For my whole life, really.

I finished watching Jessica Jones on Netflix. The showrunner, the producer/creator is a woman, and she intentionally directed it in a certain direction so her superhero is not wearing short skirts and not using sex to interrogate people, and really going for a strong female character point of view. Very complex person and background and if you haven't seen it yet, it's the best thing I've seen on TV in years other than Game of Thrones. I think it just gets stronger through the whole series.

It was just really good. It starts strong and all of a sudden I feel like, "Holy fuck. It just went to this whole other level." They shifted it but they didn't. They opened a whole door to another level of possibility, and then that happens several times through the whole series. It's smart. It's really really well-written and plotted. I was just so impressed with it. It's really interesting that this is on Netflix as opposed to cable or, for sure, on network television.

It's harder to watch other shows now because my standards have been raised. Look at some of the interviews with Melissa Rosenberg, the showrunner, how she intentionally crafted it. She did not want to show any rape scenes or anything like that. She felt like that turns something which is a violent act into titillation by showing it. She had a very strong point of view about how she wanted to present the series and the show. And then, of course, they had a superb cast and production values were really good, too, so I loved it!

What do you think videogames have accomplished?

In terms of the games that I've been connected to, I think that they can help you think in ways that you wouldn't normally think. If you look at graphic-adventure games -- I think they really change how you would approach problem solving and approaching issues in everyday life theoretically. I've definitely had the experience where in real life I was trying to find my way around some place and having played adventure games and being able to move around an environment, it definitely helped exercise some brain muscle in terms of finding my way around something in the real world.

I don't want to talk about the negative stuff because I don't play that kind of games. I'm not really into shoot-'em-up-type stuff. I think that would be a negative impact to the degree that playing a game where you're going around shooting people all the time could desensitize yourself to doing that in real life. I think that might be possible in some cases. Most people can separate reality from fantasy. I've had the experience of coming out of a movie like Star Wars or a movie where you're flying around at really high speeds in a plane or a ship or a car and getting behind the wheel of my own car and having this feeling like, "Okay! Now I can go around corners really fast." There's that impulse, although even if you never act on it it kind of takes you back. I think people can separate the two. Most people can. But for some people, maybe not.

Well, I’m Chuck Eddy. I am actually 56. I'll be 57 in November. I'm in Austin.

And I've been writing about music since -- well, really, since 1979, but I think I've been getting paid to do it since probably early '84. [Laughs.] So, that's, like, 33 years. I've written four books: Stairway to Hell, The Accidental Evolution of Rock 'n' Roll -- Stairway to Hell is a guide to heavy metal. I also wrote The Accidental Evolution of Rock 'n' Roll and then two collections: Rock 'n' Roll Always Forgets and Terminated for Reasons of Taste, which came out in the last five years. I was the music editor at the Village Voice for six and a half years or so, like, around 1999 to 2006. And then I worked at Billboard, the music business magazine, for about a year and a half. I've freelanced over the last three decades for, gosh, everywhere. [Laughs.] Rolling Stone, Spin, Entertainment Weekly, Creem Magazine back when it used to exist, and on and on and on.

[Laughs.] You sound like me. It gets to a point where it just becomes a soup of names. I always worry, like, whether you seem standoffish or like you're trying to dazzle people with name-dropping.

No, I'm just trying to sum it up! I've never done anything for The New York Times. [Laughs.] There's some places I've never done anything for. I don't know. [Laughs.] Most places out there, I think I have at least now and then. I still do stuff. I just did a Kid Rock for Billboard a couple days ago. But a lot of what I do now is curating or archiving playlists of radio stations and so on for streaming services. I've been doing stuff for Rhapsody, I think, since 2008. I've done stuff for other places I'm not even allowed to name. [Laughs.]

That's fine.

Yeah, just contractually not.

No, I understand.

A lot of them are signed, and so, I think they just want to just assume that the work comes out of the ether. [Laughs.] But, anyway, that kinda sums it up.

This is kind of a leading question to start with, but I always think it's interesting to talk to writers and critics about the work they do on a bigger picture level. You may disagree with the wording of this and if you do, that's fine: How is your life better because you write about music?

Oh God, it's not. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.] I said it might be leading.

If you were to ask me that 10 or 20 years ago, I mean -- gosh. I wish I -- I don't know, had been an architect or gone to law school or something. Although I know people in those fields -- I've gone into academics and only had a bachelor's degree in journalism, actually. Before I wrote about music I covered zoning commissions and sewage boards and sports for suburban weeklies in Michigan.

I mean, I don't know. I think I've been lucky. For years I got free records in the mail. [Laughs.] And then CDs and then records and CDs and now I only get free MP3s in my email which I just delete without listening to them, pretty much. But, you know, I got four books out of it. Writing at times can be satisfying in its own right. I have managed to do it and I've managed to make a semblance of a living for 35 years. So I obviously I feel really lucky. But at the same time, would I have more retirement savings if I had gone a different route?

I mean, I graduated high school and my high-school guidance counselor was like, "Why are you going into journalism?" I did way better in my SATs on math scores. I was like 99 percentile and maybe 65 percentile verbal. And I feel like if I had gone into tech in the late '70s and early '80s, you know, I could retire by now. At this point, who knows whether I'll ever be able to "retire." But at the same time, it's been fun in a lot of ways. So, I shouldn't complain.

No, I don't perceive it as complaining. This is the reality that we're all in the soup together on.

Yeah.

I don't hear -- I'm 34 -- at my age level worrying about retirement, but I'm very conscious and aware of that fact. I’m worried.

Yeah. The thing is, I have siblings who have retired, who are younger than me. And I know people my age and I'm like, "Retiring?" It's just beyond me.

But at the same time, I think if I even go on a different writing route -- for some reason I found my voice writing about music, starting in college. I mean, I could have been a local reporter somewhere or whatever but immediately I was doing stuff for the Village Voice and places like that when I was 20 years old. So, I kinda fell into it.

Is it a thing that you're able to compartmentalize? Like, are you able to listen to music and not think about angles to write about? Can you just be present and enjoy listening to music?

My entire life is compartmentalized, David. [Laughs.] I had a really traumatic childhood so you have no idea. [Laughs.]

Yeah?

You know, I finish one chapter of my life, I close the door and don't look back. But that's not the kind of compartmentalizing you're talking about.

As far as toning stuff, I mean, I don't know. I have a nine-year-old daughter and I write better if she's at daycare or at school. [Laughs.] It's easier to focus. But, I mean, everything goes into my writing. One of the advantages if you actually look at my books is when I write about music, I also write about politics and baseball and zoology and anything else I'm obsessed with and what I'm reading and what I'm watching on TV. And parenting, I mean, I have kids. I always have. And I've mostly been allowed to do it. I mean, depending on -- some places I could do it more than other places. And that -- and I probably don't do first person as much as I used to, like 20 years ago. But I still pull all sorts of stuff in. So, I don't compartmentalize -- I guess I'm not completely sure what you're asking, so I'm just kind of Rorschaching here.

No, that's fine.

But I don't compartmentalize in the sense of, like, separating music from everything else because people don't listen to it a context of --

My question is not directly about burnout.

Oh.

But it's more -- I think for people who write about entertainment, they reach a place where they feel like they can't even engage with entertainment because it just feels like work.

Oh, yeah. One thing I've noticed and actually I've written about this some and I noticed it a lot when I was at the Village Voice, which is one of the great gatekeeper jobs of music criticism for decades. That was the goal of writers, to write there. Music critics -- I mean, really, you're not entirely, but in a lot of ways you're talking about music that's made for young people.

Interesting.

When writers hit early thirties, a lot of them -- and this may happen more with male writers than women, but a lot of them hit this kind of crisis. In fact, I did, for a couple years in the early '90s. I was like, "Why am I still doing this?" It winds up and you start phoning it in maybe a little bit. It seems like a lot of them either get out or they muddle through. But it almost seems like for people who make this career, that's the time. It's like this weird hump. I've talked to a lot of music critics about that and they're like, "Yeah, I totally see that."

But, I mean, right now in a lot of ways I am kind of burned out. Which means I feel like I'm lucky because I can do a lot of things now that's not writing, that's kind of more -- see, I like databases. When I was at the Voice, I had a really good filing system.

One thing I didn't mention is I was in the army for four years in the early '80s. I ran a communication security vault. I was a Signal Corps officer. A lot of the on-the-ground-stuff, like being out in the woods for a month, I could do without. But filing systems? I'm good at filing systems.

And so, a lot of this glorified database stuff I do with streaming services, I kind of find it relaxing. I've written less and less. In fact, the Kid Rock thing I wrote over the weekend after he announced his running for Senate in Michigan that I did for Billboard, they emailed me Friday. I started talking to my wife, I'm like, "I haven't written anything in a really long time. Do I really want to do this?" She's like, "You have to do this." I mean, I grew up there and stuff. I grew up in suburban Detroit. I know where he's coming from as much as anybody who's written about music. I kind of innately know it and I've known it from the beginning. I kind of got Eminem in the same way. And I've written about Detroit stuff in general.

And I did it and I was done by Monday night, filed it Tuesday morning, and a lot of people really like what I wrote. They're like, "Nobody else could have written this piece." Which may or may not be true, but it's not as easy. [Laughs.] I mean, it's easy once I sat down to write it, and I have a process in my head of how I would do a piece like that. It was an essay.

It's easy by virtue of who you are and the life that you've had.

Yeah, and it's just like, I've been doing this long enough that I know how to do it.

Right. Right.

But, you know, I was talking to my wife about how it used to be so much easier. And I don't even know if it's true, but in my head it's true.

Once I sat down to write, I had it knocked out in two hours. I had 1,000 words and they wanted 600. It's actually sitting down, which I used to do everyday. I've done four books and stuff and I've written thousands of pieces over the decades, but in some ways I feel like it doesn't come as naturally as it once did. But I don't know whether that's a virtue of age.

There used to be a lot more freedom as to how I could write and where to write.

Yeah.

The way I write -- and I think that there's some ageism involved, whatever. I don't make -- although I still listen to tons of music. I've never burned out on that. I don't make -- I don't bend over backwards to listen to what I'm "supposed" to listen to. I listen to what I want to listen to unless somebody assigns it to me.

So, in some ways, I'm sort of a satellite. I'm out on the outskirts of the bigger conversation that the music critics have. Whereas, I used to be the sun. I used to be the center of it. And now I'm an asteroid out somewhere, if it makes any sense.

It does.

Which, I'm fine with.

But it's interesting because you mention -- I do think this is a thing that just universally happens, at least in the U.S., which is after 30, people start evaluating what their opportunities are and where they've gotten. You said some people burn out and some people muddle on or through.

Yeah. They figure out how to do it. But the thing is, I've never been an ambitious person. In a way, although I've accomplished things in my life -- even being the music editor of the Village Voice, it was like a dream job for me but it wasn't like it was a goal.

Yeah.

And the thing is, I had that job for the second longest of anybody who's ever held that job outside of Robert Christgau, who's basically the first, the dean of American rock critics. I mean, outside of him I don't think anybody's ever held that job as long as I did. And partly that's because it never occurred to me that I wouldn't be doing it. [Laughs.] I'm not using it as a stepping stone to get somewhere else.

And my thing is when I was in my early thirties, it's like, "This is what I do." [Laughs.] I finally started a LinkedIn profile last year, but the way my mind works, it doesn't really -- I actually went to a career counselor last year. The hardest questions for me is, "What are you going to be doing five years from now or 10 years from now or 20 years?" I never knew how to answer that. I don't know! I've never thought in those terms.

This is something I don't know as much about. I mean, I got my start in music writing as an intern for Rolling Stone.

Sure.

I've gone on from there to just broader entertainment journalism, working for and editing alt-weeklies. So, I actually don't know this firsthand, but how has the job market of music writing been hit by the internet?

Oh, I mean, I get paid less than I did in my late twenties.

Are there fewer opportunities?

There are fewer opportunities. I think what happened is when the internet came in -- I mean, you're basically talking about the juncture of two industries. Because the technology has gone under drastic, drastic changes in the last 20 years. I think when the internet came in, what happened was you had lots and lots of young people who were willing to write for free.

[Laughs.] You still do.

Places -- you know, I don't even want to name names but most of the publications I write for paid better 20 or even 30 years ago. I mean, and I don't mean after inflation. I mean, they paid better, period. I mean, a lot of people that want me to write I'm just like, "I'm not going to write for that little." It's not worth my time. And still, places that I do deign to write for, I still don't get paid what I used to. You know, and a lot of people that would really bother me. It does really bother me. But maybe because of my lack of ambition I wind up living with it.

But, yeah, as far as places? As far as I can tell, there are way fewer outlets that I'm in touch with. But that may be because I'm out of touch. I don't know. There are definitely places I've never contacted that I see people do a lot of work for. It's possible that's just me. But definitely the impression I get is that 20, 30 years ago there were way more places to get paid and way less competition that was happy to get paid less.

I think you talked a little bit about this at the South By panel. Something else that has occurred, too, in addition to those technological changes is just the changing of expectations of what the work is.

Right.

This is pretty blunt, but when did you notice that music criticism essentially became advertising?

Well, I think when I was at the Voice. I was there, like I said, probably 1999 to 2006. A website started at some point, and there started to be -- just early, because they didn't really know how to do it then. Some emphasis on eyeballs.

Clicks.

Clicks. You know, but even then it was like a -- they were just starting to inch the way it is now. They didn’t figured out how. Even as an editor, what my music section looked like became more and more codified as that six years progressed. Now, even earlier, I think I talked about this at South By, but in the early '90s Entertainment Weekly started publishing. I actually did a lot of stuff for them early on. Those little haiku-length reviews of albums. Their big innovation in a lot of ways was you had to review albums the week they came out. Now, whether that was somebody there's idea, I don't know. But it also coincided with SoundScan moving into record stores.

Which, once SoundScan went in, the industry could concretely quantify how many copies a given record was selling in a specific week. And so, the industry started placing more and more emphasis on first week sales. Which I don't even remember hearing about before, say, '91. When SoundScan came in. That sort of snowballed through the '90s into the first decade of the 21st century.

Is that aping box office?

Yeah. I don't know that much about box office, but basically albums started to be treated like movies. So, I don't know what technological innovations were in the movie industry. I just don't know that much about it. But I'm guessing that it probably happened in the movie industry earlier. For all I know, it could have happened decades earlier. I really don't know.

In the late '80s, writing for Rolling Stone or Spin or Creem or any of those places, you could review an album -- unless it was an a gigantic album. But, no! Even in a lot of cases, on gigantic albums, you could review them months after. I mean, I'm sure people wrote about, say, Thriller, which came out in '82, like, you know -- once it really exploded, people probably wrote about it more. And I know, say, Def Leppard's Hysteria, which came out in '87 or '88, I don't think I wrote about probably until in '89.

Yeah, I think the way you talked about it at South By is that critics used to be able to --

-- they would live with the music.

Yeah.

But the industry would also live with it. And a record's first week sales -- so, this happens once in a while now, but now, almost always a record's biggest week is going to be its first week. That was not the case. So, you'd have -- and now, of course, especially with streaming you'll have a few singles before the album comes out. Which is weird because it's sort of a throwback to how things happened in the '60s.

Right.

We are -- and now, a lot of times, if those songs don't catch hold, an album might not come out.

So, for example, Kid Rock just put out two singles last week when he announced his Senate bid. I mean, that's just the freshest example I have. I don't know if there's any date set for an album. You know, it could be months down the line. But, when, say, Def Leppard's Hysteria came out, there were like, four or five hit singles. So, the album was more part of the world a year and a half after it came out. Same with Appetite for Destruction by Guns 'N Roses. It's actually the same thing that happened with a few Kid Rock albums. One thing I wrote in that Billboard piece is his biggest -- sorry to keep using him as an example. [Laughs.] I mean, his biggest hits have actually been third or fourth singles off of albums, where the album kinda died and then it picked back up.

Right.

So, it's not just that the music critics lived with the music: The world lives with the music. But, the way reviews changed in the early '90s is that, like I say, it started with Entertainment Weekly. The assumption would be that you would review the music the week that it came out, or at the latest the second week or whatever.

The other thing that really changed with alt-weeklies around that time was that alt-weekly writing became more and more geared -- oh, and again! You asked about advertising. An album release is not a new peg. People know an album is coming out. It's basically, to me, seems like advertising to boost those first week sales. It's like the symbiosis between the publications and the record labels.

And a similar symbiosis, I think, happened on the alt-weekly level where pieces were geared more and more to who was coming into town to play shows that weekend at clubs which, inevitably, advertise in the alt-weekly. [Laughs.]

Right.

So, you're basically advertising these shows. But to a lot of editors who never struck me as that bright, to them, this was a news peg. It's not like I would avoid writing a piece at the Village Voice the week that there's a show. It's a nice thing to put that, "Such and Such Band will play at Bowery Ballroom on Friday." Or whatever. But to make that the purpose always struck me as really, really strange and, really, would have cramped my style as an editor.

So, I think it's something that happened over the course of the last quarter-century. Increasingly. It snowballed ever since.

Well, you do see things increasingly now like these "surprise" albums.

Right.

I think it's to the point that people have this expectation that if an album is announced before a critic gets on the plane, they want to have a fully formed review by the time they land.

Oh, yeah. I mean, that's obviously certain superstar acts mostly.

Yeah.

And -- I don't know. Whatever. I'm just glad I'm not an editor or writer who has to worry about that stuff. I don't think you can listen to a Beyoncé album and write something especially insightful about it. Maybe people have. Honestly, I try not to pay attention to it. I think it happened with [David] Bowie's album. Wait, was Bowie's album a surprise? The last one? Before he died? I feel like it was? But, I mean, and it seems like it happens with Kendrick Lamar albums or whatever. I think the My Bloody Valentine album. There's a smattering of records -- the thing is there's this requirement that actually makes me not even want to pay attention to those.

I just -- it seems like this kind of grandstanding thing. And if I'm gonna listen to -- most of those I still haven't gotten around to. [Laughs.] The ones that have come out in the last couple years.

But, you know, I do understand how if what you're worried about is clicks, people wake up in the morning and they go, "Oh, I wonder what this Beyoncé album's like. I wonder what this David Bowie or Kendrick Lamar album is like." And so, you know, whatever. To me, it's part of the same thing. I will say that these record releases really not really surprises.

Right.

There are often, like, hints through the week or whatever. And, you know, it's a marketing thing.

Yeah, I was going to say just that it's shifted to a different way of covering marketing.

But the thing is I think it gives these big releases an air of importance that they might not otherwise have. And critics buy it.

But what do you notice things across the board that critics are becoming less thoughtful about? What do you see not written about --

David, I don't even read that much criticism. So it's like, I don't even know how much I want to speak to that.

Sure. No, that's fair.

I mean, music is one of the last things I read about these days. I mean, I subscribe to the Times and Austin Statesman on paper, by the way. I'll occasionally read stuff in there. I don't click on that many news pieces online. I mean, I don't read that many pieces online, period, to be honest. But -- so, I can't speak to how people are writing now. It's like, that was my job when I was editor, to keep up on that kind of thing. It's probably another reason I'm not part of this internet conversation. I'm just not that interested in it. I feel like -- I mean, I'm on and off Facebook. There's times I'll be off for a couple months. When I'm on, enough of my Facebook friends are also music critics that if there's an interesting conversation going on, I may see somebody link to it, you know? And honestly? I don't get the idea that there's that many interesting conversations going on these days.

But, that may be me talking as an old guy. I just don't even know what those conversations would be about. There was, like, this poptimism/rockism for years, which kinda just went on and on and on and on for years. It just went on and on and on and on and on. [Laughs.] You know? Even since then -- for a long time it seemed like people were really interested in racial appropriation, like, Miley Cyrus is on a TV show, is she twerking?

Oh, yeah. I remember that.

I don't care about award shows. I don't care who's in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. It seems like non-stories to me. The controversies aren't really. You know? [Laughs.] But, maybe there's something I'm missing.

Well, it's interesting because I'm doing a type of digging on this into topics I'm really not seeing much writing about. At South By, you mentioned a few questions about stories or apparent lack of curiosity or writers not even realizing --

Oh yeah. [Laughs.] I was motivated -- these were the stories I would be getting off my butt to do. Actually, I think it was Greg Kot, the guy from the paper in Chicago who was asking about stories. [Laughs.] I wanted to be talking to Mexican-American acts about immigration.

Yeah, that's what you said.

I can't even remember. Honestly, they were off the top of my head then.

Yeah, you said, "What is the music of Brexit? What metal bands in Europe are aligned with far right politics? Are there regional Mexican artists being deported?"

Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Metal bands? I know some of those.

To what degrees are editors and publishers party-line obstacles? And to what degree --

I haven't been pitching those stories. So, I don't know. I just -- I would guess that some of those stories it might be determined that not enough people would be interested. But I'm talking out my ass there. It's not like I pitched those stories. It's interesting that I haven't seen people write them. [Laughs.] Because to me they seem pretty obvious.

I would agree. Yeah.

But, you know, I can't say why.

To flip it, and talk a little about criticism, this is a basic question but I don't know if I've ever seen it be asked.

Yeah.

How do bands benefit from having critics?

I don't know.

Maybe they don't?

I'm sure some have. To a certain extent over the course of the last 40 years -- the thing is, if record labels didn't think it would be advantageous to them, they wouldn't have been sending me free CDs and albums for decades. So it must help them somehow. There are certain acts -- I think that they're definitely exceptions. But, I mean, I don't know. Beck. Or White Stripes. Or probably Frank Ocean or Kendrick Lamar, who have benefited from having lots and lots of positive reviews. I think it works into their marketing in some ways. And, you know, it gets the word out. I mean, these days, I'm sure there are some who will get top 10 albums and they're not really on the radio. In the last -- this is how out of it I am -- 10 years, did Arcade Fire get played on the radio at all? There are indie bands who -- I don't care about Arcade Fire -- probably have, and it's helped them sell records.

And the thing is, especially at certain times of years it's not like you have to sell that much to have a top 10 or even No. 1 album these days. You put out an album in January, hell, I could have a No. 1 album.

It's weird, though, because -- are you familiar with the Big Star documentary?

I'm familiar that there is one. [Laughs.]

The documentary is about the opposite of this. It's about how despite all the critics rallying --

Right.

I mean, I think they're known today.

Oh, sure. I mean, I think the industry learned -- I think there probably still are cult acts who only get great reviews. But, yeah, I think there were always cult acts who consistently got positive reviews and it didn't help their sales.

Yeah.

I don't know. [Laughs.] Did Raspberries get as good reviews as Big Star? I don't even know if Raspberries sold some records in the '70s. They're better. Sorry. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.]

I mean, it might have something to do with the fact that they're not as good as critics said, but don't get me off on that tangent. They did get the theme song for a crappy TV show for a while with That '70s Show, which had nothing to do with the '70s. But that's another tangent. I was there.

We've talked about this before. I'll ask you about this again, these clichéd sentiments and perceptions that music was at the center of the culture.

Yes.

I'm curious because people talk about this a lot, and we talked about music criticism basically be advertising. I don't know if you saw the HBO documentary series, The Defiant Ones?

I have not.

In it -- so, I'm quoting Trent Reznor here. He talks about how music has gotten co-opted as a way to sell ads.

Oh, come on. It got co-opted before Trent Reznor was born.

I don't even know if I believe in things being "co-opted." Markets respond to demand.

I mean, to be an ad? Yeah, whatever. [Laughs.] That cliché has been around longer than Trent Reznor's been making music. [Sighs.] I mean, John Mellencamp used to complain about that in the '80s and then he mentioned Tastee Freez in his songs.

[Laughs.]

You know, Run DMC would say, "Don't want nobody's name on my behind," but then they do a song about Adidas. [Laughs.] I mean, this is like the most hypocritical cliché. It goes back forever.

Yeah.

Music has always been part of movies. It's always been part of commercials. I mean, I'm sure it goes back before the rock era. But in the rock era, but it has never not.

I think to unpack that a little bit, what Trent Reznor is talking about is this feeling that musicians are being dehumanized. I guess what I'm curious is whether you have a sense that the music-consuming public has forgotten about realities of what it means to be a musician making a living as a band? Or are there aspects of being in a band that you think people who claim to love music don't think about?

I don't know that they ever did. I mean, I'm just being honest. When I was growing up, it wasn't like, "I need to go out and buy this Aerosmith album because I want them to make a good living." [Laughs.] Whoever talks like that? I guess there weren't as many options then, although once home taping started there were. People would tape music off the radio. It's just like -- [Sighs.] Look, I'm an old guy. I like music from then for the most part better than music now. [Laughs.] I think people growing up had better taste.

And also, isn't Trent Reznor's whole point the dehumanization of music? I mean, maybe I'm missing something? Isn’t that kinda his whole shtick? I mean, except that he would be so much better if he had a German accent because that kind of music is much better with German accents. Which is true. I mean, dude, you're not Rammstein. [Laughs.] But, you know, whatever. I mean, you know, Einstürzende Neubauten, the German band who invented industrial -- I'm reading a history of Berlin before and after the wall fell -- and they were accused of selling out because by the mid-'80s because their music was being used in certain art exhibitions or whatever.

It's just funny to hear Trent Reznor talk about that because dehumanization is sort of the point of industrial music to begin with. You know, whatever. I know this isn't about him. But at the same time, I mean, look, in some ways I would say -- I could even play devil's advocate. I would say that because of things like Twitter, and because of things like just celebrity reporting in general, and because starting with rap music especially, the assumption was made that we were supposed to care about pop stars' lives? It became part of their songs? And so we're supposed to know the gossip about them? I don't really remember what the equivalent of that was when I was growing up. Somebody like Hank Williams Jr. maybe sang about his life a little bit, or Lynyrd Skynyrd or Mott the Hoople? But they were definitely exceptions. Starting with hip-hop, you're supposed to know more about -- the way Twitter works, where kids talk to the stars supposedly? I mean, that's the cliché. This is what people have been saying for the last 15 years or however long Twitter's been around, is that it puts fans more in touch with the musicians. Not less. So, I don't know. I see kind of a contradiction there. I mean, does Trent Reznor tweet? He seems like somebody who might tweet. I could be wrong.

Sparingly.

So, he's talking directly to fans in a way that The Knack probably didn't. [Laughs.] No, The Knack aren't even a good example. In a way that the Cars probably didn't in 1978. I mean, people may be more interested in Trent Reznor's life than they were in Ric Ocasek's life in '78 or '79.

But at the same time, you told me when we talked last week that this is yet another clichéd sentiment, that music was at one time the center of the culture and that the internet has ruined that. You said that things like The Beatles and Michael Jackson and Nirvana were huge exceptions.

I just think -- when you mention those names, I think what you're referring to is how people talk about how there was this monoculture where everybody was in tune to the same music at the same time. I mean, I've been hearing about fragmentation ever since I started hearing about music. I cared more about baseball than music through high school. I'm kind of a weirdo in that way, where I didn't really start buying records, like, constantly, until my freshman year in college. That's basically when I started reading music criticism and stuff like that.

But ever since I started, I've heard people talk about how the music world is becoming more fragmented. Again, that's something -- and I've seen criticism from long before then, probably to the late '60s, that would talk that way.

Yeah.

But, it's like, if you think about it, in the early '60s, the same people who bought Kingston Trio albums probably weren't necessarily buying girl-group albums. You know? I mean, what I really wonder is whether the same people who bought Kingston Trio albums bought early Beach Boys albums because they kinda dressed the same.

They both covered "Sloop John B." I get the idea that it was two different audiences. That you had a college audience buying the folk revival bands, and suntan high-school frat-boy audience -- these are clichés -- buying Beach Boy albums, early on. Pre-Pet Sounds or whatever. I'd have to check but I feel like I read once that the biggest selling album of the '60s was The Sound of Music soundtrack. Lots of people in the wider culture hated The Beatles. They hated their long hair. And it was like news when Leonard Bernstein embraced. And I'm no Beatles expert.

A lot of people hated Michael Jackson! I mean, it wasn't long after the whole "disco sucks" thing, which I lived through in the late '70s. I remember when those disco records were set on fire by rock bands at the Tigers-White Sox game.

I was going to say, being from the Chicago area. I know all about that.

Yeah. I was in the upper Midwest. I mean, Steve Dahl had been a DJ in Detroit. So, clearly, that example alone -- although, maybe some of those baseball fans burning disco records secretly had the Rod Stewart album with "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?" at home or whatever. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.]

They never told their friends or it didn't occur to them that that's a disco song, and that "Miss You" by Rolling Stones was a disco song. And probably some of them had a couple, you know, KC and The Sunshine Band albums in the back of their -- you know. But, the point is these were factions.

I mean, there was always a thing about punks didn't like metal and metal didn't like punk until punk and metal became the same thing. You know, The Clash had a song in 1978 about all the different factions, "Last Gang in Town," about all the different skinheads and Quiffs and whatever all these weird British street cultures were who were literally fighting each other in the streets. Mods and rockers in Quadrophenia. It's like, when was it not fragmented?

Now, I guess the difference is -- I mean, there's still top 40 radio. There's still pop radio. But maybe it's more fragmented now because there's so many other places that you can learn about music. YouTube and social media and Twitter. But I think, if anything, it's a difference of degree. And I don't know that I've ever seen that quantified.

My daughter who's nine loves Selena Gomez. Selena Gomez is a pop star. I mean, is Taylor Swift less of a star than Carol King was or Carly Simon was? I'm not convinced. I mean -- I'm kind of guessing Taylor Swift is a bigger star than Carly Simon was or Carol King was,, meaning she has a wider scope of the audience. Is Selena Gomez less of a star than, I don't know, Donna Summer was? Maybe. Was Donna Summer a bigger star than Britney [Spears] wound up being? I don't know. [Laughs.]

Yeah.

Rock is maybe better. Rock I think became more and more a niche audience, or what actually counts as rock. Still, I don't know, Nickelback and Linkin Park are pretty big. They're not my music. I have no use for 'em. But, you know, they're probably bigger than Black Oak Arkansas ever were. [Laughs.] You know? Maybe not as big as KISS was. I don't know. [Laughs.]

I would think that the demographic likes whatever Puddle of Mudd in high school probably isn't that much different than the demographic that used to like Aerosmith when I was in high school or Mötley Crüe in the '80s. You know? So, anyway. Again, I went off a zillion tangents.

No, no. I think it's good. I think there's a tendency, first off, for people to overstate the importance of the time that we're in and to act like we're such a revelatory species today.

Right.

But I also think there is a degree of so much more awareness of things that it seems like last year was the Dark Ages.

Right. I mean, I can also say in the decade that ended seven years ago, the '00s, I think the biggest selling music stars -- actually, I think this in my book where The Beatles were one of the biggest. But then Eminem, Britney, and Kenny Chesney, Tim McGraw, and Toby Keith. I think country probably has a bigger and wider visibility now than it did in the '70s. I'm guessing. I mean, there are just -- in some ways, the hip-hop stars, people like Kanye and Kendrick, probably have bigger visibility than most, well, definitely rap stars in the '80s but probably most R&B soul stars were. So, I think it's shifted in some ways. But I just -- I guess I don't really entirely buy the fragmentation thing. It's almost like people put the -- they look at the supposed cause, the internet, and they gather an effect from it. I'm just not -- I'd have to see it quantified somehow. It'd be a great piece for somebody to do if you actually could quantify it. I just don't know how you would actually do it.

Right, I agree. And that pre-supposes there's a place that would want to run it. [Laughs.]

Right. Sure.

Well, similarly, to bridge a little bit more 1:1 with videogame industry and culture stuff, I'd be curious to hear you talk about how the ecosystem of readers and labels and critics respond as the internet enabled music criticism to become more diverse?

[Pause.] Oh, I don't know. No. 1, I don't know that it has become more diverse.

Yeah.

I think there were always -- in fact, I think as far as voices, it may have become less. There were always fanzines before there were blogs. As far as how the audience? Again, that's something that -- I'm not even clear who the audience for music criticism is now and I'm kind of glad that I don't have to think about it that much. You know, because that's wherever those clicks are coming from. I mean, I would assume obviously pieces get shared in a way they didn't in the days of paper magazines and newspapers. [Laughs.] So, it wasn't like people were copying my Village Voice articles and Xeroxing around to all their friends and then they were Xerox them onto their friends.

[Laughs.]

Wouldn't it be so cool if they had done that? [Laughs.] In some ways, I'm sure things did spread around more. And obviously people do that with YouTube videos. I don't even know how much -- I mean, critics do it with music criticism. But do fans? "Oh, I just read this great review of the Lana Del Rey album this morning. You should all read it!" Do people actually do that?

I have this theory that fans who like stuff are just really busy listening to it and enjoying it.

Yeah.

[Laughs.]

I mean, YouTube clips get passed around. But do reviews? I'm skeptical. [Laughs.]

Well, I ask because you had told me from a distance you had kept eyes on Gamergate.

Yeah.

I'd be interested to hear what interested you about it? What did you learn following it? Did you see parallels to the music industry and culture?

You know, I don't know that I've ever seen anything that extreme in music criticism as far as the threats. If anything, it almost struck me as this kind of recon mission for what a couple years later wound up being called the alt-right or whatever. You know, these kind of internet trolls. I mean, I wasn't -- and I guess that the "men's movement" was another kind of precursor to the whole Pepe the Frog thing or however you say it in the last year and a half. And so, in some ways, I think it was a precursor to Trump.

But as far as a parallel to music criticism? I mean, in a way I guess I saw it as a more exciting or more contentious debate than I was seeing in music criticism at the time. Although, it seemed a lot uglier. You know, just the reaction to -- and there are probably some parallels to the whole poptimism/rockism thing. But, again, I mean, I'm not sure how familiar you are with that, the idea that we need to pay attention to young music made for teenage girls or whatever. "Oh no, that's phony music!" [Laughs.] You know? "That's not real! They don't use real instruments! They didn't write their own songs!" I could see some parallel to that, that there's this sort of authenticity thing. You know, and in some ways there's some parallel to -- I'm not going to let myself off the hook, here. I grew up in the '80s writing about metal, when critics really ignored it. I mean, I didn't just write about metal. But I was writing about metal and it was one of the ways I initially found a niche when people weren't really paying attention to it. I mean, probably, there are some -- and same with country. I found them kind of, you know, this is in some ways working class, white, and especially male music for working class white males. Again, that's a stereotype, but in a lot of ways, that's who the music was marketed to and that’s who consumed a lot of it. And yet, critics are spending all this time pay attention to, you know, what college kids like or whatever. It's 1988 and nobody's written seriously about Def Leppard.

You know, I never -- and it wasn't just that. There were things like that in freestyle music, Exposé and The Cover Girls, the critics weren't paying attention. It wasn't just white male working-class music. But I can kind of see how that in Gamergate, there's this sort of class paranoia. I mean, I think it's mainly a gender paranoia and a race paranoia. I mean, it's probably mainly gender with Gamergate. But there's this kind of defensiveness that -- although, I don't relate to how the Gamergaters carried it out.

The thing is, metal was always accused of being sexist music, too. There were times in the '80s I wrote defending what people deemed "metal sexism." In fact, it's probably in some of my books. In my metal book, some of the writing goes back that far. So, I guess what I'm saying is that as far as the Gamergaters go, although they struck me as idiots and assholes, I sort of in some ways identify with some of that defensiveness. I used to say back when feminist criticism -- a lot of which I buy. In fact, I walk both sides of this fence.

People who talk about structuralism or reconstructing and stuff like that. I remember I said sometimes, if you go to the amusement park and you go on a roller coaster and you get off the roller coaster and somebody asks you how the roller coaster ride was, you're not going to talk about how the roller coaster depicted women. It's kind of besides the point. And I would make that argument.

But at the same time, I watched The Lego Movie with my daughter last year and it pissed me off that the strongest character in the movie is a girl who the whole thing she's trying to do is get the attention of a guy. I found it really annoying to take my eight-year-old daughter -- and people love this movie. I also found a lot of the movie way too videogame-like.

It just seemed like this kind of sensationalist nonstop action stuff that just struck me as boring and noisy for really pointless reasons, which is how I feel about a lot of action -- I think a lot of movies try to be what I perceive videogames to be.

You're correct. There's chocolate and peanut butter smearing all over both halves. Games really want to be movies. Movies really want to be games. And the end result is we get a lot of shitty games and a lot of shitty movies.

Yeah. So, I guess what I'm saying about Gamergate is I sort of in some ways identify -- at least some peripheral ways. I mean, I have a daughter who's got a gender-studies degree from University of Wisconsin. You know, so, I'm a feminist.

Yeah.

But at the same time, like I said, the old metal thing. I'm a feminist but I'm also -- [Sighs.] I mean, I'm Trump demographic. I'm a 56-year-old white male army veteran from suburban Detroit.

Yeah. Yeah.

I'm the sweet spot there. I'm the guy who they call when they want somebody to write about Kid Rock.

I guess I just found it interesting. And yet, I've never really been on 4chan. I've barely ever been on Reddit.

Yeah.

In some ways I found reading about Gamergate more interesting than -- and it's like, if my eight-year-old daughter is gonna play videogames, I would like them to be games that depict women in a non-gross way. But, I'm also saying that as somebody who really doesn't know what I'm talking about as far as games go.

But I actually find -- from what I've read, and I don't read widely. I think I mentioned that I tried to get through a book about game criticism.

Yeah, that's right. You were telling me about that.

I tried to put it on hold through the library and they never got it in. But if there's reviews of videogames in the Times, I will read them without have any interest at all in playing the games just because I'm kind of interested in how game criticism would work. And it's not -- if it's in The New York Times, it's not going to be "you should buy this because."

Right.

But the thing is, I do the same thing a lot of times with movies or TV shows where -- and honestly, I probably do it with music sometimes, too, where the criticism is almost like an art in itself. It's not like, "Oh, I'm going to read this to find out whether I should buy or play this game or whether I should see this movie." Maybe, with movies or TV shows. Probably very rarely with games. It will make me interested, now and then. Probably most of the TV shows I've liked in the last 15 years, I read a review at some point. I guess I like criticism. It's like a thing in itself.

I would read a book -- I'm not going to say serious criticism, because I hope there's jokes and punchlines in there. But I would read a book of serious, maybe even academic criticism on videogames. I would find that an interesting book. But I don't think I've played a videogame since my grown kids were young in the early '90s and I played The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros. and Tetris.

[Laughs.] Which, were fun. I've just had no interest since then.

Going from there to keeping eyes on Gamergate from a difference. It's interesting because you're checking back in with the culture after it's been however so long.

Sure.

Did you notice there were questions you had that weren't being asked when --

I mean, I'm not sure I delved into it that deeply. I looked at a couple of pieces and I'm like, "This seems kind of fascinating." You know, it pissed me off in some ways. The thing is, just this week I read this Washington Post business article about -- did you see this? The amount of time Americans spend playing videogames and core games has risen 50 percent since 2003? It said it's especially rising among young women and the number of hours per day and which states, which I found really -- woah, I wanted an explanation for that! How come they're so much bigger in cold-weather states and not as big in the South and especially Hawaii? Is it just that people like to go outside more? [Laughs.] I just find that fascinating, I think, from a cultural and almost sociological perspective. I think Gamergate was in some of the same things where it's like, I don't know how much more I want to know but I'll read this over my morning coffee. Or over a beer or something.

You emailed me that your wife had convinced you had some things to say about gaming. Is this --

Oh gosh, that was a couple weeks ago. I mean, she's an artist and a musician and a graphic designer. We were trying to figure out why we're not interested. One of the reasons I said was it's too much like sports to me. [Laughs.]

Yeah.

In the same way that there's things in hip-hop that, like, the whole competition thing. I don't really -- I know, lots of times it's people playing on their own. But I perceive it as being this competition thing. It's like, I don't want more competition. You know? But it's also like I said about movies, just the bombarding with images. It's just like, it's not -- I don't find it relaxing.

What she said was -- and, again, she's someone who's a visual artist. A graphic designer. She's had different bands and stuff like that. She basically said -- she wants to be involved in creating. Or she wants to be consuming the creating. She doesn't something halfway in between, where it's like -- if she's watching a movie or reading a book, it's there for her. You know what I mean? If she's writing a song or creating a piece of art, she's doing it.

Videogames seem like they're there this kind of gray area. And actually, there's -- another tangent. [Sighs.] There's a TV show that I think -- I can't remember if it was going to be on Nickelodeon or one of the, I think, kids' channels that was supposed to start airing in the last couple weeks. Kids would sit with the remote and they would help determine the trajectory of the show by clicking different buttons.

Hmm.

Have you -- I don't know if you've heard about that. It sounds like a show that would work kind of like a game, you know? And I think the idea is kids like having, you know, controlling those things. And, in theory, I guess -- I don't even know. Like, if you were going to ask me, "Could videogames be a movie or art or literature?" I don't even know what those words mean. [Laughs.]

Somebody asked me that last year on Facebook: What literature is there involving balloons? I said "Neunundneunzig Luftballons" by Mena. I don't know why a song can't be literature and I would think that -- I don't really care.

Yeah.

But I would think that it's a creative form that could produce great whatever. [Laughs.] You know? But so is macramé, and I'm not that interested in macramé. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

I think that when we first talked over email, you were going to ask me why I don't play videogames and I'd say it's probably the same reason that I don't play handball or I don't do crochet. It's just a hobby that I don't do. [Laughs.] I don't know that there's a reason. [Laughs.]

Sure. So, my name is Jonathan but I go by Jonny Roadblock online. I live in San Antonio, Texas. I'm originally from Dallas.

I served five years in the U.S. Navy and have been gaming ever since -- wow. The Atari, really. I've been kinda gaming since about three years old, four years old. Kinda grew up with -- my dad had the old TI, Texas Instruments videogame console in the house. I was too young to really play with it then, and then had to have the Atari so I could play Pong and Pac-Man and all those good games. And then my world changed when the Nintendo Entertainment System came out. Ever since then, I've pretty much played videogames as much as possible.

What did you do in the Navy? Did you see combat?

I was a cryptologist and I served in a combat zone. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.] That’s all you can tell me?

That’s all I can tell you. That is simply the nature of being on the tactical side of the intelligence field.

Okay. I have to at least ask. What was your highest rank within the Navy?

When I got out, I was an E5.

And what do you make of this, me reaching out to interview you about your views on videogames?

[Pause.] Well. [Laughs.]

You won't hurt my feelings if you think it's weird or whatever. It's just a good way to throw down the baseline of where we're both at on this.

I think it's nice, kind of understanding our take from the veteran -- and though I'm not active today, 10 years ago I was active and I was still a hardcore videogamer. The media doesn't really pay a lot of attention to us when it comes to that unless we do something stupid or we claim videogames made us go out and do something or some veteran committed suicide because of something that happened in a videogame. They don't ever take a look at the positive outlook and the positive aspects of what videogames do for us. So this is kinda a cool way. When the guys from Operation Supply Drop asked me if I'd be willing to talk to you, I said, "Well, as long as he's not a douche, I'm good."

[Laughs.] I make no promises.

[Laughs.] But I guess, here we are talking, so they must've thought you were a good enough guy to at least put a good perspective on our thoughts and our feelings.

Well, yeah. So, maybe it's an odd place to start, but did videogames at all influence your choice to enlist?

No. Me dropping out of college because I was bored out of my mind was the reason I enlisted. But, my genre of choice is around the more military-style videogames, like first-person shooters. I played a lot of Command & Conquer on the PC when I was growing up. I mean, I have every Command & Conquer videogame ever created. So, military and war-style videogames do definitely appeal to me. I've always been interested in 'em. Maybe in the background it kind of helped, but I think it's more of, "Oh crap, I just dropped out of college. What am I gonna do?" as an influence.

Have you ever played America's Army?

[Laughs.] No. I stayed away from it. In the Navy, I don't play the Army's propaganda recruitment tool.

[Laughs.] Let me take you back, then, because I think the obvious place to start is by asking what you think of military videogames. But, when you weren't out in the field and serving, what non-military videogames were popular with you and the people around you?

Non-military games would have been -- I loved Tiger Woods and Madden back then. Grand Theft Auto.

What did you like about Madden and Tiger Woods?

Well, Tiger Woods is great. I actually hate gold but my dad loves it. My dad was playing Tiger Woods back in the states and I was overseas and I would play it and we would be able to compare scores and he'd be able to tell me how he's doing on his character and I'd be able to say how I'm doing on my character. Even on the videogame side, he did better than me at golf.

But with Madden, I love just getting the guys together and to play and have that electronic camaraderie of playing videogames and just getting us all in the same room, drinking some cold beers, and battling it out. You know, the hometown pride. I was always the Dallas Cowboys and almost everyone else was either some California-based or some New York-, New England-based team. So, that was always fun, just beating each other up electronically. So, that was fun there. But yeah, that's what it was all about. It's just a good way to escape. That was important.

Did you find that different types of stresses in that lifestyle of serving attracted you to different sorts of games?

Maybe. I mean, The simple grotesque violence that was in Grand Theft Auto was awesome because it was so fake that it was fun to play. I mean, that might be an oddball way of saying it, but when it's super-fictional and it's just -- it looks so stupid, that makes it fun. Especially if you're coming from a zone or an area that you're used to seeing the real thing. So, seeing the cartoon version of it as you're jacking a car and rolling around, it gets kinda fun. And, again, it's that whole completely different world and environment and it's just you and your console and your cold beer and you're just having fun and not thinking about real life.

This is broad, but what is your opinion of military or war representation in videogames?

It's gotten a lot better over the years. When I say "better," I mean closer to real life, except for the whole respawning thing, obviously. But recent games have come out, like Rainbow Six: Siege. The game came out just over a year, a year and a half ago now, and it's one of the best -- from a realistic standpoint -- squad-based games. You know, you're working with a team. Me and four friends from all over the country get online and we play. We're calling out what we're seeing, we're givin' orders, we're telling each other where the enemies are. We're kinda spotting everything and that's the closest I've been to a real-life style of videogame. And I think it's gotten better. Call of Duty and -- well, Call of Duty, they've gone way off the deep end with all this space BS that's running on walls and lasers and crap. I mean, it got to the point where I didn't even buy this last installment of the game.

Talkin' about Advanced Warfare?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's so advanced that it's not believable at all. It's -- I don't know. When you hear some of the kids that jump on these games. You know, they're, like, 10. They're already desensitized to this stuff because they're just pulling their trigger on their controller. They don't have a concept of what this could be like if it was real. So, it's hard because being an adult playing a videogame and hearing a 10-year-old trying to talk trash and keep up with us, it's just hard because I have nieces and nephews that are that age. My hope is that they would never see what this would be like in real life.

There is a desensitization. There is that going on in these. I personally believe that some of it's good, but some of it's removing the innocence of our youth from it. But on the flip side of that coin, if they watch FOX News or NBC or CNN, they're seeing just as graphic stuff. If they're watching any primetime show, they're seeing the same graphical situations. People getting shot. The death and destruction of bombing. Things like that. I don't think I can say that word in the airport. Oops!

[Laughs.]

[Laughs.] At the end of the day, though, I think that the videogames is just a game. It's a release. And because of the stresses of real life, it's nice to jump into the videogame world and not think about it.

It's funny you say 10-year-olds because I had a question about the 10-year-olds who play these games. I don't know if you read it, but I sent along to Ray to pass onto you -- I had interviewed one of the writers from a couple of these Call of Duty games and one of the main reasons he quit writing those games is because he said 10-year-olds are playing them. He thought the games are fine, they're not too violent, they don't need to change, but he just [didn't want to be a part of helping 10-year-olds be desensitized to these things](www.nodontdie.com/adam-gascoine" target="_blank).

Well, if he thinks his game is the main contributor to it, I would beg to differ.

What do you think is the main contributor?

TV.

Yeah.

Television.

It all shows up on the same rectangle.

Sure. True. That's very true.

Yeah.

But the difference is mom and dad are sitting in the room with them when they're watching TV and mom and dad are nowhere to be found when they're playing the videogames.

But what do you make of that? That we have 10-year-olds in this country and other countries, too, that play these games and they think that that's what war is really like? I don't know that they always necessarily explore these topics with seriousness or even considering the consequences.

Well, so, I grew up playing shoot-'em-up games.

Yeah. Me too.

I mean, being in war, I don't think I was desensitized.

I know a lot of guys, a lot of friends who if they were desensitized before they left, why is their PTSD so bad today after being out? It's one of those things where every mind is going to accept what they see differently and they're going to deal with it differently. So if parents are buying these games for their kids, I would say that either they know their kids better than they think they do or that we think they do. Or that they don't care because it's a videogame and that's their take on it. "It's just a game," they tell their kids. "It's not real life. It's not real killing. It's gonna be different than what you see on the news."

So, it's not real life, but I think you mentioned you wouldn't want to have your nieces and nephews to have to go to war. I'm curious to hear -- what do you make of the fact that civilian videogame players, they do get burned into their heads gun makes, bullet calibers, etc.? Do you think it's weird that real wars and combat experiences have seeped into our art and entertainment in that way?

It is funny to have some guy that has never joined, never served tell me the specs of my M4 better than I can. And I used to have to field strip and clean the damn thing every night.

[Laughs.]

[Laughs.] So, I mean, he can better explain twist patterns and twist counts on rifling than some of the gunsmiths that I had in Navy. I mean, it is interesting.

Really.

And I think it's good. I honestly think it's good because it puts more of an onus on the real life side of it. Yeah, he saw all this crap on a videogame, but he understands it now and the questions are better than, "Hey, what was it like in this country? What was it like in that country? This ship? That ship?" I mean, it's more like, "Hey, did you have this while you were there and did it actually fire the same way as what they're portraying in the game?" I think the questions are more educated and some of the comments sound a little bit later. But, again, it's coming from an adult. Because I do try to game with people my own age. I'm 34 years old. Wow, I just said that out loud, I'm 34 years old. [Laughs.] Most of my gaming friends are in that 30 to 45-year-old category.

So, yeah, it's weird. But I kinda like the fact that it's more realistic. But I do fear that what is that gonna do in the future when a 10-year-old becomes an 18-, 19-, 20-year-old and wants to go buy one of the real ones and who knows -- I do think that our childrens' minds are not as strong as ours were or our parents' or our grandparents' minds were. And what if there's some kind of mental disability going on and this kid gets a hold of an M4 or an AR-15? He knows all the specs. He knows all the things to -- he knows all the mechanics around how to shoot and now he's going out and pissed off at the world because mom didn't hold him enough or dad didn't show him enough attention growing up and he goes on a rampage?

I mean, I'm not gonna blame the videogame industry for that. But that is a fear. They are -- I mean, when you go through some of these tutorials of these videogames, they're pretty in-depth and some of them are very close to real life when it comes to how to hold and carry your weapon. If you look at videogames today compared to 10 years ago, 15 years ago, they always had the guy with his finger on the trigger. Now it's showing the guys, finger off the trigger, going down range. They're getting more and more lifelike and it's there. You know?

I'm not sure if you were joking about America's Army, but when is a game not just a game and it's actually propaganda?

Well, when the U.S. Army, or any military for that matter, puts out their own videogame that they write in a time when they could not get enough recruits to come in, that is a propaganda tool. I mean, it is what it is.

So, you weren't kidding before.

No, I personally felt that that was a propaganda tool because the U.S. Army was the one who pushed it.

Yeah, I wouldn't disagree.

But I don't blame 'em.

I wouldn't either.

Get the games to get them interested in these things now so you can recruit them. Technology is what's driving our military today. You look at Cyber Command out there. That came out of a videogame. I mean, we talk about these types of things in the Splinter Cell series or the Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell series. They were in Tom Clancy books and Terminator. We look at, "Yeah, they're fictitious." But fiction's based on some form of non-fiction or reality.

But we have CYBERCOM today. We have drones. We have all kinds of unmanned vehicles. We are able to fight wars from Las Vegas, Nevada area and these drones are down in Afghanistan, in Iraq. They're being flown off aircraft carrier decks. Some of them even smaller than that coming off of smaller ships. Some of them are coming out of backpacks and being thrown in the air and they fly.

I mean, these are things that I think were inspired by some of the crazy tech that shows up in videogames. The kids are the ones playing those. They're the ones that are able to control a device on a screen using two joysticks, four firing buttons, and a D-pad. I mean, come on. That's your people. That's who you need to fight the next massive war.

Yeah, I sent you that thing which I'm sure you saw anyway about drones from December in The Guardian. I can't remember if we emailed about it but I'm sure you know the quote from Reagan back in '89? You know what I'm talking about?

[Laughs.] Yeah.

I assumed I wouldn't have to tell you about it. So I guess I should first ask: Why are you laughing? Then I'll ask the question I was gonna ask. [Laughs.]

The '80s were an interesting decade. I mean, if we look, Back to the Future talked about Donald Trump being president. Holy crap.

Oh yeah. I heard that happened.

Yeah, it's nuts.

[Laughs.]

Self-lacing shoes are there. Star Wars, though it was a complete crack-pipe dream, and his advisors going on that crap really good -- but how much of it was fake? How much of it was something that in the making or in the works? I think -- and this is gonna sound like I'm some kinda conspiracy propaganda theorist guy here but I think that the government tests the concept or the idea of things by putting them in the public like putting them in videogames. I mean, we all know that these videogame developers have contacts with the military and will say it even though no one will probably admit it, DARPA, to get concepts or to consult to make sure that they're being as lifelike as possible.

What's it to say that EA or one of these other massive developers -- Red Storm -- didn't get told, "Hey, try this out. What do you think about this? Hey, run with that. See how it does in your game." And market tests the concept by putting in crazy drones or insane night vision and other weird shit. How do we know that they weren't testing them in the late '80s and early '90s?

I don't think it sounds like conspiracy stuff. I had heard that back in the '60s that Gene Roddenberry had a friend who worked or used to work for the DoD and had snuck out or leaked information about some of the technology they were working on and it showed up in Star Trek. And then years and decades later it's turned into stuff like the iPad. I don't know how crazy or conspiracy that sounds to you, but I've heard about this sort of thing -- that relationship between the armed forces and the entertainment world for a long time. When I see these articles, though, or Reagan saying the things about the air force and how all our kids playing videogames are going to be outstanding pilots -- I mean, do you laugh? I know you just did laugh, but is it overstating the relationship between playing games and fighting wars? How actually similar are they? I know you talked about the D-pad and stuff, but --

Well, let me turn this around. Do you remember that movie, Toys with Robin Williams?

Yeah. [Laughs.] I do.

They were talking about drones and they were having the kids play the videogames who didn't know the difference. They were getting points. A hundred points for a civilian. Two-hundred points for someone in the military. A jet blowing up, a tank blowing up. Things like. I mean, what year did that movie come out?

Maybe '95 or '92?

Really? I was thinking in the early '90s, late '80s. Either way, I think it comes down to -- it makes perfect sense. I mean, look at all the flight simulators out there. I mean, these have been going on since computers could actually run them. So, '97, '98's when the really good flight sims came out. I mean, you now have -- you can get a full set of flight controls for your computer and play pretty real life flight simulations that some pilots even admit are better than what they had when they were going through pilot training.

But, like, do we have navy staff planners or their equivalent who have used Command: Modern Air / Naval Operations for both work and play? Does that happen?

I do. I use some of the same tactics that I was taught. When we squad up and we're playing Rainbow Six or we were playing the Ghost Recon open beta this past weekend -- I mean, we're setting up strategies. We teach each other and work with each other on how to stack up and go through a door. And it's a videogame. But it's realistic enough where you could actually play the tactics that are legit stacking tactics. You know, you have one guy breach a door, you toss a flash in, and then you go in start shooting. You already know where your targets are. You're doing the recon, the intelligence gathering. I mean, it is as close to real life combat situation as you can get without donning a uniform and take the note.

I mean, it's legit to the point where some of the tactics work. [Laughs.] I mean, that's what's fun about this. I mean, or, you go out and you'd have to do some paintballing or airsoft to kind of get that same experience. But now, you can be 450 pounds and sitting on your couch or something, doing the same thing that the guys who are out in the field doing the same type of stuff. You have that same feeling, that same notion without having to leave your couch.

Are there aspects of serving that you wish videogames did a better job of portraying? Just, the lifestyle or what it's like being out there?

So, there's a certain romance about what they're showing in the videogames. You're the hardcore spec ops guy. What they don't show is the real soldiers out there. I mean, I'm not saying the SEALs that chase targets are not the real deal. But they're the few. They're not the Marines who are going in and there's 150 of them trying to take a town. You have the thousand-person brigade coming in behind with the Army who have to occupy the land. It just shows the mission: Okay, you have to take this point. Okay, you got it, you held it for X amount of seconds. Okay, you win. [Laughs.] They don't show that one operation could take a year after the initial attack occurs. They don't show the aftermath of it. They don't show having to take Fallujah twice because the team that was occupying it got overran. They don't show those things. They don't show the downtime where people go bonkers 'cause they're bored. They don't show the adrenaline comedown that happens -- they just don't show that.

I think that's one of the big things that people going into the military are kinda shocked when it hits them: "Holy crap, I'm bored out of my mind. What'm I gonna do? I need to go shoot something. I need to go run. I need to go workout. I have to do something." They're always looking for that constant adrenaline rush and that's the part that they're not showing. That's the part that's tough. Because everyone thinks, "Well, when I get old, I want to join the military. I'm gonna be this badass Navy SEAL or this counter-terrorism force." When, in reality, that's, like, 1 percent of what the military does. You know, it's tough looking at it from that standpoint because in real life the folks that don't get hardly any of the love are the 99 percent that go out there and bust their ass everyday. The only people who get all the attention are the SEAL teams or the Deltas -- the scout snipers, the rangers. You know, those guys, the elite of the elite. They don't ever focus on the average Joe that's in the military.

I talked to James Clark at Task & Purpose. He's an editor there. He told me he felt that war videogames are insulting and dehumanizing, that soldiers basically exist as two-dimensional crosshairs.

I could see that. I never thought of it that way. But yeah. Well, think about it. I go to Rainbow Six. I'll tell you, I've played over 700 hours of Rainbow Six. I'm kinda attuned with that kinda gameplay. But I tell you, the premise, while a lot of people I've played with online, they don't understand it -- it's supposed to be training missions. It's "you're a counter-terrorism unit squad and you're training against another counter-terrorism unit squad." But, yeah. I'm not talking about, "Oh, I got him out of the game." No, it's, "Okay, I killed this son of a bitch. I killed that son of a bitch. Okay, headshot! Boom. Done." If you go to my YouTube channel and look at any of my Rainbow Six gameplay -- I mean, that's what I'm calling out. "Okay, this guy's dead. That guy's dead." I'm guilty of it. I mean, my buddies are all guilty of it. That's what we think about it. They are targets for us to kill. So, yeah. I mean -- [Laughs.] As soon as you put it in that light, it makes sense. Two-dimensional targets are the people in the uniform that's not on your team. Yeah.

What do you think these games do a good job of portraying but don't really get much credit for?

[Pause.] Wow. I don't think they do a good job of portraying anything other than entertainment. Because as soon as you respawn, real life no longer exists. You know, you don't take 40 bullets and some guy comes up and injects some magic potion in a needle and you're good to go and your health's back up to 100 percent. That shit don't happen.

I didn't really imagine you crouching behind a lot of boxes out on the field until your health regenerated.

Exactly.

[Laughs.]

Or how a cardboard box will stop a bullet.

Yeah. Also that. But, do you think that's irresponsible that those games don't feel the need to do that?

No. Would you play a game that was closer to real life? You get shot in the head and you're done and you don't regenerate? That'd be a boring game. I mean, the biggest part about videogames is it's entertainment. That's all it is. I think the thing that we have to focus on is making sure people truly understand it's a videogame and entertainment and not real life. And I think the one thing that they're horrible at portraying is the real life aspect of what these teams are. I mean, I understand you want to be politically correct and market to the broadest group of people you can, but you have games that are putting women into the Navy SEALs and women into some of these other special ops groups where there are no women and women will never serve in, probably not in my lifetime, unless they go to the Israeli defense force or they're in one of those groups, where having women in a special operations role is common. But I find it's kind of a slap in the face to put this fictitious female character in that role when it won't happen in today's military because there's women who have tried out for explosive ordinance disposal for the Navy and that's as close as they can get.

And they're just as hardcore as any of the men, but they want to be politically and, "Oh yeah, this woman, she's part of the Navy SEAL team." Eh, no. And then they butch her up pretty good. With tats and big-ass biceps and shit. Yeah. [Laughs.] I mean, don't get me wrong. I enjoyed the shit out of Demi Moore in G.I. Jane. She looked hot. Had a phenomenal body. But, again, we don't want to see our women coming home in body bags and caskets from a war zone. I don't think -- I know for a fact there are some women in, well, when I was in a decade ago, that could lift me. I'm 6'3" and back then when I was 265 pounds, they could pick me. Me. So, it's not a question of, "Can they pull their weight?" It's a public perception. But we're defying actuality by putting these women in a combat situation in a videogame when in real life it doesn't happen that way.

You mentioned earlier you had played Madden and Tiger Woods. I guess this doesn't make as much sense for golf, but do you think the Madden games, do they do a better job of portraying that team aspect that you're talking about these war games falling short on?

No. I think the wargames by far have the best team aspect of the game of any of the videogame genres out there. I think that you can't get around that. In the football games, the hockey games -- I don't think they can compete with the wargames.

What do you think about -- this is broad, but I'm curious what you make of the messages in some of these games. Like, I'll give you an example. I talked to the head of PR for Call of Duty last month. Just to get a sense of what the people who make these games -- do they stand behind the messages in these games? Are these games just excuses for more shooting? What are they?

I mean, does it surprise you to hear that a game company like that doesn't want to talk about the messages in their games or talk about the violence? That they just want to make sure it's positioned as a product for people to buy?

Well, again, it's entertainment, right? Do you think that they have an actual message other than: what if? Maybe that's the message: "What if your next combat soldiers are running on walls and have jetpacks to have some kind of super-jump-boost crap and they're shooting laser weapons?" Maybe that's what their message is. Maybe they're trying to spawn the curiosity of the next generation. Or maybe they're trying to spawn as much profit margin as they can. Either way, they're putting out a product.

Yeah.

It's a consumable product. And they want to market to the largest base of consumers they can, so they keep it interesting or fresh or whatever. EA or was it DICE? With Battlefield 1, they went the complete opposite way. They went to World War I and started in that direction. That blew my mind. It's one of my favorite things. They went that direction and it's frickin' awesome. It's by far my most favorite Battlefield game in the series. Now, a lot of people are gonna hate me for saying that because everyone thinks Battlefield 4 was the most amazing thing since sliced bread. But, I'll tell you, World War I without a bunch of bogus technology that doesn't exist -- they did it right. I can definitely appreciate how they did that because, again, they went the opposite direction of what Call of Duty went. I mean, Call of Duty literally went to space to fight a war.

I think, again, you were talking about messages. I don't think these videogame companies are trying to push a message or an agenda. I think they're trying to push a product. I mean, let's look at -- you've heard the media talk about how videogames are being made to be addictive. Well, maybe they are. Maybe these videogame developers are just drug dealers of a different type of drug.

There's no mission statement behind what they're trying to do. Just to create something that people want to buy. Maybe that's what their goal is. I mean, some of the storylines are really good stories. They could be movies. But, again, they're complete bullshit fiction. That's what's nice about them, is they're fiction. [Laughs.] So, I don't know if that answers that question or not but that's what that all comes down to. If it's not fiction, then we're just watching the news. Right? We have a lot of fake news out there, too, if you listen to the White House.

I've heard about that, too. I think we used to call it lying.

[Laughs.] Well, come on. Politicians don't lie. And neither do videogame developers.

[Laughs.] I forgot. Well, so, what are some of the good stories in some of these videogames? What stands out to you as memorable and good?

Some of them -- I mean, I like games that bring people together. Battlefield, it kinda does, but not really when you have such a massive group of people. Like, 64 people out on the battlefield. It doesn't quite do it. That's why I think I really do like -- again, I keep going back to that game, but Rainbow Six. It is five on five. You feel the pain when you lose someone. If your best defender goes down in the opening seconds of a round, you feel it. You understand, "Wow, this guy is gone. That sucks. Now we have to work harder."

I mean, those are lessons, right? You're only as strong as your weakest link kinda thing? If you have someone go down early and that's your weakest link, now everyone's trying to play their weight differently and having these reformed tactics and play with that. I think that's great because if you don't even look at it from a war situation, if you look at it from a team situation, and your work environment? If someone's out sick, everyone else has to pull that extra weight. So that sucks. I mean, there's no way around that. It really sucks having to do that. So, from that perspective, I think that part of videogame life is nice. But, I do like the concept of, "What if? What if war goes to space? Do you think it looks like it does in Call of Duty?" Reliving some of the World War I in Battlefield 1 has been awesome. It's been fun. I mean, they did history and we can go back to some of the battles they re-enact and look it up in Wikipedia or go back to the history books and look some of this stuff. It's legit. What they talk about is legit. So, it's almost like you play the game and are given a history lesson without even knowing you're getting a history lesson. So, it's kinda fun that way.

I know you mentioned some disdain for Advanced Warfare, but in the last 15 years we've gone from almost all war videogames being about World War II to going to the future and literally space. Do you think that says something about the relationship between the American game-playing public and our military?

Sure. I mean, again, how much has warfare changed over the years? I mean, we can look at it from -- well, we had Vietnam, which was new tactics from World War II. But not really. We had guerrilla tactics, but it's just a different setting. And then you have that lull. A lot of shit went down that no one really talks about between Vietnam and, really, until Bosnia. We had a little conflict in Somalia which spawn a book and a movie called Black Hawk Down. But you have Bosnia and Kosovo. That was was a long ago conflict. The first Desert Storm it lasted, what, 93 minutes? I mean, we look at these things, but then we have Iraq. It's still going on.

Yeah.

We're still occupying there. Afghanistan, we're still occupying there. But if you look at that, the game Command & Conquer: Generals introduces terrorists. We didn't have any conflicts going on around that timeframe that dealt with terrorism. So, I mean, I think the change in what we're looking at -- I think the videogames, to me, was trying to keep up with it.

Yeah, I wasn't sure the politically correct way of asking this. But another thing taking place in these shifts from these games, we've gone from shooting Nazis to, basically, typically, shooting brown people.

[Laughs.] "Brown people."

You know what I'm referring to.

Yeah.

Why do you think that shift occurred?

Because it's acceptable.

Do you think it's desensitizing us?

Well, it's -- if you ask a kid, "Who's the bad guy of America?" what is he gonna tell you? He's gonna tell you an Arab. He's not gonna tell you it's Putin -- it's the European Union or China or Korea. He's gonna tell you it's the Arabs, it's the terrorists. That's what he's gonna tell you. I mean, I'm not saying he's accurate at all. But that's all we talk about.

So, I mean, kinda looking at it, the media, the news outlets, I should say, they're portraying our enemy are these terrorists and the videogames are kinda going along. I think that's our sentiment across our country. I mean, I do think the American population drives significantly the videogame market. It's a global market.

Yeah.

But you have people in Saudi Arabia playing games where they're killing Arabs and terrorists.

Yeah.

And they don't think twice being against their own people, being portrayed as these horrible bad guys that need to be wiped out. So, I think it's mainly we are desensitized from calling out a specific race because it's okay. No one cares. Right? That's what the sentiment is: "Well, we know that Arabs are terrorists and terrorists are bad." Even if we're not gonna say that to our Arab neighbor who we go to dinner parties with. We're not gonna go through all that. But, by God, in a videogame, yeah. I'm gonna kill the tangos. I'm gonna take out these Arabs. Because it's a videogame and no one gets hurt, right?

I mean, that's kinda the way people look at things. "No one gets hurt." I don't know. I think that's the direction our country has gone and our country as a whole has intensified when it comes to calling terrorists terrorists and calling Arabs terrorists.

Do you -- are you familiar at all with civilian videogame culture?

Like, what do you mean?

Basically, just people who hang out on message boards, people on social media, people in comments on articles. Just sort of the conversations they have about videogames, that's all I mean.

Oh, I mean, I have my nephew. He's 20. I have another nephew. He's 16. They both are gamers.

Yeah.

Definitely both civilians. They never served a day in their life.

Right.

So, I do hear them and I do game with them sometimes and they're friends. So, I do hear them talking about it. Honestly, most of my friends did not serve. So, the majority of my friends are civilians.

Do you notice whether they like to talk about different sorts of things with videogames than what you or your friends who have served are interested in?

Yeah. I mean, most of it's around the developer side of it. Like, "Oh, the amazing graphics." Or the soundtracks. Things like that.

Yeah.

But when you're playing a war game or a first-person shooter, it pretty much always goes back to the military side of things. Or the characters. A lot of it's about the characters and how the characters are developed.

You mentioned DARPA before. I interviewed a media theorist two years ago who felt the reason there's so much fighting and arguing on the internet is because it started as a military experiment through it. Do you think there's anything to that notion at all?

People are combative on the internet because people are people. I mean, let's face it. There are people who think their opinion is the best thing out there. No one wants to have a conversation. They just want to spit their own thoughts and feelings and then be done with it. I mean, that's why arguments happen: My opinion is better than your opinion, your opinion is better than this other person's opinion. But no one wants to actually talk and have a discussion to try to have a more positive outlook or a different opinion than they had when they started the conversation. I mean, it's like when my wife and I discuss politics. We don't -- we're not trying to convince people of the rights and wrongs of Trump or Clinton. We're just trying to get people to understand that Johnson was a better candidate. [Laughs.] But it comes across as we are combative in the conversations and I'll tell you, social media makes it a lot easier because I'm a faceless person behind a keyboard. So I can type my own version of propaganda and who cares? Notice, I don't ever give out my full name. That's because I am a corporate professional. If my opinion as the same as a potential employer, that could cause me not to have a better job later on.

So, on my social media, it's never my full name. Even my primary Facebook account, I have generic email accounts just to cover it all up. [Laughs.] Well, there's a reason for that. It's because I like having some form of anonymity to who I am online. I mean, we used to call it privacy or whatever, but let's face it: HR departments scour social media on the people they're about to hire. So, but, yeah. People are just naturally assholes and all of us think our opinions count even though some of them don't. [Laughs.]

What do you think is weird about the way people talk to each other online in general?

I think online, people are more blunt than they are in real life. I warn people that I'm blunt because I try not to have that separation there, that difference.

Yeah.

I've written blogs for a couple years and I'm very blunt in how I put things. I don't want them to meet me in real life and say, "Oh, well, you're a completely different person." So, I'm who I am but I also have the ability to back it all up. You know, if someone comes to me and they have a different opinion, well, we can argue it out. Or if they want to throw down and have a fight about it, then, okay, fine, let's do it.

[Laughs.] But how often has that happened? How often have you actually had to throw down with someone off the internet?

Luckily, never.

Has that ever happened?

Never.

Yeah. Yeah.

But I don't go into conversations looking to piss people off. I look at it -- if you ask me my opinion on something, you're prepared for whatever that answer might be. I think people on the internet, like Facebook -- I think they take it too seriously and they put too much stock into what people are saying on Facebook. It's not really the person that you're used to talking to on the phone. It's not the person you go and have Starbucks with every morning. It's their online persona. It gives them an outlet to be who they want to be in a non-conformist type of way.

Do videogames help you relax?

[Laughs.] Yes and no. Yes, in the fact that it takes me out of my world. No, because I get pissed off or stressed out when I don't do well. I'm extremely competitive. So, I actually had to take a break from Rainbow Six because my squad was not doing as well as I wanted them to do, so I was getting more and more pissed off at the game. I was like, "Wait a second. This is my want, my desire for my team to be better. It's not their fault that they're not meeting up to my expectations."

So, I had to take a break. [Laughs.] I started playing other videogames that I don't care about. The Division is one of the games where I didn't care about what my score was. I wasn't playing in a situation where it mattered. In Rainbow Six, putting things out on the internet, videos of my gameplay and things like that, if you're sucking, no one's gonna wanna watch. And so, yeah, my extreme competitiveness -- I sit in the complete opposite end of the house to do my videogaming and I can shut my door and my wife still asks me to soundproof the room as much as possible because I get into it. She's shocked that I have friends who listen. I mean, these are headphones that we're all yelling into and talking trash to each other in. I get loud. [Laughs.] So, some games are great stress relievers. But I think other games where it's uber-competitive, it shifts your stress.

Having a bad session on my Rainbow Six, it's a lot easier for me to let go of that stress at the end of the day. I just turn off my system, go take some vape puffs or whatever, and call it a day. Hang out with my wife. It's easier to get rid of that stress than real-life stress. So, I think it's a good conversion tool.

You said that videogames are just products. What annoys you or what do you think is dumb about the way videogames are marketed?

[Laughs.] The Comic-Cons where they go and get these buffed-up dudes and gorgeous, completely fake female models and they put them up in the uniforms and glamorize warfare by having these guys who have probably never seen warfare. The only kind of uniform they've worn is for a cosplay event. They over-glamorize what it is. Or, the biggest thing I hate is the complete and utter garbage that they show as the advertisement of the game. Mobile Strike with Arnold Schwarzenegger? That game is nothing like what they say. It's a boring, garbage game that's they just reskinned another game. So, things like that annoy me. Where they just go and reskin their own previous game and call it something new. They put it in a new setting. They may go from Eastern Europe to the Middle East and that's a new setting of the game. And then they'll change the character names but it's the exact same game. So, it's like, they're not coming up with anything new. Of course, I complain about the space operations from Advanced Warfare or whatever, but I'll say they're trying to be new. They're trying to innovate. Though I bitch about it, I can appreciate that piece of it.

It's a rare videogame where you can shoot robots.

[Laughs.] Exactly.

What do you think videogames have accomplished?

They have created multi-billion dollar industries. That's what they've accomplished.

But they've also created a ton of hours of entertainment. And they've created a social setting for people who may not be all that social. I know some folks that are extremely closed off, introverted, if you will, that the only socializing that they actually do is online playing videogames. And I think if it wasn't for videogames and that aspect, I think you'd see more suicides out there. Especially, unfortunately, but especially out of the veteran community. A lot of us connect online and even though the people we're gaming with have no clue they're doing it, but they're saving lives because they're talking to these guys and girls. They're providing an outlet. Some of it -- they're giving purpose to these guys. It sounds crazy that a videogame does it, but the videogame is the catalyst for it.

My name's Rosie Pringle. I am 26, turning 27 pretty soon. I'm in Brooklyn, New York, been here for almost nine years. I'm a user experience design consultant. I run my own user experience consultancy in New York. I generally work in fashion, art, and lifestyle clients, so I'm usually coming at it from that perspective. And I help them with tech expertise and research. So that's where I am now. And I used to work in branding and advertising at a media company, so I have a little bit of that perspective as well.

I really first got into gaming because my mom bought a copy of Ultima Online when I was about nine. So, we all played that together. So, I've been playing games a lot of my life with my family and close friends. My mother also taught me how to code when I 11, so that kind of introduced me into the tech world from a very early age. I remember coding Sailor Moon fansites back when the internet was just getting going on AOL. So, that's kind of where that all started. And yeah, I mean, I come from a really nerdy family.

[Laughs.]

So we're all in this together. [Laughs.]

I think this is a thing that you can claim that not everyone can brag: You said your grandmas, they both still play videogames?

Yeah, my dad's mother is more of a Wii Fit type, not necessarily a “hardcore gamer” as some would say. But my maternal grandmother, she played Ultima Online, she played World of Warcraft, she still plays Guild Wars 2 with her sister, who just turned 80. They live in two different states and that's how they keep in touch. And they have a whole guild of very elderly MMO gamers who play different games with them. So they're still very much involved -- probably more involved in the gaming community than I am right now.

I wasn't expecting to start here but it could be a good way to give context for you and why I'm talking to you, which was [this Medium post](https://medium.com/@mostlyoriginal/that-s-it-folks-we-solved-everything-pack-it-up-and-take-it-home-product-design-is-over-7555496a1aa6" target="_blank). You wrote that earlier this year?

Yeah. I started getting into it this year.

I guess it’s weird for me to sum up your piece for you, but --

It's all good. [Laughs.]

No, I mean, I'm going to kick it to you in a second, and just queue you up by saying it was a little bit sarcastic. [Laughs.] Is that right?

Yeah.

Can you talk a little bit about that? I think from there that'll take us to a good place to start exploring.

This is the one, the World of Warcraft Twitter harassment that I linked to you? I've written a couple Medium posts.

It’s the one about how "it's solved, it's all been solved."

Oh, right! Yeah. So basically, in the design community, especially since these design social networks and gallery sites have come about, there's been a lot of interchange of ideas and what they call design patterns. Basically like, "Here's the best way to design a website. This is the best way to do it, do it this way. And just make it the most beautiful you can." Which isn't necessarily -- it doesn't line up with what my idea of design is, which is solving problems and making things easier to understand.

So when I see people posting -- I guess there's a tension between creating design patterns that everyone understands, like, for example, making a door handle that everybody understands they need to pull to open the door rather than push. Standardizing design patterns is a good thing, but there's a point where it reaches this homogeneity, I guess you could say. A lot of the people coming into the design community fall into this complacency of, "Oh, everything's solved. Everything's good. We've perfected everything. That's why everything looks the same, so don't criticize it. It's already perfect." Which I completely disagree with, because there's a lot of problems that still need to be solved.

For me it's like, “How dare you say that? Just because the drop-shadow on this button has stayed the same and styles have stayed the same for what, like three years? How dare you say that design is over, done, and we should pack up and leave.”

It's interesting because I did another interview with this woman who used to work in the game industry and now works at a tech start-up. She was talking about how it really feels like in videogames, [there’s this sense that they’re trying to “solve genres.”](https://nodontdie.com/adrienne-hunter/" target="_blank)

Yes. I would agree with that.

And so, I mean, this was sort of when I first reached out to you. Could you talk a little bit about what you see as familiar problems or patterns of thought that seem to be the same in videogames and in tech and design?

Yeah. I can definitely see it while I'm playing games when that line of thinking has been applied. Usually what happens is I think one game, or one website, or one place does it really well and then everyone's passing it around like, “Oh my God, look at this.” Like, “Look at that, this tutorial in this game, how they introduce you to the story is amazing.”

And then, you know, that reverberates as a trend throughout other games. Or, “Look at how they styled this web page.” That reverberates, everyone copies it. And it kind of circumvents a lot of the hard thinking and research that most people do when they're designing because you kind of have a template to go off of, and it saves a lot of brainpower.

But you do get kind of stuck. For a while those Ubisoft games -- I don't know if I said that right. [Laughs.]

I don't either. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.] Tomb Raider, and, I'm trying to remember. Maybe it’s not Ubisoft.

Assassin's Creed?

Right! They all had these intros that were all the same. It's kind of like those interactive storybooks where it's just "click to continue." "Click to continue." And it's frustrating. It's not a normal game pattern. It was lazy design thinking, basically. And whenever I play or watch a game and see that, I get frustrated. I know that they weren't really thinking when they designed that. If they were just cramming more stuff in there.

[Laughs.]

You even see it with a lot of game mechanics, like this whole choice-and-consequence game trend that you see with Dragon Age and The Witcher and Mass Effect. And I love those games, but then you see people get angry when you see people expect a game pattern like that -- like in [Mass Effect 3 in the ending](https://nodontdie.com/greg-zeschuk/" target="_blank)? They expected it like, “Oh, all these choices I've been making throughout these three games and this 80 hours I've invested in this story, or more, and then at the end, I get to choose my ending? It should have been chosen for me.” Like, they're angry that they're given a choice, because they feel like all their work and effort is for nothing.

I think what people forget -- I think when we use those words like “choice,” we kind of forget it's kind of the same as choice in a grocery store. Most of the choices have been made for you. And you can leave, but you're only going to leave with the things that they wanted you to pick from.

Oh yeah. That's design, definitely. Through and through.

You said something you wanted to see be challenged a bit, you called it "the mindless defense of innovation in tech." This'll be weird but I'll read part of your email back to you.

You said, "People value the newly designed system and novelty over actual functionality and usefulness. You're all about experimentation and improvement, but so much of the industry is just re-inventing the wheel. Certain people will throw millions of dollars at it like it's a ballsier version of Vegas, and it's disappointing to see this become the playground of the rich. But maybe it's always been that way."

So my question to you is: Does it seem like we've just actually gotten worse at identifying innovation and actually asking for it, both as workers and as an audience?

Yeah, I think so.

You think we've actually gotten worse at it?

Yeah. I think it's easier to fool people into thinking something is innovative. There have been templates that have been made both in gaming and design and tech and things like that. Like in tech, you always hear about, "Oh, this is the Uber for blank. This is the Uber for dog-walking.” And you know what they mean, that this is an on-demand service.

But honestly, we're at the point where we're pretty comfortable with on-demand service technology. It's going to get better, sure, but at this point it's kind of stagnated in terms of real innovation. We need to zoom out a little bit more in terms of looking at bigger patterns. There's not a lot of people who are really willing to do that. And in tech, at least, it's this kind of wooing of investors with beautiful pitch decks -- which I've helped companies put together, and they're all full of shit. Like, "We're going to get a hundred-million people to buy this, and it'll be amazing, and it'll make billions." And none of this is true, or based in any kind of fact or research.

It's like we can't even be innovative about imagining what success looks like.

Yes. I think so, too. As an interaction designer, sitting in the hospital and seeing people use the technology there, I was with someone with epilepsy and they had a seizure. Watching the nurse try and enter his signs into a pad, and she just gives up and picks up a napkin. Part of me is upset because someone is having a seizure next to me, but the other part of me -- the design part of me -- is looking at that and saying, "This is really shit design. This is where we need some innovation.

My mom works in medical tech, too, so I think about this, too. Like a call button in a hospital. You just have a pad with one button on it that says, "Bring someone to me." There's no level of urgency, whether it's "I want more apple juice!" or "I'm --"

-- "having chest pains."

Right. Exactly. Something like that. And that's because there's a really physical process for working with medical tech. There's all kinds of regulations and things like that, but it just seems too difficult to try and break into that system and innovate. So most people will say, “No, it's just easier to make Uber for dog-walkers.” Even though that problem is not really necessarily urgent.

Yeah. Do you know what E3 is?

The conference, right?

Yeah, the conference. So, many years ago, I used to write or help write the show daily, which is like the catalog/newspaper that's rolled out daily for attendees and retailers and media to sort of just see what's been announced, what's coming out, without having to exhaustively hit everything on the floor themselves. We would do the headlines on the conference in short stories. Sort of -- what's sort of the new thing people are trying to showcase.

We were actually instructed in-house by one of the sponsoring companies that pays for the actual thing to be there: "When in doubt for an adjective to use, use innovative."

Yeah!

[Laughs.]

I mean, I used to work at a branding firm, and it was like "innovative, streamlined." It was an old-school branding firm, one that was 30 years old, and they were all aflutter because they had just discovered the term "disruptive," and it was all about disruption! You have no idea what these words actually mean.

Yeah. You had said something games and tech have in common, I'll quote something again, you said: "They both have a real desire to be taken seriously, and to be seen as forms of art, or positive drivers in society. But they are very resistant to critique." Do you see that as a pretty 1:1 thing from games and tech and design, or do they seem to resist in different ways?

I think it manifests in different ways, but I think it's the same root cause. One thing that I'm very grateful about with going to art school, was really learning how to give and receive critique. It's a skill, and it's a skill that not a lot of people have. How to understand when something is a good critique, versus a bad critique. When something is constructive, versus, you know, destructive I guess. Most people don't know how to give it correctly, and most people don't know how to receive it.

People in both tech and games get defensive when they receive it. They're just not open to any kind of commentary on it. And I think part of that, at least for games, is because it's still such a new medium. There's no real central authority on games. There's Metacritic, I guess, but unless I'm missing something, to my knowledge, there's no established organizations that are dedicated to the central authority of game validation. Does that make sense?

Yeah. And I feel like something like Metacritic is even kind of an inside baseball name to drop. But I don't know, because so many people around me would know it. That's the problem, too. I mean, when you're so familiar with the subculture, it gets really difficult to suss out, is there a thing that's outward facing? I don't think there is.

No, I don't think so. And people get upset, especially with Gamergate, when there's some critique that isn't, you know -- if you are talking about it, about ethics in gaming journalism, from that perspective, as valid as that may or may not be, I think that's coming from a place because there is no authority. If someone, a journalist on Kotaku writes this or that, and there isn't that perceived authority, but they're writing a critique that people disagree with, there's no framework to -- I don't know where I'm going with this. But they just don't have any structure to it.

Well, I think part of the problem too is, at least in the case of videogames -- there are some voices clearly voices. Talking to a writer colleague of mine, also out on the East Coast this morning, he was talking about how it's almost a miracle we even know about videogames, because the companies don't want to talk about anything else other than their marketing.

But it's almost like we're not supposed to know about them, were it not for the fact that so much money is being thrown only in that. I don't really want to dwell on Gamergate, but there was that thing where Intel wound up becoming the market-leader as far as trying to seem progressive or help, you know, it's sort of built on a flimsy premise of building up scholarships and assuming that the school system works, and this that and the other. But that's an example of how those voices are just missing. There could be a central place that's more public-facing, but I don't think the game industry is interested in that.

Yeah. And the idea that Intel is some kind of authority, even if they sponsor things, if you think about it from a different medium -- that would be like movie camera manufacturers being the authority on film. It doesn't really make sense to me.

[Laughs.] Well Intel, too, they got shamed into doing it, because I think they misunderstood some of the nuance of the politics around this stuff. Which, how could you blame them, but on the other hand, they should have maybe been listening to the people.

But you were saying too, though, there's just a lack of education for how to even think critically in tech spaces. Which is really, you know, you said a basic philosophy class could handle most of these problems. I haven’t worked at a tech company, so, when you’re on the ground, working in places or in meetings, what does that lack actually look like? That they don't understand how to take critique when it's coming from a well-intentioned, safe dynamic?

One example is this Lambda conference. I don't know if you've been keeping up to date on that at all, or if that's just an inside tech community thing?

I've been keeping eyes on it, but probably for people who aren't familiar it won't hurt to explain a little bit.

Sure. And I might be getting some things wrong. I'm not really the biggest conference-goer because they aren't really very valuable to me in what I do, but as I understand it, as a functional programming conference, one of the speakers has written some things that people would consider to be white supremacist. And a lot of people were pretty upset that this guy was getting a platform. And it came down to a debate of whether or not -- the organizers were talking about, "He's not going to be talking about white supremacy while he's up there," but you're literally giving someone who believes this a platform, and you're helping their career. So is that or is that not an endorsement of his beliefs? And that was kind of the debate.

The conference received money from white supremacy groups to support them in their decision to keep this guy as a speaker. There was backlash, there's a petition signed by a lot of people who I guess you would call social justice-oriented people, including Alison Bechdel. Another group of people, I guess you would say Gamergaters or alternative right-wing people, created a Wikipedia where they were going to host all this identifying information of everybody that signed this petition to remove this guy from the conference. And the whole point of this Wikipedia, or this Wiki, rather was to collect information on these people and prevent them from finding employment in the future. Which is more threatening than it does seem because I do think there is a scarcity of work these days as automation kind of rolls forward.

So, it was just this huge culture war. I don't know if it's a huge culture war, but there is a culture war. What was really interesting to me -- the organizers of the conference then posted a huge, long blog post, with diagrams, explaining why, I forget exactly what it was, but [how being offended works, what is oppression, what is inclusion, what isn't inclusion](http://degoes.net/articles/lambdaconf-conclusion" target="_blank), and it was done from a functional programmer's mindset, who hasn't studied any kind of philosophy. And it was painfully obvious.

So even that basic level -- it's interesting because programmers and tech people think of themselves as very logical, they work with logic. You make statements based on logic: if this, then that happens. Things like that. So they think of themselves as very empirical. But ancient Greek philosophers talked about this kind of logic and all this kind of stuff thousands of years ago. And these guys are trying to reinvent that -- not necessarily in the most logical way.

I mean, are you talking about -- is this the sort of talk you see where it's like people forgetting, yeah, okay, everything is made of systems, but these systems are made of people in them? People who may think and feel differently -- that doesn't necessarily make them wrong, or make them not people?

Exactly. There's definitely this denial of humanity and this kind of almost reverence of technology that I think is kind of weird to me. My profession, I'm a user experience designer. So my job is to really think about things from the perspective of people who use a product. Whether or not that's customers, whether or not that's employees using systems, things like that. That's kind of always been my interest, and the fact that you can deny that people are involved in this and deny them their community is bizarre. I think technology should be in service to people and not vice versa.

When it comes to tech and games, do you think -- because obviously part of the voices that are missing is that coming from more people, and it coming to a point where companies decide that they need to address it. I mean, do you think something that's not really poked at enough is something about how you can't really conflate perks with a happier life?

[Laughs.] Yeah, of course. I've always had a problem with that. Some of the best jobs I had were in the most dismal offices.

Do you think that's intentional, or is it just a coincidence?

I don't know. I don't know if I put myself there as a reaction, but I'm always suspicious if I walk into a job and it's like, "There's a free breakfast chef!" I mean, I worked in one agency where they literally would buy you a hotel across the street so you wouldn't have to go home at night. I lived 20 minutes away, by the way. It wasn't really like I lived that far away. And the fact that you need that extra 40 minutes, maybe an extra hour with me taking a shower or whatever, it's ridiculous. There's a problem with your company and the way you guys work in terms of efficiency if you need that extra hour and a half.

My impression from people who work in Silicon Valley is that those perks are there so that you practically live there. Is that fair to glean?

Yes. Yeah! And there's places where there's bunks built in, chefs, all kinds of things like that. And that's kind of a return to worker dorms that were owned a hundred years ago in the Industrial Revolution. It wasn't really a time that was known for being great for workers’ rights.

Right. There's this weird thing where -- maybe it was the 18th century or the 19th century? We're sort of ignoring the lessons from that time. You talk about Greek philosophers, who we're also ignoring.

But, you know, regulation might be a thing to embrace. You see stuff with Uber. Charter schools embezzling. I’m never quite sure if it’s just by proxy of me and this project and the beacons I’ve put down, causing people to tell me about certain things. But you’re in a different circle. Do you feel like you hear about this type of stuff all the time too?

I mean, I'm looking for it, so I do hear about it. But I'm not necessarily sure that people just coming out of school or people who kind of buy into the ideology of Silicon Valley are hearing about it. People who buy into that "innovation is great" and "we really take care of our workers." I grew up in Florida. I was right around Disney. Well, I was in Tampa, which is a little further away, but Disney was definitely a force to be reckoned with in Florida. Walt Disney was kind of this benevolent CEO who took care of his workers as his family like they're all his creative minions.

Like, he would always take care of them, they would always be taken care of. They'll have a place to live, and a place to work, and everything's gonna be good. And then he died. And Michael Eisner took over. And there is no union, there's no nothing. You arrive to be exploited, and there's not always going to be a benevolent person as the CEO if you don't have those protections in place. So that always kind of stuck with me.

The other thing too is, I don't do my job best unless I have a multitude of influences, and I can sort of soak in what's going on in the world. To have a connection to humanity, whether it's going to movies or parties or shows. Things like that. Any kind of cultural thing, I want to be part of that. And if I'm not granted the time to be able to go do that, for me, it alienates me from everyone else. And that scares me: If there's people designing our future who are cut off from humanity like that, and are just insulated within a bubble of sleeping at work, eating at work, all you friends are who you work with. All of a sudden, the rest of the world seems very far away.

For example, in Silicon Valley and in San Francisco, there's a social network called Nextdoor. You could call it Facebook but for your neighborhood. And it's really the people who live there. I studied it a lot, because I worked at a local news organization, and our investor was interested in making a neighborhood social network, so I was taking a look at Nextdoor and Every Block and other local-based social networks like that. Well, the Nextdoor in my neighborhood? There's some tension because I live in a gentrifying neighborhood, so there's a lot of dialogue back and forth between gentrifiers like me and long-term, west Indian immigrants who have lived here for a few generations. But there is a dialogue, and people do talk, and it's good to watch that. But in some places like San Francisco, Nextdoor is completely populated by tech workers. And they're using it more as a neighborhood watch: "There's a suspicious character around my corner, I'm gonna call the cops on them." I'll have to look this up, but I think one person was recently killed in relation to this. This total insulation, I don't know how you can design great products for humanity if you're insulated like that. It's just not possible.

And yet! I don't know if this is too personal a question to ask, but this something I did want to ask about. You're based in New York. Did you intentionally steer clear of the West Coast for any particular reasons? And if so, beyond just the financial cost? I mean, New York is not cheap either.

Beyond the personal reasons of friends being here and I just love New York, I've gotten job offers that had relocation assistance to San Francisco and I mean, I've never been interested in working in a primarily male-dominated office environment. And some people would probably be upset at me for saying that, but it definitely stifles what you're able to do and what you're able to say. To not really have that freedom, and to be in a culture that's so, so much about that -- it's just not up my alley. For example, we were talking about good critique and bad critique. If you're in a room of people who don't understand how to critique, and how to receive critique, and to top that off you look different -- not that I look super-different. I'm still a white woman, but I am a woman. And there's a whole slew of issues, people who aren't used to working with women. You can't have a real creative environment where there's real critique going on and it's constructive and it's pushing things forward. It becomes more defensive, and it's just not a great environment to work in. I've worked in it before. I didn't really see it being very different in Silicon Valley, and from what I've been reading and seeing and hearing, it isn't.

Yeah. I'm sure you're familiar with the show, Silicon Valley.

Yeah.

I don't know if you know this, but the writers of this show, they go and they visit companies for research. One of the former Twitter executives advises on the show. What's interesting is from what I hear, from people at those companies, no one ever thinks it's about them. That show, I don't know why they think they're going to visit and see how ridiculous the companies are.

But what do you think is not being said about these dynamics you're talking about? Is that just part of our design as human beings, we think, "I'm not the one that's being racist and sexist, that's someone else! There's no way I can be that bad."

Yeah. People are really uncomfortable with that. It's really funny that you bring up that show, because I was thinking about it earlier. I really liked Mike Judge's quote. I think he said: "The people who work there are ashamed of their greed." Which I think definitely plays into the whole, "We're making the world a better place! This is innovation!" all that rhetoric.

He said they are ashamed?

They are ashamed. Which I think definitely is pervasive in all of the things you see coming out of there. There's a huge denial of that. The other thing that's interesting about Silicon Valley -- I was watching it with a friend of mine who is another nerd. We played games all the time together. But she's a black woman, and we were watching it, and I felt a little bit uncomfortable watching it because there's not that many female characters on it. They had a really good female developer last season, but she left. And it was still only one.

But it was different watching with her, because we watched a few episodes, and the only black woman that showed up was a stripper. And she was -- my friend was super-uncomfortable. And we stopped watching it after that. She didn't say anything about it. But you can tell. And I felt really bad, because I didn't even think about that. There was another level to it that I wasn't even aware of.

It's like that for Mad Men. I had a friend who got upset about that. I’m not commenting on the comment or mocking it, which I’m just clarifying for the transcript, but they were really upset and saying, “Why are there no Chinese people in Mad Men?” I’m not sure these types of things can always be addressed all the time in all art, but I get where they’re coming from. And it does require more effort, more open-mindedness, and all sorts of things people know they could be doing better on.

But when do you think these types of critiques -- when do you think those are fair? Are they ever unfair to make? Obviously, with Silicon Valley, I don’t know what the statistic is, but I think I saw yesterday that 15 percent of tech company roles are women. So it’s like, well, it is representing reality, but sometimes it’s like, how is that reality ever going to change, then?

That's true. There is something to be said for showing an example that people can identify with. That's part of making culture, pushing it forward. But then there is also the part where you're depicting what's actually going on. But I don't think Silicon Valley -- it's a comedy show. So they're trying to keep it light-hearted and funny. And the experience of working as a woman in tech is not funny. [Laughs.] It's really, really horrible in some instances.

There was a study really recently called ["Elephant in the Valley,"](https://www.elephantinthevalley.com/" target="_blank) where it said something like 60 percent of women who work in tech are sexually harassed. I forget the numbers too, but a majority of them are both told they're being too aggressive and not aggressive enough. These ridiculous contradictions. And the reality of working as a woman in tech is that you have to work twice as hard. And if you're any kind of person of color in tech, it's the same. Or more. If you're a woman of color in tech, I'm sure it's exponential. Just to get the same kind of respect and the same platforms.

Is your perception the problems women are facing in game development any different than women in the rest of tech?

I'm sure there's some differences, but the culture has sort of developed to this point where it doesn't seem very welcoming.

And I feel, too, that a lot of the confessions and the attempts by the industry -- it does feel like they're sort of insincere.

Right. I think it kind of leaves a lot of ground uncovered. I mentioned earlier, I've never seen a game where anybody could get pregnant for any reason at all. That's -- I think that would be interesting. Maybe that would upset a lot of people but, it would definitely make it kind of like a God mode.

“How dare this videogame have a relatable life event?”

[Laughs.] Everything else ever happens, but things like that will never ever happen, it seems like.

It's interesting. That's true. I did want to ask, it's interesting the way that it's gendered -- it's really broad to call it the tech industry but I think you know what I mean. In games, designer is statistically typically a male job, but in tech it seems to be female even though it's the exact -- well, it's the same skillset. Why do you think that that has wound up being gendered differently?

There's been a lot of studies and research done into why that has happened. And a lot of it comes back to the advertising industry and culture that was made in the ‘80s. There are studies showing there are just as many women going into computer science in the ‘50s and ‘60s and before that. And then over time, tech and computer science and programming somehow became a male-oriented field. Revenge of the Nerds came out, dads were buying their sons computers and letting them program. When it came to dads or moms buying their girls that kind of stuff, it just didn't happen. So, by the time computer science majors got to college, all of the young men in the class already had a basic 101 knowledge of things, and all of the women in the class kind of had to play catch-up. So there was kind of this culture made where women felt they weren't as good, just because they had started a couple steps behind. A lot of women dropped out of computer science majors, and it just keeps reverberating up the whole ladder.

And there's also this perception of creative thought being more of a woman's domain, at least, I don't know if that's true across all media, but definitely when I went to art school it was about 75 percent women. Made dating in college very hard.

[Laughs.]

As a straight woman.

I was going to say, yeah. Depending on your orientation.

Yeah. But it seems there's culturally this idea that being creative is somehow female and being analytical is male. Which is very weird to me.

I don't know when UX started to become -- I don't know if people consider it to be a buzzword, but I certainly feel like I've heard more about it in the last 10, 15 years. Or, well, just heard the term if nothing more.

But my perception is that that is seen as a more feminine disciple? And I don't know if that's just because it has empathetic thinking, and that engineering is more "masculine." Why do you think that is? Obviously that's not necessarily inherently true, but is that sort of the expectation and perception?

Yeah. I would say so. I'm not sure if it was always that way, I don't know what the field looked like 30 years ago. It was called more "human-computer interaction" back then. And certainly a lot of the texts written about it were from men, from that era. But I think, for me at least, it's the way to stay within the tech world without necessarily having to participate in some of the toxic tech culture that's inherent in engineering teams. I mean, I still program as a UX person, which for me, it's a broad enough term it can cover most of the things I have expertise in doing. But for people who are hardcore user experience researchers, I think it definitely does relate to that human element and being able to talk to humans.

I saw one person who wrote about that as, like, offsetting your emotional labor on someone but calling it user experience, which both upset me and resonated with me. So maybe that's at play. I couldn't really say for sure.

How do you feel your upbringing, and maybe even feel free to include your mom in this a little bit -- how you feel like your upbringing influenced the way that you approach that type of work? Do you have any specific events or examples of memories that correlate?

Oh yeah. Maybe I'll just start with a whole brief history: My mom worked in Sears, and she worked in the hardware department. Then they started adding computers, and she started going to people's houses to set up computers, and help them understand the technology. This was back in the early ‘90s. As the internet came out, she was very interested, and started programming for the web. Got a job as a software engineer at Sprint in the late ‘90s. She was laid off for not being a cultural fit as a slightly older, lesbian woman. It was completely remote -- everybody worked remote. But she was the only one that wasn't a white male, a straight man.

And then we were on welfare because of that, so that definitely was a formative part of my life, knowing that this tech world isn't necessarily equal. And then I decided to go into it, I guess.

That's okay, I have a similar story.

[Laughs.]

I understand that. Where you've been shown all of the evidence to not go down that path, but it's just not the way life happens.

Right. Part of it was I had a lot of fun growing up and messing around with coding websites and making different experiences. Back when the web was a little bit more crazy. There's Flash everywhere and bizarre artistic expression. Not necessarily the greatest user experience, but people were kind of experimenting and finding out what works and what doesn't. And I liked being part of that.

Then, as I was graduating high school: “You know what? I should probably learn how this stuff works beyond just messing around.” So, I went to school for that. It was bizarre because while I was in school and when I was getting started in the tech industry, I kind of forgot what had happened to my mother. And she got laid off again, from a different place, for not being a cultural fit -- after making her way up to being a director. That really angered me, and I started paying more attention to what was going on.

And then I had another incident, where I was harassed. That was my third wake-up call that --

That these are not isolated events?

No. And the person who did it to me had already done it to at least four or five other women that were known. The fact that this guy wasn't even that great at coding, either -- I was like, “Why was this even a thing?” So that's when I started looking around, and finding the same kinds of stories. I'm glad people are talking about it more now, but it's bizarre that it's been going for so long.

I mean, I guess it's hard to simplify, but do you somehow make them feel threatened? Or what is it?

Yes. That's what it is exactly. This person in particular, he was the CTO, and he kind of tried different kinds of intimidation on everybody. And he kind of found what worked with everybody, in terms of getting them to do what he preferred. And I'm kind of obstinate and anti-authoritarian, and he had tried a couple different things on me, and nothing really worked. And that was the next tool in his toolbox.

This was the CTO?

Yes.

Wow.

They got rid of him, which is good, and my story is happier than a lot of stories. But he became CTO somewhere else, so, that's not too great. And it upset me that it had happened with several women before me, and nothing had happened. And they had to work with this guy for years before something happened. That upsets me more than what actually happened to me. The fact that there was no repercussions for them until I happened to come along.

How have your relationships with even "very well-intentioned" male co-workers changed as you've gotten more experience, and perhaps gotten more independent and opinionated?

I always try and start from a place of empathy. That's my job, and that's also kind of my nature. Which makes me kind of decent at my job. [Laughs.]

Are you being humble there?

Well, I've had a lot of time beating myself up, so I'm done with that. I always try and start to understand where they're coming from, what their perspective is. I apply the same framework: what their background is, what they may or may not have encountered. So I always try and start with that in mind. I'm pretty forgiving when it comes to working with men in tech. But there are things that can be done -- like if you see something happening, and you're on the sidelines, and you walk away or you say nothing? That's a problem to me. You might need to be educated on what you can do. And I understand how it might be awkward, but people, and men in particular, need to get over that. I'm so grateful that I worked at a place where I told one of my co-workers what happened, and he was like, "You should do something about that." I was still in shock, but his support helped me a lot to understand what happened to me was not okay. And the fact that he supported me and my boss supported me was great, and the fact that they were on my side was great. It's as they say in The Witcher, there's no such thing as neutrality. You can't stand on a sideline and watch what's going on, in my opinion, and be innocent.

In tech, it seems like people love to mentor women, but very few people realize that they should be mentored by women.

Yeah. I still have to kind of progress to that point. I'm still starting out in the industry. I've only been professionally working in it for six to seven years, maybe. Maybe I'm at that point where I can start to do that. I was actually talking about mentorship with someone a few months ago, and there are people that I like to call -- and I thank J.K. Rowling for making this term a thing -- dementors.

[Laughs.]

They say that they're going to be your mentor, and they help you out, but then when the time comes, they don't step up to speak up for you. And they don't help you out in your times of need. And they kind of exploit you for your work and take credit for it. And they're basically like vampires, where they might recognize that this young person has talent. I've seen this happen to other people, too. On one side, they say, "You're great! You're doing great! You're really talented!" But on the other side, they never really help that person. In any creative, or tech -- I would consider programming a creative industry -- but in any industry like that, there's a lot of insecurity when it comes to your own talent. And there are people out there who can smell that insecurity, and prey on it.

I was going to say that one of the strange things about videogames is that it's a field of artists that rarely thinks of itself as consisting of artists. And what I've noticed in tech is above a certain pay grade, the luminaries consider themselves artists. I guess it would be lazy to cite someone like Steve Jobs, but a lot of people at that level see themselves as artists. But what you don't really see is those people treating their workforces like fellow artists and collaborators in an artistic pursuit.

I don't know what your experience has been -- who in these types of companies seems to be indulged or given leeway to experiment, or allowed to experiment with expressing or exploring ideas that maybe there aren't KPI's or whatever the letters are that most people use. [Laughs.]

Yeah, definitely. [Laughs.]

Not that I'm looking down on those letters, but I'm saying that's not how you wind up with something that hasn't been done before.

Yeah. I could get into that, but definitely that leeway to experiment, it does seem like that's something that has to be earned. And the people who actually get that leeway, often, are the people who have the most mainstream views, I guess you could say. And when you do have a CEO or a C-level person, who was a white male person with limited experience -- if that's the person who creatively experimented, you're going to be pushed in a certain direction.

However, if you have someone who's just starting out, and they come from a different background, they're going to offer a different perspective, and they're going to pull it in a different direction that you never would have imagined. And the fact that they don't get the leeway to do that is pretty awful, and it's definitely holding us back. Every study out there says if you have a diverse team, it's both better business and more innovative. So it's just kind of mind-boggling to me that it's not happening more.

Well, inertia is a powerful force, when you don't even want to look at what direction you're going in.

It’s interesting and I think you’re right, that people with the most mainstream views get the most leeway to experiment. What a weird concept and a great way to put it. I feel that telegraphing in what you see in a lot of videogames, too, though there’s this attitude in the industry that people say and act like videogames as an artform moves very fast. It’s like, they say it’s moving fast but it’s not really moving at all. So, but, we talked about innovation a bit before but what do you think in tech and in games, when people use that word “innovation,” what do you think it actually means to them? What’s the perception you’re gleaning from people who walk that walk and talk that talk?

One thing I wanted to talk about earlier -- there's this concept, it's from the statistics community, but it's been applied to the user-experience community as well. And in user experience and analytics and all these places, data science, we like to do testing, and it's either quantitative or qualitative. I don't know how long you were working in media on the web, but you might have run into A/B testing, where they have two versions of a specific element, let's say it's to sign up for a newsletter. And with A/B testing you have a red button, or a blue button. You test and see how many people click the red button versus the blue button. That's your A and B. This has been utilized a lot in tech -- I don't know if it's been utilized in games, it may have been. But the problem with A/B testing? It seems very simplistic and obvious, "Oh, we can eventually work our way to the perfect thing, backed up by numbers, statistics." But the problem with A/B testing is that you're limited by what you already have, the framework you already have. You're still working off the fact that there's a button there. You're not starting over completely with a new, fresh design. You're working off the old template. So, you reach what they call the local maximum: the best possible iteration you can have of the design that you have. And you never hit the global maximum, which is what would happen if you tried every option ever and all the different designs.

So I think we're hitting this local maximum as a field. Based on the framework that we have and the framework of tech right now, which is this start-up style business model where you seek investments and you try and gain as many people as possible on your app or whatever. We're limited by this framework, and we're about to reach the maximum there. We haven't really started looking other ways to push it forward. What you would call a conservative innovator, they're operating from a totally -- not to bring up the C-word, but they're operating from a capitalistic perspective.

It's okay. [Laughs.] You can use that word around me. I’m an adult. [Laughs.] But it's been coming up a lot lately, actually.

Right. So there might not necessarily be great money unless you kind of pervert it and say the medical or the education fields or governmental infrastructure -- unless you can kind of find some sort of in-road, or secret inside way of doing it. There's not a whole lot of money and there's not a whole lot of interest.

Do you get the sense that videogames at least are they trying to retain people past a certain age?

I don't think so. I think they are definitely focused on younger people. I don't really know because I am a younger person. [Laughs.]

I think it's really interesting because there have been studies coming out that older gamers -- it helps with Alzheimer's, being involved in a game like that. People who play World of Warcraft after a certain age had a higher cognitive function than people who did not. Seniors, not to stereotype, but they love Bingo. Why wouldn't they love World of Warcraft? It makes perfect sense to me.

I think some of it does come down to representation. I think this has been written about before with Grand Theft Auto, but you also extended it to Hitman or Metal Gear -- even just that one thing of why can't we play a game like that with a different type of character in it? Maybe the question to ask is: When you do see game companies trying to make concessions to a broader audience, what do you feel that you see them change from marketing perspective or from a design perspective? What do you think they recognize as the thing to try to address or assuage or broaden? It's not always necessarily, "put a female character in it," it's sometimes also "make a different type of game."

Definitely. I still appreciate the female characters, someone like Shepard. It's really awesome to play that as a woman, with a female's voice, and be a bad-ass space marine. I love space. I named my cat Garrus. I loved that. And it's interesting to watch the evolution of Tomb Raider, definitely, how they've re-defined Lara. I like it a lot.

At least aesthetically they did, yeah.

I mean, she's still hot! But she's not ridiculous. I remember my aunt bought that one, I think it was the first Tomb Raider. She was playing it and I was sort of looking over her shoulder, and we were both making fun of the polygons. So ridiculous.

Like two stop signs, basically.

[Laughs.] Yeah. I mean, we still played it together, so there's that. But it's not as immersive. I can't really lose myself in a game like some games are designed to. In the industry, I don't know. I definitely see some efforts at inclusivity. You know, this controversy about the Baldur's Gate remake with the trans character. Is that just a side NPC?

I don't know. I don't read everything or I would just get too depressed. My understanding was there was some sort of joke about a trans person, and then they took it out. But don't quote me on that. I think this is a community and an industry where the people who want to are realizing maybe they should be a little more careful and a little more tactful about how they're doing things.

But I don't think a joke is the best way of acting like you have a seat at that table. I think it's always better to do your research and be respectful and try to exercise some empathy. I don't know why that is so hard. I understand videogames are very expensive, and I understand you're not going to please everyone.

It's interesting. I think the primary demographic is viewed as very loud and vocal and opinionated so it's like, "They must be appeased!" When in fact, if you did bring other people into gaming -- when it comes to shopping I think it's, at least in America, moms are the No. 1 spender. It definitely can be adjusted when it comes to bringing other demographics in, or keeping them in. I guess you could call it tokenism, in terms of including this character or that character. And I don't mind it, I guess. But if that's all they got, that's not enough. I play games as a chronic escapist -- I play games when I'm sick of the subway smelling like a sewer, and I want to come home and pretend I'm a knight. Or a space marine. [Laughs.] Or like Grand Theft Auto. It's really fun to play that game. It's designed to be super-adrenaline rush fun. So why can't I play a game where I'm a criminal woman? [Laughs.] That's what my question is. It wouldn't necessarily be for everyone. Grand Theft Auto isn't for everyone, although a lot of people really love it and it makes a lot of money.

I don't really expect to see anything like that from the industry. But it is interesting to see what indie developers are making, what people are doing with Kickstarter and things like that. I think it's starting to move in a really cool direction.

I would have hoped in the last 10 years that so-called enthusiast sites would be a lot more curious and a lot more bold about taking risks and giving things coverage that other places don't because it really does broaden things. Obviously there is more and you can always be doing more, but sometimes it feels like they're not looking that much or trying to listen.

What is the purpose of enthusiast press if they're not all that curious and they're just looking to try to get traffic? But maybe that's more my fixation than yours, as someone in the media. But what do you feel the media could be doing a better job of to put more pressure on these types of things we've been discussing?

I used to work as a product designer for "the media." [Laughs.]

Does this get to some of what you were talking about things being much more data-driven?

Yeah. There's kind of like that BuzzFeed, I guess it's more pioneered by HuffPo, but then taken to the logical extreme with BuzzFeed, of data-driven journalism. Hopefully some places like Medium can push back on that. It would be interesting to see where that goes. It's all being templated, like I said. Headlines being A/B tested for whatever gets the most clicks to bring back ad revenue. Tenuous ad revenue. Rather than providing content of interest in value.

To people. To human beings.

Right. Part of that is perpetuated, too, by the social networks themselves, like Facebook's increasingly strict algorithms as to what gets displayed and what doesn't get displayed. The fact that Facebook has kind of become the front page of the internet, or Reddit, as they call themselves too. Although that is a bit more community-based, whether or not that's a community that you like or not.

Reddit is very much where a lot of stories get found and swiped and not credited.

Yeah. I think people are getting kind of weary of shit content. I think there is a push-back against that. So I think there will be a backlash against that that we're going to see over the next few years. So maybe that will be the space for more interesting game criticism and discovery. I was just talking to my boyfriend about that -- I wish there was a Siskel and Ebert for games. The fact that someone like Anita Sarkeesian is so controversial? I'm glad she's doing what she's doing, that she's pushing at the space, but her critiques are so simple. [Laughs.]

Right, they're actually fairly sedate. I feel like that's an unpopular thing to say. But I think you can say that and also say the reaction against her was not at all called for. You know, it's a whole other topic.

Something I typically ask men I interview, but I'd be curious if you ever talk to any of your male friends about where they zigged and other people zagged -- why they're not spending their time on the internet making life living hell for women and people they don't know?

Probably the nerd I talk to the most is my brother who wants to go into the gaming industry. So I'm hoping just because I was around, he didn't zag. I would have kicked his ass. [Laughs.]

Well someone would, sooner or later.

Yeah. [Laughs.] When it comes to that, definitely when I played World of Warcraft and I got stalked by creepy dudes, I think they come from this place of loneliness. Sometimes crazy, pathological loneliness like finding my address and sending me cards when I never provided that. But there is this deep loneliness, and isolation.

And you're not the first person I've talked to who has told me that that happened from that game.

[Laughs.] I got three or four people threaten to commit suicide when I didn't want to quest with them anymore. What kind of place are you in where you're threatening to commit suicide on Ventrilo with this 16-year-old that you've been talking to for three weeks?

You wrote in that Medium post we mentioned before that with Medium, or the way we act on social media or on videogames with each other, you were talking about how "we're not pushing the field in humanity forward by patting ourselves on the back and continuing a giant circle-jerk." Can you give a little context for that and what you were talking about, there?

I like having a satisfying day at work and congratulating myself when things are done well. It's really great when something does launch, and people use it and they love it. I guess I like to tell people that I'm really efficient, and by that I mean I'm really lazy. I think they're the same thing. I look at the resources in the world and how so much of it isn't used correctly. And it just makes me anxious to say that design as a field is done just because we've found the perfect way to shape a button -- whether or not that's true. It's ridiculous to me.

I don’t know how long we’ve been locked in this pattern, but it feels like we’re just sort of serializing our knowledge and mapping it for various machines. Is it naive to think that this is the way we move forward? Is that even really the point? From a media perspective, it feels like we’re trying to put off or just delay the inevitable.

Yeah! Definitely. So, I think there's a pattern that has been created as we automate more and more things and as more things will be automated. We're going to see a huge crisis when truck-driving is automated. And that's when I think that in America people are going to really come to terms with the fact that the jobs may have disappeared to China or India 10 years ago, but that's not where they're going now.

Right. This is a benchmark I read about a lot. I just read a thing yesterday about truck routes and automation, how the average truck driver can only be driving on the road 10 to 14 hours. But an automated truck can go 24 hours. Is that the point of why we work?

Well, for some it is. And for the people in Silicon Valley, for what they're programming, it is. More and more jobs are going to disappear, and the people who design the tech and make the tech and own the tech are going to become more and more wealthy and more and more isolated. Less able to design for the masses and more interested in designing for themselves.

Do you ever talk to people you work with that maybe you’re not super-tight and friendly with, just shake them on the shoulders and ask, “To what avail?” [Laughs.] I mean, do these conversations ever happen in companies like those in your experience?

I don't know. I haven't worked at a huge tech company like that. And now I run my own company, which is me and my consultants, so if I talk about that, it's with other consultants in a friend-to-friend way.

Maybe it’s only at certain pay grades, anyway. Is it just what we said before, these are companies trying to drive the culture but are resistant to and actually resent criticism, but also don’t want to think about what innovation is?

Yeah. Only certain people are going to get in the door at companies like that. They're recruiting from a certain type of universities, and to get into those universities there's a certain demographic that tends to get into those universities. Affirmative action and scholarships and grants notwithstanding. So it's just insulated itself. Here's a prime example: I was working on that neighborhood social network, like I told you about.

Nextdoor?

No, I wasn't working on that one. I was working on a competitor, I guess you could say. We were talking about the kinds of people who would like to use this app. We were doing demographic research. One of the groups we decided to focus on were mothers, just because they're interested in their communities. And a bunch of other reasons. So you start to dive down: Are we targeting working mothers? Are we targeting stay-at-home mothers? Who are the demographics associated with that? What kind of money do they make? How can they be advertised to? What's the return on investment? Blah, blah, blah.

So then it got down to a discussion of, all right, what kind of questions are we going to be asking on this network? And I got into a fight with one of my co-workers, because she insisted that mothers would be intent on choosing a school for their children to go to, and finding the best school for their child to go to. And I told her, that's a hugely -- this was several years ago, so I wasn't really familiar with the concept of privilege so much, but I would have said privileged back then. That's a really privileged view to take. Many working mothers and parents don't get to choose what school their child goes to. So if you're designing a system that has these assumptions baked into it, and you don't even know how to test for them, it's going to funnel a certain way, and attract a certain kind of person, and benefit a certain kind of person. It makes the gap even wider.

You mentioned Kotaku before when we talked a little bit about media. I think the way you put it is you were interested in expanding your online whatever or persona to sort of make it be known that you are interested in games. What types of stories do you feel like you never see but would love to read about, coming out of the industry or game culture? Stuff you never see, but would absolutely be all over it?

I don't see much artistic critique of games. For some reason, it's still a debate that games are art or are not art. And that's ridiculous. By any definition you have, some games fit the bill, so I think it should stop being a debate. And I think there needs to be real artistic critique of games. I just played Firewatch and I loved it. I think that game is so awesome. But no one had the language to adequately talk about what was going on with it. It was like, "It's pretty, and then the ending sucks!" [Laughs.] You can go further with it. I want to write about how there's this idea of agency, and as a gamer you have agency over your character. But you don't really, and especially in a walking simulator, there's only one way for you to go. So the illusion of agency, nobody's talking about that. Nobody's taking it to that level. And I think it would be very educational for a lot of people, a lot of gamers, to start to know this language so they can talk about stuff and push it further. Film criticism, at this point, with this new golden age of television, they all have that language. But games don't have that language. It either needs to be invented, or it needs to be refined, so people can start talking about more than someone's skirt length. I don't even care about that anymore.

You heard about that controversy, I'm sure, with the Let's Play of the cancer game, That Dragon, Cancer?

What happened? Are you talking about people not wanting to pay for it?

Right. That's interesting to me. I haven't played that game in particular, but from what I understand, it was an interactive story-book. People were streaming it on YouTube, and making money off of the ad revenue, while the game itself did not see much money. Not that many purchases.

For me, it's interesting. The people streaming this game and showing the whole thing -- for one, yeah, they're giving away the ending and people and watch it and see the whole thing, and this couple doesn't get any money from it. But, on the other hand, something like Firewatch, which is also a walking simulator, I watched a Let's Play, the first ten minutes of that. And I went and I spent twenty dollars on a four-hour long game. It motivated me to go and buy it. The people who do the Let's Play streaming, and stream these things, they have huge audiences. If you're an indie whatever, tapping into a huge audience is always a huge boon. It's what you pray for. So it's interesting to me that the people who made this game were so angry about this, when they got a lot of exposure. Which can be a double-edged sword, too -- whether or not exposure should be for free or not. But it takes it to a lot of interesting places, as to what is a videogame, what isn't a videogame, what's worth paying money for, what's not. It's really interesting to me.

Who decides, who influences those decisions.

Right! The argument they were using is sort of the same one that the record industry and the movie industry use: oh, all these people pirating something, we're losing these many sales, because of all these people ripping us off! Which may or may not be true, because those people who ripped it off may have never intended to buy it, and they just did it because they could. It's impossible to know.

Bringing it back to the film industry, I guess this is the capitalist, designer side of me thinking, but they made a game which isn't necessarily something that a lot of people want to pay for. And if you think about it, let's say that this artistic group of filmmakers submitted it to the Tribeca Film Festival. And it doesn't take off and get blockbuster-level money from being in the Tribeca Film Festival, but it is hailed as a great artistic masterpiece. Just within that independent, and really engaged community. That's kind of how I viewed that game. It was more about the artistic meaning. I think we will end up designing rules as to whether or not it's okay to do a Let's Play of this or not, and I think that was a good case to set that up. But the expectation that you're going to have a blockbuster from making a game about something like that I think is unrealistic to me. But it would have been nice for them to get more money than they did.

So, this is intentionally a broad question, you can go with this wherever you want: What do you think videogames have accomplished?

Well. I think it's definitely, for me personally, it's introduced me to a lot of different people and a lot of different ways of thinking. And it's kind of connected me to the world, more than, say, Facebook has -- because that's kept me within my circle of people I know. Being able to grow up and go on the internet, and talk to people who live in England, or Japan, or Australia. That was pretty amazing. And it kept me in touch with my family. My family lives all around the U.S., and the fact that I can log onto a game and hang out with my mom, even though we live across the country from each other, or my grandmother, is pretty awesome. And it's brought me closer to them than I think I probably would have been if I didn't have that. I think it's definitely eased a lot of pain for a lot of people, being able to have something literally magically that they can go and partake in. I think it's probably helped quite a few people live in life today.

Steven L. Kent, living in Seattle, old guy. In my fifties.

Okay, so in 1986, I started doing book reviews as a freelancer for the Seattle Times. Went off to BYU to get my master's degree. When I came back in 1993, had a PC, didn't have a CD-ROM drive in it yet. Back then, you had floppy disks, right? Figured that if I could get them to let me doing a review of virtual haunted houses for Halloween, i.e. 7th Guest and Alone in the Dark and a game called Legacy. If I could get them to greenlight me to do a review of those games instead of book reviews, which I had been doing, I could afford to put a CD-ROM in my computer, a CD-ROM player, and I could get those games free. So, I got permission to do that. That was October 31st. The article ran 1993.

I decided since that worked so well and I got three games for Halloween, just think what I could get for Christmas. So, they did greenlight me to do a Christmas list. It turned into two Christmas lists, and I got dozens of games scot-free to review.

I thought I was in heaven. I was making a whopping $50 for these enormous articles, comparing all these things for the Seattle Times, but I was also getting great games. The following year, that expanded to a column with the LA Times syndicate. I was writing for Electronic Games Magazine. I got into CD-ROM Today. I believe in the next year or the year after that, I was an inaugural writer for a fledgling new web promotion called MSNBC. Became their columnist. Became a columnist for the Japan Times. Wrote weekly columns for a lot publications. And so, I suspect that's what you're interested in.

I also spoke in the senate about videogame violence. I was invited in by Senator Joe Lieberman for 10 years in a row.

And I wrote the Ultimate History of Videogames. Didn't come up with that title, by the way. Hate that title.

[Laughs.] I assumed not.

It was originally titled The First Quarter, referring to that games were 25 years old at the point that I started writing it and also the double entendre.

Yeah.

But unfortunately, that didn't sail because -- so, I self-published. At first, nobody would buy the book from me. The quintessential example was Workman Publishing, where one of their editors said, "You know, we'll take it!" And then Peter Workman walked through, looked at it, and said, "What's this?" And she said, "It's a book on videogames." And he said, "People who play videogames don't write books. We're not gonna publish it." And that was the end of it." That happened at a number of publications.

Do you feel that has changed? The notion that people who play videogames don't write books. I don't know if you know Tom Bissell -- does that name sound familiar?

Yeah! I know the name. I don't know him.

We were emailing earlier this year and he told me the way that that has shifted is that people who play videogames now write books but don't buy them.

Blake Harris made some pretty good coin with Console Wars.

But do you feel that's an exception? Is that a trend that's shifted?

I think it's a trend that's shifting. I think he's one of the pioneers who is shifting it. I think that it's a combination there. One is that he's a very competent, very good writer. Two, he took an aggressive stance and he got good backing. He got Seth Rogen behind him. You know, and he had to work hard to do all that. I think that people like me and Tom Bissell and Harold Goldberg and Dave Kushner and certainly the real pioneer would be Lenny Herman, opened the door for him and he opened it wider.

Did you study journalism in school? What did you go to school for?

Bachelor's degree in journalism. Master's degree in communications.

I know you mentioned you started writing about games to be able to afford a CD-ROM. When you started writing about games, was there a path you were trying to head down? I know as a writer, you start doing a thing and then organically -- you started rattling off those other places. That work sometimes just finds you, and sometimes you have to find it. But was there a place you were hoping to go toward?

Nope. Lots of free games. [Laughs.] Truly that was the motivation. I'm not a pleasant person. I've gotten better. I've mellowed a lot. But I was not a very employable person when I was younger. I had a terrible temper. I don't control my mouth very much. So, freelance work appealed to me.

Yeah.

And so, at the time that I got started, really, truly the vast majority of people in the game industry only knew two adjectives: Things either sucked or they were awesome. Since I knew a few adjectives in between them, I was able to flourish.

I'm 33, so I certainly remember reading games writing at that time you mention. The stuff that you're talking about. What was the directive or the wisdom from editors at that time? What did they see as the purpose or the point of covering videogames?

You know, really truly, at that point, the Seattle Times, they had me on record. That's why they took me. It was like, "Oh, great, here's somebody who knows something about videogames. We can write something about games and that'll be great!" That's really all they were looking for. They were excited about that. I'm a pretty polished writer, and that helped. At the point that I came in, people looked at me and they said, "Well, he understands videogames and he can write on an adult level. We'll take him." That was really all it was.

When was the last time you talked to someone about videogames or really thought about them critically or culturally? I know I wrote to you last year, but it sounded like from our correspondences that it's been awhile other than that.

I follow what's going on in the industry fairly carefully. Not as carefully as I should. I do the annual Christmas list for CostCo Connection Magazine. Although, doing the Christmas list is an interesting compilation. The buyers have a core list of games they want me to describe, and then I'll go through and add a few more that I like to the list.

You mentioned that you don't write about videogames as much anymore.

No. I'm a full-time novelist.

Right. Were there stories you wanted to write about videogames, but maybe the cultures at publications weren't there yet to provide those opportunities?

Back when I was active at it?

Yeah.

You know what? People were so supportive and so interested. You know, I wrote for USA Today quite frequently. I remember when I went to Bruce Schwartz. Okay, so, this is a quintessential example. It's probably -- it was the same time that Stephen King's book The Green Mile came out. So, whatever year that was. I think it may have been the same year that either the Dreamcast came out, which would have been 2000 -- no, 1999. Dreamcast came out in 1999, and 2000 was when the PlayStation 2 came out. So I think it was that year.

I went to Bruce and said, "I'd like to do an article on videogames and violence." And he said, "Well, don't you think that topic's been kind of done up too much?" I said, "No, I think it would be a good to do a really, truly non-biased article on it." Bruce gave me carte blanche. I mean, he just gave me carte blanche. He simply threw the door open and said, "Whatever you think you need to do to do this right, go ahead." It turns out it was one of the largest articles I think in USA Today history. I mean, it was in three separate sections of the newspaper. It was on the front page partially. I got that kind of support because they were that kind. They knew they didn't know videogames. They felt I did know videogames and they wanted to support me however they could, as long as I was giving them good, readable information.

Yeah.

Or MSNBC, I mean, MSNBC, at the time I was writing for them, they were an unquenchable thirst. They would just -- I'd contact them and I'd say, "I'd like to do an article." And they'd say, "What do you want to do an article on?" If I did an article a day for them, they were happy but they actually would have preferred two.

So, some of the things I'd do would be goofy. I'd go to Japan to cover something, and then I'd go to Akihabara. Are you familiar with Akihabara?

Yeah, the electronics district.

Yeah. Back then there used to be lots -- before PlayStation 2, Akihabara was probably 60 percent videogames. Now it's maybe 10 percent videogames.

Yeah.

But back then, it was wonderful. You'd go into these stores and if you looked around long enough, you'd find absolutely goofy, strange things. You know, I'd buy a bunch of those goofy, strange things and I'd come home and I'd tell my editor at MSNBC about it. I'd just say, "Can I write an article about this goofy, strange thing?" And he'd say, "Sure." And I'd write an article about it. So, yeah.

Why do you think you had that freedom?

Well, one, I was readable. I hate to sound cocky, but I was readable. The things I writing about, you wouldn't find them in the rest of the mainstream press.

Yeah. That's what I was trying to figure out how to articulate for readers who maybe don't remember that context, but I think it was -- why was it so unusual? I remember, like, Mortal Kombat getting a lot of attention. I remember Nintendo getting a lot of attention. Why do you think that despite those types of surges, there wasn't more nuanced mainstream media attention?

Videogames hadn't received credibility yet. I think I may have played a small role in helping videogames get some credibility. Not a major role. But the point being thought of games as something kids do. What played a major role in games getting credibility was Sony. When Sony released the PlayStation, all of a sudden it was demonstrable. Especially the PlayStation 2. It was demonstrable. It was no longer elementary school kids playing these things. It was college kids.

So, at the time, Time might do an annual videogame story about the industry or somebody else might do something. Dean Takahashi at the Wall Street Journal. When he'd do stories, they were really insightful. For the most part, the mainstream didn't then pay attention to videogames. MSNBC -- you want to hear a really funny story about how I got into MSNBC?

Of course.

So, I was writing for the Seattle Times. That's where I got started. My editor was Mark Watanabe. Really nice guy to work with. Mark got sick and so a guy named Mark Matassa took his place. I wrote a couple of articles for Mark. Mark was actually -- I think he was an assistant editor on the political desk, but he was sitting in for Mark Watanabe. We liked each other. He was nice to work with. I turned my things in on time and I proofed my spelling and I was readable and we liked working together.

Then one day Mark Watanabe came back and I got a call from Mark Matassa and he says, "Hey Steve, I'm at this new website called MSNBC. We haven't gone live yet, but how would you feel about writing for me?" And I said, "Sure." And so, the Superbowl as coming up. I did a piece about the Super Bowl and football videogames. I was kind of on the cutting edge of doing that. I don't think anybody had done it yet. I did a couple of other pieces. And when I called to turn it in, he was already gone. He had been at MSNBC for maybe a week and then the Seattle Times said, "Look, we really want you back. We'll give you this thing that you always wanted. Can you please come back?" But that was how I got in at MSNBC. I would never even have thought of applying at MSNBC. But because of that, that's how I got in.

A lot of conversations today online -- I'm guessing if you say you keep up, you see this, but people talking about how the medium can evolve or ways they'd like to see it evolve. When you were writing about games, were conversations like this taking place then?

Oh, absolutely.

Were people talking about different ways for it to evolve? What did evolving mean 15 years ago?

Exactly. That was the big thing. One of the big evolutions that people were predicting -- I remember at the Japanese launch of the N64, around that time, the big word was "convergence." Okay? The idea that videogames and TVs and computers would one day converge, and everyone figured that videogame consoles would go away and computers would swallow up everything. Imanishi -- Hiroshi Imanishi over at Nintendo, who was VP there, I interviewed him and he said something that was really curious at the time but turned out to be quite prescient: He said that he agreed with the whole convergence thing. He thought that there would be convergence, but he thought the end result would look a lot more like a TV with a console than it does like a computer. That was a really interesting take, because everyone else was saying, "No, no, the computers will swallow up everything." And he's right. Smart TVs are everywhere now.

Yeah. I mean, how do you feel that those conversations are different today about people talking about the direction for the medium and the industry?

So, the evolution that we talked about back then was -- it sounds so retro to you, now. Like, interactive movies was one of the big flashpoints: "Oh, they're gonna look like movies but they're going to be interactive." Back then we thought that meant video. Basically, there were videogames that, like, Prometheus or Flashpoint or The 7th Guest or Myst, where video was incorporated and it was really kind of a multiple choice test. You had to sort of decide how you were going to move when you hit the little break in the video, or the video would stop and a game would come in the middle of it.

Now, the graphics on the computers, they don't need -- with motion capture and high, high-resolution and high-def that, the regular games now look more like interactive movies than the interactive movies from the 1990's.

How do you sense that videogames are struggling with how to be a medium for artistic expression? What are things you perceive that people are trying to figure out right now?

Well, on the one hand, it's struggling because there's this huge dichotomy. On the one hand, you have the indie games, and the old creativity from the '80s is sort of back with those games. Some of those games are really amazing. It's really true that for with the new tools that are out there for very little money, you can make a very expressive game. But the reverse is true, too, that -- then there's this sort of no man's land where, frankly, not a lot of money is made and an awful lot of money is lost between the inexpensive indie games and this upper echelon where every game is an epic production and the budgets are unheard of now.

Yeah, it goes up by a factor of 10 each hardware generation.

Yeah, well, look at it this way: Are you much of a reader?

Yeah.

Have you ever read the Harry Dresden novels?

No. I mainly read non-fiction, sorry. [Laughs.]

Oh, okay, well.

No offense to you personally.

No, no problem. Jim Butcher wrote a really sensational series of novels about a wizard who works as a gumshoe in modern day Chicago. They're the Harry Dresden novels. There are quite a few of them out there. If you were to take all of the Harry Dresden novels -- okay, so, if you were to write the word "magic" on one little piece of paper, and then you put that on one side of your desk. And on the other side of your desk, you stack all of the Harry Dresden novels, plus all the Harry Potter novels, including the new one that's about to come out this month. The difference in the number of letters between that little slip of paper that says "magic" and all those pages and all those letters on all those books is the difference between the amount of coding and work that went into Pac-Man versus the next Call of Duty. You know, so I was around watching all of that evolution take place. I started at a point where a guy could still lock himself in his garage for a year and come out with a Choplifter or a Prince of Persia and make a million dollars and go home.

But by the time I was done -- one of the watershed moments was when Mario 64 came out and other companies complained complained and complained about how many people Nintendo had working on Mario 64.

How many was it?

Oh, I think it might've been 75 people or something.

Yeah, I was going to say, it's probably a number that seems conservative by today's standards --

Yeah.

-- where you have teams of hundreds of people all over the globe working in concert together. Seventy-five -- I mean, that's a lot of people, but it's not hundreds of people.

You take a look in the movies, too. They said in the end if you saw X-Men: Apocalypse, one, you were the only person there, but the other thing is if you did see it, at the end of the movie they said that 10,000 people were involved in the making of that movie.

I interviewed Neil Druckmann a couple months ago, who -- he works for Naughty Dog. They do the Uncharted games. I asked him whether that trend -- because I feel like I haven't heard people complain about it, I guess, since like you're saying with Mario 64.

But I asked Neil whether these conversations take place at big game companies about whether this is tenable and is going to be sustainable. That company, they're in a position where -- the way he put it, they don't need have those kind of existential conversations because they're lucky enough that their games make money and are able to sustain themselves. But I think for most companies, that's not the case?

Did you ever do stories about this kind of thing when you were actively writing about games?

Oh, yes.

Yeah, I thought so.

First of all, I was there for some of the most notable failures of all time.

Are you talking about, like --

Shenmue.

Yeah.

Where companies were destroyed. I actually did the book on the making of the Final Fantasy movie, where a single game could -- you know, so much was banking on this game, or in the case of the Final Fantasy movie of a game, the idea was, "Not only are we investing all this money in this game, which we thought would do well, but the technology that supported this game will keep us going another generation." And it didn't work and companies went away. When's the last time -- even though I personally think they were brilliant games, when's the last time you saw a Ninja Gaiden game?

Oh, I mean, are you talking about the modern reboots or the original?

Yeah, I'm talking about the modern reboot.

I think the creator of that was let go, and I don't think --

Yeah, Itagaki.

Yeah, Itagaki. I think they did about four or five remakes of those games and I think they're just kinda done.

Yeah, in fact, I think Tecmo merged with KOEI, didn't it?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, so, these are all evolutions and these are all things that are changing. Tecmo, for a little while, they had these two enormous peaks where they were a company you looked at, that you stopped -- when you were talking about videogames, you stopped and you talked about Tecmo as kind of a pioneer.

Do you feel like the videogame industry learns from its mistakes?

That's a great question.

Usually people just laugh when I ask that question.

No, that is a brilliant question. I think there are people in the industry who learn from their mistakes. I think that Howard Lincoln and Peter Main and Minoru Arakawa looked very closely at Atari and said, "We don't want to make those mistakes." And yet it's so interesting because a couple generations down the line, they did indeed make some of those mistakes and were pushed into them very hard by Nintendo of Japan. You know, one of the crucial things -- one of the watershed moments in my time covering videogames, and we're getting there again, and I think Nintendo is watching this really closely, was the fall of Sega.

Because during the time of Dreamcast, you could argue very very very solidly that Sega, with its different game studios was probably the strongest game company on the face of the earth at the moment. But the reason they were so strong is because they had their backs against the wall and if they didn't keep Dreamcast alive, they were gonna pull out. And then one by one, they got rid of those great studios. Now, Sega is a shadow of its former self.

Yeah.

I think Nintendo's in a position where they need to fight back because they're in the Sega seat if they don't make some good important calls now.

We've been talking a lot about companies and publications. We haven't talked too much about the audience yet. What do you remember about the audience for games or maybe people who read your articles and your interactions with them? What do you remember as far as general demeanor or types of things you would run into?

Well, one, because I did a lot of TV and I've done so many different publications and things, there was a point where I would get recognized walking through an airport or something, and not just by kids. The big change in the audience -- and this is when it was obvious and I'm just stating what you know, so I apologize.

It's okay.

But, the big change is the mainstreaming of videogames. When I was getting started, the Genesis was still out. Nintendo really was what your younger brother played. The older brother played Genesis. He might play Super Nintendo. But if he did play Super Nintendo, he was a little embarrassed about doing that.

There was a wonderful moment when Sony was getting ready to release the PlayStation and they brought in focus groups. They knew they had equal parts Genesis players and Super Nintendo players. But Sega did such a good job of branding and making their brand cool. What Sony's research had found was people who owned Super Nintendo were embarrassed -- even though they liked their console better, were embarrassed to admit they had it.

So, they'd have these focus groups and they'd know that half the people there had a Super Nintendo and the people -- it was like that Austin Powers scene where they pulled out his extender and they said, "No, that's not mine." "But you said you owned a --"

[Laughs.]

"No I didn't." "But don't you play Super Nintendo?" "No, never have." You know?

I've kind of wondered -- in some pockets of the videogame audience today, there's a bit of toxicity. There's a bit of aggression. There's a bit of vitriol. I've always kind of wondered whether that has roots in the way Sega approached its marketing and branding.

Sega certainly discovered it and exacerbated it. But throughout history, the Nintendo people always sort of circled the wagon. They loved Nintendo.

Yeah.

During the rise of the Genesis, the Nintendo people -- if you wrote too many articles that were pro-Sega, the Nintendo people would accuse you of Nintendo bashing. I was always very, very pro-Nintendo. I loved Nintendo. Although, in the last years of the N64 -- well, the N64, too, but in the last days of the Super Nintendo, I thought that Sega came out with more good games.

But I remember when getting ready to go on a trip with Sega, to go visit Sega, and my editor warning me -- my editor, Arnie Katz, from Electronic Games warning me that I should be careful because Sega might just drive me out into the desert and shoot me.

[Laughs.] Sorry, I assume that was a joke? I take it that didn't happen?

Yeah. Of course. Again, it's funny because now that I'm out of -- I'm as far removed as I am, the people who I stay in touch with or the people who make an effort to stay in touch with me, I hear from Steve Rosen once in awhile. We have a really nice relationship. I hear from Minoru Arakawa once in awhile. You know, the guys at the top who were really at the top.

And I think I really pissed off a lot of guys lower down the field. I was not very good at watching what I was talking about. The other thing is, one of the things I did that made my writing entertaining was my view was if I was reviewing a game, and especially a bad game -- almost certainly a bad game -- that the review should be almost as much fun if not more fun than the game itself.

Do you have an example of a review you wrote and why it pissed off PR? What happened?

In 1993, the "holy grail" was to create the first great "interactive movie." Basically, CD-ROM had opened the door for games to include video footage with really, really bad resolution using early compression techniques which resulted in game delays and supremely bad acting. Some of these games were well thought out and had great actors. Donald Sutherland played a Soviet general in a game called KGB. That was a Virgin Interactive game. Back then, Virgin Interactive was always a cut above the competition. I remember chatting with Steve Baxter, the pioneering TV reporter who brought game reviews to CNN. We both agreed, Virgin, Access Software and LucasArts were the most dependable PC companies at the time. Neither Virgin nor Access survived intact. Virgin closed. Microsoft bought Access and eventually sold it to Take-Two.

Sorry. Old man. Memory Lane.

I didn't like many of the interactive movies of the early day, so I once described an early publisher as, "Not publishing games, rather, purging its vaults of heavy-handed, minimally interactive, politically correct slop." When the owner of the company called to complain, I let him shout at me until he said, "That wasn't a review; it was a personal attack." I answered, "No, man, that wasn't a personal attack. I didn't say anything about his hair." He hung up on me.

I was proud of myself for doing that at the time. Now i sincerely regret it. For the record, I'd never seen the man in person and have no idea what he looked like. I was just being a jerk.

I wrote a very popular article for MSNBC called “Generation Drek: The Worst Games for the Newest Consoles.” For the record, I played all of the games on my list quite a bit. In order to make that list, you had to be a huge letdown. One of the games was sort of like a Twisted Metal or a Mario Kart battle, only set at sea with speeding boats. I found the game exceptionally frustrating. I added it to the list not because it was terrible -- though it really was a frustrating game to play, but because I was so disappointed. That game was one of the reasons I was so excited about Xbox.

Anyway, my article came out, and a programmer who worked on the game sent me an exceptionally polite note in which he said, "I understand you are frustrated with the game, but it does not belong on this list." I sent him back a note saying that in all honesty, I believed the game did belong on this list and I explained why, which was mostly a rehash of what I had said in my article. I did not go out of my way be insulting in my letter. In fact, I think I was pretty polite. I certainly hope I was. The following day, the company that was going to publish the game cancelled out on the order and everyone at the company was laid off.

For the record, they guy who had contacted me the day before wrote me again to let me know that the cancellation was already in the pipeline and that it was not my fault. That was an unbelievably kind thing for him to do.

I think reviews written by young, aggressive and thoughtless journalists are more fun to read, but when you get older, you look back at what you wrote and find yourself full of regret.

Wow. Well, who at that time did people at game companies feel your responsibility as a writer was ultimately to?

They were -- it was an interesting time there. When I was -- oh, I forget the guy's name. Something, David Israel? Something like that. I forget his name now, and I apologize. There was a guy who worked for a San Francisco newspaper, and he accused the entire press of being bought out. That we were -- and he made a lot of trouble for a lot of people, including, not so much for me. I got myself in trouble later. A good friend of mine, it turns out to be not as good a friend as I had expected, but at the time that all this was going on, I was a freelance writer. The only way I could ever cover something -- I mean, cover the stories, was if for instance, Nintendo said, "Hey, would you like to interview Shigeru Miyamoto? We'll fly you out." That was the only way I could ever interview Shigeru Miyamoto. And so, if Nintendo offered to fly me out to Japan to interview Shigeru Miyamoto, I took it. I never hid it. I was very open about it. But this guy came out and accused us all of being bought.

He was a journalist and he accused us of all being on the take. And the thing that was really funny about that was I had met him once. Where I had met him was at a Virgin Interactive press thing. We were all staying at a Four Seasons hotel in California. There he was, staying in the Four Seasons with the rest of us, a guest of Virgin Interactive just like the rest of us. But once he was out and he wasn't being taken on trips anymore, he got really good at pointing fingers at people.

Oh, is this a little of what you were mentioning in your note to me, when you were saying you didn't want to be one of those people who once they're out they start pointing fingers?

Well, mine is different. Mine is -- one, I have a lot of respect for the guys covering the games. The writers today are wonderful. I think a real turning point might have been Geoff Keighley getting into the industry. He -- you know, very young, very smart, very sharp. I think N'Gai Croal, covering videogames for Newsweek was a real watershed moment for videogames, too. My wife was actually quite a fan of his. It's funny because she'd kind of show me his articles and say how wonderful they were. So, you can guess how much I loved N'Gai. But anyways.

[Laughs.] Well, speaking of pointing fingers. It sounds like you were able to write about pretty much anything you wanted to, but were there things you felt obligated to write about or take a stand on? In other words, to not just write about videogames as products but to provide some friction and context for how they fit into mainstream society?

Back in the '90s, the concern was violence in videogames. In the early 2000's we started to notice -- well, first of all, in the '90s -- have you read Freakonomics?

I have, yeah.

You know, they made this -- back in '93, which was the year I got started, which was the year of the senate hearings, strangely enough violence went down. Physical violence in the United States.

Yeah.

And it continued to go down. I remember in maybe' 97, Doug Lowenstein -- he was the head of the ESRA or IDSA, I think, at the time. Whatever it was. He was the lobbyist for the videogame industry. ESA. That was it. And he made -- he pointed out that since the year that Doom came out, which was also '93, videogame violence had gone down every year. And if you don't blame school shootings on Doom, then we won't try to take credit for the drop in actual violence and say that Doom caused the drop in violence.

In Freakonomics, they make a really, really, really solid argument that the drop in violence is actually traceable to the passage of abortion, the legalization of abortion. That a number of kids who have grown up neglected and disadvantaged and at risk weren't born, they were aborted. Many of those would have been kids who would have been attracted to violence.

It's interesting because I've done a couple interviews for this project where I've talked to rap historians and rap academics who teach about the history of rap music and industry, and there was one person I talked to who told me that actually videogames are also partly to thank for a decrease in videogames. That you can't blame rap music for increasing violence, that actually videogames are to thank for there being less violence.

But a throughline that I've been exploring is wondering about what videogames have in common with rap, and of course you'd be an interesting person to ask about this because they both had congressional hearings in the '90s.

Yeah.

On how they were both ruining the youth. When I throw that out to you, that there is a parallel, how crazy does that sound to you?

There's real truth to it. I mean, there was a point -- look, I think that in politics, it's very very very attractive to create a bogeyman and blame everything on that bogeyman.

Yeah.

Tipper Gore, who I actually agreed with on many things, by the way -- I don't see the problem with labeling and ratings systems. I don't see a problem with that at all. In fact, I think that in many ways, it should be seen as a very freeing thing. It's not -- there's an enormous gap between telling somebody to rate something and then to label what the content is and censorship. People who don't see that gap I think are being obtuse. Purposely being obtuse. So, but, you know -- I think that at somewhat at the same time, there was a very distinct effort to point at rap music and say, "This is different from us. This is different than what good people listen to and this is leading to violence." And the same time, Senator Lieberman, who I worked with closely and who I really admired deeply -- you know, Senator Lieberman did point the finger at videogames. I think, again, there's a huge difference between Joe Lieberman, who wasn't calling for censorship -- he really in his heart of hearts, he wished the videogames never existed.

[Laughs.]

But he knew the dangers of censorship. He knew them implicitly. What he was calling for was he was calling for sensibility. He wanted -- I mean, everyone agrees that the IDSA has actually been helpful for videogames. That having -- you know, I remember when we got our ratings system in America, which was before they got one in Japan, I remember going back to Japan and interviewing, oh, I think it was the guy who was doing the Resident Evil games at the time, and he was really lamenting that in America, there was a way to communicate to the kids that this game was going to have this, this, this, and this. Or communicate to parents that these things will be in the game. There was no way of communicating that to Japanese parents.

He was lamenting it because?

Because he didn't want kids picking up his games -- you know, he didn't want five-year-olds picking his games thinking, "Oh, this will be like Mario, only a haunted house." And then seeing zombies biting people's necks and all the scary things that made Resident Evil Resident Evil.

It's interesting because last year I had interviewed someone who had quit writing games like Call of Duty. He reached a point not where he felt that shooters had to change, but that he got tired of acting as though those games don't influence on some level. But the main thing I remember him saying is that people are playing those games too young. That they're allowing kids who are too young to pick them up.

No question. As a journalist, I've said this time and time again. So, this is on the record and I still believe it: What's the point of having a ratings system? I think it's incredibly hypocritical that the game industry says, "Hey, we're so behind the ratings system. We love the rating system. The rating system is the greatest thing since sliced bread." But then they spend millions of dollars a year making sure they can't be enforced.

For people who don't follow games closely, how do you mean?

Oh, that if any governor or any state starts saying, "We're gonna enforce the rating system, we're gonna make sure that stores only sell M-rated games to people who are 17 and up," the game industry takes them to court, they threaten to sue, they call it illegal, they fight it. They love the rating system. They think it's the most wonderful thing on the face of the earth: It liberates them from responsibility. But the second state and government organizations try to enforce the ratings system, they say, "Leave our games alone. What happened to our constitutional rights? Everyone's supposed to have access to everything. If it's okay with the parents, we think it should be okay with everyone."

What do you feel the audience for games doesn't understand about the work that goes into writing about games?

Well, you know -- that's another interesting question. One of the things that people didn't realize -- this happened during my ship, when I was an active game journalist, was that people didn't realize that -- so, the Nintendo Entertainment System, you know, the basic Nintendo came out in '86, right? In '89, the Genesis came out, and '89, interestingly, and '90, the first full year that the Genesis year was out was the most successful year that the old NES ever had. But, by '91 and '92, the majority of gamers -- the big hot spot in gaming was teenagers, people in high school. It wasn't people in elementary school anymore. And then, by the time the PlayStation came out, really the hot spot started to be college kids. What people didn't realize was if you looked back mathematically, those elementary school kids who loved their NESes were now in high school and they were playing Genesis. And when they graduated from high school, guess what? The PlayStation came out and that same generation was picking them up.

Okay, that generation was game fanatics. Those were people who liked the idea of playing games. What we have now is a very different thing. Now, you're not a game fanatic any more than you're a movie fanatic because you go to movies or a TV fanatic because you watch TV. Instead, you have people who have just grown up with this medium and it's just part of their life.

When were you writing about games, were you always able to support yourself with your writing?

Oh, yeah. I did really well. I had never done as well as I did then. But, you know, I published an article a day.

Yeah. As a freelancer or ever as a staffer?

As a freelancer.

I know you mentioned you were a freelancer but didn't know if you were full-time freelance.

Yeah, as a full-time freelancer, I published an article a day and some of those publications paid -- I mean, it's funny, Seamus Blackley once made fun of how little money I made on some of my articles. But the truth of the matter is, yeah, I made a very substantial living as a game journalist.

You mentioned being able to make a pretty good living writing about games. It might be tacky to ask, but writers hardly make anything these days covering games -- $300 a pop for a feature if they're really ambitious, aggressive, and lucky. It can be $20 or $50 for a review, again, if you're aggressive. How much were you making?

Like Donald Trump, I am not handing out my tax returns. I will say this, Parade Magazine, paid me $5 a word. Sony Style paid me $3 a word. MSNBC was my best account. I wasn't paid anything even approaching Parade pay, but I couldn't ever write enough for MSNBC. My editor there wanted daily articles.

How did freelancing about games pre-internet even work? How would you pitch ideas and get greenlit? How did edits work?

Back in the day we had this thing called a telephone.

[Laughs.]

It was attached to a cord which was attached to the wall, so you couldn't take with you when you left the office. Phones already had buttons by the time I started freelancing, but they still had cords. Anyway, I spent a few hundred bucks buying Beacons Magazine and newspaper directories, and I called editors. Back then, you could call editors out of the blue, at least newspaper guys.

I started out at a tiny PR firm called Morse McFadden in Seattle. One day Joyce Worley of Katz, Kunkle Worley -- the founders of Electronic Games -- called about one of our clients. I was already writing reviews for the Seattle Times, and I asked, well maybe begged, for permission to review a game for Electronic Games. By the way, Electronic Games is not the same magazine as Electronic Gaming Monthly, a newer magazine that had a much larger readership.

Oh, I’m aware. I wrote for the latter.

Anyway, my first review happened to come out in May, 1993--the same week as the old Summer CES show, and they handed the issue out at the Sendai -- the publisher -- booth. I hid near the booth and stole as many copies of the magazine as I could get, tore out my review, and walked the floor of the show handing out copies of that review along with a really pathetic home-printed business card. That strategy landed me in CD-ROM Today and Computer Life.

I asked you before about the feeling among game companies about who writers are ultimately responsible to. I was a kid at the time, but I read about this years ago: Trip Hawkins from 3DO at that time, writing a letter to GamePro, putting them on notice for negative reviews they've done. Threatening to pull all advertising. I don’t even think it’s online but do you remember this at all?

Oh yeah, and I got in trouble with Trip a few times. I love Trip. Trip is a really amazing, bright, charismatic, smart guy. He puts his money where his mouth is. He really does. I like Trip, but the first article I did for Next Generation -- no, I didn't do it for Next Generation, I did it for Electronic Games. It was funny because one of the first issues of Next Generation did an interview with Trip Hawkins, and I did an interview with Trip Hawkins that same month for an Electronic Games. Mine was called "The World According to Trip," which was kind of playing off The World According to Garp.

Right.

Nowadays, people remember that book, so I have to point that out. But it was funny because when Next Generation did another interview with Trip a few years later, they stole my title for it. But the thing that was so interesting was I interviewed Trip for a long time, and in the time I was interviewing Trip, he was very aggressive about attacking his competitors. The 3DO was out, the 32X for the Genesis was just being released, the Saturn was coming out and Sega was hinting, at least, that if you had a Genesis with a 32X and a CD-ROM drive it would play Saturn games. They were really doing their best to insinuate that. PlayStation was coming out and N64 supposedly was gonna come out. So, this would have been 1995. Jaguar was out as well.

So, Trip said, "First of all, with Jaguar, they're saying it's 64-bit." He said, "That's absolute hokum. You can take a look at the specs. It's not a 64-bit. He said, "Nintendo's saying that their N64 is gonna come out next year. It's a lie. It's not true. It's not gonna come out -- you know, you call them this time next year and they'll say, 'Oh, it's gonna come out this time next year,' and maybe it'll come out in the following year but maybe it won't.”

Yeah.

Then he said, "As far as 32X Genesis being able to play a Saturn game, simply not true. Sega has no interest in doing that. Why would they do that? Why would you create a poor man's version of your console? It makes no sense."

You know, so, he attacked each of his competitors. Because I came from a real journalism background, before I went to press with my article, I called Nintendo, I called Atari, I called Sega, and Sony. I gave each of them a chance to respond to what he had said.

[Laughs.] Yeah.

Boy, he was livid about that.

Because you gave them an opportunity to respond?

Yeah, because I gave them an opportunity to respond. Game journalists weren't supposed to say that. Do you know what the interesting thing is?

Hmm?

The interesting thing is in no way could a 32X ever play a Saturn game. The N64 did come out two years late, not the year they said it would. Everyone now agrees that the Jaguar wasn't a 64-bit game system. Every single thing he had said was right. He was just upset that I gave all these people a chance to respond to what he had said.

In fact, I remember once having dinner -- it wasn't his PR person. It was somebody else's PR person. I remember having dinner with a PR person who in the middle of our dinner said, "You know, I would hope that if you were looking at giving our games a grade between A- and B+, that you'll give it the A-." You know, I looked at her and I said, "Excuse me? What was that?" [Laughs.] She retracted instantly. She realized that she had stepped on a booby trap there. I went to an event as a guest of Square once. Or, I think we were guests of Sony but we went to Squaresoft. Square showed us a game and said, "What do you think about it? What are you going to write about it?" There was a whole room full of journalists and they asked, "What are you going to write about it?" I just sat in that room, shocked and amazed as journalist after journalist answered the question. They all sat there and said, "Well, I'm gonna say this and I'm gonna say this and I'm gonna say that because I really like that." When they finally got to me at the end, I said that as a freelance journalist and as a journalist, period, I resent the question and I'm not gonna tell you what I'm gonna write.

How did that go over?

They were very polite about it. I mean, they may have decided never to have invited me back again. But I don't think they did. I think they were very polite about it and they did invite me on later trips.

But let me give you a different example that takes us the other way. I went to Japan as a guest of Sony. The PlayStation was out for one year and the N64 was about to come out for that Christmas. Again, a bunch of us went to Japan as guests of Sony and Sony showed us all these different things that were coming out for the PlayStation. They let us play with an N64 if we wanted to. Then they sent us home, and all those other journalists who had been there as guests of Sony turned around and said that they thought the N64 was a better -- was the console to buy that Christmas. I actually said that I thought the PlayStation was the console to have that Christmas.

I don't think -- I didn't say that because I was bought by Sony. And I know they didn't say it because they were bought by Nintendo 'cause Nintendo hadn't sent them to Japan. I mean, you know, they were being honest. But I'm gonna just point out that Sony flying them to Japan didn't buy their endorsement.

Is there any sort of harm -- I mean, I've heard and lived through so many things like what you're talking about here that I forget what I know and the fact that most people don't. Do you think is there any sort of harm done to anyone with that kind of expectation from game companies that writers and journalists are towing a party line together?

Well, I don't think -- the writers I knew back in my day wouldn't have towed the party line. I mean, there was an incident where a PR woman slept with a journalist, and that'll remain completely anonymous. But other than that, the truth of the matter was these guys were gamers back in my day. You know, you try and go to a gamer and say, "Tell people you like this game and I'll give you $10 and most gamers can tell you what you can do with your $10 or $100."

Well, maybe. There’s been a ton of stuff with YouTube and vloggers running into trouble with not disclosing that they’re actually making endorsements or essentially doing paid product placements. It’s a story that goes back for years and years and isn’t only happening in videogames, and it’s a big deal. Laws have been changed and clarified around assuring this is disclosed. But anyway, please continue.

Now, there were some smarter things they did. One of the things they did, which made a big difference: Gamers may be proudly independent, but on the most part we were a lowly, pimply, chubby breed, and most of the smart companies had a stable of very, very pretty PR gals who were very free with their time. They weren't sleeping with you, they weren't doing anything questionable whatsoever, but they were paying attention to you on a level that you certainly didn't get in high school. I think that there were certainly games that got flirted into better reviews.

People, when they leave games writing, they typically go and do PR, which we were just talking about. They do that or they do community management for game companies.

Yeah. A lot of them do.

Yeah, you went in a different direction, which I want to ask about. But why do you think that typically happens? Does it say anything about the field of writing in games and who writers are beholden to?

No, I don't think so. I don't think so at all. I think that that's the case -- it's the case in politics. It's the case in movies. That the journalists -- in PR, one of the things you need is somebody who understands the industry and is able to write. Yeah, no, I see nothing incestuous about it whatsoever. I think that -- you know, frankly, I think the main reason I never got offers like that wasn't because I was fiercely independent. It's because people had nightmares of being stuck in an office with me for long periods of time.

[Laughs.]

I'm being honest there.

No, I take your word for it. I don't find myself at all being bothered speaking with you right now.

Okay. Well, I've gotten better over the years. I think when I announced that I was retiring, you could hear a quiet little chorus of "Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead" going in the background.

Why leave -- it's funny because we haven't really talked much about the internet and the way that that's changed freelancing. I mean, I don't want to lead your answer, but --

Oh, but that's an interesting thing you're bringing up 'cause -- what you're bringing up is really interesting. There was a pecking order. When I got started, the pecking order was TV above all else. If you were TV news, boy, you walked on water. Nintendo would open any door for you. And then after television, broadcast news. The next thing was Time and Newsweek, and then after that it was the game magazines. After that, it was the newspaper. And then after that, the websites and everything else. But if you were a big newspaper, you were really treated well. So, since my middle initials were USA Today, MSNBC, and Japan Times, that opened a lot of doors. Sometimes some of the PR people would quietly make jokes about how they'd hear it from all these kids who would say, "I'm with this little website and one day we're gonna be big, so you need to send us games."

Okay, so, the first thing to die was the newspapers. When -- you know, people don't buy newspapers anymore. So many of the newspapers I wrote for back in the day are just gone. They've been eaten up by -- you know, I wrote for Seattle Times. That's where I started out. But when I stopped getting work from the Seattle Times, I went to the Post Intelligencer, which no longer exists. So many of the newspapers are gone now. And then, the newspapers that are there are languishing. The TV guys aren't the biggest guys anymore. The big magazines -- I got into Parade Magazine. I did their Christmas list for three years. Parade Magazine at the time had, I think, 75 million readers every Sunday. It was considered the largest publication in the world. Then everyone looked at what Parade was doing and they started doing it and then the newspapers started dying and now is Parade not such a huge thing. Now, Kotaku, which would have been laughable back in '93, if it existed at all, is as important or more important than anybody. And GameSpot is very important. And Geoff Keighley -- I enjoyed this little window of time where, you know, I was arguably not the biggest, most important journalist. I think Andy McNamara always was very, very important.

But I was important. And now, the things that I wrote for would have been nothing. I would have been the one that wasn't all that important when I'd contact Nintendo or Sega, they'd say, "Well, yeah, we like you, so we'll loan you games if you want but that's about it." There was a point where I had about 1,500 games coming through my mailbox every year.

[Laughs.] I would believe it. Not just the games, but the extra stuff they would send you with it: knick-knacks and toys and tchotchkes and --

Oh yeah, they were -- and jackets and suitcases. I got one PR person really, really angry at me. Well, I got lots of PR people angry at me. But in this particular case, when they sent their game out to most journalists, they sent it with a mountain bike. When they sent me my copy of the game, they sent it with a little box of Slim Jim meat sticks. I think there was a message there. Most of the games that arrived would arrive between late August and late September or October. There was one year where my family was getting ready to travel in late September, my wife and I our children. My next door neighbor said, "Oh, no problem. I'll just pick up your boxes everyday and keep them in my living room." And when we returned home a week later, he didn't have a living room. It was filled to the brim with my boxes.

Why leave to become a novelist?

Well, a couple of things. One was I had written two books. Well, I had written one book. I had written a book called The Clone Republic. It sold -- they said they would buy that if I could give them a good outline for a sequel. So, The Clone Republic had released and was selling pretty well. I was hoping that they'd buy more books, and before I even finished the sequel, which was called Rogue Clone, they called up and asked for two more books. Okay, so, that's the positive side of why I quit.

A very real truth to the matter was that the writing was on the wall. The beginning of the end for me was September 11th.

Why is that?

On September 11th, obviously I was in Japan -- well, not obviously I was in Japan, but I was in Japan covering the launch of the GameCube. Obviously, the World Trade Center came down. And a number of my editors said, "Hey look, Steve, let's lay off for a month or so because we really need to concentrate our space on terrorism and what's going on." And I took them at their word. So, for a number of them I didn't contact them for a month. A month is a long time in journalism.

Especially in the internet era.

Yeah. And so during that month -- they obviously stopped hearing from me and a couple of them had quit their jobs and the new guys who came in didn't know that I was writing for them. Other places hadn't heard from me and thought maybe I'd moved on, so they let new writers. I lost a lot of really good clients at that point. So I started scrambling and I still had some big clients. I could make a decent living. But the writing was on the wall. I'd had 15 years of really good success at the time that I quit.

Can you talk a bit about fandom for sci-fi novels? What seems similar or different about it from videogames?

That's an interesting question. You know, the person you really should be talking to would be Arnie Katz, because Arnie Katz -- the founder of Electronic Games Magazine and really truly the pioneer who launched game journalism -- went on to write columns and things about fandom and science-fiction fandom. That's really his area, so he might have a lot more to contribute to you than I would have.

Maybe you'll feel this is a little out of your expertise if you're referring me to someone else, but have you heard of the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies?

I don't think I know those.

You don't? Okay.

I don't.

Maybe I will reach out to Arnie, then.

Yeah, I think you'll get better information from him than you would from me.

Okay, sure. Well, something else I wanted to ask about your writing sci-fi was with some of the work you've done, can you talk about how you build worlds out and establish universes without fundamentally changing things too much?

Well, you know, the funny thing is that my Wayson Harris novels didn't start out as Wayson Harris novels. They started out as Star Wars novels.

Right.

You've heard that story before?

Yeah.

Yeah, so, I thought I was writing Star Wars and then I really did have to change it quite a bit. [Laughs.] Because obviously they didn't want me to write Star Wars novels.

How do you feel like your years of being a student of videogames influenced your novel writing?

All those years of playing games influenced my sense of narrative very deeply. I read a review of one of my novels in which the writer commented on how quickly I ramp up from scene setting to full-on-violence. My zero-to-60 throttle came from playing video games, I think. I did some boxing in high school, and I constantly draw on that experience for fight scenes, but shootouts and chase scenes are absolutely and deeply influenced from a life spent playing videogames.

What do you feel that videogames have accomplished?

Oh, they've accomplished a lot! They've accomplished the impossible. They've become a new medium. Right? When you stop to think about it, first there was print, and then somewhere along the line we got -- I think, didn't we have moving pictures before we had radio? I'm not sure who came first: Edison or --

Well, didn't radio start or first get invented in the late 19th century?

Well, let's see. When McKinley got shot -- who was one of the pioneers of radio?

Marconi?

I don't think it was Marconi. They were involved with trying to pull the bullet out of him. I don't remember who it was. It was either Garfield or McKinley, but one of them was shot and it shouldn't have been fatal. But they spent so much time trying to get the bullet out that it killed them. One of the people they brought in to do that was one of the pioneers of radio. I don't think it was Marconi -- no, you know what? It was Alexander Graham Bell, I think. Yeah. I think it was Bell.

So, I'm mixed up. I'm not sure which comes first, but when you think about the space between when print became a medium and when radio and TV -- you know, it got closer and closer. To the point where I can't distinguish which came first, movies or radio, and then TV wasn't too far after that. They've tried other things. They tried to create other mediums, but videogames pulled it off. And not only are they another medium, but they're a major medium. They're shaping society. I mean, so much of what young men think and do now they learn from videogames. One of the big differences -- you know, videogames are an active medium. Somebody once pointed out to me -- and it's a really good point -- that the famous creator of Sonic, oh, come on. You know who I mean.

Oh, I mean, I'm probably going to mispronounce it, but do you mean Yuji Naka? Is that right?

Yeah, Yuji Naka. Thank you very much.

I had to think there for a second.

Well, at least you were able to think. Like I said: old.

So, Naka, when Naka came out with NiGHTS, another journalist -- a good journalist by the name of Jared Horowitz made the comment to me that Naka was a great teacher. And he was exactly right. The thing that made NiGHTS and Naka and Shigeru Miyamoto stand out is that really they were teaching you new behaviors. New ways to press the button and new patterns to press the button. They could do it better than anybody else around them at the time. And that's the difference between an active media and passive media, is that active media does teach you behaviors. And videogames -- you know, I think if you were to check to test the acuity and the dexterity of young videogamers, you'd find that with the exception of maybe magicians and musicians, people didn't have the kind of dexterity that now you find in great supply around the United States, the finger dexterity. I think the way that people approach problems -- again, this is the positive side of videogames. I think that videogames -- a lot of videogames -- teach a kind of quick analysis.

On the negative side, videogames combined with TV combined with a society that's involved in entertainment more than work, we're heavy now. We've put on weight. We've got obesity. We've got -- one of the scary things with videogames, and I wasn't the first journalist to get concerned. Actually, David Sheff was the first journalist I know of to bring it up, which was fears about addiction. And videogame addiction has turned out to be a very key concern.

My full name is Stefanie Joosten, and I'm 28 years old. I'm born and raised in the Netherlands, but right now I'm based in Japan in Tokyo.

Well, I got involved in Metal Gear Solid V a couple of years ago. It started with going to an audition for -- it was an unannounced game. It was all completely secret. So, I was not sure what I was getting myself into at that moment. [Laughs.] But it was an audition for the motion capture of a new videogame. So, I did the audition and I got the part. And that's where I started working in motion capture, and then I got to hear everything. Of course, that it was the new Metal Gear Solid game. It was quite a long road, yeah. I think I'd been working on it for about three years in total.

Yeah.

It was spread out -- I wasn't constantly working on it. It was divided into several periods of working on it for a couple of weeks with breaks. It continued on like that.

Did you get a sense while you working on it about how your being cast that way directly by KJP -- how that was different than for people who have been hired to work on videogames by proxy? Like, David Hayter was not involved, but I believe on other games in the series when he was, he was hired not directly by Konami Japan. Whereas, you were chosen by Japan. Have you gotten a sense of how that is different, coming into their orbit and working with them and that onboarding?

I think it's mostly a technical issue of them wanting to do the motion capture in Japan, because I knew Hideo Kojima wanted to direct all of the motion capture by himself. I think it was more convenient for him to find actors who were based in Japan to start working on the mocap.

I think he talked about how with this particular project it was a much more strenuous process, to the tune of needing 30,000 reference pictures. What's actually involved with all that work that you were doing?

Hmm. Well, it's -- I think he was talking about the 3D scanning process, which is totally separate from the motion capture, again, because not all the motion capture actors got 3D captured. So, actually, it wasn't really a time-consuming thing. They did do the 3D capture on me, so they captured my appearance so Quiet would look like me. Yeah. But it was just one day of doing it and it was done, right? It was very different from motion capture.

And you did a lot of military training for the game as well, right?

[Laughs.] Yeah.

What was involved with that?

Well, I knew for the other motion-capture actors, they were kind of looking for guys who had some military experience. But for the female parts, it was harder. Well, it was almost impossible for them to find people who had that experience. I didn't have any experience in the military field, of course. So, it started with general training that all the actors participated in. It was just like a general idea of what it evolves to be, infiltrating and working as a team as well. So that wasn't really directly related to the part of Quiet, but that was just a general thing.

And then I got some individual training sessions as well, just to focus on my character and what she needed to know and her way of handling weapons of her specialty. So, yeah, I did a couple of sessions for that as well. [Laughs.] I got a replica of a sniper rifle to take home with me so I could practice on my own as well. [Laughs.] I thought that was pretty funny.

While you were doing that training, was there stuff you found you had a knack for that you wouldn't have expected?

I think -- well, I was able to pick it up quite quickly and get a sense of it, I guess. Well, what they told me was -- it wasn't meant as a sexist thing, but they said in general most women have a really hard time to have the right posture and stuff while handling weapons. They were really happy with the way I was doing it. So, I was really glad to be doing an okay job, I guess.

Can you talk a little about -- I don't know if you feel like you're a celebrity, but can you talk about what it means for people to think you're a celebrity in the internet age?

[Laughs.] It's very strange. I don't really feel like a celebrity. [Pause.] It's still quite a surreal idea, to have -- well, to have a really big following on social media now.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's very surreal because I'm not like a mainstream celebrity, so I don't feel like I'm a celebrity in that sense.

Do you feel like people who are "bigger" names are able to crossover that way from videogames to become "regular" celebrities? Or does it feel like if you're a celebrity in videogames you're just a celebrity in videogames and on certain parts of the internet and can’t move anywhere else?

I do feel like it has given me a little bit of opportunities to broaden my field of work, as well, because I'm actually working on two film projects right now. I've always wanted to work on film, as well. So, well, I got approached by people who were interested in me because I was in the game, so, in that sense there's more intertwining between the industries. I feel like it'll happen more and more since in videogames they're using big-name actors as well. So, I feel like in the future there will be less of a gap between them.

Were you given a primer or told what to watch out for or what to expect on social media before it was announced that you were going to be working on this game and before you gained such a big following? Were you told by people in Konami or anyone in the game industry what to expect?

Mmm, not too much, no. I did have -- I don't know. It was hard for me to imagine, but since I was a gamer myself I kind of knew how you get sucked into the world of the game that you're playing. Like, when I thought of that feeling -- when I was younger and I had that feeling playing games, I was very curious about how people would feel about having a real mouth -- well, a real person being in a game. [Laughs.] I was mostly just curious how people would think of that. Yeah, I was maybe like a little bit worried if people would hate it or -- yeah, I just wasn't sure because it was quite new in a major videogame.

Did you feel like people's comments in the videogame world made about you and your performance and appearance -- how did those comments or "typical" comments in the fashion and modeling world compare?

I think it's hard to compare since they are so different. [Pause.] I'm not sure what you mean exactly, just comments in general or do you mean how people in the fashion world reacted to you being in a game?

Well, not so much that, although I'm curious to hear about that as well. I mean more the types of ways people in the fashion world discuss the appearance of someone doing a job, how does that compare to people's comments in the videogame world about your appearance and performance in that game? Do those two worlds talk about or fixate on the same things at all?

I think it's hard to compare them because it's two completely different worlds. But I think, especially in recent years, there has been a lot of discussion in the gaming world, which is really unique for the gaming scene, I think. A lot of people are talking about the influence games have on people and especially younger people who grew up playing them. There's also a lot of discussion about games having a sexist portrayal of women.

I think discussion in the gaming world tends to be a bit more -- well, people are really passionate about their opinions in the gaming world, I think. Yeah. It's hard to compare the two. In the fashion world, it's kind of flat. People don't have as much of a strong opinion. People just accept it for how it is.

That's what I've heard from other interviews I've done with people in the fashion world. They say it's more understood that taste is open to interpretation and it's up to the individual. But for people who don't follow videogames that closely, how is that different? I mean, do you feel like the fashion world is slightly more "evolved" in terms of understanding people can have differences of opinion?

I think it's really hard to compare. I feel like when it comes to gaming, though, a lot of people tend to have really strong opinions without really having a deeper understanding on the subject. Even people who don't play games themselves will have all these opinions before even playing a game. That's quite different, I think.

When you were doing press for Metal Gear, what did you notice when you were interviewed by game blogs or game sites about the types of things they tended to asked you or the sorts of things they never asked you that maybe you wanted to talk about?

It's hard to think of. Well, of course the thing a lot of people tend to ask me about was how I think of the way Quiet was portrayed and it relates to what I was just talking about. Like, people having real strong opinions. That has been the focus in a lot of interviews, I think.

Your appearance in the game? Along what sort of lines?

Well, just -- I guess people are hoping to have some sort of discussion to connect it to how people might think negatively about a woman showing a lot of skin in a videogame and how that has made its influences on the gaming scene in general. That tends to the subject a lot, I think. Well, it is quite the obvious subject that people will talk about since I think it's also in these games to stir these kinds of discussions. So, in that sense, it's what the creators want, I think. [Laughs.] I don't know.

Well, does the fashion world care about how much skin is being shown? Is that something people still discuss or is it not even really brought up?

It's not so much brought up, but since I have mostly experience in the Japanese fashion industry, it's a different world again. I haven't really experienced that too much since in Japan they tend to be a bit more traditional. So, yeah. It's not really a field I have a lot of experience in. I can't really judge about it.

Sure. I think, in general, if you're playing a character who has no words, that's hard enough in a theatrical portrayal or in a movie. It's one fewer tool at your disposal. What were the challenges for you in that with this, under layers of being digitized and portraying a character who is mute?

Well, it was really difficult, of course. But since they did take a bit of time to -- well, a lot of people think I just had my appearance scanned and that was it. A lot of people don't really know about the motion capture process or they think that's all digitally animated or something. But you really go through the whole story. Even if I'm playing a character that doesn't speak, it still feels like you're there and you're experiencing everything. The whole story. So, in that sense, it didn't really feel too different from having a regular speaking role.

What do you look for in a movie role versus a videogame role? Are they different things? Would you take another role that had no dialog?

I welcome all new challenges I could possibly take on in videogame or movie roles. I feel like acting in a movie and videogame are becoming close to being almost the same experience. Yes, when it comes to acting in a videogame, you need a lot of imagination since you mostly work on green screen sets. But the essence of acting is the same.

As you mentioned in videogames, there's a lot of passionate dialog in the fanbase. Do you wish there was something that was more widely discussed or talked about in the videogame world to help make it be a better space?

[Pause.] I think -- one thing I notice about the gaming world is that still among gamers there's a sense of that there's no diversity. There's so many people that play videogames right now, but then there's the casual gamers and the really enthusiastic professional gamers. [Laughs.] But people tend to be really judgmental and say, like, "Oh, you're just a casual gamer."

Yeah.

I think that's an interesting subject. It's really noticeable in the gaming world, how people have very harsh opinions about, like, "No, you don't deserve to be a gamer because you're just a casual gamer." Especially, I think there's still a lot of sexism when it comes to male gamers who just have this view that female women can't be "true" gamers, like they're just doing it for attention or something. Sometimes people will say strange things like that. I think that's really strange. I don't know. I happen to notice those kinds of opinions a lot. Yeah. [Laughs.] I hope things like that get better in the future because I think there's so many genres of gaming and it's getting more and more widespread. Yeah.

When you did start working with Konami, did you ever ask about or did you have conversations about why the audience seems to be that way? Did you learn anything about maybe the way -- if it's just Konami or other game companies, too -- they view the part of the audience that behaves like that?

I don't know. I don't think they really focus on that. It's not really an issue for them.

But it's an issue for the people they make games with. Or can be.

Yeah, but they're more focused on making the games. They appreciate both the people who casually play it and the people who dive really deep into it. Of course, I think they hope people dive really deep into the game and get to see all of the content and get to see the story. I think especially for those who are making the game, that's the most -- I don't know -- grateful feeling, for them to have someone really appreciate the story and go very deep into it.

You said it's hard to compare, but even if it's just the Japanese fashion world, do you feel there are things in that world you wish people would also talk more about, whether it's a workforce issue or something else?

Well, when it comes to the fashion industry, I think it's a world that could definitely use more diversity. Especially when it comes to the models as well, because it's a very tough world. It's all about -- well, youth and beauty and being skinny. So, that can be really tough to be in that world when you don't get judged on your personality but just on your appearance.

Can you tell me more about that? I mean, do you feel there's more sexism in videogames compared to modeling?

[Pause.] It's hard to look at it from a sexism point of view. I think there's always sexism in all parts of society.

Right. Those are just reflections of it.

Yeah.

France passed a law recently about how much a model can weigh and I know people are upset about things like Photoshop overly manipulating images. I mean, do you feel the sexism in games and in modeling is similar in some way?

[Pause.] Well, they're both -- like, the photos you see in the fashion industry and the characters you get to see in gaming, they're both views of a world. Most of the time, I think games are the ideal view. It's a fantasy world people get to see. And something people want to see. In that sense, it's quite similar that something is created that people want to see and that might be -- most of the time those views tend to be male-oriented.

Yeah.

So in that sense, there's always that sense of sexism maybe. [Pause.] Although, when it comes to videogames and women in videogames, I personally haven't always experienced it as being sexist because when I saw female protagonists -- like, when I was young I played Tomb Raider. The first ones. I actually thought it really empowering to have a female protagonist who -- she was like my hero. [Laughs.] I remember looking at it and being like, "Wow, she's awesome. I want to be like her." So, yeah.

I'm sure you remember a lot of the criticisms, though, about those early Tomb Raider games, too, though, right? Can you tell me a bit more about finding Lara Croft to be empowering in light of that?

Like The Quiet, Lara has been criticized for being objectified in her portrayal. Is there something you feel you see that others don't?

Lara Croft was the first female protagonist I ever saw in a videogame. All I saw was a strong independent woman. Media tends to focus on the outside and looks of videogame characters, while they don't seem to realize that those characters have a backstory and personality that can be experienced as empowering to the audience.

It's just very surreal being in a videogame. It's really hard to put into words. Well, yeah, it's just so surreal because I never imagined it would be something that would become possible to be in a game. So, mostly, I was just overwhelmed by it happening to me. [Laughs.] It still felt like a dream come true. Yeah, I was just really overwhelmed.

How did you cope with being overwhelmed? Did any of the criticisms detract from the positive aspects of it?

No. No.

What did you make of the implosion and falling out that happened with Konami and Hideo Kojima? What do you think people don't understand about what happened? What do you not understand yourself about what happened?

I'm sorry, unfortunately I can't comment on these affairs.

That’s okay. I’m sure you understand why I have to ask.

We've talked a bit about perceptions in the East and the West with your work. Metal Gear is a story about the military. I'm curious if you've noticed when it comes to Eastern stories about the military and Western stories about the military, what sorts of differences or commonalities have you picked up on?

[Pause.]

It doesn't have to just be in videogames. It can also extend to movies and a TV show. Just anything in entertainment.

I think if anything in Japan it's idealized a lot. I think people tend to like hearing stories about heroic heroes in war, or the heroic aspects of soldiers. So that might -- still, well, when it comes to Metal Gear, Hideo Kojima really portrays the horrors of war as well. So, he's not just idealizing it. So, I think that sense it's unique.

You think these Eastern stories idealize the military more than the West?

They might. [Pause.] Yeah, I'm not specialized enough in how it's been portrayed, but I feel like in the West people are showing the ugly side a bit more, maybe. It really depends on -- there's a lot of diversity, I think.

Can you talk a little bit about otaku culture, and if and how you may have noticed it's different from nerd culture in the West today? Do they seem similar to you? Do they seem completely different? What comes to mind?

When I think of otaku culture, especially the current otaku culture, it's pretty different. In the last years in Japan the trends have been to follow -- I don't know if you've heard of AKB48? These girl groups are extremely popular and there's, like, these really cute girls. I think mostly the people who follow that are the current otaku culture.

Nerd culture is really, really diverse, I think. I think there's still -- especially in the last few years, it has really, really grown almost to being mainstream in the West.

Yes, I would agree.

Like, a lot of people identify themselves as being nerds. [Laughs.] That's been a really interesting development, I think.

In Japan, people still feel shameful of otaku culture. So, people who are otaku, they won't be as proud as westerners would be. [Laughs.]

Why do you think that is?

I think it has to do with it going mainstream. I think in the past it may have been harder for people to come out as being a nerd.

You're probably of the age, then, if you grew up with Tomb Raider that you can remember being embarrassed to admit you played videogames, but --

Yes. Definitely. It was definitely an experience I had myself. It was not cool at all. [Laughs.] I do remember being embarrassed. It's really refreshing to not feel like I should feel that embarrassment of it anymore.

When you were playing Tomb Raider, was that something you were doing by yourself?

It was mostly my brother. So, yeah, I got into videogames because of my brother.

Does he still play?

No. I grew to be more of a nerd than he did. For him, it was more of a temporary thing.

Growing up, did anyone hassle or tease you for being a girl who plays videogames?

Yes, I have definitely been teased. Growing up in a small town, it was considered very unusual for a girl to be interested in videogames and anime -- specifically Dragonball Z, which I was a big fan of. I remember especially girls in school used to laugh at me if I would talk about my hobbies. Once I got older luckily, I learned that there are plenty of girls like me in the world, and I feel like it is much more socially accepted to be interested in nerd culture now.

Why do you think nerd culture became more mainstream? In America, at least, the portrayal of people who played games historically and infamously was a guy in his mom's basement eating Cheetos. And now over the years it's become a guy in his apartment shouting on his headset.

Right, right.

How do you think that changed? Why do you think that changed?

Well, I think definitely the portrayal of nerds in the media has a large part in it. I think it's also because just the people who used to be nerds have come to be in positions that they're making movies and being able to express themselves to a really large audience. I think the whole nerd culture has also -- it's nerds growing up and expressing themselves and spreading a new awareness that they're normal people and it's perfectly fine. They're dehumanized in media anymore.

I don't know too much about otaku culture, but why hasn't it gone as mainstream in Japan as nerd culture has in America?

It's hard to say why. I think it needs time. It'll change over time.

How have you seen it change over time so far? Pretty much all I've known about it is there's snacking otaku and there's feasting otaku and it's more focused on the act of collecting. I've heard that otaku are more knowledgeable than American nerds, but like you said, they're not necessarily proud of it or shouting it at people the way people in the West are.

Well, it's strange because if you live in Japan and Tokyo especially, you seem the otaku culture all around you. The industry is huge but you don't really see the people. I think it has to do with Japanese people in general being a lot more introverted.

But then again, Japanese mainstream media has very little portrayal of otaku culture. So, it's people who are not in otaku culture don't understand the otaku culture. So, there's still a very harsh division between the non-otaku people and otaku.

I've heard as well, and maybe this is because the animation production over there has been commercially successful for much longer, but I feel like in Japan there's always a new game with an actor from a successful actor. There's this pipeline of actors that people in Japan are familiar with who appear in videogames. But in America, for example, like something the first trailer for something like a Metal Gear comes out, people might be, "Oh, that's Troy Baker." But he's not really known for or from much else. Do you feel like people in Japan are more passionate and knowledgeable about videogame actors?

I think it is, yeah. It is pretty -- the actors are not famous in a mainstream way as they are within the otaku scene of celebrities. They'll have these huge conventions and things like that. Tokyo Game Show. The actors will come onstage and it's full of all the fans getting together. So, yeah, they're really big for the otaku. Yeah, still, it's quite divided.

You mean in terms of awareness?

Yeah. There are mainstream actors who do stuff on TV and movies, but then there's the game and anime actors.

You may not like hearing questions like this because you're just focusing on your work right now, but your manager told me you were out of town working on some movies. Are there things that you're hoping to be working towards in your career specifically?

Well, yeah. I think I'm still lucky to not be "stuck" and completely typecast into being just a videogame actress. I think especially in the West, people are quite open to the idea of having those two worlds intertwine. So, yeah. I'm working on two film projects right now and it's definitely something I want to keep doing in the future. So, I don't want to separate myself from the gaming scene at all because that's really special to me, too.

Well, I mean you can branch out and do different things. Is it really that much of an either/or thing? Or do you have some sense that some people are already typecasting you?

It's hard to say why this typecasting happens. I'm not really sure, to be honest.

With the type of celebrity you are, how do see your relationship with your fans and your audience evolving with things like social media or streaming, which I know you've done.

It's very special. It's really cool to have an audience to be able to share your new steps in your career with. So, that's really something I'm grateful for.

What do you think videogames have accomplished?

That's a good question. [Laughs.] [Pause.] I think videogames have a really large potential to bring people together. I think more so than maybe films because they're interactive and sometimes their stories are just on a so much larger scale. It's really, really special to see how whole communities can form because of a videogame or a videogame franchise. I think that's really unique to videogames.

[Laughs.] Okay. Well, my name is Scott McCloud. I'm a 59-year-old comic-book artist living in Southern California and I've been making comics since 1984.

I also write about comics and I'm probably known for that about as much as for my fiction, and best known especially for a book from 1993 called Understanding Comics. So, I tend to write about comics as an artform and how they operate and how the mind processes those images in sequence and what happens between the panels. That sort of thing. I also have a keen interest in comics and technology.

So, when I asked you via email, "Do you pay attention to videogames?" or if I say the words "game industry," does either of those conjure up any sort of image to you? Does anything come to mind? Do you pay attention to videogames at all?

Well, you know, I'm very industry-agnostic but I'm interested in videogames as an artform as well. Just as with comics, I think there is a kind of creative DNA at the heart of most mediums of expression or entertainment and it often gets obscured by the circumstance of various companies, characters, genres, habits that people fall into and sometimes we can mistake an artform's history for its potential future.

I think videogames are certainly in that category, and I think that there are a number of people who see videogames as having tremendous potential to grow and to move in little bit of a different direction and grow beyond the stereotypes. It can sometimes be an uphill battle because, of course, expectations are very much shaped by what people have already experienced. So, just as comics didn't always have to be stapled superheroes, and just as the last 20 years has really proven that, I think that games will probably go through a similar transformation in the next 20 years.

So, I don't know. I forget when that VR thing was that I followed up with you about originally, and I'm not really going to dwell on it but since you mention the last 20 years and the next 20 years: Can you talk about the early days of CD-ROM and whether there's anything about this particular push of VR or even the '90s push of VR that reminds you of those early days, breathless excitement for CD-ROM?

I'm actually gonna place myself on the optimistic side of the fence.

I don't think that the current interest in VR is any kind of overhyped bubble. I think that it’s the real thing. I think that probably in the next few years, we're going to be experiencing something that actually delivers on some of that early promise, that early hype back in the '90s. Paul Saffo, I think, had said something to the effect that it takes about 20 years for new ideas to kind of go through their hype cycle and go through early implementations -- a lot of hype and a lot of excitement and then kind of dying on the vine and be buried and forgotten and then actually happen.

And we do see that with a number of things. The web itself went through something like that, with people like Ted Nelson making lots of noise in the early '70s, but it wasn't until the early '90s that things got interesting. VR is like that for a number of reasons. I think that -- I mean, there were certainly technical limitations, of course. Latency and processing and all that. It's not a simple problem to implement that stuff. But I think maybe there was also a misunderstanding of its value.

Something that I've come to understand recently is the ways in which we're able to cognitively model and see experiences from different sources -- things like moving about a scene or occlusion or foreshortening or atmospherics and all these things that help create a sense of a 3D space in our minds, so that when you add parallax in the form of, you know, let's say 3D glasses at the movies, that helps bolster the effect of 3D but it's not as transformational as I think many of us really expected.

We expected that once true 3D movie-going experiences came along, that it would just knock our socks off, that it would become indispensable. That hasn't happened. And that's because we were able to produce that interior sense of navigating a 3D space pretty well previous to that. But where parallax is very important, where having those two eyes, those two subtly different vantage points on the world through those two eyes becomes enormously important is in the manipulation of things in 3D space.

That's, I think, one of the reasons why it was exciting for me to try Tilt Brush recently. The business of creating something in a 3D space, where painting a line and painting another line in front of it or between it? That's a very different experience because it's not a spectator sport. It's not a matter of just leaning back as you might with those New York Times videos on your Google Cardboard viewer. You know, it's different to make something. It's different to manipulate something in space with your hands. And that was the missing ingredient. And I think that's going to be the game changer.

It's still siloed in this high-end expensive computationally intensive little ivory tower and we're not entirely sure when it's going to be released from that and become more mainstream and more accessible, but I'm interested to see what happens with low-rent alternatives like the controller that's being introduced. The cardboard. Anything that will help get it out there in a more affordable way or PlayStation and whatnot.

You mentioned movie-going experiences, and I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about the rise of superheroes in movie theaters. I think there's a similar parallel in videogames with things that are superheroes or superhero-like have dominated the mainstream releases for a long time. Maybe this sounds like an obvious or abstract question, but why do you think things have settled to be that way? That superheroes are not considered niche, and things that are not are?

They're just being done well. Fantasies are a pretty basic kind of button-pushing that a narrative can provide. [Laughs.] I think previous to this era, they just weren't done particularly well. Along came people who better understood what the appeal was and how to leverage it -- who understood how to take something that had a certain amount of ridiculous to it and turn that ridiculousness to their advantage.

I'm thinking of, you know, like, the terrific sense of humor in a movie like The Avengers, for example, which, nevertheless has a fair amount of gravity and drama to it. Not in spite of the humor but to some degree because of it. It doesn't have this humorlessness that can sometimes weigh down things like that.

It's important when looking at comics and superhero movies, I do want to stress that superheroes are a genre which was born within that artform but it's not synonymous with it. One of the first battles that we started fighting way back in the '80s was trying to get across the message that comics are not a genre, they're a medium.

Right.

And the genre is just a subset of that medium. Obviously, the same is true with games. But it's not -- the problem is not success breeding success. The problem occurs when you have a field in which it's either our attention or literal shelf space in the case of physical markets, brick and mortar markets, such that even as a popular genre may be growing and thriving, it still needs that open space for other new ventures, new genres, new subject matter to at least be born. And for much of the 20th century that was impossible. As soon as you had a genre which was selling 20 percent better than the other genres, it took up 100 percent of the shelf space.

[Laughs.]

It didn't reflect its potential proportionately. It simply took every atom oxygen there was.

It's interesting in the case of superheroes I think we're talking with, even some of the more mainstream superheroes, some of these characters have been around for 50, maybe 60 years. Sometimes longer.

Yeah.

And yet, I feel sometimes when they're marketed that they're maybe trying to tap into the nostalgia element. I don't know if you agree with that, but how can we be nostalgic for something that never really takes a break? [Laughs.]

Yeah, I don't think the nostalgia really drives the current spate of superhero movies. I think it may produce nostalgia for some, to look at that stuff and remember the comics they'd read as a kid. But nostalgia is certainly not the selling point. Not for most of its audience.

Most of the audience for most of those movies probably -- they haven't read old Roy Thomas, John Buscema issues of The Avengers. [Laughs.] I mean, that's a pretty small slice of the public. I think most are picking up on it because it's really fun, people are flying around and hitting things, and it's cool. [Laughs.] They're just cool. People enjoy them. I think they're good movies. I think a lot of the Marvel movies were good. I think that other stuff like Scott Pilgrim or American Splendor or Ghost World were fantastic movies. Persepolis was a great movie.

There are a lot of comic-based movies that I think are just really good movies. Some of them manage that by -- my feeling with those adaptations is that ideas from the source material can make it a better movie. I hope that they'll take that opportunity. In cases where the source material does not necessarily serve the picture, I hope they ignore it. All that matters is that the filmmakers have as much pride in their work and in their medium as the original cartoonists hopefully did in theirs.

I wonder if it's a similar thing -- you mentioned Scott Pilgrim, which may be the closest thing to a videogame movie that critics think was well done and audiences think is well done.

Yeah. I certainly do.

I've talked to people for this where there's speculation or the attitude that we're not seeing good videogame movies yet because the source material isn't good or there isn't that much of a narrative taking place. Or do you think it's similar to what you said with superheroes where regardless of the source material, it's just that someone hasn't come along yet and done them justice?

Well, the thing with games is tricky because comics were more like movies to start with in the sense that they are authored narrative works that are meant to produce something of a lean-back experience. I mean, they're interactive to a degree but still it's a fully created and authored narrative experience. Whereas, games, by their nature, at their heart, that experience is authored by the user. And so, it can be frustrating having something that's overly constructed as a narrative experience. You know, the frustration of cutscenes, for example. Who wants a two-hour cutscene?

[Laughs.]

There is something conspicuously missing from any videogame, and that's you. That's your agency, that's your ability to effect the work, to create the work. You're the creator of the work in a good game. And I mean that in the broadest sense. In a game of chess, in a game of badminton, in a game of video poker or something. [Laughs.] You are the author of your experience. And that's not just my idea. That goes way back, designer Doug Church had first mentioned that to me -- some of them who first met back in '99 were already toying with this idea.

Not to quote you back to you, but you had mentioned in a TED Talk -- you were talking about how all media provides us with a window back onto our world. Maybe that sounds familiar, maybe not.

Yeah.

Do you feel like some media are better suited to different types of exploration of different parts of our world? Are comics specifically better at things that maybe videogames are not?

It stands to reason that each artform is going to have certain strengths and weaknesses, but I'm a bit allergic to declaring something off limits, to ever saying that a given subject might be ill-served by a given artform because everytime I think there's something like that that comics can't do, somebody goes and disproves me.

[Laughs.]

You know, disproves the theory, and in fact does indeed use comics to explain that thing, to explain, say, higher mathematics or quantum theory or something you thought wouldn't really work in that medium. So, at this point I kind of have a blanket policy of, while acknowledging that in theory that certain artforms may have blind spots, may have handicaps, that it's not my place to ever try to nail them down or try to figure out something that comics can't do or that games can't do or that movies can't do. Because chances are better than even that I'll be wrong in the long run.

I think that's a good thing, right? Don't we want to be proven wrong about these kinds of things, to be surprised by the potential?

Yeah. Yeah, the one constant is that everyone carries with them a presupposition of the limitations of any artform, which is the gamut of which is far too small. That's the constant. That's the one thing I can say again and again. It's very rare that somebody sees in any medium or artform too much potential. It's almost always the reverse. And you can go back to the early days of radio and television and see the exact same conversation. It's usually something to do with education. But they were never proven wrong by history. They were merely reduced because of overlooked profits by shortsighted implementations of the information and technology that followed.

Meaning, they weren't wrong. They weren't wrong about the educational potential of radio. They weren't wrong about the potential of television. That's just simply not where audiences and industries happen to go.

Similarly, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the internet and the way that it has changed things for creators. I think rather than talk specifically about videogames, I wanted to dip back to something that I think you were one of the first or among the first supporters of, critics on, and commentator on, which was micropayments for creators.

[Laughs.]

I know obviously -- you said you were reluctant to hammer things down, but you do have that Creator's Bill of Rights.

Yeah.

How have your opinions on micropayments changed over the last, what is it, 15 years now?

Well, for years I'd have to say micropayments was kind of my Waterloo. [Laughs.] I was fascinated by and extremely passionate about several different aspects of comics and technology, about digital production and digital distribution, and maybe most passionate about the creative possibilities of comics when released from the constrictions of the printed page -- something that I think a lot of people still don't fully understand. But when it came to the business end, I saw what what I called that frictionless economy -- I saw the most important component to that as the ability of people to pay fairly small amounts of money very quickly and easily. The equivalent of just tossing nickels and dimes back and forth. Some said that it was technically impossible, which at the time, I thought was ridiculous and I think it's ridiculous now. And some like Clay Shirky insisted that it was a poor fit to the way people actually consume media and it was just wishful thinking on the part of producers.

He was definitely right in the short term, but the principals have talked about the outsized power of the consumer dollar, when that dollar was only trend rather than reduced fit size. That dynamic has since been pretty clearly demonstrated by crowdfunding in the years since. I still think it's important that there needs to be some very simple way to trade very small amounts of money transparently and quickly, but the pay-for-play aspect of at this point -- it's pretty unlikely that we're going to have anything quite like what I envisioned in the next 20 years. Now, on the other end, micropayments themselves may turn out to be fairly inevitable. I was at Foo Camp recently -- the Friends of O'Reilly gathering, this sort of think tank-y thing up in Sebastopol, California, hosted by O'Reilly Publishing. They'll always get a bunch of very interesting geeks up there. I've been up to a few. There was one interested in alternate payment systems, and her feeling about micros was that they were inevitable if only because what we look at as a very small amount of money in some parts of the world could be the price of a meal, and so this idea of trading the equivalent of five and 10 cents was essential in a lot of developing nations. That makes a lot of sense. She also thought it could be very decentralized. I thought there had be a centralized form of alternate currency with a trusted vendor, and she thought there could be many vendors of the currency, which is interesting and not something I'd really considered at the time. But then, you know, I'm a cartoonist, so what do I know?

[Laughs.] Don't say that a half-hour into my interview with you. I'm hoping to learn some things here.

[Laughs.]

[Laughs.] No pressure, though.

Yeah. [Laughs.]

But I think when you break it down to the fundamentals that you wrote about a while ago -- and I think this is still true -- for payments like that to work of any stripe, like you said, for it to be viable you have to make it clear that your work is worth their time. But I do wonder maybe 15 years later, as the tools of distribution and creation for so many different artforms are so readily available, it feels like there is something more that creators have to do to demonstrate that their work deserves compensation -- beyond the fact that it's just worth their time. Would you agree with that, or --

Well, clearly the value proposition is one of those things that sunk micros. I'm sure the critics of micropayments would point to other aspects of it as well. and I don't have a lot of authority to contradict them at this late day.

Sure.

I mean, we failed. But I do think maybe the value proposition for any economy requires a certain amount of stability.

You mean in the greater economy?

In any economy, generally, you need a series of reliable experiences repeated over the course of months and years and decades such that if there is a ramping up of value in a given case that everybody is very clear on exactly what that is. And at the time we were trying to push this in 2005 -- my God, I mean, it was the Stone Age --

In internet terms, yes.

[Laughs.] We didn't even have reliable JavaScript yet. Yeah, I think back then the value itself was in flux and value requires a certain amount of stability.

It's probably not a surprise for you to hear -- I mean, if I tell you I'm a writer and a journalist you can assume certain things. I've known musicians and artists, and artists of all stripes have always had trouble paying rent.

Sure.

But the consensus among my circles is that there seems to be a disappearing or just a complete lack of "nobility obliges" dynamic of the conversation, where people who have more maybe should be a little bit more inclined to give back or to be patrons. Do you sense that? Has there been an erosion of that? Or has it just been a constant?

[Pause.] I think patronage is kind of absent from the landscape, actually, for much of my life. It's only recently that the notion of patronage has been becoming more mainstream. [Pause.] I mean, it was all business for a few decades there.

Yeah.

I mean, I think of patronage of the early 20th century and what is it? William Randolph Hearst putting Krazy Kat in his newspapers even though nobody wanted to read the damn thing?

[Laughs.]

[Laughs.] Now we have the era of Amanda Palmer and the various denizens of Patreon and Kickstarter.

Yeah.

That seems, to me, to be a much more robust landscape of patronage than anything we had, let's say, in the '80s. I'm not even sure. Like, apart from people giving money to their local symphony or NPR, I mean, what was patronage in those days?

I think it feels like a centuries-old concept.

Yeah. Yes. And with some centuries-old baggage and potential toxicity, but no, I think the disenfranchisement among a lot of young artists has more to do with what used to be a more broad and stable entry-level industry. Yeah, you could always get work somewhere doing something for somebody.

Like, when I was an illustration major in Syracuse in the late '70s and early '80s, it was understood that if you're an illustrator, "Well, you could always work for Screw. [Laughs.] Apparently there was this magazine called Screw that a lot of alumni of Syracuse or schools of visual arts -- could always get some illustration work at Screw. That was kind of like getting work at the post office: "Yeah, you could work at Screw for a little while." That's one of the things that's disappearing, that sort of guaranteed shitty paycheck for artists.

This is true.

But that wasn't patronage, of course. That was just the industry. That was the flotsam and jetsam of the industry.

It was a job.

It was a job. It was an actual job.

[Laughs.] In games -- I'm not sure if you've heard about this, but there's this thing called Fig, which is basically micropayments by way of microinvestments.

Hmm.

So, unlike Kickstarter or Patreon, which are both seemingly fairly saturated platforms, with Fig you're actually getting equity. It's sort of a new thing, it's untested, I'm not really asking for you to have a "hot take" or opinion on it.

[Laughs.]

But what do you make of that dynamic, of allowing your fans to be investors and then profiting off the work that they're giving you money to do instead of, "Here, have some money and go off and do the thing you want to do."

[Pause.] You know, one of the interesting things about that stuff is one of the things that fuels solutions like that is income in equity, right? So, the degree to which the society is progressively unequally is the degree to which that sort of thing seems increasingly attractive. Like that woman up at Foo Camp telling me about how micropayments might be macropayments in a developing nation. Which, of course, brings us back to -- fuckin' Adam Smith and his invisible hand. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.] Yeah. Yeah.

[Laughs.] You know, my little libertarian wonder if, "Okay, maybe one way or another things really do have a sort of reversion to the mean built into the system, just built into the physics of economics that one way or another things sort of tend to flow back in a tidal fashion.”

But I don't know. I'm not sure. Like, some of it runs on faith. Just as Kickstarter runs on faith. People do give to projects that are not fulfilled. People do give a dollar every month to the Patreon accounts of artists who they don't realize for years aren't producing much. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.] They just like the idea of giving them money.

But then, you know, you might give money to the guy sitting on the corner who's gonna -- like, you don't know that he's gonna use it for food or drugs.

Right. Right.

You don't really know but you're not gonna sweat it that much because it's just a buck and it's a way of living to put that message in a bottle, to just send a little goodwill headed across the ocean without any guarantee of where it's gonna end up. I think there's something appealing about that. It's a kind of tribute to one's understanding of one's own good fortune that that's even an option for you.

I know obviously the web-comic gold rush is long over, but I'd be curious to hear you talk about before the internet of today became the internet of today -- in TV, the goal under the old model was to get to 100 episodes and be in syndication.

[Laughs.] Yeah.

But during that era, what did success look like for an aspiring or even burgeoningly established writer or artist in comics?

Which era precisely? What years are we talking?

I guess I'm talking about the ‘70s and '80s and '90s.

Yeah, things were in flux during that period. What I often tell young artists is that when I got into comics in the late '70s, let's say the top 10 most successful people in my business were all successful in exactly the same way. By today, the top 10 most successful people in my business are all successful in 10 different ways. Each one of them has invented their own definition of success. They created something which couldn't be ignored, something that incited a certain degree of passion and devotion on the part of an audience, and then that simply became the rushing river that they had to either divert or build a dam around or make a water wheel or start selling off by the bottle. One way or the other, the water was money, but each of them found a way to make it so. I think that's healthy because just sort of the way perception works, that draws focus to the constant, and the constant is the work rather the method.

Do those people wanting to break in, do they understand what you mean when you say that?

I just tell them that all they have to do is create something really great and then tell somebody and then wait to figure out how that's gonna make them money. But then I always caution them that step one could take 20 years.

Yeah, and that's if you're lucky because it might never happen at all.

Yeah. Creating the great thing. And I also tell them that "good enough" isn't good enough.

That's true in videogames as well. I think of everywhere, now.

Well, videogames also have the additional challenge of scale unless you're going to do something as part of an indie-game jam or something.

The people who are the 10 most successful people in comics today, what do they use their clout for? Are they able to get clout? Are they able to do anything with it?

Oh, I mean, at the end of the day people want more or less the same thing, which is they want a pile of money so they can take care of themselves and their family and so they can keep making what they're making assuming that they enjoy making it, which they usually do.

Right.

And they want to reach as many people as possible and just improve their lives and the lives of the people reading their stuff. But money takes care of most of that, doesn't it? [Laughs.] If you make enough, you can keep making it. And then, really, I think the goal of most of the really good artists is to stop thinking about money entirely and having enough of it is usually the best way to do that. Then you can just think about the work. I was grateful my agent got me a good deal on the last graphic novel so I could spend every single waking hour thinking about the graphic novel instead of thinking about money. It was great.

When I have conversations with people in comics, they tell me they have a lot of the same problems as the people in the videogame industry. A lot of the same labor issues, a lot of the same issues with toxic or abusive portions of the audience, so when people get clout in the comics world, is it rarely used to address or assuage those types of problems? Because they really don’t in games.

[Exhales.] It's a little different.

Yeah.

Gaming is more of a collective. Most people working in games are working as part of large teams, so labor issues often have more of a conventional consciousness-raising union-style concern to them. It's a matter of a community trying to advocate for better treatment. That sort of thing.

You're saying by definition, it's bigger groups of people to produce --

Yeah. It's bigger groups of people, so it has dynamics more in accord with other forms of labor. In comics, of course, we're all our own little weird little idiosyncratic fiefdoms. [Laughs.] Very often it's just a single artist forming their own little cottage industry, and many of us don't have to deal necessarily with a publisher or we might be self-publishing online. I don't personally, but a lot of people do.

Yeah.

And also, in terms of community, while community of comics readers can be challenging at times, I think the fever is running a bit higher in games at the moment in terms of the stresses of gender dynamics and other issues. It's just right now that's an especially hot topic in games.

Right. Right.

It's a little more muted in comics, which I think is just not so aggressive but whatever. [Laughs.] We're just a little bit more bucolic. We're just a little bit more laid-back and hippie-ish, maybe, in comics. Whereas, with games, there's always a monster to be slain, real or imagined.

Interesting. Is that the media theorist in you talking, or do you just think that's how the audience has happened to coalesce? Because I've talked to a lot of other comics people who have said otherwise.

Nah, it's really just clumsy stereotyping of a misunderstood medium. I'll probably regret having even said that. [Laughs.]

I wanted to ask a little bit about the Creator's Bill of Rights. I don't know how long ago that feels to you, but how do you feel that the work-for-hire dynamic is taken too far in comics routinely?

It's changed a lot.

Yeah. Yeah.

You know, when we got together to talk about some of these issues in 1990 or '89, it's one or the other and I always mix up whether it's the 24-Hour Comic was one of those or the other. But the Bill of Rights, I suggested a meeting of creators at this creator's summit. They were pretty concerned with distributor issues in those days, but I suggested the Bill of Rights more as a document of rights that our individual artists have when negotiating with publishers. It's more about the publisher-artist relationship. At least, that's how I saw it.

A lot of those provisions really are standard now with a lot of contracts. It's not true at Marvel, especially now that they're owned by Disney, or DC, which has always been pretty grabby. I suppose that they've progressed only slightly. But my feeling was just that creators have quite a bit of power if they simply recognize it in themselves. That they have all that power, they have all that control until they sign it away.

And it's telling that two of the participants in that meeting where I proposed the Creator's Bill of Rights were Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, who had created the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Right.

Who retained the rights to their creations and became millionaires many times over as a result.

Yeah, I think I read that they helped fund one of your books. Was it the Understanding Comics book?

Yeah, Kevin Eastman created a publisher called Tundra and Understanding Comics was one of the projects that they funded in their brief existence. [Laughs.] For which I'll always be grateful, of course. But, yeah, so we had them, we had the Image boys shortly after the Bill of Rights, the Image Comics creators who struck off on their own to make their own new characters. There'd been something of an IP strike. I think for many, many years writers and artists were reluctant to create brand new characters that would then be owned lock, stock, and barrel by the company. Without the promise that they would have some control or at least some participation in the profit generated by those characters, there wasn't much reason to create them. And that's another reason why a lot of the old characters were persisting, because there just weren't nearly as many new ones being created for that reason.

Do you feel that -- should it be amended for today's internet age? I interviewed a political cartoonist for this, and she talked to me about how it's murky legal territory to have her work be redistributed on Twitter or on web sites that don't give her credit but embed her work without permission.

Yeah.

I'm sure this is among the least of the ways that piracy is rampant on the internet, but are there ways that you think are particularly damaging to cartoonists on the internet?

Well, I don't know. You really have to look at it holistically as part of a much broader issue of the vanishing of impermeable membranes, the vanishing of scarcity, the convergence of media. It's still a useful word, convergence.

Yeah.

It is a convergence of sorts. And the dynamics of it, I mean, there's almost too much to say, but it's all part of the bigger picture as people find themselves sliding down the long tail of an increasingly saturated media landscape. It's just -- riding those waves, the waves are getting shallower and I don't have a simple solution for it, except to note that there are still success stories. They do still exist. But they were always the minority, of course. I mean, those going into comics in 1981 had no better chance of being among the lucky few than artists now do. There was just a more well-worn path, that's all.

Sometimes I think back on bands I heard about in the '80s and '90s and, like, just a couple weeks ago I was trying to figure out: Is it more impressive that I heard about bands like that back then, or is it more impressive that I hear about bands I'm surprised I really like today? I ask a lot of people I interview this question: Have we become better gatekeepers than the gatekeepers we had when we had gatekeepers?

It depends. I think I'm probably a better gatekeeper than the gatekeepers I had.

Yeah.

Because I'm pretty conscientious about that. I keep trying to expose myself to new stuff. There's plenty of stuff that I enjoy in all artforms that's just from the last few years. So, I'm certainly not, as a 59-year-old man, I'm not sitting around the house moaning that there hasn't been a good cartoon since Scooby-Doo or anything like that.

[Laughs.]

[Laughs.] Which is just so wrong on its face.

Well, it's just a funny sentence.

Yeah. Yeah, I think some are, some aren't. Some people are lazy. Some people just don't want to bother. But for those who put in even a minimal effort, who at the very least check out the shows that all their friends are talking about, at the very least will click on the recommendations of a new album or something like that, they're in pretty good shape. And my God, network TV? Commercial radio? [Sighs.] Even at its best, even the really great stations like WBCN in Boston, when I was a teenager, or KCRW -- even that seems like a narrow pipe next to all the ways we have of finding things on our own.

I wanted there to be more sort of low-orbit gatekeepers, tastemakers, and critics circles. That's an economy that I hoped would also be fueled by micropayments, but without the payments, it's just been a sort of a race to the bottom in terms of recommendation services --

And the rise of --

The algorithms --

Yeah, I was about to say, and the rise of algorithms.

Yeah, and the algorithms, actually, at the beginning I thought they were quite promising. I was very impressed with them with, like, Pandora at the beginning. Then they seem to just devolve into something less useful.

Well, as I'm sure you know, they also don't pay artists all that much money. So it's kind of a lose-lose.

Well, that's something else, again.

Yeah.

I'm talking about in terms of being able to analyze the musical tastes and intelligently discern what the formal qualities of that music are such that they can recommend other artists. That's one question. That's an AI question.

Right.

As far as the fraction of a penny stuff on Spotify, there are a couple of different dimensions to that. It's an unacceptable model when the service itself really is just trying to make money by other means, like Apple just trying to sell the hardware. It's also obscene when you have the previously indispensable middle man of the music publisher just raking in 90 percent of what dough there is. from an already small reservoir of money. There's just a lot of things wrong with that.

Right.

But the most unfurnished problem is us, because we really would like to have access to all music on the planet for the least amount. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.] It's a reasonable demand.

I only have a few more for you. A while back, Simon Pegg had written this essay or blog post about this generation's "prolonged youth" of late Gen-Xers and millennials have "channeled [their] childhood passions into adult life." Do you remember that post that I’m talking about?

I remember that it existed but I have a very sketchy memory of it.

That's totally fine. I'm curious if you feel like you've seen the effects of that sort of nostalgia that I mentioned earlier in this way. Do you feel it influences mainstream comics in the way it influences TV and film?

To cling to one's youth can mean two different things. Are you speaking of clinging to the remnants of one's youth or clinging to the spirit of one's youth? I really don't see nostalgia as being the operative force. I don't know. Somehow I just don't think that nostalgia is driving culture right now. There are certain IP that's being kept going, in the case of the Marvel movies and whatnot.

Yeah.

And yeah, there's a lot of just remaking stuff because nobody really wants to take a chance on something that's genuinely new. But, I mean, just divvy it up by artform and I don't see the problem. You know? I don't think Steven Universe has anything to do with nostalgia. I think the really great stuff coming out of Pixar may spark a certain amount of nostalgia, but that's not why it's great and why we all love it. It's because it's great storytelling.

I think music is in surprisingly good shape, seeing as how all of them are starving and eat each other like the Donner Party or something just to survive. They're still making great stuff. In comics -- comics has actually kind of shaken off its nostalgia. There's very little nostalgia in the comics that matter. Even the superhero scene, I think, is trying to be a little more bracingly new than they have been previously. Remember, when I say comics, I'm not picturing the stapled superhero magazines anyway. For the most part, I'm thinking of graphic novels and the kids' comics movement, which is exploding right now, partially fueled by all those manga kids who grew up.And the stuff going on on the web and the graphic novels, which are -- yeah, the graphic-novel scene is new. I don't know. It just doesn't strike me as an age of nostalgia. I don't see much evidence of that.

Let me ask you one last question. I usually ask people this about videogames, but what do you think comics have accomplished?

Well, I'm on record as seeing each narrative artform as offering a window through which we can view the world that we live in, and the value the unique qualities of each artform is that it -- I mean, the proliferation in the number of those windows and the number of vantage points through which we can see the world that we live in. I think that's useful. Just like it's useful to see the world through the eyes of many others.

So, that diversity of all kinds, I think, has created benefits and benefits of knowledge. And I just see comics as part of that landscape. I don't want to elevate them to be better than any other artform. It's more that I think we have to have respect for every artform and we have to have respect for what makes each artform unique. That's been my crusade with comics, and I see others who want the same things for videogames. I hope they achieve that. The degree to which people are up in arms about wanting to keep videogames the way they are, I think they're really missing the boat.

An artform doesn't have to be lifted off of one square of the chess board and put down on another. Ideally, it should grow. Its territory should grow. To create new games of a sort that we've never seen before doesn't mean the abandonment of the old. It should strive in all those directions at once.

So, yeah, basically, my name is Bakari Kitwana. I grew up in Long Island and went to school upstate New York, University of Rochester. I did two master’s degrees there, one in English and one in education.

And after that I worked at Third World Press in Chicago, which grew out of the Black Arts Movement of the '60s, and I did that work for about five years. Then I taught briefly at the University of Houston and Texas Southern University. I moved back to New York, where I was the editor of The Source Magazine and I did that work in various capacities. I worked as an editor of The Source for about four years, '95 to '99. And after that, I wrote a book called The Hip-Hop Generation that kind of popularized the expression. After that, I was one of the co-founders of the National Hip-Hop Political Convention, which brought 4,000 young people to Newark, New Jersey to create and endorse a political agenda for the hip-hop generation. And we did that along with people like Ras Baraka, who's now the mayor of Newark, ironically. [Laughs.] Rosa Clemente, who was the 2008 vice presidential candidate for the Green Party. And Van Jones helped us out with that, Davey D, and many other people. Some of the artists that were involved were Wyclef, Chuck D, Dead Prez, Boots Riley of The Coup, and these guys performed and participated and helped us to organize the event.

So, after that, I wrote a book called Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop. I taught at the University of Chicago, I was their visiting artist in resident-in-residence, and I taught in the political science department. I also taught at Kent State previously, briefly, also as a visiting scholar. And I've been a visiting scholar at the Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media at Columbia College of Chicago.

And I started an organization called Rap Sessions, which conducts community town hall dialog around the country on what I call "difficult dialogues facing the hip-hop generation." We've done that work for, like, the last 11, 12 years. We pick a different topic every year and we go to 10 to 15 cities with a different panel of folks who are a combination of artists, hip-hop artists, activists, scholars, journalists. This year we're focused on the election and we're calling it "Vote for the People: Reform or Revolution."

So, that's, in a nutshell, the range of my experiences. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.]

I've also been an expert witness on hip-hop for a number of court cases where hip-hop has been entered in as evidence, generally, by the prosecuting side. And so I've been brought in as an expert witness to, you know, decipher some of the intricacies of hip-hop or people that are generally using it against black and brown people. But one case I did was a white kid who was a junior high-school student. That was a federal case out of Pennsylvania.

What's your perception of the videogame industry and what's going on it? From where you sit, what do you see, what you think, what do you hear?

I mean, when I think about videogame culture, I'm reminded of my days of working at The Source, really. There were always kids who were editors and writers and artists who were into gaming, and sometimes they would be up at the magazine playing games. [Laughs.] You know what I mean?

Yeah.

So, I mean, that's always been something that's been in the background of the culture of hip-hop.

Yeah.

This is something that we just take for granted.

And then we have different points where artists' images and music are being used in videogames. I can remember the controversy around -- what was it? I can't remember the game where people were stealing cars. What'd they call that?

Oh, Grand Theft Auto?

Exactly. [Laughs.] Exactly. Grand Theft Auto.

[Laughs.]

Right. I remember the controversies and some of the racial depictions that people were concerned about. And then, I guess, other instances where there would have been debates about athletes' images being used in games and them not being properly compensated.

Yeah.

So, those are some of the things that have come under my radar as an activist and as a person who has worked in hip-hop and activism. These are the issues that come up. And then, a lot of times, a lot of young people, working with young people, they're talking about games and playing on games and I remember there was the -- what was that? Warcraft or something? What was that thing called?

Are you talking about World of Warcraft?

Yeah, World of Warcraft. Right. I remember a lot of people talking about that. I never really got into the games at that level. It just wasn't --

You've been busy is what it sounds like.

Yeah, it just wasn't something that -- I don't generally look for things to consume my time that aren't information- and knowledge-growing things. You know what I mean? So, I'm constantly trying to immerse myself in something where I'm learning more information.

But, you know, there's a friend who teaches at University of Illinois. And I know that they have some gaming academic sides going on with the creation of games and stuff with that. I don't know if you're familiar with that.

Are you talking about down in Champaign?

Down in Champaign, that's right. So, he's periodically -- me and him have gotten into conversations about where is hip-hop in this conversation? Where are young people who are into the games in that conversation? Because you have scientists and engineers and these kind of hacker, nerdy kids who are creating these games and becoming financially well off. And so he's always raising the question of where are the black and brown kids in this conversation at that level?

What conclusion does he draw?

He's saying that we need to make sure that they're present.

That's sort of at the core of this thing. I don't know how odd an assertion it is when I ask you about comparing rap culture and videogame culture. I mean, does that sound strange? Does that sound strange that I reached out to you to talk about that?

No, I mean, it doesn't sound strange because I think that America is a highly entertainment, consumer-driven culture.

Yeah.

And so, you know, a large part of the goal of American entertainment for the powers that be is to create these distractions.

Yes.

And to get people invested and to be entertained instead of really confronting the problems that are facing everyday people. So, I mean, yeah, that makes sense to me. I mean, I feel like within hip-hop it's a constant battle between people need to make a living, but at the same time is the culture benefiting the people who created it or people outside of the culture? You know what I mean?

How is it affecting people internationally? American culture is often the new imperialism as it feeds on other culture. So, I constantly struggle with the point where hip-hop is entering into the international and the global space and teaching folks way to get free. But then also, the component of this cultural imperialism where we're basically using hip-hop as the backbone upon which to ride into American culture. I would imagine some of those lines get crossed with gaming just as they do with hip-hop just as they do with film.

Do you feel that mainstream rap has gotten less violent? Has there been any shift in the amount of violence in it one way or the other?

That's an interesting question. You know, I think that -- it's an interesting question on a lot of different levels. I mean, on the one hand the way that we measured impact and reach of the music has changed. So, like, in the earlier days of hip-hop it was how many record sales.

Yeah.

And now, with people listening to and sharing music in so many different ways that are trackable and some that just aren't -- and so I think it's difficult. I guess if you look at people who are at the top of the food chain who are the most financially successful, I would say it's definitely not the N.W.A era of hip-hop. Even so, I think that you have a lot of artists who still dabble in that imagery. I think that that N.W.A formula that was created back in the late '80s is very much something that's still with us in hip-hop and it is still a dominant trend.

But then you have artists like the Drakes and the Nicki Minajs, but at the same time you have the Chief Keefs and that whole genre of hip-hop artists that are also dabbling in that same imagery. It's been pretty consistent from N.W.A all the way up to 50 Cent right on up to the present.

Are you saying it's not less, but just because of the internet we hear about a lot of other things now, too?

I would not say it's less.

Yeah.

But I do think that the dominant -- those artists, solely in the way that they seem to be for a while, I think it's an evolution. I wouldn't say that it's less, though. I think more music is being made in a lot of different formats. It's being listened to and shared. You've got a lot of artists that aren't on major record labels, but they're still being listened to. How do you quantify those? I think, for me, the quantification of the impact is different.

Yeah.

Is hip-hop is what people are listening to on the radio? It depends on how you're defining violence. If you're talking about the ways women are talked about in misogynistic ways, to some people that's violence.

Yeah. I was gonna ask about that, too. You were talking before we started about some of the sportscasters being harassed. But have any of these stories about misogyny in tech or treatment of women in tech been making their way to you?

Only -- not really. I think to the extent of people talking about the lack of diversification in the workplace type of stories. That's always a presence. That's something I do hear about, but not much beyond that.

Yeah, I don't think there has been any single story that has spiked. I think it's more of a constant boil. But do you think rap has been more hostile to women than tech?

Oh, now that's interesting. I think that it's always important, I've found, with hip-hop to not get so fixated on where hip-hop is doing wrong but to look at where it's going right.

And I think that when we look at where it's doing right, it begins to tell a different picture. When we look at where it's doing wrong, because black and brown kids are so often criminalized, it's very easy to fall into the belief that, "Oh, hip-hop is responsible for all of this misogyny and it's the most misogynistic thing in American culture." People fall into that kind of a mindset particularly when you're dealing with a group of folks who don't have political power.

So, I think that when people raise the question about misogyny and homophobia in hip-hop, I want to talk about that but I also want to talk about where is hip-hop pushing back? Where are you seeing the pushback within the culture? And a lot of times, that's somewhat interesting terrain. because it's not dictated by the capitalistic economic impulse. A lot of times, the misogyny in hip-hop is very market-driven. It's bottom-line driven. It's not necessarily -- that's not the monolithic message that's really coming out of the black and brown community.

It's not the monolithic message, but I think that if you look at, within hip-hop, for example, in terms of gender, there's a very robust movement within hip-hop around gender. There's a book actually that written called Hip-Hop's Inheritance: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Hip-Hop Feminist Movement by a professor, his name is Reiland Rabaka. He teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder. But then there are books like Joan Morgan's When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost. There were books like Gwen Pough's book called Check It While I Wreck It, looking at women in hip-hop but also the messages of women in hip-hop.

And then you have the resistance movement within hip-hop pushing back against this. There's an organization that was starting by Rosa Clemente called REACH Hip-Hop that began to attack some of the way that women were being represented in media. Also, Lisa Fager Bediako started an organization called Industry Ears that looked at some of these same issues. Davey D was involved in a lot of that work also, just kind of pushing back against the images and representation of women in hip-hop.

When we did the National Hip-Hop Political Convention, we had a women's caucus that advocated on behalf of women's issues and the representation of women in hip-hop. And I think you've had congressional hearings where folks like Michael Eric Dyson and Lisa Fager Bediako have talked about the representation and image of women in hip-hop. So, I mean, I think that that resistance movement, to me, is equally compelling of an area to think about when we think about what's happening in terms of the representation of women. Because, one of the things that Joan Morgan says in her book, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost, is that hip-hop made her a better feminist. I just think it's a beautiful statement. Like, hip-hop forced her to think about feminism in more complicated ways.

That's the other half of my last question, too, in a way: To talk a bit about the internet and activism. You do see a fair amount of what I call "click to protest." It's this low-bar, low-effort type of activism where people think they are hugely involved but haven't really done much of anything. How do you feel the internet has changed the nature of activism within these broader entertainment communities?

Wow. Another really good question. [Laughs.]

Thank you. I told you when I emailed you that it's gonna seem like it's only about videogames, but it's not only about videogames.

[Laughs.] Yeah.

I think that -- I have been really interested in this question of internet activism. In a lot of ways, because of what happened with Arab Spring, what people called the Arab Spring. The upbringing in the Middle East in various countries like Tunisia and Bahrain and Egypt, etc.

You know, I think that when we looked at what happened over there and people credited the internet and things like Facebook, I think a lot of people begin to look for those parallels here. But I think that it took on a different manifestation. I mean, in some of these countries you're dealing with a state-run media where it's very difficult to get any messages out that are contrary to the powers that be. This is not the same type of media environment. Some would argue that it is. [Laughs.] And I would agree, to some extent, but it manifests itself in a different way than it does in the Middle East.

So, for example, if you got an activist organization and they're advocating a position, say, like, Black Lives Matter. They can get mainstream media coverage here. So it's not like the mainstream media is not gonna cover you if you have a radical message. But I think that what made the internet different here I think is what we saw what happened when Ferguson exploded.

Yeah.

And you had activists reporting from the ground with live streams, etc. You know, community activists, citizen journalists were emerging and able to document what was happening on the street. And again, this is a byproduct of the mainstream media because what the mainstream media did was the mainstream media downsized and it's a constant conversation about the elimination and the under-representation of people of color in the newsroom. And I think that when something like Ferguson happened, that becomes really apparent because then what you have is -- when Ferguson exploded, some of these organizations didn't even have people of color they could even send into these communities. They didn't have them on their staff.

Yeah.

So, the internet impact in a setting like that is also driven in part by the lack of representation in the mainstream. Another thing -- there was a student protest. This was before all of the Black Lives Matters stuff. I want to say it was maybe before five years ago when it caught my attention. It was a young girl in Newark, I believe, who called for a student walkout. I can't remember what her name was. It was just something that really caught my attention. And they have this massive student walkout because she put it on Facebook or something and kids saw it and people responded. But it was huge.

So, I think of things like that and I think of things like the big protest in New York. It was around the time of the stuff that was happening in Ferguson, and it was a march on New York by three women. They were artists and they called for a march and people responded. And a large part of that response, I think, is because of the influence and power of the internet, the ability to get the word out and to get to people. I can't remember how many hundreds of thousands of people came out, but it was a huge, huge thing. So, I think that's what I see in terms of activism and the internet and the impact that it's having. I think it's interesting. It's complicated, but I think that sometimes it's overstated. You know?

Yeah.

I don't think that the internet is a substitute for being in connection with real people. I mean, if you were building an activist movement, you're building community in some sense. And you have to know the people you're working with. You have to be able to touch them, talk to them, spend time with them, care about them. I don't know if the internet really allows that.

One of the things that I feel that even happens with the internet is you lose people. It's hard to keep people together. It's just different. You don't keep people together and I feel like you move from one issue to the next. Like, this is one of the problems right now I think with the anti-police movement, or what some people call police reform or some people call police abolition. We're moving so quickly from one thing to the next.

I saw it this week, where people were really upset about Donald Trump one night and then the next morning they were talking about Star Wars.

Exactly. Exactly. Or people are upset about a police shooting one day and then they're talking about Beyonce's Lemonade.

And that was just last week.

Yeah.

I think with videogames, it's been really hard for people because this is a thing that's always existed on screens. You talk about community and that's kind of unclear for many people what that means. So there's a component here that I think you can talk to, which is how do you deal with activism on the internet when you're also talking about intergenerational conversations?

Because the perception used to be that videogames were just for kids, even though it was never true. That's still sort of the rhetoric around it or at least that's how it's marketed. But those people that were kids then, they have kids now. So we can't talk like that's even the case anymore.

No, that's interesting.

Maybe this is unusual for subcultures and cultures at large, but in videogames the younger generation wants everything to stay the same. They still want violent games. They don't care about the people who are making them. The older people, more generally, want to see things change. But they aren't considered the audience by the industry.

There's no real mechanism for change or outlet to be heard. I'm not asking what would you advise, but do you see parallels to rap there?

I do see parallels with hip-hop in terms of inter-generational threads. It's interesting that you raise that because I feel like, again, this gets back to the business kind of marketplace, capitalist-driven economy, which basically is saying, "We gotta sell this music to young people." Like, hip-hop was sold as a youth culture.

So, when those youth were coming to Kool Herc and some of the pioneers, they're in their fifties. They may even be approaching 60 at this point, right?

Yeah.

So, you got guys who are not "youth" anymore who created the culture and some of those guys get pushed out of a culture that they created beyond being seen as an iconic kind of figurehead.

But I think that for older people in hip-hop, I mean, I'm 49, and the answer to that is a 45 or whatever how old Jay-Z is now, right? Jay-Z, LL Cool J, I mean, these guys who are still doing hip-hop well into their forties -- even Chuck D, you know what I mean? He's still doing hip-hop, performing, he just had music come out recently. I think that the audience is sometimes divided and they're divided in part because people have been told it's a youth culture. But no other black music was promoted as just for one generation. [Laughs.]

It wasn't like: R&B, it's just for young people! Or: Blues, it's just for young people! I think that this is a marketing capitalist-driven idea.

Yeah, I mean, am I remembering this correctly? Is this something that videogames and rap have in common, where it was kind of treated like a fad that would blow over or end quick?

Yeah. I mean, I didn't realize people felt that about videogames. Yeah, I guess you could say that. Yeah. Yeah. We should talk about that.

But in terms of this inter-generational piece, I think that you find is older people who either buy into the notion of it as a youth culture and they feel they gotta do something else now that they're older. They might still be listening to hip-hop or love hip-hop quietly, or off to the side, but they concede the territory to young people.

And then you have the older people who are like, "You know, this is my lifestyle, this my culture, this is what I do," who might be educators. And so people age in hip-hop in different ways. Sometimes that means beating up on the young people. [Laughs.] You know, saying, "Music isn't like it was. The music is not as good. You're not doing it how we did it, you're diluting it." You get those kind of debates.

It's the same everywhere.

Yeah. But what I think, to me, there's something to be said about -- you really wanna talk about it on multiple levels, but how do you age as an artist in hip-hop? How do you age in hip-hop as a fan or as a person who feels themselves a part of hip-hop culture and as a participant on some level? Maybe you're into some of the art.

People do it in different ways. Like, if it's a career, like, a lot of the folks that I worked with at The Source who were hip-hop editors have gone on to do a lot of different things. June Ambrose, who was the fashion editor when I was at The Source, she's created an entire industry around fashion and design and styling. I think she even had a reality show at one point. Erik Parker, who did the Nas film [Time is Illmatic], he used to a music editor at The Source. You know, he's gone on to do this film with Nas. So, it's that maturation of most people got into hip-hop as fans and then nurtured that fandom into a career of some sort. And as they aged out of -- because a lot of the prominent journalists writing on contemporary hip-hop were young people, they went into anywhere they could find a place like writing books or Dan Charnas, who wrote the book The Big Payback. He worked at Def Jam, then he went onto write this really amazing book about the business of hip-hop.

So, I think you have -- Carlito Rodriguez, who was an editor at The Source who's now a writer on Empire. He writes for Empire and he's been an editor at The Source. He has done documentaries on police brutality and New York City and gang culture and the evolution of gang culture from back in the '20s and '30s and the black community leading into the '60s and on into the hip-hop era.

So, I mean, I think that people have aged in hip-hop in a lot of different ways.

But they've taken that entrepreneurial spirit and that hip-hop ethic and brought it and infused it into whatever they were doing. But I think that evolution of aging is an important question.

Yeah.

Yeah, a lot of it is crippled by the economy and the marketplace that's saying: “This is youth culture. It's a youth culture. It's a youth culture.” They're drumming that into people's heads. I think we have to push back against that.

How do you feel rap journalism helped shape rap?

Oh my God. That is amazing. I don't think that hip-hop as a mainstream phenomenon would look as it does if it wasn't for hip-hop journalism.

Yeah.

To me, hip-hop journalism was the propaganda arm of the mainstreaming of hip-hop. Hip-hop journalism introduced people to hip-hop beyond the music.

When hip-hop was emerging as a musical phenomena, people, I guess, seeing it as music because that's they've known this as: a musical form. They weren't looking at it as a culture and as a lifestyle. That was one of the great things about The Source Magazine.

The Source Magazine thought about hip-hop as a lifestyle. And that's what we saw their mission as: How do we promote and advance the lifestyle of hip-hop beyond just it's an artist, you go to the concert, you buy the music. Like, there's a whole culture behind hip-hop. The Source got into all of those intricacies.

That became what the magazine was, it was the intricacies of the culture beyond the music, beyond the breakdancing, the graffiti art, the turntablism, to the lifestyle of the the people. Like, how did hip-hop culture overlap with all these other areas of people activity? That was the basis for my book, The Hip-Hop Generation. It was to look at hip-hop not as a musical phenomenon, but as a generational moment. And if you're looking at it as a generational moment, then you don't get locked into the ageism of the capitalistic machinery that's saying, "We're marketing this music as a youth culture." [Laughs.]

That generation is gonna get older, and so then you start to have multiple hip-hop generations: You have the pioneer generation, you have have the generation that helped to usher hip-hop into the mainstream, you have a post-hip-hop generation, you have a generation of young people now who are listening to hip-hop who are listening to a lot of other music also. Hip-hop is not the end-all, be-all defining musical cultural moment for millennials as it was for people who grew up in the hip-hop generation.

This is an example of one way I feel hip-hop culture has moved forward in a way that videogame culture hasn't. There's not a lot of places you can go to write those types of stories you're talking about in videogames that you just mentioned in rap. A lot of these bigger picture things about systemic problems from the mindset of reaching out further doesn't get a lot of oxygen. I don't know if you see parallels with rap, but when you see a movement or an industry or an artform where the media is ignoring problems, how does that impact the ecosystem when things are going unexamined?

Yeah. I mean, I think that the power and the possibility for hip-hop came from people outside of the corporate machinery. And I think that if a culture that has a grassroots appeal is gonna have a grassroots voice, it's gonna take those people at that grassroots level becoming almost the propagandist for what that thing is.

You need the documentation of who are the people playing the games. What are those cultural things that don't even speak to the marketplace? Because the marketplace is gonna define things in a certain kind of way. The corporate-driven media is going to define things in a certain kind of way. I mean, hip-hop, when it emerged as a journalistic idea, a part of it was because you couldn't get coverage. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.]

You had people reviewing and talking about the music who really weren't a part of the culture.

Yeah.

And so it was young people pushing back. The Source Magazine was created by college students in their dorm room at Harvard University, who were hip-hop heads and they were into the music and culture and they wanted to talk about it in a more broad way. I can remember one of their articles on hip-hop on the cover of Newsweek or TIME, but these things were few and far in between. And a lot of time, in the most early days, they were quoting people like Henry Louis Gates and Houston Baker, who were English professors who happened to be black.

And people were making the connection between the poetics of hip-hop and the history of black poetry and literary tradition, and so they went to these experts in black literature and poetry. But there's a lot of nuances lost. I mean, hip-hop artists are poets. It's no question about that. But there's a lot more going on in the generational moment of hip-hop as a poetry than, say, what Phillis Wheatley was doing. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.] Yeah. Yeah.

And so I think that -- we created a whole generation of journalists who began to write because they were writing about the culture that they thought they were a part of, that they were more connected to and knew more about than any mainstream newspaper of publication could tell them.

And a lot of times, like, my first book, The Rap on Gangsta Rap, was about writing about hip-hop and gangsta rap -- what was being called gangsta rap -- because I was tired of people like Henry Louis Gates and Houston Baker being the go-to expertise. [Laughs.] That the media was advancing what they thought about it and I'm like, "Look, I grew up with this music and this culture and what I'm hearing and what I'm seeing and what I'm experiencing as I interface with these artists is radically different than what these guys are saying, who are really just interlopers. They didn't grow up with this music and culture.”

So I think there's something to be said for people taking ownership of the space and beginning to define how they are living it outside of the creators. Like, who are the people creating the games? But the people who are playing the games, that's a whole different arena of people activity that in some ways can be arguably more important or as important as the creators. If you don't have an audience, who are you creating for? Sometimes are artists are creating just because they're artists and they like the art. I think as the industry evolves, it's evolving because there's an audience. I think the audience that serious about a culture has to create a way to talk back to that culture.

When I started this, I started by talking to people who lost interest in playing videogames because there's something that says about the culture and how it's losing people, too.

There's gotta be more differences between a 12-year-old gamer and a 35-year-old gamer. That needs to be documented to have a better understanding of the impact that gaming is having on American culture.

As rap went mainstream, what are the frictions you remember popping up where it became apparent in the culture that people weren't all on the same page? In videogames, the creators and the audience and the industry and the media aren't on the same page at all as it's all struggling to figure out how mainstream it wants to be or can be. But what do you remember like that in the rap world?

Yeah. I think from the beginning. [Laughs.] I think from the beginning, because from the beginning, the emergence of hip-hop journalists is really the emergence of cultural criticism through the lens of hip-hop. So, it's people critiquing a disconnect between a corporate-driven industry and a lived culture.

Just by virtue of it going mainstream, that's what happens.

Yeah. I think just by virtue of it going mainstream, yeah. Yeah. And a lot of the origins of hip-hop in these black and brown communities, these poor and working class communities, a lot of that culture was a very folk cultural experience. The earliest hip-hop that I remember is being at a basement party on the weekend after a basketball game, like, in the seventh grade or something. [Laughs.] Or my neighbor two doors down from me, blasting his music on a Saturday afternoon cutting records. So, that live culture experience became the foundation of my hip-hop knowledge that allows for me to offer critique on this corporate manifestation of an artist being published and distributed to by a global multinational corporation.

Do you know the documentary Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes?

That's by Byron Hurt.

Yeah. Have you seen that?

Of course! I've seen it many times.

There's a part in the movie where someone is talking about how once you're above 70,000 units sold, that those are all white hands buying records and that those white hands are the ones that want to hear all the violent stuff in rap. I'm not asking you to respond specifically to that, but is it irresponsible or inaccurate when people make statements like that?

I mean, I wrote a book called Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop. In that book, there's a chapter whose name I can't recall because it's been so long. [Laughs.] But I wrote a book and one of the chapters focuses on -- I think it have been titled, "Are white kids really hip-hop's buying audience?" but that sounds like too long for a title to be mine. [Laughs.] But that was basically the idea, was to examine where the idea came from that white kids were the primary buying audience of hip-hop.

There's never really been a study on this. That was one of the interesting things about it. There have been -- it's primarily based on conjecture. The emergence of a company called Soundscan, it's really the foundation of it, and Soundscan, they do over-the-counter sales. That's how they started.

Oh. I didn't tell you, but I got my degree in music business.

Okay, so you know what Soundscan is. Mike Shalett and the other person [Mike Fine] founded it.

Right.

So, they were tracing these over-the-counter sales. And what they didn't do was they didn't track demographic data. So what they're basically doing is -- you're in Chicago, you know all kinds of people from all kinds of neighborhood go to the Water Tower. So, if you go into the Water Tower to buy music, just because the people that live in the Water Tower neighborhood may be predominantly white, it doesn't mean that those are the only white people that are buying the music.

Yeah. [Laughs.]

But that was one of the measures, was just where people are geographically buying it. The other measure was they did a separate survey of what they considered to be active music consumers. These were people who bought anywhere from 15 to 20 CDs a month. I don't know who that would be, but they supplied this survey of these 15-to-20 active music listeners, they determined that the primary listening audience for hip-hop was white suburban teen boys.

Okay.

So that's where this idea came from. There was an attempt by a woman named Wendy Day. Wendy Day, a long-time early pioneer around hip-hop advocacy. She was an artist first.

She started an organization called the Rap Coalition, and I believe Chuck D and Tupac were two of her founding board members. And what they did was the Rap Coalition -- one of the things Wendy Day did was help artists get out of bad record deals. She did a lot of different things. She helped to launch independent hip-hop labels. One of the things she also did was to go to the music industry major labels executives and say to them, "Hey, you guys really don't know who's buying your music. I can help you to create a study and we should do a study where you really know who's buying this music.”

They didn't want to do the study. They didn't. [Laughs.] All of this I talk about in Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop. They didn't want to do the study and they said, "If it's not broke, don't fix it." So, we really don't know if that was ever even true. There's no demographic study that's ever been done to demonstrate. And so, in my book, Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop, I talk about some of the political reasons why people might not want to really know.

I mean, just imagine if the economic source for hip-hop from the beginning was really black and brown people. What does that say? [Laughs.] What message does that say and where do people go with that, when you have this idea that black people are not responsible for economic development in America, even though the entire capitalist economy is built on the backs of black people?

I feel that type of conversation, of a white-buying audience for hip-hop has never really been factually proven.

I hate asking questions like this, where it's like, "Hey, you remember what you said a decade ago?"

I might remember. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.] We'll find out. You were on NPR and I had never heard about this either, where you were talking about white rap fans into white rappers who think they're smarter than black rap fans who listen to black rappers.

[Laughs.] I know I've said that, I didn't know I said that on the radio, though! Whose show was that? [Laughs.]

It was on NPR.

Was that something recent?

No, it was, like, 10 years ago.

Wow. I didn't know I was saying it 10 years ago. But yeah, I could see that.

[Laughs.]

[Laughs.]

Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah.

I think there are some parallels there in games, but maybe not split along racial lines.

Right. Well, I think that what I was talking about was I wrote an article a little while after -- it probably was about 10 years ago, but Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop came out in 2005. Around that same time, I wrote an article for The Village Voice called "The Cotton Club," which was about the politically conscious hip-hop artist whose concert-going audience was increasingly becoming white. It was predominantly white. I talked about how this evolution had taken place. Alongside that same time, you start to see the emergence of the white independent hip-hop artist and you start to get the emergence of the white middle-class college audience that is, you know, the audience for a lot of these smaller concert venues where those black political hip-hop artists were playing.

And so, people like El-P and some of the folks like that who were emerging around that same time, some of the cats out of Rhymesayers and Minneapolis, some of those groups -- there was another group out of Boston. I can't remember what their name is off the top of my head. But all these other things were emerging and there was this kind of an idea -- we were starting to move into an era where there was a white hip-hop fan who no longer really had to interact with black people. [Laughs.]

Whereas before, in the early days of hip-hop, if you were a white hip-hop kid, you had to at least be around black people even to listen to their music. You had to go into black communities, you have to interface with black people. We arrived at a point where you could be a white hip-hop fan and your audience -- your whole social circle could be white, also, but also the artist that you listened to could be white and you didn't really have to have any real engagement with black culture. And so, that's a different thing than what hip-hop was at its origins for white people.

Hip-hop, at its origins for white people -- a political consciousness came with that. You had to make a certain kind of commitment to understanding what was happening in the black community and some kind of a commitment to racial justice. And we move into an era where that was no longer a prerequisite. You could be a white kid in hip-hop and not have anything to do with black people, and at the same time imagine that the white rappers that you were listening to were smarter than the black rappers.

I remember one time -- God, I'm trying to remember what was the concert. I was in a debate with someone. They were talking about Jay-Z.

Yeah.

It was something about Jay-Z and they were talking about some of the white rappers, and I could just tell that what they really were saying was that they thought that the white rappers were smarter. [Laughs.]

And this is a complex thing because Jay-Z, like, intellectually is a really complex artist. You think about the complexity of his intellectualism and the range of it. I think that sometimes people can equate rapping about what was happening in the hood with anti-intellectualism.

You see a lot of that in videogames, too.

Oh? Tell me about that. [Laughs.]

Well, there's something about it where there's a lack of curiosity about other cultures and subcultures. I've talked to people who teach in academia around videogames who their philosophy is it's a waste of time to read books because literature can't tell you anything about videogames.

Oh, that's fascinating.

At a certain level, you do see that espousement of: Keep your interests narrow, just stick to videogames, don't bother to learn more about it or people who are different from you. Just like what you like. Don’t challenge yourself.

Right.

That thing about books is a really egregious example, but sometimes you go to industry events or conferences around videogames and I don't want to be smug but oftentimes it's like, "Man, can we talk about something else other than videogames? There's a whole other world out there."

Yeah.

But for some people it's like, "No, I'm good. I got this, I got my one thing. I'm done growing as a person." Like, they're sort of fine and they shut down.

You mention you got into a debate. I've talked to some people for this project where they talk about there isn't even a conversation, it's just other people bludgeoning them with their opinions so they shut up.

Right. Yeah.

So, you get stuff like that.

Well that's, I think, a growing American cultural phenomenon across the board, the idea that your opinion is just as important as the facts, even if your opinion is wrong. [Laughs.] There used to be a time when people debated facts. We don't really debate facts anymore. It's like, whoever's the loudest. And we have convinced people that their opinions is important -- this is the height of American individualism, to tell people that their opinion is important, even when it's not rooted in any facts and when presented with the facts, they still stick to their guns.

There was a time where people, they would actually just be wrong. [Laughs.]

Yeah, you can't be wrong anymore.

What I see in videogames a lot -- basically, what people are saying is, "As a bigot, you are offending me. You need to be quiet."

That, I think, is definitely a trend in American national discourse. I talk about this in my new book, which is Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era, which comes out this summer. I think that what we're seeing is the rise of conservatism in America, and a large part of how it's been able to thrive has been with that very notion. That your opinion is just as good as the facts and stand on that opinion, don't let people "bully you" with the facts. [Laughs.]

Right.

Your opinion is okay.

I remember there was a girl who made some kind of veiled death threat against Obama in Florida. I can't remember what her name was. This was a while ago. This was back when I think he was still running for office. And the FBI came and scooped her up or whatever, but her argument basically was: "But that's what I thought. That was my opinion." [Laughs.]

It's permeating. It's the way that I think conservatives begin to make these arguments, but it's so permeated mainstream culture. It's so permeated national culture that it's almost become an American phenomenon to stand on your uninformed opinion as an argument that's valid alongside the facts.

You mentioned some of your work in courtrooms. Do you feel like the types of conclusions or things being argued against rap in courtrooms, is it any different than what you see in the mainstream media or on the internet? Is there really any difference?

I think that -- no. [Laughs.] I think that when you have created a narrative in American mainstream culture about black and brown people, that's a go-to narrative. And we use this narrative over and over and over and over again. [Laughs.]

Yeah.

And it seems like it because it's so familiar, it worked again. It's these racist stereotypes that are what people call dog-whistle politics.

Yeah.

And I think that we've done that. I think it's almost embedded in American culture. And so I think that, yeah, you get those same kind of narrative about black boys in the court cases where they're saying -- there was a case I did last year in Cincinnati. There were a handful of black boys that went to a predominantly white school. They got kicked out of school because they were alleged to be in a gang. They were rappers. They had a rap group and their rap group was called Cincinnati Money Gang.

And so the school decided -- there was a shooting of some sort that didn't involve them but somebody who used to be in their crew. But he was no longer attending the school but I guess they cracked down on these kids, like, "This is a gang. They call themselves a gang. They're rappers. They're rapping about violent stuff and they're gang members." And that was the basis upon which they had thrown these kids from school.

This sounds like the kind of stuff we were hearing in the early '90s.

[Laughs.] Yeah. Yeah, well, it's very much alive and well. But the difference is in the early '90s, nobody was trying to use hip-hop as an argument.

Yeah.

So what had happened in this case was they went and listened to their music and they cherry picked the lyrics to suggest that the kids were really a gang.

Yeah.

So, I think that's something that I see happening a lot. It happens with -- let's say Mike Brown. or Trayvon Martin or Tamir Rice here in Cleveland. I mean, you get these stereotypes: "Oh, Tamir Rice, he looked like an adult. He's not a little boy playing in a park. He's an adult. He looks like an adult." Mike Brown: "I felt threatened. He strong-armed a grocery store." You understand what I'm saying? It's these old tried and true racial stereotypes about black people.

And I see those same things playing out.

And this is the dangerous thing about the capitalization and corporatization of the music. That became a dominant trope in hip-hop. These same stereotypes that have oppressed black people became the dominant tropes used again and again within the music and in the culture. And then you get this crossing over from the entertainment world into the reality of somebody’s life in a courtroom.

When you get called into a courtroom, how do you disprove and shake people from these archaic notions?

Yeah. I mean, I think that the most important thing is to -- each of cases have been different. But the most important thing for me is to talk about what hip-hop and what it isn't. [Laughs.]

Yeah.

That's basically what I do. I mean, I talk about hip-hop. I talk about what hip-hop is and I talk about what it isn't 'cause a lot of times you have these prosecutors who may have a police officer who thinks he knows a lot about hip-hop and he's giving an interpretation to maybe something that's being said. Or you have a school administrator who's giving an interpretation to something that he thinks. Hip-hop has been criminalized and demonized in mainstream culture. That's one of the fascinating things about it. You got this multi-billion-dollar industry that's making corporations all of this money all across the world, but at the same time the media -- which is sometimes owned by the same corporations -- are demonizing the artists. [Laughs.] N.W.A was one of the most demonized rap groups in history.

So I think you have that ongoing demonization of hip-hop, and so I think people who are outside of the culture who are just watching from a distance or maybe tuning into a Bill O'Reilly program, who has a constant ongoing tirade that demonizes hip-hop and demonizes black and brown people. If you're tuning into that, then you're sitting in your room at the school and you're downloading, listening to hip-hop lyrics and you can't discern between the art and the fiction of somebody talking about, say, no snitching or killing suspect witnesses. So, the art becomes a reality to them in their mind. There's no distinction between the art and the reality. So they fixate on it as being real and that these people really mean it.

Meanwhile, we have a long tradition of music in America -- no other music has come under this kind of scrutiny. Not rock 'n' roll. [Laughs.] Not jazz. Not any other American music. Not pop music. No other American music has been entered as evidence in a courtroom case to convict somebody of something. Just hip-hop.

How would you like to see the portrayal of rap become more nuanced?

I mean, I think that there already is more nuance. I think that what's lacking in the nuance is at the corporate level. I think some of the most interesting music that's happening in hip-hop is by independent artists. And I feel like if there was more -- and this has been a constant argument from people who have been advocates for hip-hop, is to broaden the representation. We don't have broad representation. We have the same kind of handful of content ideas that just get repackaged over and over and over again.

Meanwhile, you have people creating new and original music, ideas, approaches. There's a hip-hop artist that I like who's from Ghana. His name is Blitz The Ambassador, and he performs with a live band and he calls it Blitz The Ambassador & The Embassy Ensemble. They tour internationally but no mainstream record deal. Jasiri X, who is a hip-hop artist from Pittsburgh, he has been making independent music for the last probably seven or eight years, now 10 years, and is actually getting an honorary doctorate from Chicago Theological Seminary next week. No mainstream record deal. [Laughs.]

Yeah.

Blitz The Ambassador, he got an award for musical creativity from an emigrant. I can't remember the name of the organization. Jasiri just got this Rauschenberg fellowship where he got to spend two months working on his music. The foundation was started to really lift up artists.

So, I feel like the industry is promoting a monolithic idea that is the idea that they're comfortable with, the representation that they're comfortable with. But there's a lot more music being made and a lot more artists that are doing really creative, cutting-edge stuff. Rebel Diaz is another group that I like. They're amazing. No mainstream record deal.

I should also mention some of the women because the sisters will kill me if I don't. Invincible, out of Detroit, who has always been on point and has been for a long time, also an activist. A woman -- she's from Connecticut but she lives in Germany: Her name is Akua Naru. Also doing some really amazing stuff. A lot of international touring. I mean, she is absolutely amazing and I think you got all of these artists doing this work and they're doing it outside of the corporate mainstream. And so their message doesn't get pushed in the same way as a Jay-Z or Beyonce or someone -- Drake. You know what I mean?

So, I just think that the nuance is there. It's just not being promoted in advance inside of the corporatized machine.