Serious Business

Yes, I guess for Minecraft where it's just one or two guys doing it, it works fantastically. Probably for the next decade we're going to see stuff like Minecraft because we're always discovering new kinds of gaming. It's not like the movie industry where all the genres that are going to exist have already been invented. So there'll always be breakout games like Minecraft. For us, we're in a different sort of niche from that. What we're discovering is that we're finding people who really love our games and just we need to get enough visibility to reach all those people.

A lot of the serious games community are not people who are out the outset game-makers, but they might have been teachers, or someone with a particular interest in a subject

I've always felt that we're just at the beginning of understanding what we can do with games, and gaming should be doing more. It's like wanting to use your powers for good, as it were. I wanted to find ways to work on projects that were appealing to me as well as to the market. It's extremely important that you believe that the product's going to appeal to an audience. And I really like doing innovation - that really interests me in games development. So for me, the Red Redemption project appealed to me because it was innovative, I could see that it was uniquely marketable - if you wanted to play this kind of game, there was basically this game and not really anything else.

I really liked the idea of trying to show that serious games could be done on a commercial scale, because I felt that if we could do that we might show publishers that they could maybe start to take risks with all the other great serious game-makers who are out there. There's a ton of people making quite small-scale serious games on all kinds of subjects. The guys who did Peacemaker, they did really well with it. I just felt that there was there was a market here, and it was actually feasible to develop serious games commercially. We're still a way from quite proving that, but I think it's a high concept that I'd like to prove. We'd also like to get into a position where we can ourselves sponsor other projects in this area - that would be incredible.

I had other choices at the time, I could have gone back into large publisher production, and that's good as well. But I think I'm most drawn by the projects themselves. When I worked on Midway, that was one of the first projects where I really had a choice over what I got to work on. That's really important, because at least if it doesn't work out then you know that it's your own damn fault! It's really soul-destroying to work for a couple of years on a product that at no point did you have a choice as to what it was going to be. It's just as hard as to make a bad game as a good one, in many respects.

Also I really wanted to do a serious game. I looked at a lot of serious games at the time, and essentially most of them were taking a subject and pushing it onto a game. That's not really the right way to do it. The gameplay has to emerge out of the subject, ideally, or map very tightly to it. I think that's because a lot of the serious games community are not people who are out the outset game-makers, but they might have been teachers, or someone with a particular interest in a subject. So what they're doing is often not really doing the job of fabricating a game, but taking a dressing of a topic or political point and then lying that onto an existing game - that might not produce a very good mapping. So I was drawn to this for a lot of reasons. I guess the first big question I asked myself, though, was did this look like a marketable proposition, and offer something that you couldn't get elsewhere.

I'm very project-driven, but other people might not be so concerned about the project, but just the process, and getting that to work well - or they might just be interested on an economic basis. I love innovation, even though it's often diabolically horrible to do. Doing innovative work is really, really difficult in game-making. You look at something like Minecraft and think "wow, that's cool", but what you don't see is all the many, many other game ideas that don't actually develop into anything at all. That's the thing about innovation - you're trying to find the thing that will actually work.

One of the things that we did with regard to that was to map the plan out over multiple products - it's not a one-product deal. I think that, again, you'll struggle to show a really interesting, investable opportunity to private investment if you try to make it off just a single game. I think you would only be able to do that if you were already known, had had some fantastic hit, and people were willing to take a risk that you can repeat that hit. But basically you need to look at the risk profile and how that maps out over multiple projects, rather than assume that you're going to have a smash hit with any one game. Try and make more modest assumptions.