Gamasutra is proud to present the latest Gamasutra Podcast, part of our regular GDC Radio podcasts, which include both the Tom Kim-presented Gamasutra Podcast show, alongside the best lectures, tutorials, and roundtables from this and previous years' Game Developers Conferences.

For today's podcast, we present an interview with Iain Simons, writer and live events coordinator of Nottingham's GameCity Festival. Besides serving as the co-creator of GameCity -- now going on to its third year, Simons is the author of three books: Difficult Questions about Videogames, BFI Film Guides 100 Videogames, and Inside Game Design -- part of which was recently excerpted on Gamasutra. He is a tireless advocate for the cultural significance of games.

In the course of conversation about the festival, which grew out of and evolved from initially more informal alcohol- and curry-fueled get-togethers, Iain speaks passionately about various subjects such as the role of game advocates as apologists of the medium, the lack of a human face to the games industry, and the reluctance of game publishers to discuss the process of creating games as opposed to promoting finished product. He also takes the comparison of games and cinema to task, particularly regarding what that analogy implies about the aspirations of the form.

He talks about themes that have been going through his mind recently, such as non-threatening entertainment, the removal of player-character death from modern game design, and safety and the permission to explore in-game environments.

He also discusses how to make games and game culture more palatable to non-gamer audiences. These include directly addressing the creative process of making games -- getting to questions that one might ask of any creator working in better known contemporary mediums.

Finally, Simons discusses ideas that didn't quite make it into his latest publication, Inside Game Design, and what factors defined which ideas made it into the book or not. He also shares some wonderful personal anecdotes about developer involvement with both GameCity and Inside Game Design. And he closes with Nottingham Trent University Undergraduate and Post-graduate programs' support of GameCity's latest project: an archive of early to current game artifacts and history.

November 8th interview with John Davison of What They Like / WhatTheyPlay.com.
Copyright (c) 2007-2008 CMP Media LLC.

---

Full transcript of interview:

Gamasutra: You're listening to the Gamasutra Podcast on GDC Radio. This is Tom Kim and today I'm talking to John Davison. John is the president and co-founder of WhatTheyLike and jointly manages the daily operation of the company and directs all the content generation for the brand and its various products.

John brings more than seventeen years of experience in the interactive entertainment industry to his role at WhatTheyLike. With expertise in every sector in videogame media, he's contributed to a variety of well-respected print and online consumer and trade publications in the U.S. and Europe. Prior to WhatTheyLike, John was Senior Vice-President Editorial Director of Ziff-Davis Game Group. John and his wife have two sons.

I think that last little blurb might be the best qualification you have for WhatTheyLike.

John Davison: That I have two sons?

Gama: That you're married and have two sons.

JD: Yeah. That was a big part of... both myself and Ira Becker who's the other the other co-founder of WhatTheyLike, we both have two kids each. We'd been thinking about how our own attitudes towards entertainment in general -- and we've been hearing a lot of stuff anecdotally -- we were both at the 1UP network. Ira was the General Manager. He ran the sales team. And we'd been talking to a lot of people and it was clear that there was a big shift going on in gaming in a lot of areas, both on the development side and also, just the media mix.

Increasingly we were seeing that there was this huge hole. And that was that the 18-34 year old core gamer is more than sufficiently catered to in terms of media coverage. But there's this growing need from other demographics for information about games. Particularly parents. And we would talk to people that were either just terrified of games 'cos they don't understand them. Or there's actually a big sector in our generation coming through that have grown up with games but they're sort of lapsed gamers, where they would play 5... 10 years ago, and were really into it. And then as they settled down and had a family, they just stopped.

And now, there's a generation of kids going through that who have never known a time where videogames aren't a big part of entertainment. You know? It's been there since birth. And the kids are demanding it, and it's becoming more and more part of the way franchises are being developed. And there's nowhere really for parents to go to be like, "Alright, I don't care if it's good or not. My kid just wants it. What do I need to know about it?" That was the core of it, really.

Gama: Was that decision based off of just your anecdotal observation of trends in the industry? You're talking about serving a growing, and perhaps a different market. So, were you seeing financial evidence there of the need to cater to this broader audience?

JD: The Entertainment Software Association published a bunch of data about how much more powerful the parents were in terms of making buying decisions, and so that really helped! We were just seeing more and more, there were parents that were getting a lot more engaged, and we were seeing more research. But then also, when we were speaking to publishers and retailers, that they were like, "Hey, the untapped thing is definitely the whole family thing."

I think early on, it was easy to just generalize that there's the Wii and DS effect on everything, and everyone was thinking about family games a little more seriously. Much to the disappointment of a lot of hardcore gamers who are definitely pushing back a lot on a lot of what we're seeing happening right now. You know, I was reading a piece about Smarty Pants the other day where people were like, "This is another symptom of the decline of the way games are being built."

Smarty Pants is a Wii game from EA and PlanetMoon Studios. And it's a trivia game that uses the Wii remote as like, a buzzer. And it's designed so that the questions can be tailored for families to play together. So there are kids' questions and grown-up questions. And it's all an "E"-rated thing and it's all done in kind of a jokey, silly way, but in a way that's very family-friendly. And I think it's indicative of a lot of the kind of things that we're starting to see, particularly on the Wii.

There's a lot of these experiences being made now by developers and publishers that want to tap into different areas and grow out of the core demographic. I think some of it also is driven by the fact that as an industry, we've all grown up together and we're all at an age now where we're settling down and having kids and starting to look at things differently. And, you know, there's a lot of guys on the development side that I've spoken to that are like, "You know what? You know what I'm working on at work's not for me anymore." And I think that... that's a really important part of the culture shift that's going on in the industry right now.

It's not very long before... you know, I think we're starting to see it across everything. The really important part of, I think, the evolution of videogames. And, you know, you hear a lot of people with the sound bites about let's bring the consoles out of the bedroom and into the living room. Well, you've got to bring a certain kind of experience with it for that to work. And I think there's these trivia games, these quiz games, these party games and they're important: they're the first stages. But I think they're the things that are going to bring the consoles into the living room and get parents looking at videogames and going, "Okay. This isn't the thing that I thought it was." You know. 'Cos they read all the bad press and they'll hear about how awful Grand Theft Auto and Manhunt is, and make sweeping generalizations about videogames based on that. I think it's good to be able to get these more positive experiences in front of parents.

Gama: Perhaps you could talk about how WhatTheyPlay functions, or how WhatTheyLike functions in terms of just organization. Because there seems to be two sides of it. There's the side which is kind of editorially covered by you and your writing partners and contributors. And then there's a community side which is covered by the people who participate in the site. Maybe you could explain why you did that separation and exactly what kind of services you're hoping to offer.

JD: Sure. So the company name is WhatTheyLike. The intention is for WhatTheyLike to be a platform. The reason we did games first with WhatTheyPlay is I think it's a part of the media that's under-served. Secondly, the data structure for organizing a database for videogames is really complicated. You have multiple SKUs and things that have the same name, but have different functionality. So we wanted to nail that one. Plus it was kind of our core competency anyway. So, we built a database, and the goal is editorially, to be completely objective. We're not going to offer any criticism on the editorial side of the product. The goal is to put the information that parents need into context. So, look at what they're faced with: the demands that are coming from the kids -- if they do want to do any research, the things that they're going to be bombarded with; or, if they're in a store and they pick up the box, what it is that they're going to be faced with -- and try and help them understand it a little more. It's parents, so they're definitely time constrained. So we want things to be quick and really easy for them to find.

The write ups of the games are going to be descriptions of the experience, descriptions of just kind of the themes that come out of the game, and then also to address the ESRB rating and the ESRB content descriptors. Just be able to say, "Alright, so my kid wants Gears of War. And it's 'M'-rated and it says, 'blood and gore, intense violence and strong language' on the back. Alright, I got a pretty broad idea of what that means, but what specifically is it?" And just be able to say, okay, so this is what happens in a game that warrants those descriptors.

And for the "M"-rated stuff... you know... you have different degrees of violence and blood and gore in different games. But then, when you get down into the "T's" and "E's," some of the descriptors you get there... It can be kind of tough to work out what it is exactly, that you're being faced with when you have, "Mild Suggestive Themes," or uh, "Comic Mischief." And it tends to be very different from game to game. I think it's important to know, specifically what you are being faced with. The "Mild Suggestive Themes" can be anything from a piece of dialog buried three hours into the game, to a girl with a huge cleavage and a low cut top. You know? It can vary very much from game to game.

Gama: The ESRB already exists. There is already a ratings system in place. Why do you feel that parents might need an extra layer of qualification above looking at a ratings system which to most gamers would appear to be fairly clear in terms of how it delineates what kind of content's inside that experience?

JD: We came at this with, we didn't want to reinvent a ratings system, we didn't want to challenge the ratings that they were giving. It was to help parents understand it a little more. Particularly because the descriptors aren't really a constant from game to game. The words on the descriptors are, but what they relate to can be very different. So if you look at "violence" as a term, and you look at a game like Halo 3. and then you look at a game like Jericho, or Manhunt, and what you're faced with is... you know, there are some similarities, but the effects can be very different. So I think it's important that, because the ESRB rates within the context of the product so there's no sort of general line in the sand for, you know, this is what it means when it's "violence," and as soon as you step over here it's "intense violence." It's not communicated where that line is. So we just want to be able to say, "Okay, this is what this game has in it. If you allow this game into your house, this is what's in it." So it's got, hacking people up with chainsaws, or it's got girls with big boobs.

Our attitude throughout the whole things is that the best possible parental control is parents. You have all these tools, you have all this information. But I think the more context you have, so that you as a parent are able to make an informed decision about something... Very often, I've found that the best way with some things is to sit down and play the damned things, you know? To know whether it's okay, A: if my kids can play it; B: if it's okay for me to play it with my kids in the room... There's a lot of games where me, personally I wait 'til everyone's gone to bed to play them. There's lots of different needs that parents have in terms of letting the games into their house, and then the situation in which they can be played. So I think the more information they have, so that they can say, "Okay, I'm cool with this being on." You know?

Gama: The converse way of looking at this is, these ratings systems exist for other media as well. To some degree for music, but certainly for motion pictures. And parents don't seem to have a difficultly with making a judgement call on movies, even though an "R" rating might be very different for one movie versus another. Just like ratings on the games side are context-sensitive based on the product or the experience as well.

JD: Uh huh. And I think this is something that the ESRB would acknowledge if you tried to push them on it. And I think there is a gap right now between "T" and "M." And I think there's a pretty good chance, I would think, that they are going to do something about this. And I think it's important because I think of any of the ages in that scale, I think that time between 13 and 17 is when, as a family, your line in the sand is likely to be the most different from the family next door. I think to be able to make a judgement of just how able to deal with this is your 14-year-old. And I think there are very mature 14-year-olds, and there are very immature 14-, 15-year-olds.

So I think whether it comes to making a judgement as to whether, particularly an "M"-rated game is okay, I think parents that are really engaged, that are really paying attention to this stuff, they need to think about, "How is my kid going to respond to this specific type of content?" It's probably a really difficult time for a lot of reasons for parents. And I think to be able to, you know, have the information to make that judgment...

In movies, they have PG-13, which increasingly is a way of slipping out an "R"-rated movie with a little bit taken out. I think "T" kinda does that. I think there's some room for something in between. to kind of help with some of these experiences where they're a little bit violent.

Gama: And also to have the comfort that you're not the only one who's got to make these judgements and have a context of a number of voices to talk about their situation. I think that could be very helpful.    

JD: Yeah.

Gama: So what do you think is going on there in parents' heads and why are they not quite getting it to the degree that perhaps they should with games? And how do you think that interfaces with the kind of service that you'll be offering?

JD: The first point you made about movies... this was actually one of the little epiphanies about starting the company as a network of these things as opposed to just focusing on games. And that was, I started to notice the way that my kids would react to things that you make assumptions are kid-safe or kid-friendly. I noticed that in the Pixar movies, in order for them to establish the pace of the story, there's always a scary bit. In Finding Nemo, it's the sharks, in Cars, it's Frank the combine harvester thing. And, uh, my kids were terrified of 'em. And my wife had said, "Why does no one ever tell anyone that?"

It's "G"-rated, so there's this assumption, okay it's perfectly fine. But it's very hard to find any anecdotal stuff where it's like, "This is what a movie is about, uh, but it's got this bit in it that if you've got little kids, they might find it's a bit scary. " And I think just knowing that, 'cos like my little one, when the DVD was on, he'd know when the Frank part in Cars was coming. And he'd ask us to skip it forward so he didn't have to watch it. And it was just like one of those little moments when you're like, okay, there's a little bit of this in everything. There's these pieces of information that particularly, if you don't have kids, you don't notice it.

Before you or I had kids, if we sat down and watched Cars, we probably wouldn't have even registered that there was a scary part in it. And it's not a big deal, but I think just need to know, hey there's this one bit and it's about 20 seconds and it's got... you know, this happens. Your kid might be a little spooked by it. And I think there's... all entertainment there's a little thing like that in it and I think there's a tendency for the media, because it's focused for the most part on criticism, saying whether it's good or not, as opposed to... I think there's a lot of things in entertainment, particularly where kids are involved where the decision about whether to consume it or not is made irrespective of quality.

We are going to go and see Ratatouille whether it gets reviewed well or not. My kid is going to want to play Pokémon whether it's great or not. I think there's a lot of that now. So I think as a parent, you're like, "Alright, what I need to know is, what's in it. Is there gonna be a part that spooks them?"

Gama: Your service, at least from an editorial perspective is to provide kind of an independent, informative resource.

JD: Uh huh...

Gama: You're not interested so much in making those qualitative judgments?

JD: Not at all. We won't be telling you if it's good or not. We also won't be telling you if it's appropriate or not. What we're gonna do is just give you the information that you need as a parent in order to make that judgement yourself. I think some of the mistakes that have been made in the past, having to do with videogames is, people have come in and they've tried to make sweeping judgements.

But every family is different. Every family's line in the sand of tolerance for different things is in a different place. So who am I to come in and tell you that this is too violent for you or that this is too sexy for you? But I'll tell you what's in it so you can make that call, so you don't have to play through it.

And some of this stuff is buried really deep in the game. We were just playing Final Fantasy Tactics on PSP. And one of the content descriptors on the back is "Drug Reference." And we were playing it, and playing it, and playing it. And we were looking at each other, and we were like, "There's no drugs in this. What the hell were they talking about?" And you play through it a bit more, and you start to be like, "What was this though? Is it potions? Is that what they're talking about? Is it the fact that you're taking these, like..." And then twenty hours into War of the Lions, you encounter the opium trade. But it's that deep into the game that the reference is made.

To me, it's kind of innocuous. Fine, the opium trade. Whatever. But to some parents it might be like, "Okay, I don't want my kid seeing that." But you do have to play them to find them. So the, I mean the ESRB does it's job and, you know, when people submitting, they're saying it has this, this, this and this in it, I think it's important to talk about in a little more detail than you can fit into that tiny little box on the back of the packaging. Talk about the nature in how it appears. 'Cos drug reference can be Bioshock, where you're jabbing a needle into your arm every five minutes, or it can be a five minute scene in Final Fantasy where it's a bunch of guys peddling opium.

Gama: On that qualitative side, is that more of a resource that you're leaving for parents to hash out amongst themselves? Namely, among your community features?

JD: Yeah, so the model is um, it's kind of Trip Advisor for games in a lot of ways. So we'll do an objective description of the experience. And then, what we want is for all the subjectivity to come externally. We are going to reference external criticism. If it's warranted, we'll talk about that the game has generally been reviewed really well, or acknowledge criticisms that might've been made, but not make them ourselves. So then, what we want to encourage more than anything is for the parents to share their subjective views on the game.

So we'll say, "This game has this, this, this and this." And we want the parents to say, "We have this game, and I was fine with it because of these reasons." Or, to actually get into the specifics so that people tend to not think of. LIke some parents have issues with the soundtrack. Very often you hear, "Yeah, I really liked Burnout, but the music was quite angry. I'm not sure if I wanted all that angry punk and metal. You know? I'm not sure if I want my kids..." Because that's where their sensitivity is on that. Whereas other people are like, "Yeah, Burnout was fine." Or it'd be like, "Oh, the car crashes made my kid start slamming his car into the furniture." And there's a lot of things that anecdotally, they're like, after playing this game, this is kinda how it affected my kids. Or this is how my kids felt about it, or how I felt when I walked in the room and saw this particular part. I think there's a lot of that anecdotal stuff...

What we found in the enthusiast stuff, when I was doing 1UP and EGM, is we found increasingly that with the core, that the coverage was validation more than it was advice. If you're saying that something was good, very often the core would be like, "Well I already decided that's good, so you know, you just validated my opinion of that." I think what we're going to find on the parent's side is that when parents see their peers expressing something that they feel the same way about a game that they did, there's some validation there as well. You know, they don't feel alone in being oversensitive to something or to being okay with something.

They're like, "My kid plays Halo. Am I weird for letting him do that?" And I think the community can confirm, "Okay, it's 'M'-rated. But I think it's okay for a... 14-year-old, say." And then to have the parents to be able to say, "Yeah, you know, it's okay. It's mostly blue and green blood so it's fine." And I think the more of that that comes out, and to get that kind of dialog and parents talking about, "Look, it's okay for us all to have our threshold somewhere different. And this is where mine is, and these people agree and these people don't." That's kinda where we want the subjectivity to come out.

Gama: How much of that are you getting in real life? Like, among parents that you know, do they hit you up because they perceive you know more about the subject than they do?

JD: I used to talk about this stuff on 1UP Yours. Every Friday when the show went out, if I talked about playing Crackdown in the middle of the night, or I talked about how my growing Oblivion habit was taking place at 2... 3 o'clock in the morning because it was the only time I could play, all these dads would come out of the woodwork and be like, "Thank god you said that, 'cos I do that, too!" And then, when the news came out that I'd left, I started getting the same kind of outreach through Facebook as well. Like a lot of people have been like, "Hey, you know I heard that you were doing this." And so there are a lot of parents coming out just sort of unprovoked in that fashion. And then the other thing is just, as we are getting the information out about it, we're hearing from parents groups wanting for us to come talk to them about it because it is a big part of what's going on in their homes, you know? They're like, "Oh, my kid really wants to play videogames. But I know nothing about it. Can you come and help me?"

Everyone we reach out to, it's like, "Yeah, don't tell me what to think. Just help me think better." And we've actually been able to grow, um, Tom Byron who's our VP of marketing, he's been building this kind of mom's group as like, an advisory group for us. Which is growing very quickly because, you know, we invited some people in and asked them to invite some more. So there's a very viral effect to this advisory thing. And it's, what do you want to know? What's important to you? What are the things that really bother you? And being able to reach out to parents and concerns tend to come in the same places. There's the obvious stuff, which is all the stuff in the press like, do I really need to worry about the violence, or whatever.

Gama: What are some of the things they've told you that have really surprised you?

JD: The thing that surprised me the most, I guess, it being the first thing on the list is almost everyone has been like, "How long is too long? My kid locks himself up in a room for hours and I wanna put a time limit on it. But because I have no frame of reference for the experience, I don't know where to put a cap on it. My gut is, I dunno, an hour." We hear anecdotally that, "I told my kid he can only play for an hour. And then I call up and say, you gotta turn it off now. And he'll say he's not played it yet. How is that possible?" And you go, like, "Well, you know, what games has he been playing?" "He's playing Forza 2." And I'm like, "Well, he could be spending an hour painting his car."

And what's coming out of that is there's a need for parents to understand that the games aren't just the action. There's a lot of thinking about piecing things together an setup. And in Forza, it's making the car you want and in a sports game, it's setting up the team to be the perfect way that you want. So I think the flip side of that is, there's an opportunity there for parents who are intimidated by the controller and, you know, they don't wanna go, "Hey, let's play a game together" and be rubbish. But to be able to say, "Hey, let's sit down together and set up a team together." Or, "Let's sit down in Forza and build the car I had when I was 18." I think there's ways to reveal to parents that there are ways to use games to bring the family together that aren't just playing.

Gama: Well there seems to be such a... I don't know, lack of information out there. Because just anecdotally on my side, it's not so much products I get asked about when I go to my local EB -- some of the managers know me and send parents my way. It's things like, if I were a parent and I didn't know much about the industry, I'd be tremendously confused about product SKUs right now. Of course, a big question is, which console to get for my kids. So are you planning on having any kind of content on hardware, or anything other than just the games, themselves?

JD: Yeah. And we want to come at it from... For a parent that has a rough idea of what it is, we just wanna be able to say, "Okay, this is what the console is. These are the costs. These are the hidden costs that you might not know about. Here are the parental controls that it offers." You know, just a lot of the things that as a parent, you might need to know. But then, there's another layer down from that, and this is the... the grandma, kind of, part of this. [Laughs] Which is that, "My kids love videogames." "Okay, what do they want?" "Well, they want this new... they really love Cars. They want this... this 'Mater' game." "Okay, well what console do they have?" And at that point they're like, "Well, I have no idea." "Well is it white? Is it black? Does it have a green ring on the front?" You know, "Is it hand held?"

Just to be able to get into the... providing a resource for these people so they can come and just be like, "Alright, what is an Xbox?" [laughs] You know? And from my enthusiast background, I think there's some stuff where the first instinct is like, "Well, duh. Of course." But there's a lot of people out there that just don't know. They have absolutely no idea what it is that their kids have. Even if it's in the living room under the TV, they probably couldn't tell you what it is.

I think there's a lot of education that needs to be done because it is so confusing. And beyond the hardware, if you sort of do stray into the enthusiast communities... Or you know, anything that is more enthusiast focused, it has its own language, it has its own attitudes. It's kind of intimidating.

Gama: Yeah. Very much so. I mean, it's perhaps yet another lever that kids use to assert their individuality from their family and parents.

JD: Oh yeah. Big time.

Gama: That might be disconcerting for the players that their parents are actually speaking in an informed way about their personal hobby.

JD: [laughs] Can you imagine how spooky it would be to a 14-year-old boy if dad walked in and went, "Hey, the animation on that's kinda janky, huh?"

Gama: That could be terrifying. They might take up macrame as a response. Personally, what do you play with your kids?

JD: My kids are young. My oldest is four. My little guy is two.

Gama: So a little young to be playing some of the more traditional deep game experiences then.

JD: Yeah. They kind of started with Leapster -- Leapster has a handheld that has these Flash-based games that are... You know, there's a Spongebob one and a Cars one and a Dora one. So they kinda started with that. And then my oldest is obsessed with anything to do with cars, like me. So, when I would be playing -- if I was playing for work or just myself -- so if I was playing Need for Speed or Forza or Burnout, he would want to sit with me. And that was kind of his entry into wanting to play console games. He wanted to play driving games with me. And he picked it up remarkably quickly. The thing about driving games is that they're all pretty much "E"-rated. And if they do get anything more than that, it's usually because of the soundtrack. I think Burnout's an "E-10" because it has some... I think lyrics is the justification for why it gets the "10." So it was a good place for him to start and for him to learn the controls.

And then, obviously when we brought the Wii into the house, there was a way for him to really feel like he was doing something. So we've been playing, um... He's really been getting into sports right now. He's kind of discovering soccer and football, and we've been playing the family mode in Madden and in NBA Live. You know, the thing that just lets you use the Wii-mote and kinda press a button, and you're not really controlling. You're just timing shots or timing a pass or whatever. And he's kinda getting into that, and we play Mario Party.

And he kinda got into the DS as well. It's really surprised me, 'cos I thought some of the DS stuff might be a little complex. Again, some of the sports stuff -- he's been playing Winning 11, believe it or not, on the DS. Because it has the touch screen thing, so that the penalty shooter in Winning 11, it's like a six piece grid, and basically you pick where you wanna shoot, or where you want your goalie to jump. He gets that. So he's starting to understand how the interfaces work. So then, as we've kinda moved into other games, he's relating to other things that he's had.

The thing about the Wii that was really unusual for him. I mean, he's young so... But his first kind of video game experience was joypad and controller oriented. So when we brought the Wii into the home, it was a bit alien to him. It took him a while to get used to the fact that you were pointing at the screen. So it was kind of the flip side of the sort of intuitive thing that Nintendo wants for you to point the thing at the screen. If you have any experience with previous videogames, it's a little alien at first.

Gama: How do you feel about the Wii? There's been some talk online about... Sure, it's a big enough install base that publishers can't ignore it now. But some people seem to think it's a fad, some people seem to think that there's no quality control on the platform. But it would seem, especially for your product and your service, that it's something you're definitely keeping an eye on.

JD: Well, yeah! I mean, I think it's great. A lot of the things that the real enthusiast in me kind of was like, "another one, really?" But I think anything that makes people... It's almost, anything that makes people think of videogames as not videogames is good. You know, there's this barrier in a lot of people that they associate videogames with a certain kind of experience and behavior. And if we can kind of get past that, so that they don't think of it that way, then I think we're on the right track. You know, there are these people that will play -- kind of the cliched argument -- they play Minesweeper and they play Bejeweled and they play Zuma, but they don't think of that as videogames.

But I think if they were to expand that into all of these other experiences so that the market kind of moves in that direction... And it's like, "Yeah, we'll sit around and we'll play Smarty Pants..." We've been playing Buzz on Playstation 2. Have you played that? Another trivia game... I think "trivia" is the new "party" right now. But it's great because there are ways that you can bring four people together and they're playing a videogame, but they don't realize it. I think that's really important. And the fact that the Wii caters to that so well, I think that's the real benefit to it. It's this kind of transparency of the experience.

A really good Wii party or trivia game means that you never have to actually have to think about the mechanics of the game, ever. And that's what videogames really need. I think when the enthusiast press, in particular reviews a videogame and it comes under fire, it's that it gets too bogged down in the mechanics. The reviewers... why are they talking about frame rate? And why are they talking about all the mechanical bits?

I think the reason that you can't review a game purely on the emotion and the experience or the artistry is that very often it gets interrupted by something technological. The underlying technology isn't completely transparent yet. Until it is, games criticism is always gonna veer into the mechanical. It's like, "This is fantastic, this is fantastic, but it choked here. Or it did this thing I didn't want it to do here." And I think it's necessary in games criticism in a way that it's not really necessary in any other kind of entertainment criticism. So I think one of the good things about the Wii is that the types of games that are being designed are that they bypass that. Because it is just about pointing at something and pressing a button and having fun. You never really have to think about it.

I think this is what we're starting to see some of the casual guys doing. You look at the way a lot of the casual games -- and it blows me away that there are casual game franchises now where there are games with multiple sequels -- and what I've noticed on the casual side is that these games are becoming the games that I played 20 years ago with different skins on them. If you look at Luxor 2, it's like matching gems or whatever, but it plays like an old Amiga shooter. It's what was 20 years ago would've been a hardcore gamer game with a pretty skin on it. And I think that the ways these games are developing on it, they're kind of dragging the audience into more complex game experiences. And I think that's good. I think that there's a lot going on in gaming right now beyond the real core enthusiast stuff. I think, three, four, five years from now, I think it's all gonna come to a head and everything will be mixed up pretty nicely.

Gama: You said something interesting earlier about games criticism being bogged down in the mechanics, and I think it's an interesting thing to look at how the community at WhatTheyPlay will talk about games because it is a different audience. Perhaps there'll be a different kind of discourse about the content.

JD: For a start, just describing the games... I think the first time through when we try and write one of these things, I found that I was reverting into the language that I knew, and it'd be like... Just recently I was writing up Orange Box, and my first inclination was you know, "Orange Box is unique... It's five first-person games." And it's like, "Well, what's a first-person game?"

So you have to kind of get into, not being condescending or patronizing in any way. But you do need to think about how you communicate these concepts that we all take for granted as gamers or as part of the games industry. Then it's just like, well how do I characterize that? You have to talk about how this is a game that you see as though it's through your own eyes. This is how the experience is relayed. And you don't have to go on at great length, but I think that you have to kind of keep double checking yourself on the language that you're using. So that an important part of bringing parents in is subtly educating them on the terms.

Gama: I'm sure you can't completely contain your player's instinct or your journalistic instinct to give some kind of a qualified, or I guess a critical overview of some of the products you present. But your model right now is really to provide an objective resource. Is there a mechanism on WhatTheyPlay where you can actually talk criticism -- about context -- in a different way than just presenting an informational overview of a product?

JD: Not when we launch, but soon after. So the core of the site when we launch is going to be a product database and feature. The features are gonna be experience based... educational... so things like, you know, the terminology and the language. We want to shed some light on that. We want to interview people and talk about, sort of more parent-friendly videogame features.

And then soon after we're gonna launch a small blog network. You know, maybe three, four blogs. We'll start with one and then see where it goes. You know, there might be a dad blog and a mom blog and a teacher's blog or something. And that's the place where I want the subjectivity to come out from the editorial side. And I think the way for us to do it there is... Full-time editorial staff right now is myself and Zoe Flower. People might know, she worked for me back on Official Playstation Magazine, and she's been around the industry a long time. She's a mom, and I think a lot of people know her and really respect her. And we want to talk about a lot of these experiences from a personal standpoint in those blogs.

So, the WhatTheyPlay position will always be the objective broad description. And what I want to establish is that, you know, the only place where I or Zoe can lay down the law and say this is how it's gonna be is in our own homes. And I think in the blog what I want to be able to do is talk about, alright so this game came into the house, and this is how I dealt with it. So that it's not saying, "This is violent. No one should play it." Which tends to be what happens, you know, in a lot of places when this subject comes up.

So I think what I was saying going back to what I was saying earlier on about the sort of validation of seeing how somebody else responded to something, I want to be able to say, this is what happened when we played Rock Band together. Or this is what happened when this game that had you know, one tiny bit of touchy content in it, this is how I chose to deal with it. I think it's important for people to say, as well, you know, "Okay, well I probably would've responded that way as well." But I don't want to be making these sort of blanket judgements and saying, "This is how everyone should think."

Gama: On a side note, from a gaming journalism standpoint, a lot of sites, magazines, publications have kind of an editorial voice that they put on, you know, certainly previews. I'm not sure about reviews -- policies differ between publications. But to introduce a first-person writing perspective into that kind of discourse, I think that's another interesting diversification of WhatTheyPlay and how you plan to cover this material that isn't being done in a traditional games journalism way, certainly.

JD: It's something that's come out of -- I need to be honest -- out of doing podcast stuff and seeing how an audience can relate. How they relate to individuals when you do a podcast. And I'm sure you've found it as well doing this, and I found it doing 1UP Yours and this stuff. Sometimes you would say something and people would relate directly to you and said, "I want to talk about this more." And to be able to have the editorial voice, but then also to be able to bring out this personal stuff. And to establish it as, this isn't the blanket opinion of everybody here, but this is just my opinion.

And I think, you know, it's coming out a lot in the blogs. And I think it's happening a lot in the videogame blogs right now where we're really getting to learn who Brian Crecente the staff around him really are in just the way they insert themselves into the blogs. And I think it's a great luxury to have editorially. I think when you're set up as a 1UP or an IGN or a GameSpot, there's a different set of pressures on what you represent when you're writing. So it was good to kind of push reset on the whole thing and be like, "Alright, starting from scratch, thinking about a completely different kind of audience, how do we want to talk to them?" And it's been quite a cleansing experience to be able to do that.

Gama: What's going to happen in the future when everybody who, as parents has grown up playing games? How soon do you think that's going to happen, and what do you plan to do with yourself then?

JD: [laughs] Oh, I don't know. Well hopefully, there'll be a lot of people contributing stuff on the user submitted side. I think it would be great to have the audience building a lot of the content for us so that early on we're prioritizing stuff based on what's selling right now, and what's in demand right now. But we want to backfill a lot, and particularly I think one of the big challenges for us moving forward is, as more and more back catalog is opening up online, the focus isn't always what's coming out this week anymore. It's the need for backfilling a database on what's available is going to be really important. So without getting all Web 2.0 about it, I think it's important to have an audience that is getting increasingly engaged and into it so that they wanna contribute. So I think that's a big part of it.

But to the point of, how long before... I don't think we're that far away from a generation that kinda came up with videogames from day one. I mean, games are what -- 20-30 years old? I think over the course of the next 10 years, we're gonna have a lot of shifts in a lot of different areas that impact videogames, whether it's families or politics or where, you know, people are familiar with it and they aren't afraid of it.

Gama: Thanks for sharing your time today and talking about WhatTheyWant and WhatTheyPlay.

JD: It's been a pleasure! Thanks, Tom.

Speaking as part of an in-depth Gamasutra report on EVE Online's Fanfest held in Reykjavik, Iceland, CCP executive Hilmar Pétursson has been discussing how the complex economy and new elected 'Council of Stellar Management' bring structure (and therefore focus) to the PC space trading MMO.

When discussing why the EVE Online community, which has grown steadily to over 200,000 active subscribers, is so invested in the game, Pétursson suggested:

"I would say what ties it all together is the economy. The economy of the game is very much controlled by the players. All prices are decided on the market, CCP doesn't set a price on it... And then the game very much focuses on [the fact] that you're always at risk in terms of all the players attacking you or taking something away from you. So that creates very interesting interactions between war and the economy."

Though the economy in EVE Online is much more complex and modeled than many other MMOs, Pétursson suggests this leads to a more interesting and competitive game:

"War and economy is something that has created a lot of events in human history. That is essentially what we maybe have put in place to drive the storyline. But then, the players have used those systems to create something much more spectacular than we could ever have envisioned in the beginning. So I would say, the economy is the tool to create this."

Interestingly, Pétursson also discussed how to easily garner feedback from the increasingly large player base of the game, revealing that the company is adding an officially elected council to exchange feedback between CCP and the community:

"For soliciting community feedback, we have used various methods throughout the four years. And we're trying to evolve those as our world has evolved. You use different methods for a community of 50,000 players than you do for a community of 200,000 players. Especially when all those players live in the same world. It's different when you have sharded worlds down to smaller shards, and you just have more shards. And you have to tackle the community of each shard. Then you can use the same method, but scale it up.

But when the community fundamentally grows as it has in our case, then you have to adapt and evolve your method of soliciting community feedback. And we're now, at this Fanfest, introducing a new idea which we call the Council of Stellar Management which involves allowing the community to elect representatives for a council. And we'll do this through voting. So this council will then be a venue for exchange between the community and CCP so that it is a more meaningful discussion than us talking in a non-structured way with 200,000 people which... um, achieves very little in its current form."

You can now read the full Gamasutra report on the subject, including full coverage of the Fanfest itself, as well as more comments from the CCP CEO on the state of the game and technical and design plans for the future.

For today's podcast, we present an interview with Mike Wilson, Grand Champeen of Gamecock Media Group, who we caught up in Chicago with after a marketing and promotion planning meeting with Wideload Games.

Co-founder Wilson has a vital business role in game history over the past 15 years - working at id, setting up the influential GodGames, and now running his upstart publisher (Dementium, Hail To The Chimp), and this latest Podcast, he talks about his storied career and intriguing plans.

Gamecock's business philosophy sees it stretching themselves to leverage very asset from box designs, guerrilla marketing to reach untraditional audiences, and direct communications with gamer communities. It also secures approval from the developer on all phases of marketing, advertising, promotions, and PR.

This philosophy stems from Wilson's deep history in game development and publishing, starting out at DWANGO and id Software, and moving on to Ion Storm, and his first venture in artist-driven publishing, Gathering of Developers. Wilson generously shares his personal experiences and observations working in the game development and publishing industries, and how he has refined his personal and professional approach along the way. Although Gamecock Media Group is a new venture, Wilson reveals how the principles on which the company was founded have been in existence for more than a decade.

You can now download the Gamasutra Podcast: The Strange History Of Gamecock's Mike Wilson (.MP3, 54 minutes, 25 MB). Today's podcast is also being simultaneously offered as a feature on Gamasutra.com.

In addition, you can subscribe to the Gamasutra podcasts by clicking this link for iTunes. You can manually subscribe to our feed in your favorite RSS reader that supports enclosures by using this URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GDCRadio.

For today's program, we wrap up our interviews from this year's Penny Arcade Expo with double-header conversations with both president and CEO Vlad Ceraldi and COO Joel DeYoung of Penny Arcade Adventures developer Hothead Games, and CCP Whitewolf's Peter Golan and Noah Ward, marketing director and lead game designer of EVE Online.

In the first part, Hothead Games' Ceraldi and DeYoung describe the challenges studios faces from quality of life for older employees with families, staffing and outsourcing pressures, new technologies, and as-yet still small installed bases. The two talk particular Hothead strategies such as taking advantage of alternate distribution platforms, adopting novel production models for games using a best-fit supplier model and scalable staffing to maximize efficiency. They also discuss how these strategies don't mean that a developer has to sacrifice on quality.

Next, Peter Golan and Noah Ward discuss the longevity of their lead franchise, EVE Online. EVE has been on the marketplace since 2003, far longer than most MMOs. Interestingly, EVE has always had great subscriber retention and a steadily growing base since its launch. Golan and Ward explain how they aren't afraid to make a specialized experience for a hardcore audience, and in fact how their focus has lead to their ongoing success.

In their upcoming expansions, they state that CCP has no plans to simplify their game, but are interested in providing tools to the player to more clearly introduce new players to the options their game has to offer. Although they don't seek to make their game more mainstream, they discuss their efforts to ensure that everyone has a significant role, regardless of their experience or rank.

They talk about how most of the changes to the game to date have been directly driven by their player base and how their design philosophy has always allowed their players to dictate a remarkable level of input and control over the lore and design of the EVE universe.

You can now download the Gamasutra Podcast: PAX 2007 Interviews with Hothead Games and CCP Whitewolf (.MP3, 32 minutes, 14.8 MB).

In addition, you can subscribe to the Gamasutra podcasts by clicking this link for iTunes. You can manually subscribe to our feed in your favorite RSS reader that supports enclosures by using this URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GDCRadio.

Today we present a two-part show featuring live interviews at PAX with Richard Iggo of GameCock Media Group and Joe Ludwig and Rick Saada of Flying Lab Software, developers of the upcoming MMO, Pirates of the Burning Sea.

Much has been made of the cavalier attitude and indie spirit of GameCock Officers, Mike Wilson, Harry Miller and Rick Stults. After taking some hard licks with the implosion of their previous publishing venture, Gathering of Developers, the founders of the new company are capitalizing on their experience and giving indie publishing another go.

Prior to its untimely demise, GodGames's PR antics often upstaged the fact that they managed to make the relationship-based publisher model work and released a number of critically and commercially successful games.

Likewise, Gamecock certainly attracts its share of interesting PR. But there seem to be some more serious activities going on behind the scenes. GameCock VP of Marketing, Richard Iggo takes a moment from his duties wrangling his bosses at PAX to talk about GameCock's efforts to repeat the behind the scenes successes of GodGames with the benefit of its founders' hard earned experience.

For the second interview, Joe Ludwig and Rick Saada of Flying Lab Software share a long and storied history of the independently developed MMO, Pirates of the Burning Sea. Starting out as a small-scale casual title, Pirates of the Burning Sea has grown to a full-blown MMO with loads of content and an impressive set of features. Joe and Rick talk about how the growth of their game influenced the growth of their company, and what they have learned along the way.

You can now download the Gamasutra Podcast: PAX 2007 Interviews with Gamecock Media Group and Flying Lab Software (.MP3, 34 minutes, 16 MB).

In addition, you can subscribe to the Gamasutra podcasts by clicking this link for iTunes. You can manually subscribe to our feed in your favorite RSS reader that supports enclosures by using this URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GDCRadio.

For our July 30, 2007 show, we present a round table on the new format of the E3 Media and Business Summit. The panelists discuss the new format of the show and reflect on their impressions resulting from these changes.

Representing the gaming press, we have Susan Arendt of Wired's News Blogging team at Game | Life, N'Gai Croal, General Editor of Newsweek and John Davison of the Ziff Davis Game Group's 1UP Network. From the developer and technology services side, we have Todd Northcutt, Director of IGN / GameSpy Multiplayer Technology and Denny Thorley, President of Day 1 Studios.

This year's E3, spread out over several hotel suites and the Barker Hanger at Santa Monica was an effort by the event's organizers to offer a more viable environment for exhibitors to present their products and to conduct business.

Susan Arendt of Wired commented initially on the changes in the podcast: "E3, to me this year, felt more like it was being done out of habit than anything else. There weren't any big surprises, really. Just about every game that we saw we knew was coming had already seen at a game day event. With rare exception, we pretty much had already heard everything everyone had to say. It just felt like we were all kind of there because we all get together for E3 every year."

The panelists discuss how access to materials was affected by both the invitation-only attendance as well as the physical layout of the expo, spread out as it was between multiple locations.

Newsweek's N'Gai Croal added of these issues: "Obviously there was no Kentia Hall, so there goes a lot of the obscure, the Korean, the sort of the variety of stuff that you would see over in Kentia Hall. That was deliberate on the part of the ESA. In previous years they had allowed a range of smaller publishers to draft on their coattails as they saw it, and this year they decided not to do that... For me, coming from Newsweek I tend to have to cover some of the bigger games with a mix of smaller games, and I am personally more interested in indie games than I've been in the past, and again, because I couldn't get over to Barker Hanger I couldn't see those."

Their reports weren't all critical. Particularly from the developer side, the panelists go into some specifics about how well the format worked for them in terms of doing business. And on the press side, the journalists appreciated the quality of access they got unfettered access they got directly with the developers themselves.

The panelists wrap up their commentary by speculating on how the ESA could address some of the perceived deficiencies of this year's format, and some of the challenges they might have to face to do so.

Newsweek's Croal particulary noted: "I go to a news conference for news, and little news was being made... You have all these companies, these video game publishers that are based in the United States, yet Sony and their third parties just announced a whole slew of new games in Japan [immediately following E3] and it's not even Tokyo Game Show. What does that say when those games could have been announced at E3?"

He concluded: "I know the Japanese market needs a boost as far as the PS3 is concerned, but what does that say about North America's position in the global game market - when Sony can just have its own event not even a full week after E3 and unveil a slate of new games from itself and third parties, and it’s not even TGS?"

You can now download the Gamasutra Podcast: 'Does The New E3 Work?' (.MP3).

In addition, you can subscribe to the Gamasutra podcasts by clicking this link for iTunes. You can manually subscribe to our feed in your favorite RSS reader that supports enclosures by using this URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GDCRadio.

For our July 6, 2007 show, we feature an interview with Manifesto Games now open for a couple years, we check in with Greg Costikyan to see how the independent digital distribution service has fared. In the years since the service has opened its doors, the gaming landscape has changed perceptibly, though even with many more distribution channels emerging on both the PC and consoles and a broadening of the market, Manifesto Games still offers titles that appeal to particular interest groups that conventional games don't.

Despite the varied offerings of casual games portals such as Pogo, online distribution services such as Steam, and classic games and new content services such as GameTap, Costikyan says that he does not feel that the marketplace is crowded. Rather, he feels that games are now common cultural currency, perhaps to the degree where people can be convinced to check out games in subjects that appeal to them, whether they are self-identified "gamers," or not, and says success is really a matter of identifying the right markets for the titles that each service offers.

Costikyan explains that one of the most significant challenges for the indie space is to convince the public that games produced by independent, smaller teams don't equate to poor quality, but instead says that individual creators can work with a more singular vision to craft worthwhile experiences. The games that have done best for Manifesto, such as Impact Games' PeaceMaker and Wadjet Eye's The Shivah, says Costikyan, distinguish themselves by being particularly innovative in theme and topic or game play.

In the course of the interview, Costikyan addresses Manifesto Games' plans to appeal to community building to foster a relationship with the audiences who are most interested in the kinds of games Manifesto offers. He talks about his general impressions about the indie games scene, and the emergence of digital distribution services such as Xbox Live Arcade and Sony's PlayStation Network. And he shares what accomplishments he is most proud of, and what we might expect out of Manifesto in the future.

You can now download the Gamasutra Podcast: Interview with Greg Costikyan (.MP3, 32 minutes, 15 MB).

In addition, you can subscribe to the Gamasutra podcasts by clicking this link for iTunes. You can manually subscribe to our feed in your favorite RSS reader that supports enclosures by using this URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GDCRadio.

For today's show, we feature an extensive interview with Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter.

His unvarnished opinions and gutsy predictions have garnered him and his firm a high profile among the gaming community.

But, says Pachter in the course of the interview, "I don't solicit all this press coverage. The press finds me. I think that the press finds me because I'm colorful, I'm not shy, I have an opinion and I frankly really don't care if someone agrees or disagrees with it. I'm willing to share."

"The controversy - the invective - that I get comes primarily from the games industry people always writing me emails and asking me, 'what do you think about this?' You know, 'what do you think when one of your competitors said "something"' that I thought was stupid. I wrote back that the guy was naive. And boy, headline: 'Pachter calls other analyst naive.' Today someone asked me, 'what do you think about the Sega marketing guy saying the Wii is a fad,' and I responded. Boy, headline."

We talk about the method behind his madness, delving into some of the thinking and methodology behind his analysis. He talks about how his coverage of the entertainment sector, and games in particular, differs from other categories covered by sales side analysts. We discuss his thoughts on investor-friendly publishing and consumer desire, and why the two might not be mutually exclusive.

In true Pachter-ian fashion, he straightforwardly addresses his cult of personality among message boards and gaming communities.

"I publish my monthly console and handheld hardware numbers because the NeoGAF guys think it's so fun," says Pachter of the infamous messageboard. "But no one's ever asked to see my annual forecast for all those things. I'm spot on, for my annual forecast. I'd love to see those guys put out a contest for annual forecasts for the next five years and then we'll compare my numbers to theirs, because I've been spot on for five or six years now."

"The average NeoGAF visitor isn't equipped to actually prepare those things," says Pachter, "because it requires you to make an assumption about pricing, and I've been great on that as well. It's hard to do."

Pachter shares some of his biggest industry surprises of the past few years, and his personal pick for most under-rated company in the game industry:

"I love the innovation. I love the opportunistic rapid market response. I think this company's going to earn a lot more money than most people do."

And, finally, responds to earlier comments he's made that next-gen game prices are too low and that "consumers are getting a gift":

"I'm just making an economic argument, not so much a suggestion," says Pachter. "[Prices of next-gen games] aren't going up. You're seeing collectors editions at $70 -- you're seeing the GTA collector's at $90. Guitar Hero -- $90. People don't even blink. They stand in line for the thing."

"I just meant that the public is willing to spend more for the content that they want," he adds. "Again, adjusted for inflation, the old PSone game in 1995 that came out at $49.99 would be probably about 70 bucks right now, just at 3 percent inflation compounded for the last 12 years, you'd be up over $70. On an apples to apples basis, $60 is a bargain. And the content of a PS3 game is a lot greater, or an Xbox 360 game, than the content of the first generation PSone games."

You can now download the Gamasutra Podcast: Interview with Michael Pachter (.MP3, 48 minutes, 22 MB).

In addition, you can subscribe to the GDC Radio podcasts by clicking this link for iTunes. You can manually subscribe to our feed in your favorite RSS reader that supports enclosures by using this URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GDCRadio.

For today's show, we feature an interview with Kane Minkus, principal and founder of Somatone Interactive Audio.

Although you might not be familiar with Somatone, you are probably quite familiar with their work. Somatone scores and produces music, sound effects, and voice overs for over 120 titles a year, including some of your favorite console, casual and downloadable games, such as EA's Medal of Honor series, PlayFirst's Diner Dash series, 3-Rings' best of IGF winner, Bang Howdy, and PopCap's fiendishly addictive Peggle.

Not only does Somatone handle music composition, sound design, voice overs, and mixing and mastering, but they are also responsible for developing a highly optimized, high quality sound and music technology specifically tailored for downloadable games.

In the interview, Kane talks about his motivation for starting up Somatone, specifically with an eye, or ear, toward servicing the game industry. Kane explains how their movement into the downloadable casual space has been a great challenge to the sound designers and composers at Somatone in terms of the breadth of styles and the diversity of the audience for those games. Also, how Somatone's tight integration of technology for their clients allows them a more cooperative and creative role in working with the game development team.

He addresses some of the technical considerations in the development of their audio technology for downloadables, and how it shapes the feature set of their production tools. The end result being a highly optimized, very efficient and surprisingly flexible solution.

Kane also talks about some of the unique process that Somatone applies to score games, including their use of Laban Movement Analysis, a systematic means of describing and deconstructing motion. Finally, he talks about the musical inspiration behind the score for Peggle, which turns out to have the same controlled randomness as the game itself.

You can now download the Gamasutra Podcast: Interview with Kane Minkus (.MP3, 36 minutes, 16 MB).

In addition, you can subscribe to the GDC Radio podcasts by clicking this link for iTunes. You can manually subscribe to our feed in your favorite RSS reader that supports enclosures by using this URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GDCRadio.