I think if you look at, uh, other methods of play and you look at sports and you look at, you know, the play action that kids do in the, the schoolyard -- when we were kids we used to play like soldiers and cowboys and Indians and so on. And, uh, I think some of it is straight up evolution. I think some of it is you just practicing to be a hunter, gatherer in a conflict, resource poor environment, right? I think some of it is, is gener-, generally biology. I think when you start to get into the psychology of the games and you just move away from the, the biology of it, I think that there’s something deeply, deeply satisfying about the, the maximum amount of agency that you can have. And I don’t think it’s about killing actually. I think it’s more about power. And I think that that part can be expressed in lots of different ways. It can be expressed in the Master Chief saving the galaxy with, with his guns and his grenades and his spaceships. Um, but it also can be expressed in s-, really simply things like being able to jump really high. Well, I can probably jump about three feet in real life, but when I’m Mario I jump about six to eight feet depending on how fast I’m running. And, uh, and, and, you know, one of the most satisfying games to me w-, one I go back to time and time again, eh, really distills that on, uh, it’s very simple scense which is Crackdown. And I have this sort of d-, gravity free ability to do pretty much whatever I wanted in environments that feel weirdly realistic and familiar. So, when the bad guys start shooting at me in Crackdown, instead of getting a weapon or, or a rocket launcher, I just avoid it like and go off hopping from rooftop to rooftop and just enjoying the elation and the liberation that it gives you from your, from your physical limitations that you have as a, a fat 42 year old guy. And, uh, and I think that that’s always true of video games and it’s true of -- you know, pong I think you’re able to say, “I’m great at tennis.” Right? Now, I’m suddenly this super human athlete in this very, uh, removed experience. And, and as we go forward I think it’s about power and agency. And, and, you know, shooting and, uh, war, uh, many of the best pieces of literature, uh, in human history everything from the Iliad’s to War and Peace they’re about war, right? And, and it's because lots of stories happen in that and they’re human stories. There’s romance. It’s adventure. It’s politics. It’s, uh, personal interaction. It’s heroism. All the things that we admire as, as humans, uh, can come out of war. And, and it gives you a huge canvas of different types of, uh, experience including peace. You know, that’s the beauty of war is you can contrast it with peace. And, and, you know, that’s where the, the conversations happen in the trenches and so on. And, uh, and I think that, that the combination of those things is why you see so many games that a, appear to be either violent or at least sort of, um, projecting power out into these, these environments and this universe. And I think it’s just a very simple, uh, aspect of human play. And, and it’s been like that for at least hundreds probably tens of thousands of years.
