You know, video games - I would say games as a general form have more well understood vocabulary. Like, we see a die we know it has an affordance to roll. We’ve done it - we’ve seen it so many times it’s kind of a universal language in and of itself, um, markers on a board, these kinds of things. But video games are almost as arcane as opera to some people, right? They’re so abstracted. They’re so - you know, the - the languages have developed so that you have to have played a certain number of games to understand the depths of the visual interface. Um, it’s a real problem when we talk about bringing people into games who might not have followed along with the progression of the - of the medium. So, uh, to me this is - this is a problem because I am interested in players who are, perhaps, coming from a more naïve perspective. I’m interested in attracting them. Um, but I’m also interested in players who are very advanced. So, just as an example, on, you know, on one game that I did - on The Night Journey game when we brought in testers to - to test the interface we brought in people who’d been - who self, uh, sort of, um, uh, recognized themselves as being art aficionados, had been to an art gallery in the last six months. And then we brought in people who identified as, uh, players of experimental games. Okay, you couldn’t find two more disparate audiences, right? You have people who probably have never even picked up a game, you know, console - controller, in fact, many of them picked them up upside down. And then you have people who are so advanced that they’re playing the newest, latest things in the game vocabulary, right? And then, you know, the - the trick was to find an interface that was - that was simple enough to allow the - the newer players to navigate something, for them, very complex like a 3D world, using a controller they’d never touched. But also have the game have enough depth so that those familiar with the tropes would be able to push forward and, um, find their own deep experience in the game. This is - I mean, this is a lot to ask. When we make a film we don’t have to go through this kind of a process and yet if we want to attract people into the game form who have not, um, yet been touched by it then we have to set that as a project for ourselves.
