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Thank you and I will switch to audio only.  So, recording now.  Thank you for speaking to us.  You know a fair bit about the project, obviously, being on the board, but just to kind of give that very brief outline.  
You know that Gaming Horizons is a project around video games and gaming, looking at the social, cultural, ethical implications and associations of video games.  We're interested in seeing the kinds of discourses that go on around video games with different stakeholders.  So we're interviewing researchers, educators, players, designers, and your voice or your transcript from this interview will be one of about sixty people.  We'll be anonymising the transcripts and we'll be doing some analysis of the kinds of discourses that are going on around video games.
So this is planned to be an interview of between thirty and forty minutes, no longer than that.  I've not got any fixed questions.  I've basically got some areas to cover and anything that they kind of prompt you to talk about is absolutely fine.  So I'm not looking for specific answers, obviously.  It's just kind of a prompt for you to talk and kind of get some of your expertise recorded and down in the transcript.
Is that okay?
That's fine, yeah.
Great, thank you.  Okay, so I'm going to start by asking, really broadly, if you can just talk about what your interests are around gaming, what your background is, that kind of thing.  Just give us some insights into your interests.
Well, my background is very much within the [0:01:51] serious games, in that they're serious games where we've done a lot of work in terms of trying to look at games for health, games for learning, games for raising awareness on the environment.  So from there it’s a [0:02:11] process as has moved on or not on serious games.  
We are very much interested in gamification as well and the use of play as part of the concept that we should look at in terms of creating gaming or gamification experience because I believe, before we can actually engage anyone in serious concepts, we need to make sure they create engagement for a particular platform or activities or tasks.  So when we're looking at gamification, I look at it as a tool that can actually help us create the experience, regardless of whether it is going to be digital or non-digital.  
So this is where my interest is in terms of the engagement, the experience, the design and how that will impact someone's engagement, be it a serious task, concept or challenges.
Thank you.  So if we can stay with the idea of gamification for a bit then, could you maybe expand a little bit on, when you're talking about gamification, what things are you talking about there?  What does gamification mean to you?
Gamification to me is about getting inspirations from gaming and game-based mechanics and trying to see how we use or mix them to create an experience which doesn't have to be a game.  So it's more about reusing what we've learnt from game play and using that to create an experience that would engage anyone with any activities.
So the final product from a gamification process doesn't have to be a game, but it could be game-like.  So this is where I'm coming from and what we have done so far in terms of the work I'm working on.  The gamification that we are doing at the university and beyond the university, some of them lead to creating a playful solution, some of them lead to creating a playful product, some of them lead to creating an actual game.  So it's quite a versatile design approach.  That's how I look at gamification, as a design approach, rather than just technology code driven techniques.
That's great.  And thinking about the design approach, a lot of what you talked about there seems to be drawing on the idea of motivation and engagement.  Would you say that's the main draw of gamification?
For me, yes, that is the main draw because I'm quite interested to see why would someone engage with, for example, digital games for a long period of time.  And can we actually get or learn something from that and create something that would give the same sense of confidence, the same sense of engagement, the same sense of fun that would intrinsically encourage you to engage with something that is totally serious and not fun.  This is how I look at gamification, as a design process, rather than technology.
Hmm, absolutely, that makes sense.  So if you're thinking about gamification as a design approach, could you expand upon the sorts of mechanisms that you would be thinking about using that might have their origins in video game play?
We are using a method which is called game-based intervention method, based on what we have done within the health sector, as well as within the learning sector.  So we are trying to merge different best practices.
So when I look at [0:06:46] create a gamification program or solution or product that would engage learners or any audience that we have, we have to think about the approach as an intervention, because when we talk about intervention, we need to think about what objectives do you want to achieve and how to measure the change in behaviour, perhaps, or change in attitudes.  
How that would be linked to gaming is that the design of the game itself would have to be mapped against the intervention objectives that we have, and there are different ways of doing things in terms of learning.  There are different mechanics in learning, so we need to be able to map the game mechanics and how actually we do it in games, and thus the engagement, and see whether it is supported by the pedagogical construct of the learning activities that we want to support.
So if we do it that way, we will be able to test and see if there are any relationships between the mechanics of game play – for example, if you use repetition in gaming and quick feedback – with learning that would require someone to actually practise a lot in solving problems and whatnot.  So we can actually map the same sort of approach, but we would try to make it more game-like rather than just a task where you need to do the same or similar problem solving.  So we can actually do that in terms of the mapping between the game mechanics and the learning mechanics.  So this is how we actually do it in terms of the work that I've been involved in for the past few years.
That makes sense.  So when you're considering these kinds of opportunities for gamification and thinking of gamification as a design approach, are there any ethical considerations that come into play when you're planning those opportunities or when you're designing them?
Yes, definitely, especially when we are working with children in schools.  We had to make sure that we had to adhere to the ethics process that we have at the university.  So we had to go through the ethics approval before we engaged with them.  Even if we want to engage with the teachers and engage with any other stakeholders, we have to make sure that we have the ethics approval in place, which is from the university.  
It's just a common process that we have that will allow us to define what that sort of information or data is that we're going to collect from the process.  And besides, our work, of course, is very much a co-designing approach, so we like to work with teachers and students in designing the gamification program or a digital game or a board game or card games, or just a program that is playful.
So we were mostly working with the stakeholders in co-designing the experiences, so we needed to go through the ethics process to make sure that whatever we were collecting would adhere to the procedure of data protection and whatnot.  So yeah, we had to go through the ethics process.
Absolutely.  Thank you.  So you've outlined there how, in researching these things, there's a number of ethical things, ethical processes that you have to adhere to, which is great.  Staying with the idea of ethics, does gamification as a concept itself pose any kinds of ethical problems?  As in, obviously when you go into a research context you have to get consent and that kind of thing, but is there something specifically about gamification that can be ethically problematic?
Yeah, as I said, it depends on the motivation behind using gamification.  What types of methods that we will use and I refer a lot [0:11:20] choose books in terms of looking at the black hat and white hat approach in trying to encourage people to do something in either an extrinsic approach or intrinsic approach.  So there will definitely be some ethical issues in terms of we are using game mechanics that would focus majorly on the extrinsic factor in terms of rewarding people for doing something which will create a behaviour that would require rewards all the time in order for the person to actually complete a task that is given to him or her.  And there'll be a lot of issues in terms of note the attitudes and behaviours that we will produce from the experience itself.  
But I do believe, in terms of dosage or dosing a project, in terms of—  One of the researches I'm interested in is how can we understand in terms of dosage that we should give to the users in terms of encouraging them to be on board with a programme or an activity by using intrinsic approaches which were slowly morphing into something which is more extrinsic [0:12:52].  Because I do believe in using extrinsic to nurture positive behaviour in some ways, but we don't actually know what dosage should be given.  So we can only try and see whether, by using an extrinsic approach, it would allow someone to discover their own intrinsic motivation.
For example, Fitbit is using an intrinsic approach in the beginning but, towards the end, someone is actually following their own intrinsic motivation behind getting involved in some fitness activities.  So they don't actually rely a lot on the Fitbit mechanism anymore because I've seen that – it has not been researched, but I've seen it in real life observations – some friends of mine found their own motivation for getting fit and I can see that they don't rely on Fitbit any more.  But the problem is, on the flipside, that type of gamification can produce an addictive behaviour.  So some of them got very addicted to running, so addicted to losing weight when they don't need to, and they became less healthy than they were before and they looked different.
So that's one of my own personal observations, but there's not a lot of research being done in this area in terms of what dosage should we give, or what dosage of gamification, extrinsically and intrinsically, should we consider when we design our own gamification program.
That's really interesting.  Thank you.  So it sounds like you've talked there a bit about gamification being almost like—  When you talked about those healthy behaviours, the gamification becomes like a gateway into some other behaviour.
Yeah.
So that might be the thing that starts it, but it's not necessarily the gamification that carries on.  And there's also those ethical issues around addiction or compulsion to do the things.
Yes.
So yeah, lots of ethical considerations there.  If I take us back to near the beginning of our conversation, you talked about – so this might move a bit away from gamification; we'll see.
Okay.
You mentioned games for environmental awareness.  You talked a bit about health and you talked about environmental awareness.  I wondered if you could talk a little bit about that kind of aspect of your work and how games have the potential to be positioned as things that can make us aware of social or cultural issues.
Yeah.  I think one thing which is quite interesting in terms of research in digital games is how we would like to encourage people to discover their ethic purpose.  Ethic meaning that if people can create a digital game that will allow people to do or to discover different issues which are relevant to their environment, it would be quite interesting to see how a game can be an internet game where you would go and it is actually produced by the players themselves.
We've got games, for example, like the one that I’ve seen so far, similar game to Evoke where it's more about discovering different things and solving different missions.  It is relying on a community, a community-based environment awareness type of game as one of the key things that is coming up in the future in terms of citizen stories where a lot of games have been created to encourage people to engage with real issues and real problem solving.  For example, Cancer Research has produced a series of games that is encouraging people to do DNA matching and stuff.  And then, of course, the most popular one is where it's more on encouraging citizens or the public to be involved in solving real problems.
So I think in terms of creating games for health, games for change and games for raising awareness on environmental issues, I think we need to look at the mechanics of what allows people to discover their own purpose in their own surroundings and environment and community.  So I think this is relying on people being very aware of what's happening around them, I think.
Yeah, that's great.  Thank you.  You talked about your interest largely being in serious games and you've just talked about some kind of potential things that video games have to offer.  Do you think that what we might call entertainment games have the opportunities to offer that kind of thing?  Do entertainment games offer the potential for cultural or social change, or is it just what we might consider serious games that are best positioned for that?
No.  No, I think there's a lot of crossovers now between digital games that are created for entertainment and the ones which are specifically created for serious purposes, because I believe in reusing, repurposing and reconceptualising existing games for teaching and learning that exist in games to teach.  And again, I think The Legend of Zelda, the TV version, is focusing a lot more on problem solving and a lot more on learning, so you can see that it is not created as a serious game.  It is created as an entertainment game, but it's actually teaching you a lot about relationships, a lot about problem solving and teaching you a lot about how to connect different concepts within the particular game.
So I think it is quite interesting to see how existing entertainment games are actually relying on the fact that solving problems and solving complex problems is a motivation in itself in terms of trying to achieve some sort of mastery in the game.  So I think we can use existing digital games that are created by entertainment companies as part of a repurposing and remixing of existing games that are actually engaging, because I don't think we should start from scratch.  If there is anything out there that we can actually use for teaching and learning, for example, why not?
There is a lot of movement where people are trying to re-mod existing games and trying to make them fit to a new objective in terms of trying to raise awareness on certain things, trying to raise awareness on [0:21:09] issues to help lecturers and teachers to teach within a classroom setting.  So, again, I can see more entertainment games being used in classrooms rather than us creating bespoke games that are going to take a lot of time and be quite costly.
Yeah, that makes sense.  Thank you very much.  You're obviously involved in a lot of research around gaming and gamification, but what – I'm trying to think how to phrase it – what's the kind of status of the field that you work in?  Do you feel, within the field you work in, that the kind of research you do around video games is valued within that context?  Is there a particular type of research around video games that's more valued than others?
Well, in terms of the work that I'm doing and what I've seen so far in the systematic reviews that have been done by others – for example, my good friend [0:22:15] has done a lot of work in terms of trying to find out more about game-based learning and games in serious contexts as gamification, and within my own work as well – I think the domain, which is quite high in terms of the uptake of the use of games or game-based and the use of serious games and the use of gamification and learning is education.  So this is where most of the work is being done and some of the work is very mature in terms of the types of games that they use for teaching and learning.  
One thing that I found from my work, anyway, in terms of games is people are moving on to a more hybrid approach.  That means that we're not relying on one particular solution or one particular platform, but we are relying on a collection or a suite of tools and technologies and platforms to create that game-like experience.  As we have seen in Pokémon Go, it's one of the most well-known [0:23:28] that we have, but in terms of reality meets expectations, we are not there yet because we are still relying on one platform, which is our mobile phones.  And even if we're outdoors, we are interacting more with the mobile than we are interacting with our own surroundings.
So there is a lot of work within the context of internet things where people are actually using different tools and different technologies to create a live action game.  For example, one thing that we are working on and we're trying to experiment with because of this research that we have done is we've tried to experiment by creating remote escape rooms.  So we can set up one room in the UK and one room in the USA, for example, and we will set up different puzzles, different clues and different things that people need to solve, which can either be non-digital or digital, or a combination of both. 
So, clues and puzzles in one room will help solve clues and puzzles in another room, and you can have two teams.  So the students can only communicate via Skype; that is the only way for them to communicate their findings.  So this is a game.  
It is a more hybrid approach where you actually combine non-digital and digital, as well as physical and virtual experience, and this will be able to teach not only the structure of the puzzles and the problems that you set in the different rooms, but it will also teach a lot of different soft skills.  For example, the ability to express your ideas, the ability to communicate and the ability to do teamwork, because this is one thing we've seen in serious gaming is the soft skills are quite difficult to – how to call it? – to facilitate because, if you are only working on one digital game, it's not going to teach you a lot of this, it might be able to increase your knowledge because it doesn't really allow you to actually practise what you have learnt in the real context.
So we are trying to get as real as we can in this experiment that we are doing in terms of the escape rooms.  So that's just one example that we had, but we are very much interested in the hybrid approach of creating a game in digital and physical games.
That's interesting.  So the idea of a game crossing space, crossing places, virtual, physical, that's all conceptualised as a game because of the different opportunities it offers.  That's really interesting.  Thanks for that.
I'm presuming, maybe wrongly, that your interest in gaming might come from playing games yourself.  Is that where—?  What kind of sparked your interest in this as an area to look at?
Well, my first interest in gaming was very much engagement because I'm very much interested in the psychology behind the use of any tools that will engage you.  And games, I found, is one of the key tools that is actually getting a lot of attention in terms of real engagement and real achievement in terms of virtual achievements.  Because what I've seen so far, for the past ten years, is I've observed people who are actually playing a lot of games, and I call myself a gamer but I'm not as staunch a gamer as most people I know, so I'm also thinking, how can we take them out of their bedroom into the outdoors and then practise what they've learnt?  Because a lot of the research that has been done shows that people have got more confidence within the virtual environment than when they are out in the real environment, so how can we bridge this gap?  So that's where my interest comes in.
But in terms of playing games themselves, I like games which are focusing on solving problems.  One game in particular that I'm still playing for the past two years is a game which is called Black Box.  So this game doesn't really tell you how to play it, so it's up to you to discover how to solve the different puzzles.  So what I like about this game is it doesn't follow the – how do you call it? – the technical formula that casual games can have.  Existing casual games will give you a lot of feedback and will give you a lot of instructions and will give you a lot of help in terms of trying to [on board 0:29:08] you, but this game [on boards] you by exploiting your curiosity in the mystery of the game itself, so you need to figure out how to solve them.
For example, one of the puzzles on that particular game, it took me about four months to solve, and that shows that the engagement is very high.  So I'm very much interested in the fact that there are people out there who are very much interested in solving something.  If they can't solve it, they work harder to find out how to solve it.  It is quite a good game.  I recommend that you give it a try.
I'm going to, straight after this.  I'm going to Google it in a minute (laughs).
(Laughs)  Black Box, yeah.  I think, at the moment, it is only on iOS.
Oh, cool.  Yeah, yeah.  Okay, that's great.  So there's something there about the game causing you to persist with something.
Yeah.
So again, drawing back on the idea that you're coming from around engagement and motivation, you're kind of seeing that play out in your own life in the fact that you've had this game on the go for two years.  
I'm aware of the time.  I suppose the final thing to talk about would be future directions in research and how you see things going.  Now, you've already talked a bit about that in terms of the kind of hybridity, the crossing places and virtual places.  Are there any other ways in which other things that you're interested in looking at or other ways in which you see research around video gaming going?
Yeah, there is a lot of work being done in terms of the use of VR.  I remember when VR first came out, it was quite niche and it was very expensive and costly, but then it died and no one has actually wanted to use it for the past few years.  Now it is back on the radar again because it is more cost-effective and it's easier to code.  There are a lot of plug-ins available to create your own stuff, so I think VR and AR are the things that are being experimented with at the moment.  Even social media, like Facebook, is experimenting on AR, aren't they?
Yes.
So I think this is where digital gaming is going to go and it sits nicely with the hybrid stuff that I've talked about.  It's just one of the tools that is going to be used in terms of this, and one thing we are working on as well is the use of VR as part of the remote escape rooms.
Oh great.  Yeah.
So instead of being in physical rooms, you can be in highly simulated rooms with different people from different parts of the world and we are looking at what is the infrastructure that will allow us to do that and what types of assessment and what types of activities will allow the engagement with the game play, like multiplayer game play, in that way.
So I think AR and VR are the things that are going to be high in the agenda for game research.
Hmm, so there's some real potential there.  Thank you.  Before I end, is there anything that you haven't said that you think might be important to say?  Is there anything you thought we might talk about and we haven't done, or have we kind of covered all bases for you?
Well, I think just on a final note, in terms of whenever we are going to create or in terms of the use of games for serious purposes, we need to make sure that we do the groundwork in terms of the types of interventions that we want to produce and the types of behaviour and attitudes that we might nurture, and what types of change objectives we have that we can measure throughout the process itself.  Because I've seen a lot of serious games projects where they will go straight into creating the game instead of working with the stakeholders.  I think it is very important for the stakeholders to be included in the beginning, as well as the theories and the different experts in different areas, and that's why I'm very much interested in a more transdisciplinary sort of approach in game creation when it comes to creating a game for interventions.  So that's what I would say as my last note.
Great.  Thank you.  So the idea of getting the people who are actually going to be using and engaging with this tool involved in the design process from the beginning, rather than imposing something on people?
Yeah, and the experts in the area, especially when you're working in terms of children in schools.  You might want to engage with child psychologists or educational psychologists and whatnot, so they are the ones who can actually help you create something.  It may not be usual for a digital game, but the end product will have more impact.
Yes.  Brilliant.  Thank you.  That's great.  That's a great point to end with.  Thank you ever so much for talking to me.
Okay.
Fascinating to talk to you.  Thank you for spending the time.  Have a good day and I will no doubt see you soon.
Definitely.  Definitely.  Thank you.
Okay.  Thanks ever so much.  Bye-bye.
Bye.