Interview with our games designer

April 16 2009

Ian Roberts,
Creative Director and Lead Games Designer on Climate Challenge 2010

Ian Roberts is the lead games designer on Climate Challenge 2010. He designs the game experience and mechanics that the developers then programme and the artists bring to life visually. In many ways he is the heart of the game. Ian came to us with experience across a wide range of new media forms, ranging from award-winning video production and editing to 3D Graphics and website programming. These skills are combined with a background in media, film, literature and cultural research in the forms of academic study, writing, lectures and teaching which gives him a unique outlook on games design.

While working for Red Redemption he has been lead games designer on all of our games (including Climate Challenge and Operation: Climate Control), has produced extensive web portals including the ClimateX.org for Oxford University, directed and edited academic multi-media presentation films for University College London, and was an games industry consultant for the UK Department of Trade and Industry.

I wanted to interview him about his influences...

GR: What was the first game you ever played?
IR: Almost certainly something very simple like Pong as we had one of those old Atari boxes where you had this clunky selector with one of those joysticks with one of those big satisfying button. The first game I became obsessed with as a computer game was "Elite" I played religiously on the Spectrum 128k which was all swish and fancy with a tape deck.

GR: What is your favourite game and why?
IR: That's a really tricky question as there are lots of different kinds of games and they are difficult to compare - like apples and oranges. So I think a game which really captured me first time I played it was Ron Gibert's original "The Secret of Monkey Island" it was probably the first of its kind [adventure game] that I had played and it was so incredibly well put together, witty and all the things that make it a classic so that is definitely something I have very fond memories of. Modern games that hearken back to that such as Psychonauts work very well for me.

GR: What games influence your design of socially conscious games?
IR: Well I can think of a couple of examples in games where I've really felt that the game as a medium and an art form surprised me in terms of how it conveyed my awareness of something I already knew but never really understood, so for example a very early point of realisations for me was in the early 1990s. It was the game Cannon Fodder weirdly. You wouldn't think of Cannon Fodder as a socially-aware game it is a war game, it had a poppy on the front cover and was asked to remove the poppy by the Haig(?) foundation because they felt it was offensive to have a game which trivialises war, but in fact I found that to be the first computer game which didn't trivialise war, but whilst it had bright sprites and look and feel it was completely ruthless. Your little soldiers that die will die normally by being hit by a single bullet or single piece of debris, and while you play the game you see a memorial hill and you see a list of the fallen and it gets longer and longer and longer and longer. And it is very shocking as it happens where you would normally have a victorius transition. There is this really stark reminder that all of these people have died, and they have died because you are controlling them. And that made me understand casualties of war to a much great extent than reading about historical battles ever could. You had a direct relationship with what was going on, and whilst it was a fun shooter game it had this serious war message which I thought was excellent.

Deus Ex is another very good example in the level of immersion in the world and the freedom it gave you. and it was unique at the time for granting you this freedom allowed you to not only uncover the intricacies of this conspiracy in this dystopian future, but also to allow you to take control over which way it goes and allow yon to be part of its resolution in a much more active way than other games. You could make a decision to change sides or to choose how society would end up at the end of the game. It gives this feeling of great scope and made you think a great deal about the issues that the game posed.

Why? The reason why is that these were games of traditional entertainment value targeted at teen and young men that rather than just relying on sensationalism of the genre decided to do something with the genre to allow the player to discover something about the human condition within the structure that they have been given and that is the ultimate goal of a socially conscious game. which is to be both considerate of a games relationship to the world we live in and to take that next step and actually do something interesting with it, to make and experience that the player can take home with them which makes them more aware and helps them understand the world we live in a bit better.

GR: You have a strong eye for design - you were central to the design of the original Climate Challenge, Operation: Climate Control and Trouble Shooter - what drives that part of you?
IR: I'm a very cross-media person, and I'll describe what that means. A lot of people would describe themselves as being very textually focussed or visually focussed or respond well to music or so on. For me it is the combination of two or more types of media and the new experience that is made from the combination that interests me the most. So I find for example film more interesting than just music because you have the combination of lots of different elements, and with game and games design you have the combination of the aesthetics, the gameplay, the music and the emergent experience and it is in being able to create that emergent experience both in a way that you want to convey but also in a discoverable way that people could feel a variety of different responses depending on the person and all of which would be valid game experiences. That is what really drives me about game design.

GR: You were a teacher before becoming a games designer. What impact has that had on your games design?
IR: So people have short attention spans so you need to engross students or the audience or players in your world as quickly as possible for them to understand where you are and where things are going so they are never lost or feel it is an effort to follow you on this journey. The other part is that the best knowledge in terms of retention and comprehension is knowledge which is gained through personal experience and experimentation that there is only so much you can learn from reading the same page in a book again and again, or reading off the board or copying what a teacher is saying that without trying something out or creating something and seeing the results of your creation your understanding of the theory can never be fully solid. That means in games design you have to propose the theory, not necessarily in its entirety, then allow the player to discover it and discover how that theory works through their own experimentation.

Note: This interview is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 UK: England & Wales License so do feel free to reprint. If you would like to reprint without attribution, please drop me an email to gobion at red hyphen redemption dot com.