List of chapters | Fiction
Second appendix
BP: Next month sees the relaunch of your very first virtual reality game, Peak Chase, which was originally released in 2011. It’s fair to say that it didn’t make much impression to start with. It was only with subsequent games, which made full use of the capacity of the development environment to create fantastic new worlds —
ÉD: Virtual Fantasy.
BP: If you like. It was only then that your company began to make its mark.
ÉD: I’m very proud of the work we did on the first game. We deliberately aimed at a genuinely “real” effect. We wanted to make the player believe that this was something that might actually be happening. In many ways, that’s far more difficult than what we achieved in the later, more successful games, which have been likened to technological hallucinogens. In a sense, before we could indulge ourselves in the fantasy, we had to prove that we could get reality right. And we achieved our aim.
BP: You might say it was too real. The typical young gamer just found it too dull.
ÉD: To be fair, I think that the problem was not that the typical gamer found the game dull and realistic, but that he wasn’t aware of it at all. We were, and remain, a small company. For us, at the time, the important thing was to prove the concept, to demonstrate that we could build a game that might persuade a casual player that he was really living though the scenario. In that, we succeeded. Marketing the game was not at all a priority at that time. That came later, once we’d proven to ourselves that we could make something and have it ready to market.
BP: It’s noteworthy that you refer to your ideal customer as “he”. In fact, your games are unusually popular with young women. Very often, the player’s avatar is female, even if the player is male.
ÉD: That was there from the beginning. The avatar — we tend to prefer “persona”, by the way — in Peak Chase is a woman.
BP: Notwithstanding which fact, one of the criticisms that has been directed at that game is that it is markedly more sexist, even misogynist, than the later games. Commentators have put this down to the involvement of your partner, Amber Ashby, in the more recent projects.
ÉD: In fact, Amber was involved in Peak Chase too. I’d put some of the basic framework in place first, as she was busy with another project, but she was fully involved in most of the design work.
BP: So you wouldn’t accept the accusations of sexism, as regards Peak Chase?
ÉD: I believe that the perception of sexism comes from one, almost accidental, factor. As you mentioned, the persona is a woman, irrespective of the sex of the player. At the start of the game, she wakes up in bed in a mountain cabin. She’s wearing a kind of nightgown/t-shirt thing and underwear, including a bra. This wasn’t planned but we’ve found that many female players immediately want to take off the bra, which means taking off the nightgown first. Then, depending on the choices that the player makes, she might be left with no, or very few clothes for the rest of the game.
BP: Quite.
ÉD: As I said, we — I didn’t foresee this. With the early male players, in contrast, it usually didn’t occur to them to take off the bra, which meant, of course, that they didn’t take off the nightgown either, so they ended up playing the game dressed like that.
BP: Then there was no conspiracy to ensure, so far as possible, that female players were naked, or nearly so, while male players were dressed, albeit in nightclothes?
ÉD: Absolutely not.
BP: So have you changed that for the new version?
ÉD: Actually, no, we haven’t changed anything.
BP: If what you’ve just told me is true, wouldn’t the rerelease have been an excellent opportunity to correct an accidental oversight in the original game?
ÉD: The results of that oversight were too interesting for us to want to change it. First, we noticed that the typical female player actually had an advantage over the typical male player. He tended to find the bra constricting and a distraction, while his nightgown was liable to snag on branches and similar protuberances. The result was that women tended to get further before they were caught. And male players began to notice this …
BP: And take more clothes off?
ÉD: Exactly. Specifically the bra. If I were designing the game from scratch, knowing what I’ve learned since, I’d have left that off. But it is what it is. As I said, I’m proud of it, and very fond of it. I wouldn’t change anything.
BP: One final question. The female “persona”, as you call her. Is she based on a real person? On Amber Ashby, for example?
ÉD: She’s not based on one individual, no. There’s certainly some of Amber in there, and some of me. There’s actually quite a lot of the mutual friend through whom I first met Amber. That woman was away travelling when the game came out and has only recently had a chance to play it for the first time since she had a brief run through the prototype. She’s been quite critical of parts of it, including the supposed sexism. At the same time, she has a soft spot for it, for reasons of her own. But, in the end, the persona isn’t really based on anybody. It’s like a character in fiction and works much the same way. You make up the really important stuff, the characteristics that matter. You use real people only to fill in the insignificant details, to give it a kind of colour. Reality supplies the background, the little touches you don’t have the time or the energy to make up.
There’s just one more thing I’d like to say. The game is dedicated to the memory of my good friend and former employer Jacob Kiever whose comments planted the idea for the game in my head, and whose violent death — a crime which has still not been solved — set in motion certain events which led us to complete it.