David Streak Playerthree www.playerthree.net David Streek, Playerthree’s Director, talks games, inspiration and the future of the web Building games all day; that sounds like fun. Does it ever feel like work? It feels like very hard work when we occasionally pull a deadline all-nighter, otherwise we could certainly think of worse jobs to be doing. Actually, it’s a genuinely enjoyable job, but no more than any other creative role. Lots of different clients, briefs and styles to produce. As for the ‘fun’ side, apart from testing our work, we don’t actually have time to play any games as entertainment in the office. We’re always keeping an eye of what’s happening in our industry, though. Where does the team find inspiration? We’re all avid gamers and collectors of videogames so have huge personal experience to draw from. We’re all graduates of design, technology and engineering courses so the functional and visual side offers interest and challenge. Finally, we’ve grown up with the Internet and digital technologies. To avoid inspiration from the rest of the world we’d have to be living in a small dark box. Do you prefer to create stuff for big businesses or smaller independents? It really doesn’t matter as long as the person in control at the client side really is the person with the final say. It’s a lot easier to produce good entertaining work if there’s a clear line of approval rather than the dreaded consensus of opinion! Let’s just say we’ve not added to www. clientcopia.com up till now, but there have been several close calls. What kind of trends do you see emerging? Although our feet are firmly grounded in games, one of the purest forms of online interaction, we’d have to be honest and make reference to the increasing rise of higher consumer bandwidth and the use of linear video clips and adverts. In many ways, mirroring the early rise of computer games in the Eighties, processor and bandwidth limitations of the web made for some very creative advancements in technology and animation. Use of video was limited so there were some very clever combinations of interaction and moving image. Today and in the future, however, the cynic here says that as processor speed and bandwidth become irrelevant we’ll start to see more and more of the web as simply another delivery method for linear television (programmes and adverts) endlessly regurgitating content in the easiest way. Ninety per cent of today’s computer games look great (and are expensive to produce), but are, by and large, clones of each other. The optimist here says that just as things settle down, up pops something like the Nintendo Wii and it makes everyone stop, look and think. At the moment, the nearest equivalent for the web would be Flash providing true 3D support as per the less-used Shockwave, and offering a faster and more reliable multi-user server setup. What advice would you give a web designer who wants to break into the interactive gaming scene? They have to love games, play them and read about them. They need to understand the mind of the casual gamer, which I do think is a very different market from the traditional console gamers. Next to that, immerse yourself in branding and advertising, regardless of the quality. Without this sector there wouldn’t be an industry to work in.