John Lau

John Lau (Class of 2003) is lead producer at ustwo games and has been working in the interactive digital field for 17 years, delivering projects for clients including Disney, the BBC, and Universal music.  John has been the lead designer on VR and AR projects for organisations including Tate Modern and Amazon. He has a degree in Philosophy from Cambridge and an MA in Game Design and Development from the National Film and Television School. ·

John’s substack on gaming culture can be found here.

Is there any link between your degree in Philosophy from Cambridge and being a video games producer? 

You can definitely be thoughtful about video game design practice and bring meaningful, deeper ideas into games. I’ve enjoyed doing that a great deal in my career. I’d like more designers to be more thoughtful about how to relate games to real life.

I’m less interested in games about, say, alien invasions than I am in games about why people’s relationships break down, or how someone feels after they have a child or lose a friend. I want to see game makers explore those areas in the same way a novelist or a film-maker would.

How can you evoke moods and emotions as subtle as a film using what seem to be blunter instruments?

I’d actually say we were using very sharp instruments, just ones that are perhaps less legible to people who aren’t familiar with games. When I first got into the industry, I was excited by the fact that there were things that I could try in the medium that had never been done before. I had thought about writing or drawing and worried about not being able to say something new… in video games, the tools you can use to convey an atmosphere or a character’s internal life, those tools have been very under-used compared to literature or film.  The interactive medium is just as expressive; it’s just been much less explored.

For example, a lot of time and energy in game development has been put into making movement and physical interactions with objects and people feel expressive. But not so much has gone into making dialogue expressive. There’s good reasons for that. Computers are very good at maths, and maths is very good at modelling 3D movement. It’s easier to make a person move around and hit things than to simulate the feeling of say, having forgotten someone’s name at a gallery opening. But that’s what I’m interested in.

But that sounds like an incredibly nuanced thing to have in a game! Can it be done? 

Well, it is incredibly nuanced! But then, physically, Super Mario’s jump is very nuanced. He can change direction, he jumps higher if you hold the button longer, he can double jump etc. There’s lots of scope for people to ‘express’ themselves by combining those moves through a very simple mechanic.

But then think about how dialogue is often presented in a game – often the only way you can express yourself is to walk up to someone and say one of three things: ‘Hallo’ or ‘What are you doing here?’ or, ‘Give me my wallet back’, for example. That’s tremendously blunt. But, if you apply the nuance we’ve already achieved with physical movement to dialogue, what possibilities open up for experiences that reflect the type of situations you might get into in everyday life, and then the things you might say in those situations?

You’ve worked on gamifying education on commission…

I worked on games for educational publishers when I first got into the industry. When you learn to play a game, you take on information without realising it, because your attention is focused elsewhere. You’ve been given a goal you’re trying to achieve, so you’re not directly thinking about learning, say, maths or geometry. That’s very interesting – you’re designing a game that’s fun but also has the player unconsciously internalising curriculum goals at the same time. Games can be a very powerful tool for certain sorts of learning.

Would you say your job is better than being a film director, because there is a bigger blank canvas to work with?

I wouldn’t say it’s better or worse, but it does feel like a bigger canvas to me, because you can control absolutely everything: when you’re making a video game you can change the strength of gravity! That said, it’s as much of a weakness as a strength – being able to change anything can make it difficult to know what to change and what to stick with.

With your thoughtful approach to the content of games, where do you stand on concerns that children spend too much time on screens, whether for gaming or social media?

I think they’re valid.  I think it’s important to build literacy not just around the content of TV or games themselves, but also around the structures and incentives around their production.

I mean, social media in itself can be a wonderful thing – you can connect with people and find community when you might not have been able to before. It’s not social media or games in themselves that concern me, but rather the incentive structures that are present in the companies that create them.  If an app, for example, gets more advertising revenue the longer you spend on it, its creators have a clear incentive to make it a compulsive and addictive experience. I might allow my daughter access to those experiences, but I’d also be keeping an eye out for elements of their interactive design that are rooted in compulsion. I think it’s about educating users about those design patterns so people can turn away from them to stay safe.

But if you produce a great record, someone might play it 20 times in a row? Is the compulsion not just a factor of making something that people like?

A video game is very different to a record, though. To illustrate, there was a laboratory apparatus created in the 1930s called the Skinner Box. BF Skinner, a psychologist, trained rats to press a button by automatically dispensing a food pellet every time that button was pressed. Rats learned to press the button and get the food. Then he changed the apparatus so that whenever the button was pushed there was a random chance that a food pellet would appear. The result was that the rats just started pressing the button continually. Compulsively.

So, you can imagine a game designed to provide the player with a reward at a random interval – there are many out there, and they are incredibly compulsive, in a way that’s nothing to do with fun or art, and which is ultimately empty and unfulfilling for their players. So if you play a game, or scroll on social media for hours at a time, there may be more going on than just liking the experience in the way you might with a catchy record.

What does your working week involve?

Mainly, I’m the interface between the creativity of the team and the commercial considerations of the company. I have to make the creative team’s vision happen, or sometimes, to judge whether that vision needs to change to make it achievable. Typically, my week involves meetings with programmers, artists and designers, making sure everyone knows what needs to be done, and speaking to people higher up the business to make sure they’re happy with what we’re doing.

I might be managing a session where a group of us are working out how to solve a particular problem. When a game is about to be released, I might be helping to promote it, doing interviews and so on.  So there’s a lot of talking, but also a lot of strategy, looking at budgets and trying to work out which team members to assign to which part of the project.

What is the starting point for a new game? Is it verbal or visual? Or do you have something new you can do technically and you work forward from there?

Different studios do it differently. Some studios I’ve worked with will receive a brief to work up a game within a particular area: ‘We think there’s a market for a game that involves steam engines and travelling across Europe’.

Sometimes, a creative lead will have written an outline. For the game South of the Circle, which came out in 2020, the director wrote a short novel, outlining his ideas for the story. Some of the team even went to Antarctica to research it. Obviously that’s very unusual, but it can happen. By the time I came on board for that project, they had already done some prototyping on which game mechanics would be sympathetic to the story. My role at first was to do script development with the director as well as working out what kind of team we needed to hire to make it happen.

What aspect do you enjoy the most?

There are certain phases to a project – concepting, pre-production, production and finalling just before the game is released. I like different aspects of each one. I don’t think I could just do any one of those phases all the time, back to back. I enjoy going through the whole process.

The early stages are really enjoyable: anything seems possible and the ideas that you’re having are almost limitless. Pre-production is when you’re asking how we can deliver on our big vision and our big promises. What tools do we need? How long will it take? Do we need to scale back our ambition? That’s where reality bites, but it’s also where I feel I can have the greatest impact, solving problems with the aim of actually getting things done. You have hard conversations in that phase but they’re rewarding because you know that without them the game likely won’t exist at all.

During production you’re just trying to keep out of the team’s way. You’re solving lots of small problems but the train is on the track now and it has its own momentum.

What personal qualities would a 16/17 year-old gamer need to do well in the industry?

Empathy is important. For a producer, delivering a game isn’t just about getting it made and well reviewed and commercially successful. The team needs to survive the process, emotionally! You want the team to work as hard as it can, but at a sustainable pace. You don’t want the work to make everyone miserable, and all of that is threatened if you can’t put yourself in the shoes of the people you’re working with, or you can’t articulate the concerns of one team member to another.

There’s the basic stuff, too: you have to be organised, and answer emails and all that. But to keep the creative spark and momentum going on a team, you need empathy.

What was your first experience of work?

A Saturday job moving stock around in a warehouse of a clothing company. I got it through a friend. There was a dog in there that I was pretty frightened of, but I was just delighted to be paid money to do something. To be helpful and get a wage for it.

How did you come to be at City? 

My parents are first generation immigrants. My mother’s Polish, my father from Hong Kong. Leaving primary school, the plan was for me to go to a local Catholic school, which wasn’t fee-paying. Taking the exam at City was just an opportunity to look at an alternate path. But when I took the test and had a couple of meetings with the headmaster at the time, Mr Dancey, the prospect of me going became more and more real. I liked City better than the other school and ended up getting a bursary.

Was it a good experience?

Yes, broadly speaking! I wouldn’t say I had an easy adolescence, but then nobody does. Broadly I felt supported; I just wanted to fit in. I was a very compliant student. I don’t think I gave the school too much trouble.

Which teachers do you remember?

Mr Maynard, my Sixth Form tutor and my Design and Technology tutor. In Senior Sixth he encouraged me to enter the Audi Young Designer of the Year competition with a table I was making for my A-level final project. It was based on a Mobius strip, one continuous piece of wood, folded over on itself, influenced by the optical illusions in MC Escher’s work. When I was choosing my university degree there was a real moment where I was weighing up some very different options: it was a choice between Philosophy and Carpentry and for a time, Chemistry. My A-Levels were very varied: History, Design and Technology, Maths and Chemistry.

What other extra-curricular things did you enjoy?

I did a lot of drama. I was in the production of West Side Story that Val Marsland put on. I also played the cornet and participated in a lot of school orchestras and concerts until I got braces which made that too difficult. I also did a lot of just hanging around.

I was interested in media. movies, video games, comic books. The school at the time didn’t feel geared up to send people to film school or art school. The prevailing idea of success was all about going to Oxbridge or Med School.

And, despite your other interests, you did end up going to Cambridge to read Philosophy? Where were you going with your life at that moment?

God knows! I really agonised over it. My mum raised me on her own, and you have to understand that when you’re a Polish immigrant from behind the Iron Curtain and you get the chance to send your son to a school like City, there’s a real fear of missing out on opportunities. Me getting a respectable degree and then becoming a lawyer or an architect would, in a single generation, put us into a totally different place.

So, I think my mum found my wanting to do philosophy very challenging; it’s a difficult thing to make people back in Poland understand. Getting a place at Cambridge ended up making it a bit easier to explain, but probably for the wrong reasons.

On your Substack about gaming culture, you say that you are interested in the idea of play as care-giving? What does that mean?

Are you familiar with the idea that love is attention? That to love something is to pay attention to it, and to see it fully. When I play with our cat or with my baby daughter, I have to pay real attention to genuinely interact and respond to them. The idea that playing with someone is giving them your full attention in a particular way, and that it’s a form of care… I’m interested in that.

How do you think going to City helped shape you, personally?

When I was in Sixth Form a couple of very good friends left and went to other schools – mixed schools, state schools – that just seemed like bastions of liberalism and permissiveness by comparison. When you’re sixteen, the idea of going to a school with a smoking area, where you could call your teacher by their first name, sounds very enviable. However when I got to Cambridge and met people who’d been to schools like Westminster or St Paul’s, I realised City had actually been relatively relaxed and I was grateful to have gone there.

It feels now that City, for the time, attracted a more culturally diverse group of people than those more traditional places did, and I came to really appreciate that. It felt more down to earth, and there seemed to be kids there whose attendance would change their families’ circumstances, rather than kids whose families had been at public school for multiple generations.

I think it’s important to reflect on the privilege of having gone to a fee-paying school. I also don’t think that idea of privilege is straightforward: I grew up in Queensway, but was raised by a single mother in a one bedroom flat; I went to a fee-paying school, but on a scholarship, and mum took a second job to pay for my education. And then I went to Cambridge with all the privileges that entails … those facts don’t settle easily into a coherent picture of a person from either a disadvantaged or a privileged background.  Now that I’m 40, however,  I undeniably benefit from the compounding privileges that have come from my educational opportunities, regardless of all the other factors in my background. That can be an uncomfortable and conflicting mix of feelings.

Do these contrasts in your background feed into your empathy and your creativity, professionally, do you think?

Absolutely. I’ve had lots of different influences from lots of different places and people and it all goes in. When your identity is not straightforward – either because you’re not aristocratic or not a third-generation steel worker, say – it means that you have to question it earlier and for longer. You have to be more thoughtful.

John’s  A-Level project entry in to the Audi Young Designer competition