BAFTA have teamed up with Electronic Arts to create The BAFTA’s Young Game Designer composition, which looks for new young talent to create their very own video game. So we thought that it would be great to talk to Harvey Elliott from EA Bright Light Studios and ask him about the first steps young people should take if they want to get into the gaming industry. Interview was conducted by Mike Chinn.

Tell us more about your role at EA?

I run the Bright Light Studio which is in Guildford in the UK and we make games based on a whole load of different properties, some are our own and some are licensed in, our most recent game is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Part 2, and we’re just starting to develop a new IP (intellectual property) from now.

That was one of the questions I was going to ask you so I might as well start with it. EA are known to support their existing franchises such as Harry Potter, Need for Speed and their sports franchises, but a couple of years ago EA made a real effort to dive into new IP’s, so I was wondering what kind of an effort do EA make to create new IP’s and the risk that come with them?

Well EA is very much focused around making great games, and often in many cases there is a licence or a product that exists, that would benefit from becoming a video game and in many case they don’t exist at all and we need to make them up. I think EA is passionate about all IP in equal measure really; it’s just about what will make a great game and a great gaming experience. It’s really refreshing to work for a company that is ready to embrace a new IP as much as an established licence.

Lets talk about BAFTA young game designers which is in association with EA, I was wondering if we could talk about young people in the industry and how Bright Light Studios and EA search for new young talent, how do they look for them?

The games industry is an industry that you have to be really passionate about to be part of and you either play a lot of games or you’re a real fan of the experiences you get from them and a lot of the games industry started out in the UK. If we look at the EA heritage here, companies like Bullfrog were acquired in the 90’s and we had a UK based studio and kinda from that and a number of other businesses, a whole development expanded in the UK. What’s happened more recently is a lot of that talent and people have moved across to North America or other studios and since then I think what we realised is the home grown talent is amongst the best in the world (and I’m using the UK as my home grown base here).

I think we should be finding the new up and coming stars of the future and bring in fresh new people into the industry, so BAFTA’s young game designers is one way to do that and it’s really about showing what making games is all about, giving experience to young people and to start thinking about a new game. It’s a really nice workshop and it’s got a good process to it and a phenomenal prize at the back end.

I’m sure you and I realised that to get into the games industry you don’t have to just programme games. There are so many different areas you can be in, you can be a creative director, you can be a communications manager and I love the idea that the BAFTA young game designers is just about coming up with an idea, you don’t have to make it. I think it a nice step toward getting young people to make a game, how do you feel about that?

Yeah well we deliberately designed it to have teams of three, and the reason we wanted teams is because it is unusual, its virtually unheard of that a game these days is made without working with somebody else, so it immediately starts with a team work mentality, but exactly as you say so many different disciplines that make a game, whether you’re great at writing so you could do design or you want to go to management and scheduling and tasking, if you can code and write software, if you’re an artist or animator. So there are disciplines for everyone to follow and the idea of the young game designers competition was to get teams of people with different skills to work together on a shared project, which is exactly how it happens in the real game industry.

Except for the guy who made Mindcraft, that made $20 million.

[laughs] Well that’s almost unheard of.

I agree with you how British game design has gone away slightly since the 90’s and now we’re seeing an effort to try and bring it back. However touching on the tax break that Britain didn’t get a couple of years ago before the general election, I was wondering how much of an effort EA fight for a tax break or can’t you because your too busy making games?

We defiantly fight for them, EA is a global company so we have a lot of choice about where we get to develop our games and I’m very passionate about UK development industry. EA are very much active in lobbying hard for tax breaks and really anything that helps get support into the industry, I mean if we look at comparative industries like film for example and there is a lot of support for those groups. Well our industry is as big and as important now and it’s a shame that we don’t have the support that the industry really deserves and ultimately with global companies you can choose to make your game anywhere in the world and I want that choice to be the UK.

Does your company run any internships for young people or talent development programmes, not necessarily to take them on but to teach them and give them experience?

We don’t do interns with our UK based studios at the moment although we are looking to try and tighten relationships with universities, just to try and help shape future talent. It more through events such as the young game designers that we’re trying to reach out a bit more and the reason why we wanted to partner with BAFTA was that they have such a broad reach and appeal to the industry, they add a mark of quality. It a phenomenal association to have and we get to talk and work with so many more people through that partnership than two or three people that are lucky enough to come into the studio each year, I’d rather work with hundreds and thousands of people and hopefully build a big talent pool for the future.

I’m sure a lot of young people ask you this all the time but I’ll ask you as well. What advice would you give a 14 year old that really wants to be in the games industry?

There are three things and the first is, decide what you’re passionate about and continue to be passionate about it. If you love game design then really study it, look at which games are successful and why. Look at the review of products and what people are picking out, look at the elements that resonate with people, so make sure you develop that passion. Focus on the right things in your immediate studies, it’s amazing that there a lot of courses out there that are game design courses at university and they’re not always a perfect match for what we actually need for a skill set coming into the industry. Good strong English skills, Maths, Science. You’d be amazed how important they are to have as core skills. The third thing is persistence, if you wanna be working in the game industry, you need to be contacting and talking to people in the games industry and asking what to do. BAFTA young game designers is a great way of looking at the industry and understanding the different roles to play and just be persistent, focus on the right subject at school which are really the core subjects and be persistent to get your way in.

Maybe you could tell us about your path into the industry Harvey. I’m sure everybody’s path into the industry is different but maybe you could talk about how you got to where you are now.

Yeah well exactly as you say everyone got in a different way and I erm, I’m thirty-nine now [laughs], so my generation was ten years old when the ZX Spectrum was released

Wow yep, I remember that.

My dad brought it home and we had three brothers and we set it up and we were playing, there were two games, one called Penetrator which was basically a side scrolling shoot em up and The Hobbit which took ages to load. My brothers and I played those games to death and I remember that the Penetrator game had a level editor which was unusual at the time. I loaded in one of the opening levels and I went right to the very end of it and I drew a huge wall and I gave it to my brother to play and said to him “See if you can beat my score”. And he would have a go and be doing brilliant and then he would just crash into the wall I made. And I think that got me excited about what you could do with games and kinda from there I just carried on with my normal studies, being a fan of gaming ever since that moment I think,

My background at university was business and finance; I ended up working for a company that sells electronics in a summer internship. And I ended up setting up my own retail shop selling computer games and repairing PC’s. From there I found a path into Acclaim Entertainment which unfortunately are now no more, and slowly worked my way into development, so its kinda a reverse path, first I was a consumer, then a retailer, then a publisher and now I’m a developer, so I’ve learnt the industry backwards [laughs].

What are some of your favourite games you’ve worked on and why. You mentioned the Harry Potter series but is there anything that stands out?

I’ve loved working on the Harry Potter series, it’s been a phenomenal [pause] it’s been a phenomenon in fact [laughs]. Getting to work with the people who make the films and getting behind the scenes of everything, putting so much passion into those games has been a huge highlight. I worked with Criterion on Burnout 3 and that was phenomenal. I loved the Burnout series and I was at Acclaim when they were being published so I was excited to find out when Burnout was coming to EA. The passion behind that game was stunning and ahead of it’s time for the PS2. We also made a series of books for the DS called Flips, which was a book reader on the DS for kids. While doing that I got to meet the Bernard Cribbins who is a bit of a hero of mine from my childhood.

That’s the narrator of The Wombles right?

Exactly yes, I got to meet one of my heroes.

What games do you enjoy playing?

So I think I’m generally game agnostic, so I love every kinda game. What I love is a game that’s fun, engaging and it draws me in. I’ve just finished Portal 2 and [pause] phenomenal. Brilliant writing and I love mental challenge and I love the song at the end. At the moment it’s Mass Effect 2, so I’ve been putting a lot of time into that one, waiting for Mass Effect 3.

Have you not finish it, or is this a second play through or?

Second play through, trying a different personality type and I’m finding it quite hard making the bad choices

I played the renegade in my first go, so I have no trouble being the bad guy [laughs]

The first bad choice I made, I can tell you it was a bad moment for me [laughs].

What are some of the advantages and drawbacks of working for such a big company, EA is like you say global and I’m sure there are more pros than cons but if you could talk about some of them?

Sure, the pros are, the company is huge, but it wants to be successful and wants great games and it really feels like the organisation is organised around drawing out that creative skill and expertise. I remember when I first came into EA (for my interview actually), I went to a lovely building in the south of England and having being at Acclaim, which was a great publisher but not on the scale of EA, when you walk into that building and you realise how serious EA takes the business of making great games. I’ve not met as many smart people in one place outside of EA. The challenges are, EA is a big company and you have a lot of products just internally to compete with let alone the industry as a whole, so figuring out your niche and carving your way through that product, you need to make sure that your product has every chance of success. It’s something you have to learn by navigating the company, but like I said before the people at EA are so smart so if you’re tackling with a problem and you don’t know how to go about doing something, there are so many people willing to help just within the walls.

I’ve never thought about it like that before, that EA is so big that it creates its own composition, if someone made a racing game, you have to be careful that someone else who is making a racing game doesn’t put itself up against a game by the same publisher.

It makes you think a bit more about the competition you’re going to have, the good thing about the internal products is that you understand more about what they’re doing than anyone else could from the outside, so you can carve a niche for yourself pretty quickly but it’s something you have navigate. But what it leads to is getting all these people at EA helping you with your game and making it better and offering you advice and guidance and it’s down to you and your team if that’s what you want to do or take it your own way.

Is the industry still male dominated? We have Amy Hennig who works on Uncharted, Jade Raymond on Assassin’s Creed, do you think it’s still a boy club?

I wouldn’t call it a boy’s club but it is very male dominated, a lot less so than a few years ago but I think that it’s largely because the games that were being built five, ten year ago were really male dominated games, most of them were targeted towards a boy audience or a male audience, therefore if that ignites someone’s passion for working in the industry, then that’s the sort of game that would have to draw them in, whereas now if you look at the sort of games that are being built, whether it’s something on a social experience or on a mobile or a franchise like The Sims which has a significant female community (in fact more female gamers than male), then I imagine that those sorts of games are capturing a different audience’s imagination and creating their passion, so I think it’s going to be a matter of time. The industry’s appeal has already started to broaden and it will take a while for that to come through into the talent coming up.

So we have to wait basically.

Yeah, wait and not be narrow minded in the type of games we build.

That’s all the questions I have for you Harvey unless there is something else you want to talk about?

Yeah well I’d love to give another plug for the BAFTA’s young game designer, because going back to where we started in our conversation, we need new talent in the industry and this is one of the ways people can learn about the industry, how we make games. There is a whole bucket load of information on the website, so BAFTA.org/ydg and go there and learn.

Ok, thank you so much Harvey.

No worries, thanks a lot.