Interviews// Sony Europe Founder, Chris Deering

SPOnG: Okay, let’s talk about what you’re up to now; the Edinburgh Interactive Festival. It’s now in its fifth year?

Chris Deering: Yes, this is our fifth one and due to some coincidental developments I think we are the longest running continually running event in the games calendar! E3 of course, as you know, was very different this year – not like the old days when it was at LA Convention Centre or Atlanta.


SPOnG: So what is your role at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival?

Chris Deering: Well, I’m just the chairman of the festival. The difference between this and a lot of events that go on in the industry is that EIF is not a for-profit proposition; it’s just a celebration of creativity. In a similar way to the creators and the actors putting on shows all around Edinburgh, the EIF is just for the pure enjoyment of experimentation and rubbing shoulders with so many other people in the industry with the same state of mind. So, it has a good ability to draw on goodwill, plenty of people work on a volunteer basis.

There is some discussion of business, of course. We’ve had the views of analysts and we always have one session about evolving sectors in the industry – which are more costly, which are more profitable and so on – but by and large it’s mostly about what’s new in creativity, what’s new in interactivity and now you’re starting to see real substantive presentations such as the one we just had from (TV’s Big Brother producers) Endemol earlier today about bringing interactivity to linear programmes from traditional TV producers.

Or, in the case of (Ubisoft CEO) Yves Guillemot’s presentation, deliberately setting out to find people who know about cinematography and scriptwriting and direction.

SPOnG: So, was that part of the idea when you originally set up the Edinburgh Interactive Festival – this cross-fertilization between different creative disciplines?

Chris Deering: It was, yes, because there is a film festival here, and a TV festival and a book festival. The TV festival is of a similar type to EIF, in that they tend to discuss future trends and ways to enhance consumer experiences, much more so than it being a typical buyers and sellers market for programming. And if you make the analogy with the film business, the EIF is kind of like what the Sundance Festival started out as. We have screenings too, an idea which we’ve clearly borrowed from the film industry. Those are open to the public, so people can go along and find out what was going through the game creator’s mind when they were making the game, the issues they faced.

Like we just had the creators of Eve Online telling us all about how they need to use servers which were previously only employed for high end industrial and military use, to enable them to keep up to 200,000 people in the same game!

So, some of it can be a bit technical, but most of the festival is about people who are very happy to celebrate their own and each others’ work. As an industry we’re lucky to be in such an exciting place right now, despite the fact that many of us often might complain or express stress at working in the industry – because let’s not forget it is quite stressful. Change is part of the landscape, not only in technology but in the area of creative evolutions and the overlaps between technology and creativity to the enhancement of the consumer experience.


SPOnG: So, have you had chance to sample the joys of Edinburgh at festival time yourself yet?

Chris Deering: Well, a lot of people who come to EIF are Edinburgh fans to be honest – a lot of people come from the US and outside of the UK. This year I’ll only have time to make two shows, as my timeframe here is a little bit compressed, but many attendees always try to find a way to sneak in a day early or stay a day or two late to enjoy Edinburgh. It’s just a nice ambience. It’s something that really is an escape from the drudgery of the day-to-day. We really are able to talk about games in a good state of mind. Even though people may be fierce competitors for the rest of the year round, they can get together here and talk about almost any issue – censorship, for example – any issue that is standing in the way of the industry moving forward or providing an opportunity for the industry to move forward.


SPOnG: One of the issues that has come up this year is how the games industry might work to get more proper mainstream media coverage – in the arts and entertainments sections of mainstream newspapers.

Chris Deering: Right. Well, of course different publications cover various things to do and in the entertainment sections of a few newspapers we see the inclusion of games reviews. Some of them do it more frequently than others. What we’re really interested in at EIF is to make sure that the industry gets visibility for being respectable and intelligent and concerned and not just like some kind of ‘electronic comic book’ or just some way of enjoying vicarious violence or whatever. We’re trying to show that it is a legitimate art form.

SPOnG: Thanks for your time so far, Chris.

Tune in tomorrow for part 2 of our interview with Chris Deering, where – amongst other things - Chris tells us more about how and why Sony shook up the marketing and advertising of videogames in the 1990s and ‘the father of the European PlayStation’ (just don’t call him that to his face!) shares his thoughts on the rise and fall of the SEGA Dreamcast.

Read part two of our EIF interview with Chris Deering here.