Apocalyptic fiction is inherently optimistic, and a lot of the stories I read and write are about the end of the world. But that doesn’t mean they’re happy-clappy. It might be about the end of all our problems, but the stories themselves are often about what we’re capable of overcoming in the face of adversity. I was lucky enough to spend some time at PAX Australia, in Melbourne, Australia. It’s one of the largest conventions around. One of the things I liked about the way it worked, was the way that it was held in small venues – the whole building was one long room, like a cinema. You’d play a game, or see an indie game or a board game, or be interested in something like cosplay, or you’d go to a panel. You’d watch a film, and then people would be wandering around asking for feedback. Or they’d all go to a bar and play Dungeons and Dragons. It was like a festival. It was very, very nice. I didn’t get to see everything. There were a lot of amazing games there, but what got me particularly excited was the indie games. When I arrived and it was all set up and there were the booths, it was just this amazing environment where people were excited about different kinds of games, including things that they didn’t expect to be there. That was one of the amazing things about it, the idea that people were prepared to look outside their comfort zone. How important do you think that is? I had a conversation with Lulu about how important that sort of thing was, in terms of broadening the audience of games, and thinking that maybe people didn’t need so much of that, in terms of coming into the industry as an adult. Maybe the industry has become just a little too focused on children and young men. Are games too corporate for that? I don’t think that I can answer that, because I think there’s a very specific set of conversations, and then if you start to move the conversation to what people are prepared to accept, they start to shift it from being a conversation to a debate. I think it’s fascinating, because I love games, but I don’t think that I can judge whether they’re children’s entertainment or not, because that’s not my role as a critic. But I know that’s a problem that’s being discussed elsewhere in the cultural sphere. I’m not entirely surprised. In the games industry there’s an emphasis on the idea that games should be an escape for young boys and girls, whereas if you look at Pixar or Disney movies, it’s not primarily for kids. It’s actually adult-oriented. It’s like the people who want to make gaming only for adults are going against the grain of what the entire entertainment industry is doing. We do have a lot of problems in the media, in terms of the level of sexism that we deal with. And the level of homophobia. I don’t know what the answer is to that, but we have a problem with bullying. And a lot of people are being told they have to be perfect, and if they aren’t perfect then they aren’t deserving of any of the things that are rightfully theirs. We have to stop thinking that we don’t have the right to deal with some of these issues, because it’s not right that people should have to suffer for this stuff. There are people who have had enough, who can’t take any more of the bullying and the misogyny, and they want their voice to be heard. We shouldn’t be ashamed of that, or feel like we can’t deal with it. Because there’s too many of us who don’t care to deal with it. It sounds like your sense of humour has been pretty important in dealing with it. If you want to get on, and become the sort of person that other people think is acceptable, and you’re not making fun of your own weaknesses, then that can be hard to deal with, if you have a sense of humour, because you might not be able to deal with the realisations of other people. But humour is a way to help yourself cope, and I think sometimes that’s what people in the games industry need. A lot of them are isolated, because a lot of us are lonely and can’t talk to anybody about our real life problems, so they try and escape that through games, they try and escape into the idealistic game design, but that’s just escapism and it’s not a healthy way to deal with real life issues. And the other reason why we need humour is because it can be a tool to help get through a difficult period of your life. You have a lot of responsibilities in the writing of X-Wing. I’ve asked people this before, and I’ve read interviews, and I still can’t work out how you do it. It’s too much. I can’t keep up. What is it like? It’s a real challenge. It’s like being the executive of three companies, because we have this game that we publish, and then we have Star Wars Galaxies and then there’s the films. They are all on different time cycles, but they are all connected by the same group of people, and the same thing keeps happening over and over. I had a meeting with one of my co-workers in Australia the other day, and he told me that when he gets confused by something, he comes back to the fact that I do have my hands in all three of those things, and at least he knows he can talk to me about it. We’ve had other people come to us with their concerns, and they’re just blown away by the number of people we have working on X-Wing, and they’re impressed by the breadth of experience. This thing with Marvel is like looking at a whole new ballgame. That’s what I’m excited about, and it might well be a way for me to write for games that aren’t Star Wars for a while, which would be good, because that would make the world a better place. One of my favourite things about both Star Wars Galaxies and X-Wing is the way you get to see those fictional worlds from the ground level, I think that really works for a franchise like Star Wars, where there’s so many fans out there. Because with other franchises I feel like I see the way the franchise works more from a creator’s perspective. When you create things, you just keep trying to do that over and over, because you do learn something new every time, and you always get surprised. You get surprised by how things are going. And I’ve seen some of your tweets about this, and you say that there’s a whole lot of ideas you had, when you started on this, that are never going to see the light of day, because the game might end up in such a different place. That must be stressful, because you have these ideas in your head, and you think that one day you’ll be able to create a story based around that idea, but it never happens. When I started writing, I did get some of these ideas. But at the same time, when I was trying to write, I was trying to be careful to do it well. If I was working on a big project like this, I felt a lot of responsibility towards the things that I was writing about, to be really careful, and not to do something that would be insulting to people who were already buying the product. So I would be careful with everything I did. I don’t know what my favourite project is, because I loved every single project that I did, but one of my favourites was in my early years of working in games, when we were talking about X-Wing and it was just me and Joe Staten and Ben McLeod. We did that without an outline. We just went into it and we got excited about the story, and all of a sudden we had something to talk about. It was a much faster, much lighter experience, but it was a lot of fun. That’s what I loved about it. And that’s the thing that was missing at Lucasfilm, because the writers didn’t have that freedom. They didn’t have the freedom to play around with the things that made Star Wars so appealing in the first place. And there’s nothing better for someone like me, who likes the first Star Wars movie and is excited about the idea of a new movie in that universe, to see that we’re still open to that, and that’s exactly the kind of thing that I want to see out of a new Star Wars movie.