Game designer Jason Rohrer’s hard to get hold of. Not because he shuns the limelight or is too busy crunching. He’s hard to get hold of because he’s forgotten to turn the ringer on his house phone back on, after he and his family went to bed before nine one evening so they could get up bright and early to go strawberry-picking.

When he’s not foraging for berries, the thirty-one-year-old developer is piecing together lo-fi art games like Passage, or the recent Primrose for the iPhone (which we reviewed here): pixelated interactive experiences that aren’t afraid to tackle the big issues like life, death, and how to play a tile-based puzzler if you happen to be colour-blind. Always surprising, as of this June Rohrer confounded many of his staunchest followers by signing up to create interactive campaigns for the advertising agency Tool. We caught up with the designer – post strawberry hunt – to find out what tempted him into such an unexpected move. The bottom line: he’s not going to start producing web games to promote Hummer.

Signing with Tool seems like a strange decision for you – how did it come about?
It’s been about five years now since I’ve had any sort of job or regular income. We live very frugally, so for a while we were just living off our savings. I was also doing some programming things that were bringing in donation money: a substantial amount of money in some months, and almost no money in other months. It was a bit of a rollercoaster. On top of that, I did some consulting work, most recently for EA on the Spielberg LMNO project. My understanding is that project’s pretty much been cancelled now, what with the changing economy, but I’m not sure.

But for most of that five year period, I was saying “no” to most of the offers that came along, finding some ethical grounds to say that in each case. But I got to this point where I’m now thirty and I have two children. Over the past year I’ve had a patron, but he only supports people for two years, so I’ve been thinking: how am I going to pay for my children’s college and things? So I’ve switched my policy, and started saying “yes” to everything.

How did Tool approach you?
Tool is an advertising production company, and kind of an artist management company at the same time, and they’ve started a new digital division. They’d been working in television ads for the last ten years, and they’ve now started to get involved in interactive campaigns. They were looking for interesting people working in the interactive realm. They emailed me, and then we met at GDC this year. It sounded like an opportunity to bring in some income, and also do some potentially interesting stuff. The kind of thing they do, it’s not advertising a product in the strictest sense. It’s more brand awareness campaigns, where they’re trying to get someone with an artistic vision to do something cool, and associate that with a brand.


_{^{Passage, created for Kokoromi's Gamma256 event in 2008}}

You mentioned before that you were turning things down for ethical reasons. Is this a big leap for you, providing content for ads, no matter how subtle they are?
It was a big leap. A lot of the things people are saying - that I’m taking a full-time job in the ad world – aren’t true. So far I haven’t gotten paid. I’m not on salary. It’s more like: something comes along, we work on a pitch, we submit it to the ad agency, and then maybe they like it and maybe they don’t. It’s not something I’m doing full-time; it’s not replacing the things I’m passionate about. But I’ve had some very strict ideals that I’ve been living by, and it seems that a lot of those ideals have been getting in the way of me being able to do the most important thing: support my family, and in the way that I want to, which also involves me spending time with them. I work at home, I eat breakfast lunch and dinner with my kids, and spend the whole week with them. I want to preserve things like that.

Is there anything particular you’re looking for in the campaigns you’re offered?
A lot of people look at me as a videogame designer, but I’m not interested in designing games for campaigns all the time. For the most part, games aren’t so great at communicating those types of things. I’m really interested in overall interactive experiences – I think people might refer to it as alternate reality games - things that might tie a bunch of different pieces of technology together into some kind of whole. I guess some part of that might be a game, but I don’t know.

The first thing Tool brought me – I can’t say too much about it, because it’s still at the pitch phase – but it’s a cause campaign for a cause I believe in, about supporting local foods. I’ve been managing the local farmer’s market in my own town, and here comes a campaign about the same thing. Here’s something I care about anyway, and I get to use my capabilities to do something cool, perhaps impact the world a little bit. It seems Tool are quite sensitive: they’re not going to ask me to do an ad for the new Hummer. It makes sense for me to be doing things that resonate with me.

Do you see the Tool campaigns as being separate from the rest of your work, then?
In most of these things, I’m going to be working in a creative director capacity. All the games I’ve done so far, I’ve done everything: the music, graphics, website. I haven’t hired anybody or collaborated with anybody. With these campaigns, I won’t be doing that. I’ll be the vision guy who comes up with the idea and leads the team, so that’s something that’s different. It’s something that’s different about a lot of the work I do in the future, too, as I sort of burn myself out as a one-man team. How long can I keep doing everything on the projects I work on as they get bigger and bigger?

Another difference is just where it’s coming from and what’s motivating it. All the games I’ve done so far are either expressing something that’s concerned me personally, or just exploring facets of game design that I thought were interesting. But for this, solving the problem I’m given is the motivation. It kind of has more of an engineering feel to it. But that doesn’t stop it from having expression and turning into something I’m passionate about.