Just how different is the current-generation FIFA technology from the last generation – is it just a more complicated version of the same concept?
No, this is very new, partly because the current generation features a clean architecture on which to build. For example you could take the animation system out and put another animation system in, as long as you have the same API [Application Programming Interface] in the code. And it also forces you into certain habits, like differentiating player AI from team AI, and the action level, where it’s movement and locomotion AI, from the animation level playing itself out. It forces you into clean habits.

Does scripting, in terms of pre-defined player model interactions, still play a role?
I think fundamentally one of the things which changed in the way we build the game is we stay away from any kind of scripting. So before when there were interactions between two players we would script them: it was like, two players would come together on the last generation of consoles for a header, and we would put them into scripted animation. So, you know, they put their arms around each other, and you couldn’t do anything about it once it started. It looked really nice, but the outcomes from it were very limited.

So one of the concepts we’ve pushed on the team is nothing is scripted – you give the player logical intelligence. So I give the player intelligence to say, if a guy comes up and he’s there [motions a player challenging for position] I can shield him, fight him off like this. That means that every time a player is involved in a situation, even if it’s not a two-player header or something like that, or even if he’s just standing still, he’s behaving logically with regards to the situation in front of him. He’s not behaving according to a script that only runs in certain, very discrete circumstances. That kind of methodology is at the heart of how we’ve been successful.

It’s the same with the shooting system – we don’t script any of the shooting system, we don’t script the goalie to save it, we don’t script the ball to go into the top corner or anything. We just say, ‘right, we’re kicking the ball over here, the context says that there’s going to be error on the shot which makes him kick it on the right hand side, so ok what does kicking the ball on the right hand side mean? Well it means there’s more spin so it goes like this, or like this, it goes high and wide’. We don’t script anything like that, it’s just ‘here’s the situation, here’s the context, here’s what’s logical, that’s what’s happened’. Everything is like that. Nothing is pre-determined.

So that’s probably one of the fundamental changes from the last generation. There you had this very… if you wanted something to happen you could just code it, you could just say ‘shot goes wide’, or ‘defender wins header’. We don’t really have that power any more, because it’s all like, ‘how strong is the defender, how tall is the defender, what position is the defender in’, all this kind of stuff. So we have to make a system which makes the defender win, by using logical factors like height, weight, strength, heading ability, stuff like this.

This means it becomes harder for us to design, but fundamentally it gives you the variety and the jump-out-of-your-seat moments you’re looking for. Sometimes things happen, like, one in a million games something’ll happen that’s really really cool, because people are behaving logically [and] it creates logical, realistic outcomes. I think that’s the fundamental difference for us in moving from the last generation to the current generation: this movement away from any kind of scripting and towards realistically simulating behaviours, logic, intelligence and physical factors.

In this context, do you think the latest Pro Evolution Soccer was still very close to its last generation scripted self? It seems less of a clean slate with new technology.
I would agree that it doesn’t seem like new technology at all. Whether it’s scripted, people used to say to me it was, but I’m not really convinced. But definitely it doesn’t look like it’s any kind of new technology, the graphics and the animation don’t feel that way.

Then there’s the other, less technical, sense of scripting: you often feel that these games want to tell a dramatic story, and may even be set up to, for example, want someone to equalise. Does that idea have any place in FIFA?
That’s an interesting one. When I first joined FIFA, when I was on the last generation FIFA 07, that was one thing I was asked to do. I was asked to put in a momentum system, where if you were doing well you would continue to do well, and we would artificially create these momentum shifts. And I shouted loud in the meeting room for half an hour, like ‘No, I’m not doing it! Get someone else to do it if you want, because I’m not doing it!’

Because I strongly feel that if you make the system logical, then those momentum shifts will just happen. Like, there’ll be some times when, emotionally, you’ll know you’re 1-0 up, and you’re in a tight match against your buddy, you know that he’s attacking, you don’t want to take any risks you so just press clearance. You press clearance, the ball goes to your buddy on the halfway line, and he attacks again. And these things happen because we’ve got you emotionally involved in the game, and you start doing things in the game which are similar to the behaviours in real life. Because that’s what happens in real life – the players realise, you know, ‘there’s a lot to lose here, so let’s just clear it’, they clear it and it comes right back at them.

I think one thing that we don’t have that real life has is the mental state of the players, something like ‘I’m not going to make a forward run at this point because I know that this is a tight situation’. We don’t have that, so if we wanted to go big on this momentum system we could. If I was gonna do it, I’d say, ‘well, we have to model this mental attitude of players, because otherwise we have to script stuff, and I don’t want to be part of that.’ I feel that logic versus scripting stuff is something that’s important for us.