Has EA Sports changed since Peter Moore joined?
I think, maybe this is arrogant of us who work on FIFA, but we work with Andrew Wilson who’s our executive producer. And this kind of turnaround of FIFA, with the rewrite of the engine, and the re-route of our thinking away from scripted, the heavy investment in gameplay, the move away from gimmicky feature and into fundamentals, making sure the core of the game is good, is something that FIFA were the first to do, inside of  Sports. So we are more in line with what – and also Andrew, I think he’s very much in line with Peter. Things like Ultimate Team, were things we already had in the pipe and Peter’s directive almost came in line with FIFA’s.

One thing that Peter’s certainly challenged us with on the game side, in terms of how I’m involved, is approachability. FIFA is like, simulation simulation simulation, it’s hardcore, and it’s very off-putting for the newbie, right? Obviously there’s the controller with all the buttons so that’s off-putting on its own, but then we use all the buttons which is even more off-putting! So it’s very difficult for the newbie to get into our game. And approachability is one thing Peter’s hit us with the most, that’s how I’ve been most challenged by him. I think the innovation and authenticity he talks about, FIFA’s always had those things, so we kind of tick those boxes, and approachability we’re working on.

The other one he talked about was involving people, which affects FIFA as a whole, but doesn’t really affect the current generation stuff because we are not the game that’s going to give us that – that’s Wii, that’s online. So it’s approachability, and we’re making strides there. We haven’t done brilliantly, but we’ve got some more things to come.

Your team is so big – who’s ultimately responsible for a decision like that?
I guess partly because we’re doing well, we get to shout loudly and say, ‘look, we wanna stay big!’ But fundamentally I have to applaud Andrew Wilson. There’s David and I on the game team and Andrew is the executive producer, so he’s one level below Peter. And so Andrew Wilson has done very well for us, fighting for the team size of FIFA, fighting for us to keep our people. We tell him what we need, and he gets the job done, so we have to be grateful for him.

And could you credit any one individual with FIFA’s turnaround over the last few years?
No! [laughs]

And for you personally this has been a good year: you’ve been given quite a significant promotion, right?
Yeeeeah [laughs]. I think I’m the first Creative Director at EAC. We used to have producers and that was all. Now we’ve got producers and designers, and so we only introduced that maybe two years ago, and then like the higher up level of a designer is a creative director, and the higher up level of a producer is like an exec producer. So, it’s pretty new. I think people are scared to move over to the designer path because it sounds kind of less grand than producer.

It’s a grand sounding title. Why would you say you’ve done so well in such a short space of time?
I think I’d put it down to, and I stress this to the designers I work with on the gameplay, the fact I’ve been brought up playing football, watching football and playing football videogames. That’s obviously key. But also I’m an engineer by trade, so I understand the technology and the technical side of it. And I think that’s very important if you’re going to design a game, without the scripting and those sorts of things that need to do what you need them to do. That means when I speak to an engineer I can speak to them on their level, and get them to code the way I know is going to create the behaviours that we need to create.

Because the problem that we had on the last generation is that we’d say, or the producer would say, ‘well, there’s too many goals from headers’ and then they would code something that didn’t create the behaviours you wanted, it didn’t use the context and stuff like that, it just cheated it and made it so defenders won headers. And that’s something I try to impress upon the designers who work for me is that in gameplay you have to understand how the algorithm works and what effect that’s going to have on the rest of the game. Is it going to give you corner kicks, is it going to give you the logical behaviour you need from the system? And is it going to be football? I think that for me is what I attribute my success to. But I guess I kinda cheated my way here with the engineer path [laughs].

So come on then, who’s your team?
Oh, Aberdeen! Historically good, but now we’re struggling. We’re fourth in the league now though, so not doing too badly.