Editor’s Note: We at TGR get a lot of chances to talk with people within the industry, but few of such occasions excited us as much as our interview with BioWare’s CEO, Dr. Ray Muzyka.

TGR: How did you get to be where you are?

Ray Muzyka: I believe that if you work hard and you get good people to work with you, if you remain humble and you take feedback and integrate that into your process, if you are ambitious and are always striving to figure what you are about and what your fans want and build the games for them, then you can achieve amazing things. But it takes time. The other week, or last month I guess, we built a new video for our new partners at EA, just kind of showing them what some of the sales folks are like and where we have come from as a studio. We combined all the past products together in this one video that was about 15 minutes long, and it was amazing to see that because you see the evolution. We did not have any footage of Shattered Steel, our very first game; however, we did have Baldur’s Gate and the Baldur’s Gate franchise, Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and Vindicate 2.

This really helped show off our evolution as a studio, and our focus on characters and narrative and story-driven gameplay, as well as striving for emotion in games. That is what our vision as a studio is, to really have an emotional connection with our players. We believe this is an art form, and we are part of that. Our industry is an emerging art form. The big part of that is the human connection and the emotional mind with your fans. You can do that in many different ways, whether it is a sense of awe and excitement because you are going to travel new worlds or to instill fear as you are in combat. It causes you to really care about the people that are part of your company and take pride in your accomplishments and achievements. These are all emotionally valid expressions of the art. I think games have this ability to make you both the actor and the director of the experience at the same time.

TGR: What do you think about some of the critiques concerning games saying that they are almost too immersive, specifically when it comes to violence?

RM: I think, like all media in art forms, there is a range of expression. You look at movies, and it is very hard to categorize movies into one small bucket because they are such a diversity of expression. When you think about the story threads in a movie, there is one main one typically, maybe a few are interwoven, but they are also very linear. You watch it in a certain order. Most movies are like that and books are the same way. They are linear media, but they are powerful expressions of art. Games are too. I think you are starting to see a nexus of change, where there is a rapid change in the industry, as you are seeing a lot of things come together. Games are so diverse now, that it is hard to categorize them in one way. Is it this or is it that? I mean with the Wii, those are games, but they are toys as well. I think it is as much about the social interaction of the people playing the game together, as it is about the interaction of the game. That is new, right? The same with the DS, it is the interactive view, the touch screen and the various other things you can do. It’s the same with console gaming and PC gaming, it is no longer as simple as saying, “That is the shooter. That is a RTS. That is an action game. That is RPG.” There is a lot more nuance.

Mass Effect is a story driven game with combat and exploration. You are going to explore, and you tip the sphere on humanity on a galactic stage. You are fighting off a threat from aliens. It has artificial intelligence versus organics. There are a lot of themes that go through the games. There are a thousand stories interwoven, where you have an infinite amount of possibilities. Non-linear media can a lot of different things. So I think to answer your question, you really have to first answer the question, which game are you talking about and which specific aspect of that game? Because not only are there so many different types of games out there for all ages, but there are different types of gameplay, different ways of telling a narrative and story, different platforms and different ways of playing the games now, too. The control systems and interfaces are becoming so innovative that I think it is just like movies, and it is becoming a more mature industry. And with this, you are seeing a lot of nuances that you didn’t see with games like Asteroids or Pong. That was a long time ago, and games have moved well past that point. They are really in a market, and they are an emerging art form. It is a commercial art form, but definitely an art form.

To me, it almost feels like the technology and entertainment fuses together and shapes the industry. And it is an exciting time to be part of all this. It is really exciting, because every year you see something and say "Wow." You can’t imagine that they have done that, but they did. Where are we going to go in five years?

We allow people to fulfill inspirational fantasy worlds. All these things are role-playing, in a sense. I am kind of biased, but I believe everything involved in role playing, because it is all about what role you are fulfilling, and what inspirational fantasy you would enable. With the technology, you use a tool that allows you to convey a story or a narrative and emotion more clearly and more concisely and more precisely every time that you release a game. If the evolution of the technology enables that, then you can just rush people in to more and more credible compelling worlds.