BS: How did a Polish studies expert end up in the world of game development?
PK: To be honest, I ended up there long before I become a scholar of Polish studies. I’ve been playing games ever since I was a kid, and I even started writing reviews for one of the online outlets when I was 13. By the time I graduated from high school, I’d already had some journalistic experience and after graduating from university, I worked, amongst other things, on preparing TV programmes for Hyper, the first Polish TV channel devoted to video games.
BS: Then why Polish studies?
PK: I was always fascinated by narration –something common for both video games and literature. I wrote my master’s thesis on narration in video games and my PhD was devoted to their poetics. Video games always accompanied me as a research topic.
At one point, there arose an opportunity to turn my existing research into a creative practice and to conduct research that could enable the creation of a tool aiding game developers.
In February 2017, I was invited to collaborate with Walkabout, a video game publisher that supports developers and creates optimal conditions for their work. It quickly turned out that many development studios need a tool accelerating and facilitating game development. That’s how Narra was born.
After conducting market research, it turned out that there are no such tools anywhere in the world. We then realised that our idea could have great business potential and attract interest from the world’s important players.
BS: How does an academic scholar undertake the development of such tool?
PK: During the first part of development, I was able to assemble a team of great narratologists. We analysed together how the best games on the market are made. We looked at their plots and at the narrative devices they employed. This allowed us to create a design language for these plots, a kind of a blueprint that can be used to design events and complex stories.
BS: When did the academic project turn into a business one?
PK: We merged these two types of project into one at the very beginning. We analysed video games, but we conducted dozens of interviews with their creators to understand their needs and to create solutions that’d be good for them.
Contrary to the stereotype of a scientist locked down in the ivory tower of academia, I want to be constantly in touch with our potential users. At the end of every stage of development, we immediately tested the usefulness of specific solutions together with our development studio partners.