BIZ: Speaking of the mainstream press and the whole Fox News debacle, if they did an about face and finally wanted to talk with you guys about games as an art form, would you want to take them on?

Zeschuk: I think we'd have to be suspicious of their motives, frankly. Some of the mainstream press is about getting eyeballs; they don't care how they get them.

Muzyka: Do you trust someone who makes blatantly false accusations and is misinformed and hasn't actually experienced any of the things they're talking about, would you trust someone like that? But are we proud of the work? Are we advocates for games as art? Are we willing to stand up and defend that? Yes. Would you get a fair hearing on a group like that given their past, reprehensible behavior? No, I don't trust them.

BIZ: What I'm getting at though is I'd love to see you guys or any other prominent game makers get more air time to finally talk about games as art and their advancement and how games stack up against other mediums.

Muzyka: I think there are groups that are well informed in the mainstream media that really know what they're talking about that would give a balanced, fair treatment and that doesn't mean favorable necessarily, it means just balanced and fair, and that's all you can ask for is an opportunity to frame out what you're doing and why you believe it as an art form.

Zeschuk: The Ebert comment "games aren't art," I think with him you could have had an intelligent and thoughtful discussion around it and understand why. In his case it could have come down to lack of information. We've seen some interesting examples where we had members of parliament looking at local businesses and we showed them what we do and they were completely blown away. They had no idea. Some of them were younger guys that had played games when they were younger. They were like "this is unbelievable."

Muzyka: When you look at the new generation – Gen Y and younger – they totally get it. ... There are different kinds of games just like there are different kinds of movies, different kinds of books, TV shows, different kinds of music... It's hard to categorize "this is a video game." Because the old conception doesn't work when you consider the spectrum of things. The experiences are so broad now. It's an art form.

Zeschuk: At some level, this is getting towards the end point of the emergence of video games where they kind of poked at it for a few years, and they've also blamed us for everything. That's actually kind of going away now; the whole "blame game" thing seems to finally not be sticking because it's so ridiculous. Now it's getting to be "they're perverting the youth." Pretty soon they're going to say "yeah, they're part of our lives." Rock and Roll is the classic with Elvis Presley's hips, which were going to drive people crazy, literally. We look back on these things now and go "that was insane." I think people are going to look back on our times and go "that was ridiculous."

BIZ: Have you guys ever been tempted to make something other than an RPG?

Muzyka: We would argue we're making all kinds of things other than RPGs. But RPG's definition is so broad now it almost covers every game. I asked a bunch of developers this one time and they were arguing about it. What game doesn't have you playing a roll of some sort? There's very few. In even those you could argue that you're playing some roll; for example, you're playing the roll of the guy playing the board game, which is kind of abstract, but in almost every other game you're playing a role like a tennis player in Wii Tennis or a galactic adventurer in Mass Effect.

Zeschuk: I think it gets even crazier than that even. Here's a game where you choose your face and character, you have all these combats and do all these things to level up your character and change your abilities; that's not an RPG, that's Fight Night.

Muzyka: So what is an RPG? If it's aspirational fantasy fulfillment and you're playing a roll, progressing your character and engaging exploration combat with a story, well almost any game fits into that in some measure. Our games are broadening and the rest of the industry is actually adopting the best practices of RPGs, too.

Zeschuk: Our real focus is actually more than RPGs; it's about delivering a story with great characters and engaging emotional moments. Historically, the fairly traditional structure of an RPG was the best place to do that because it made sense. Our ability to deliver story required dialogue, for example. We're getting to the point now where a character in Mass Effect just with the quality of the acting can convey anger with a scowl, and suddenly you're opening up a more streamlined and more effective way to deliver a story than ever before. Will Bioware make what could be perceived as a non-RPG game? Yeah, we've done it before with MDKII and Shattered Steel.

Muzyka: We viewed it as a big toy box where you're reaching and picking out what works. For us it's actually a lot of the properties of classic RPGs, but applied in brand new ways. Our hope is that people can look at it and not even see it as an RPG and that RPG players can look at it and say that's totally an RPG; you're actually meeting both group's needs.

Zeschuk: One of our big focuses is trying to get to as many people as possible and still making great, quality stories.

BIZ: You already have books for Mass Effect, but is there any thinking of extending these IPs (Mass Effect, Dragon Age, etc.) to movies or something else?

Muzyka: We explain our games like a mountain with a tip poking through the clouds. There's this rich IP that no one really sees other than it feels real because the clouds are shaped by the mountain there, so it actually looks supported; there's a weight underneath what the player sees. But if you grow other mountain peeks poking through that IP, if we've spent enough time building it, it's great to consider how we can expand our universe for a game like Mass Effect into other media.

Zeschuk: You look at what movies are doing right now. They're not really investing in the properties in the sense that they're not cooking them up and growing them for a year or two. They're saying, OK other media – whose done the leg work to get this all coalesced? Or let's mine and farm the comics as deep as we can, and video games or anything else. What we really believe is spending the time in the formative stages really understanding the mountain under the clouds. One of the challenges in video games historically has been that there hasn't been much to them. Mortal Kombat was kind of an entertaining movie, but the narrative in that is pretty slim. It's a thin concept and there isn't much context for the characters or the world. The kind of properties we do make could make that transition well. Books, TV, comics, that's all on the table from our perspective in terms of what we want to pursue.