In an interview with gamesindustry.biz, the acclaimed developer also discusses his next game, ‘Judas’, generative AI and why it “wasn’t easy to step away from BioShock”
In an interview with gamesindustry.biz, the acclaimed developer also discusses his next game, ‘Judas’, generative AI and why it “wasn’t easy to step away from BioShock”
Your explanation is good and thorough.
I always struggle to know when to use the square brackets. The straightforward answer is to just quote directly where possible. But especially in interviews, someone’s answer may be jumbly, so the most honourable thing to do may be to use square brackets to make it easier for the reader to understand the speaker’s point, but you’re not being misleading.
For example, maybe this interviewee said something like “in the future, it — we might come to see that game development, and games overall, will end up turning out to be player-driven”, which could be straightforwardly shortened to what we see in the screenshot: “in the future, it [will be] player driven”. Square brackets, in the hands of a skilled journalist, can be used to manipulate a narrative through selectively quoting people, but they can also represent a speaker’s point far more authentically and cogently than the literal words.
"in the future, it will be player-driven
There’s also just grammatical stuff that looks better in text. “In the future, it’s player driven” would conversationally flow perfectly well, but as written text the tense of “it’s” doesn’t line up with the statement being about the future. Hence the present tense being corrected to future tense.