Unmuted #002 - Mateus Karvat

Hey guys, I’m back with another edition of Unmuted. This time I’m interviewing Mateus Karvat, a fellow Brazilian gamer who is a subscriber of the newsletter. Mateus is one of the subscribers that from time to time replies to the newsletter with something that caught his eyes and we always have a good gaming related chat.

Tell me a bit about yourself (you can share as little or as much as you want here, like your name, where you’re from, your age and what do you work with).

I’m Mateus, also known as Mahat, I’m a 30 year old Masters student at Queen’s University in Canada, but I’m originally from the south of Brasil. My Masters is in Computing and I am researching Collaborative Perception under adverse weather conditions for Autonomous Vehicles, which is basically the idea of making Autonomous Vehicles communicate what they sense with each other to improve their sensing capabilities, specifically in harsh weather.

What got you into gaming in the first place? Do you have any memories of the first time you played a game?

I don’t have a specific memory of the first time I played, but I have some early memories of gaming. Growing up, my sister had a PSX and my dad would let me play on his computer at work sometimes. He had this game called Colordic which was basically about painting scenarios and learning the words in English.

As for my sister’s PSX, I remember when I was 6 and I got a game for my birthday. It was the first game that was truly mine, and it was Croc 2. I loved it, even though I never got too far in it. Playing it as an adult, I realized that it’s an insanely tough game. Haha

Can you describe your gaming setup? What equipment or accessories do you use, and how do they enhance your gaming experience? What platforms do you play?

I currently game exclusively on PC and with how great PC gaming has been, I don’t see myself getting a console anytime soon. It’s a PC I built just over a year ago to get the most out of 1080p gaming, with a Ryzen 7 7800X3D and an RX 6750 XT. The powerful CPU gives me room to upgrade the GPU whenever I wish, meaning I can jump to 1440p or even 4K gaming. I also have a sim racing wheel, a Logitech G27, but I rarely play it because it takes a bit to set everything up and I am not always in the mood for sim racing.

How do you feel about the current prices of PC gaming hardware? Do you think the prices will make it harder for newer places to choose PC as their platform of choice?

I think it has never been more accessible to get a decent gaming PC that can play amazing games. The problem, in my opinion, relates to high-end PC gaming and AAA games with super realistic graphics. Getting a high-end GPU nowadays is insanely expensive and being able to run a AAA on 4K with high frame rate is something that requires a ton of money. And there is a huge peer pressure within the gaming community for those high-end specs, making some people feel like “lesser gamers” if they don’t play everything on ultra settings.

So to me, the amount of money you need to get an entry level gaming PC that runs new games decently seems to be improving every year. But on the other end of the spectrum, high-end gaming is getting more and more expensive. Based on that, I don’t think that prices have been detrimental to getting people to play on PC, especially because afterwards games tend to be cheaper on PC than on console.

What are some of your all-time favorite games and/or genres, and why do they stand out to you?

My favorite game of all time is GTA San Andreas. I am not a person who enjoys redoing things (rewatching movies and TV shows or replaying games), but I have done 100% on it 3 or 4 times already. I simply love the sense of freedom that you get when blasting K-DST and driving or flying around in this game. It has a great nostalgia factor, but overall I just think it hits all the right spots.

As for genres, I have a wide range of things I like, but my favorite games always have an element of immersiveness, freedom, action and great stories. That ends up being a broad definition that covers open world action RPGs, story-based indies, action-based indies and even the occasional MMO.

If you could erase one game from your memory to experience it fresh again, which one would it be?

Her Story. For anyone who has played it, it’s a game that you can truly only play once. I played it many years ago and I would love to be able to play it with my partner. I may still let her play it and just watch her do it, but I’d love to have the “figuring things out” experience with her.

How do you balance gaming with other aspects of your life, like work, family, or other hobbies?

I think you just need to make time for things that you feel like are important to you. There have been times in life when everything got so busy I spent a few months without gaming. But then you start missing it so much and you realize how much it makes you feel good and how great of a hobby it is. So what I do is I just try to get some alone time for myself a couple of nights a week and get some gaming in.

Do you have a “comfort game” that you always go back to?

GTA San Andreas, Kingdom Rush and Guild Wars 2 come to mind. I may go years without playing them, but then I get a sudden urge to do it.

Based on your responses it seems that MMOs were/are a big part of your gaming life. What was your most played MMO and do you miss those times?

I played a ton of Ragnarok Online between the ages of 10 and 13. I had a group of friends that I used to play with every single day and we got very close together. I think the best thing about those days was not the game itself, but about how chill the life of a teenager is. We could play all the time and still go to school and handle our responsibilities. Nowadays, being an adult, I simply don’t have all that time available anymore.

But funny enough, a few months ago I saw an article on The Gaming Pub about “gamer nights” and sent it to those friends I used to play Ragnarok with in the past. We started by playing Lethal Company every Tuesday, which after a few weeks became a nostalgic trip back to playing Ragnarok again. So I am back to playing it with that same group after all these years.

Can you share a memorable gaming moment or achievement that you’re particularly proud of?

Beating Sans in Undertale. Holy moly, was it difficult. I remember spending hours until I was able to do it.

What do you enjoy most about gaming? Is it the story, the competition, the social aspect, or something else?

The immersion. I am the kind of person that can never really shut off their brain, so I only relax with things that grab my attention and keep it there. So it’s either gaming or watching movies/tv shows with deep/complex plots.

But the social aspect of co-operative gaming is truly amazing. I have great memories playing games together with friends.

How do you think gaming has changed or influenced you as a person?

Gaming makes you love to problem solve (or is the love for problem solving that makes you love gaming? 🤔), so you start seeing challenging stuff outside of gaming in a new light and having a lot of fun doing them. But also, playing lots of different types of games make you very adaptable, so whenever a new rule system or a new set of mechanics present itself to you, you can quickly figure things out and have fun during the “figure things out” stage of the game.

As someone starting their career in research, these things are vital to my job.

How do you choose which games to play next? Do you have a specific genre or criteria you look for?

I have a massive list of to-play games. But more often than not, I will see people talking about a game, watch some videos on it and then suddenly a game that wasn’t even on my list immediately goes to the top of it. And then, my list only grows. Haha

Do you prefer single-player or multiplayer games, and why?

For me it’s either single-player or co-op games. Competitive online games stress me out a ton and I find many competitive communities to be super toxic.

What role does nostalgia play in your gaming preferences? Are there any older games you still love to revisit?

There’s a little bit, but it’s definitely not a huge thing for me. As a kid my favorite games were platformers and Crash Team Racing. Nowadays I rarely play platformers (the most recent one I can think of was the amazing A Hat in Time that I played back in 2020), but I do love racing games.

I still want to try playing Croc 2 again, but also Bugs Bunny and Taz: Time Busters. This last one I remember playing a lot with my sister as a kid, but I’m 100% sure we didn’t even get halfway through it.

You mention your sister as someone you used to play with, did she have an impact on what kind of games you enjoy until this day? Does she still enjoy playing games?

I think that my love for co-op games might come from those days, because I remember having a blast when I played with her as a kid. But no, she doesn’t play anything anymore, not even the odd board game.

If you could preserve one game for future generations to understand gaming culture, which would you choose and why?

Woah, there are so many. But to pick just one, it would actually be a game I never played myself, and that is World of Warcraft. Any kid growing up in the early 2000s felt the massive impact WoW had on MMORPGs and gaming as a whole. It was a massive online thing before massive online communities even existed. At a time we had no social media, thousands of people were having online experiences together and spending thousands of hours (and dollars) in a virtual world.

Are there any upcoming games or releases that you’re particularly excited about?

GTA VI, of course, but also Forza Horizon 6, whenever it’s announced (which should probably be later this year, with a release in 2026).

Have you ever made real-life friendships or connections through gaming?

I have never met anyone through gaming, but gaming has definitely made me closer to many people. Sharing gaming experiences and playing together does wonders for any friendship.

Do you think gaming will look completely different in 10 years? How so?

Well, if you think about gaming 10 years ago, it was not THAT different from what it is now. The GOTY nominees were Dragon Age: Inquisition, Bayonetta 2, Dark Soul 2, Hearthstone and Shadow of Mordor. Since then, I personally think the main difference in the industry was the end of the console wars, with so many exclusives going to other platforms.

For the next 10 years, I think that AI will play a significant role in gaming. I’m thinking more in terms of AI tools streamlining the development process for devs (like making realistic voiceover accessible even to the smallest of indies) than a “ChatGPT-like open world RPG”, where you can say whatever you want to NPCs and they’d react accordingly. I think that sort of thing is still super far off and I’m not even sure if it’d be that fun.

AI is a big controversy today, especially regarding creative spaces like games, music and movies. Do you think AI will have a positive or negative impact on games? Do you feel that games might lose the human touch if games art and voices are being generated by AI?

I think there will be both positives and negatives and it will take many many years until society can adapt to AI. I mean, we still haven’t fully adapted to social media…

The way I see it, AI is a tool to get things done. When creators use AI for creative purposes, I often see people having to carefully engineer their prompts so that the result is as good as they want it to be. So it all starts with an idea and then using AI to make that idea a reality. So even if everything is done by AI, that idea was still very human in the first place and good games will always have great ideas at their core. What might change is that instead of having to hire an artist to make your idea a reality, you may be able to do it yourself with AI. On one hand, it’s bad for the artist that will not get hired to do that job, but on the other, it makes creation more accessible because developers without the means to hire artists would still be able to do great things.

A huge problem arises when the AI was trained with copyright work without properly compensating the artists for it. For that, it’s paramount that AI gets regulated and AI companies are required to follow ethical procedures. But then we go back to my comment in the beginning, that not even social media has been properly regulated yet. So a lot of harm will come until society manages to fully adapt to this new technology and to create rules and guidelines for its use.

This was another edition of Unmuted. I really enjoy exchanging emails with Mateus, we seem to share a lot of similar tastes in games and as a Brazilian myself when he mentioned Ragnarok Online, which I believe was the biggest MMO in Brazil ever, it brought me down memory lane. I was a very active Ragnarok player from 2003 to 2007, playing on a high ranking guild and being part of the “WoE” (guild wars) twice a week was like a job for my teenagers years. I miss those times and I never had any experience like that anymore.

Like always it’s been a pleasure to interview him and I invite anybody that wants to be part of the series to access the link below or to reply to the newsletter.

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