Hollywood & Games Or Art VS. Money?
Horror pioneer Clive Barker opened this year’s recent “Hollywood & Games” conference by sharing with an intimate crowd of games and movie professionals his personal experiences and understanding of games as a medium.He also had some choice words in reply to Roger Ebert’s rather ignorant thoughts (in my opinion) on how he believes games to be greatly inferior in cultural value to movies and books.
“That’s BS,” said Barker. “It’s a medium that’s barely two decades old. And Ebert is saying there’s no ‘War And Peace’ yet? Of course there’s no ‘War And Peace.’ We’re just beginning.”
He continued: “I think Ebert’s position -- that if the narrative is so malleable and so full of possibilities that it’s not under the artist’s control and then it can’t be art -- is all wrong. In other words, Ebert believes Shakespeare could not have written ‘Romeo And Juliet’ as a game because it could have had a happy ending. But I believe we should really be stretching not only the imaginations of our players but also of ourselves and say, ‘Look, let’s try and make everything possible. Let’s invent a world where the player gets to go through every emotional feeling available.”
Barker concluded by noting that “We’ve given our imaginations over to people who put plastic toys in with their hamburgers. Let’s take our imaginations away from these people and give them to people whose imaginations weren’t shot down in flames by their second-grade art teacher who told them they couldn’t draw straight.”
You can’t not love a guy like that who puts things so eloquently.
Another talk ripe with valuable insight -- entitled “How Talent Can Cross The Digital Divide” -- included various folks who worked in different parts of the Prince Of Persia franchise and Flint Dille of the 1986 “The Transformers: The Movie” fame. The panel was moderated by Jordan Mechner who created the original “Prince Of Persia” game back in 1989.
One particularly interesting point was
how the leadership hierarchy in movies and games so differ. In a movie, a director would sack any grip who tried to give him advice on a shot. But, in game production, a tester can walk up to a game’s producer, point out how a portion of the game is unplayable, and that producer will probably look into the problem.
On the other end of the spectrum, a complete misunderstanding of the art form came from the conference’s final discussion. Jim Ward, senior VP of LucasFilm and president of LucasArts, compared game development to CG asset creation, rhetorically asking the audience “If ILM can make 100 CG sequences in a few months, why can’t game people build a game in a few months.”
For Ward’s benefit, here are some of my thoughts as to why:
Additionally, I finally got to ask Electronic Arts’ Neil Young why game developers’ names never make it to the front of the box. Portions of his reply were: “We don’t hide our developers … we put Will Wright’s name on the box … we always put them in front of the press … games are team efforts; how many can we possibly put on the cover?”
That’s fair enough to some extent. He’s absolutely correct that games are far more a team effort than movies, but whichever way you spin it, there are always vision leaders who are responsible for the game, much like directors and producers are responsible for driving the vision in a film.
The point is that if you market games using these particular game talents, it becomes a long-term investment. Down the line it will pay off when everyone is educated as to who these folks are and why their names being on the box matters. And then the business people won’t need to rely on licenses and hiring film talent to sell their games; they can simply rely on the talent that built the game to do that.
For me, the takeaway from this year’s “Hollywood & Games” was that money people will continue to view ideas as franchises and exploitable assets that have a day and date attached to their release. If anything is to improve in the relationship between Hollywood and the games industry, then it is the money people who need to be educated about the differences between the two businesses more than anyone else.
Jim, if you need more help, feel free to e-mail me.
By now, Wii parables are plentiful among both the gaming community and the mainstream press.
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>> Hollywood & Games Or Art VS. Money?
Horror pioneer Clive Barker opened this year’s recent “Hollywood & Games” conference by sharing with an intimate crowd of games and movie professionals his personal experiences and understanding of games as a medium.
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