Video Games: The Movie Page #4

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And then when we got

to the PlayStation 3,

we really said, "Okay, this thing's

gonna give us enough

power to really go back

and revisit that idea

of telling an interesting,

character-driven narrative

in a way that we might

be able to do

that no one's done before."

First time that I held

a Wii controller,

it was a piece of plywood

with some electronics

taped onto it,

and they had a demo

of a tennis game.

And when I first picked it up

and started playin' it, I thought,

"This is gonna be a hit."

That was the first thing

that popped into my head.

It was just so much fun.

The Xbox 360's

a spectacular console.

It's just fantastic.

I absolutely love it.

And I like the PS3 as well.

Not really interested in,

you know, the holy wars

about which one is better.

I guess they're fan boy

arguments is how you can say it.

Like, "I like Nintendo."

"I like Sega."

"I like Sony,"

you know, it's... I think

this is actually what happens,

because I was a kid,

I would've had a Genesis

and a Super Nintendo.

I would've had a Nintendo

and a Sega Master System,

if I could've afforded it,

but, you know,

you're a child.

You can't afford all that stuff.

So, then you start defending

the one you have,

and I think that's where

that comes from.

"Xbox,"

"No, PlayStation."

I still, to this day, stay up

till four in the morning

playing the latest

Xbox 360 that came out yesterday

or whatever it may be I'm,

you know, always constantly

still immersing myself in it.

With the continuous waves of

technical and artistic changes

sweeping over the industry

and games getting

better and bigger,

the video game industry

began to anchor itself

within the public consciousness,

many starting to argue that games

are as much an art form as...

anything.

The trouble is with art

is it's a subjective term.

You know, one person's art

is another person's rubbish.

And this is where, you know,

you come back to the semantics

of the word "art"

which is problematic.

Whether that is a film,

or whether that is a book

or whether that is a painting

or whether that is

a computer game,

it elicits a response.

It makes you think about the world

or look at the world

in a slightly different way.

I've always believed

that games are absolutely

an art form.

You know, as Phil Fish said,

it's the culmination

of every form of art and expression

that mankind has ever had

goes into a game.

You look at the staff

that builds a video game.

You have a music composer.

You have a writer.

You have an artist

who does sketch work.

You have a technical artist.

You have level designers

who create spaces

much like architects.

It really is kind of

the Avengers of talent

when you really think about it.

Nowhere is it more

obvious than in video games.

You have these artists creating

these beautiful

three-dimensional worlds.

And the technology allowing

players to come

into those worlds and have them be

as real as possible

is the ultimate example

of art and science

working together.

The best description

of art I ever heard

from a professor of mine

when I was going for my MFA,

was that art is somebody

whose put together something

that deliberately provokes

a response in an audience.

The consumer actually

is a participant in the art.

It's almost like being part

of a great art experiment

about a living art experiment.

Yeah, there's a lot of, like,

basic logistics.

Like, you push "X"

and this happens,

or you push "up" and that happens.

But if that's all games were,

we wouldn't be playing

them anymore, you know?

We would've lost interest

a long, long time ago.

Surprisingly, modern game

technology is still based

on the same fundamental concept

of early game tech,

combining new layers of science

and art to reach higher levels

of innovation and expression.

Modern game systems represent

not only quantum leaps

in hardware and graphics

but also the utilization of

parallel data processing

and memory within the Cloud.

What does all that mean?

Simply put,

it means from here on out,

anyone will be able to play

any game, anywhere, at anytime,

with amazing speed and quality.

The Cloud is something that

you hear a lot about these days,

and there's really two

very different concepts.

The first one is the one

that we all sort of understand

as being the Cloud.

You know, I've got a picture

I wanna upload it, I wanna tweet.

This is all being uploaded

into the Cloud

and stored on hard drives.

So, think of the normal

version of the Cloud

as a lot of storage space.

There's another very, very

big idea which is,

why not use the computers

and the Cloud

to give you computing

power that's far beyond

what you would generally want

to purchase for yourselves?

And what that means

is that the software

that you would love to experience

will be running there

and then the actual...

the video or the output

from the game

is delivered directly

to wherever you are

on whatever device you're on.

There's more processing

power in the Cloud

behind Xbox One than the

complete processing power

that was on the planet

in the year 1999.

We're now able to put

scenes on screen

that are almost beyond

lifelike in some ways.

But then you have the power

of the Cloud behind that box

that allows us to draw upon

thousands of servers

to help make the box

that's in your home

actually significantly

more powerful

than it is by itself.

But there was a time when the

future of this now mega industry

was in serious jeopardy.

After the explosive financial

and cultural success

of the first generation

of video games,

the industry began

to think it was invincible.

You know, when all these companies

saw that there was

a market for video games,

and they just, you know, they flooded

the market with so many games.

You know, there were

a few companies out there

that really wanted to show

they have a really awesome game,

but then there were,

you know, for every one

really awesome game, there were

100 really crappy games.

What happened was

there was this manufacturing

of great expectations

that the next Christmas

would be better

than the previous one.

And people just sort of moved on.

People got tired

of being sold the same thing

again and again with pretty poor

entertainment experience.

People started to produce games

at a kind of very accelerated rate.

And the quality of the gameplay

went down substantially

to the point of where

some of the games

were so bad that they ended

up havin' to throw

a lot of them in landfills.

With scores of new game developers

springing up overnight

and venture capitalists

pouring money

into what seemed to be

a "sure thing" product,

the writing was on the wall.

The market was becoming

saturated and in 1983,

the final nail was driven home.

Atari made a deal

with Universal Studios

to create a video game adaptation

of the popular movie,

E.T. The Extra Terrestrial.

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