Video Games: The Movie Page #9

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to defend the industry

until that evolution happens.

The campfire.

We've all been there,

whether an actual campfire

or just listening to someone

tell a great story.

As humans we have always had

the ability and desire

to suspend our disbelief.

If only for a few minutes a day

we want to escape

from the treadmill of life

and "give it up" to be immersed

in something outside ourselves.

We have this opportunity

to be storytellers,

to be able to give the consumer

the opportunity

to lose themself in a world

for as long or as little

as they want.

We have the realities

of life every day,

whether it's the economy

or whether it's getting by

or whether it's a job

and earning money,

but we have a medium

that we can lose ourselves in.

Day-to-day life isn't always

that exciting,

and if at the end of the day

you can turn on a tablet,

a PC, a console,

and just kind of escape

into another world,

I think it's a wonderful thing

that essentially allows you

to kind of live the dream.

The storytelling in games

is just as good as movies.

It's just as good

as reading a book.

With the resurrection and

renaissance of the industry

coming into the '90s

and early 2000s,

games began another

evolutionary step forward.

Story.

This fundamentally changed

the audience's expectations

of what a "good game" really was

and raised the bar for game

designers everywhere.

Storytelling in games is

a tricky, tricky beast to tame.

As game makers,

we have to set up rules,

we have to set up universes

that make sense

and have their own sense of logic,

and once we've established

what that logic is,

then we let the player's mind

and imagination solve problems

and work their way

through those worlds.

I think one of the things

we've really learned

over the last maybe decade

is ways to tell stories

without a cut scene, without

stopping the interactivity,

to have the story be

something that emerges

from the play itself.

Video games are

a lean forward experience

whereas film and television

are a lean back experience.

You're driving every moment

of the game.

A friend of mine a while back

actually compared games to novels

in the fact that if you stop reading,

the novel doesn't keep going.

Video games are very much the same.

Telling a story in video games

can be a lot more difficult

because then you have to...

you have to anticipate

the actions of the player,

whereas in a movie, you decide

what both characters say

and then you write it down

and that's what they say.

Storytelling in games is

an interesting problem right now

because we don't fully

understand it.

The movie industry has been around

for a hundred years or whatever

and they have a really good idea

of what it means to tell a story

in that kind of visual medium,

and the game industry doesn't

have all those rules yet.

Either reading a book or watching

a movie, it's completely passive.

You're letting the storyteller

give you their vision

of their world or whatever story

they want to tell you,

and you are...

you're listening to it,

it's unfolding for you.

You're not affecting that.

With a game,

the journey is the reward

more than, say,

the ending or the payoff.

This is our routine.

Day and night,

all we do is survive.

It never lets up.

The idea of spontaneity

within storytelling

is something that's unique

to video games.

You can't just change how

a song sounds midway through.

You can't just change

the end of a book

while you're reading it,

but in certain games,

your decisions

have a direct outcome

on the ultimate fate of characters,

and that's unique and sweet.

And I think that's what

people respond to.

Can you imagine if you were

redoing Star Wars,

and you get to Empire Strikes Back

and Vader says "Join me,"

and you, as Luke Skywalker,

go, "Okay."

And then the rest of the movie

and all of Jedi

are completely different

because you made that choice.

And that is where I think

video games

fundamentally and vastly differ

from every other kind

of nerd media that I love.

Who lives, who dies?

I get it. We're meant to choose.

Heads up, there he goes!

Guns down.

You don't have to get involved.

We must choose.

If you insist.

I do not see how I could save

the lives of other people.

I also lost someone I loved.

Whether the classic

Arthurian legends

or more modern translations,

one thing humanity

has never had a problem with

is the willing suspension

of our disbelief.

The earliest storytellers

saw the primal power

in writing, reading,

and telling stories,

true or fictional.

I think that once you show a player

what a world looks like

and how a world functions,

they get into the world,

and then that is their reality.

And so I think

as modern game makers,

we have to keep remembering

that the suspension of disbelief

comes from the creation

of a universe

and the creation of a world,

and an immersive world

that has rules that are predictable

and that are logical,

and not from the visual eye

candy that we get, you know,

with all this horsepower.

And now that we have these consoles

that deliver mind-blowing graphics

and beautiful explosions

and immersive worlds,

there's something more to it.

We've taken our inspirations

from outside of games

with emotion and character

development and storytelling

in a way that we've tried

to break new ground

that you have an association

and an attachment

with a character in a game

that makes you want to feel

for that story,

makes you want to feel like

you're there

making the decisions

all along the way.

Good storytelling

is not just entertainment.

Good stories can help us grow.

They can teach us about the past

and challenge us to aspire

to higher and greater things.

The story experience in

a video game is no different;

the campfire is just a bit

brighter and more colorful.

So many things have to perfectly

sync up for it to work.

You have art, you have writing,

you have music,

you have backgrounds,

you have timing,

you have the voice actors,

you have acting,

and then video games,

you have everything on top of that

it has to be an engaging

user experience as well,

so I think a good video game

I think is probably

the hardest thing to make.

If you want emotion,

you need the human face,

and in the world of film,

that is the cheapest thing

that you can get.

You point the camera at somebody

and you have it instantly.

But in the world of games,

you have a multi-million

investment in technology

before you see anything

that looks like a human face.

I think the most exciting part

about this industry

is that we're constantly inventing

and being fearless about

that challenge of invention.

And invention's difficult

because if you already knew

what it was going to be, you

wouldn't be inventing it.

It would already exist, right?

So whenever we invent,

whether it's a design idea

or a stylistic thing,

or, you know,

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