Ludeus Maximus

“What I am illustrating here is that in film, the film director is in total control of everything you see. In games you are in control and that is really immersive. I love films like ‘The Fast & The Furious’ but I want to be in control, so games like the awesome ‘Burnout,’ allows me to control a fast car and race through streets of traffic at breakneck speeds and crash with the car splintering and crumpling on impact, in the safety of my lounge. ”

From: http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=4243

I’m taking this quote out of context because he’s a talent scout for the industry and obviously trying to burnish it’s image, but it illustrates a common fallacy that people make when talking about games. I’d like to name this the Freedom Fallacy in honor of our great nation’s founding principles (oh wait, it took us nearly 100 years to abolish slavery). This one is right up there with the Immersion Fallacy in my list of fallacies that even people in the industry make. There’s the sentiment in the game industry that we should be giving the players what they want all the time and that what they want is more control and more choices. That the game space has no place for games that are like films.

It take a second of looking at what’s on shelves to prove this wrong. JRPGs are extremely popular and up until a few years ago didn’t even change character art when equipped with a new piece of armor. Most games have extensive cutscenes, which, get this, are little non-interactive breaks in the interactive action. Metal Gear Solid is a 3 hour long movie interspersed with game sections. And hand most average consumers Garry’s Mod and they’ll quit out of boredom or confusion in an hour or two. Consumers don’t want freedom so much as they want their tastes pandered to in a way that guides them along. Most games fall into this middle segment between the extreme of Garry’s Mod at one end and an interactive movie at the other. There is a lot of room in interactive entertainment for things that aren’t very gamey; interactive movies with good and slightly deep interaction involved should be one locus of industry expansion (see Indigo Prophecy, any old school adventure game, etc.).

I also find that this mindset is the reason the industry panders to the lowest common denominator. ‘We’ll just give them what they want’ results in games like BMXXX. And it’s ironic that he distances games from film when the industry borrows so much from Hollywood. I think the industry needs director-types (or auteurs, however much its a BS concept) making games just as much as teams of collaborators. Suda51 and others remain the exception rather than the norm despite their outstanding successes.While I think it will be a while before things (technology, economics, preconceptions) even out, I’d hope that people would believe in the power of authorship in the games space given how well it works in other mediums.

Arguably you can’t make games’ version of Citizen Kanewithout the game industry’s version of Orson Welles.