EA Discusses Spielberg Game Collaboration

simoniker writes "As part of a wide-ranging interview with EA Los Angeles' Neil Young, the exec has been talking about how EA's collaboration with Steven Spielberg is working, commenting: 'Well, he doesn't like come into work, grab his lunch and set down for the day. Basically, it's probably best described as a writers' table on a TV show... it's Stephen, [Looking Glass veteran] Doug Church, who's producing his first game, me, a couple of the designers, Ryan Church [no relation to Doug], who did the walkers for War of the Worlds...' Young also commented of Spielberg: '...he's pretty conversant in the medium. He plays a lot of games.'"

Re:Not All It's Cracked up To Be...

[AKAImBatman]

It's nice that Spielberg likes games.

He also designs them. The Dig [wikipedia.org], anyone?

And let's not forget that the company that published The Dig (LucasArts) was formed because George Lucas wanted to design Atari games. (BallBlazer, Rescue on Fractalus, etc.)

Re:Not All It's Cracked up To Be...

[apflwr3]

Judging by this article, I'm not certain that this collaboration is such a good thing. It's nice that Spielberg likes games. But if you go to any major game development forum, such as gamedev, you'll see lots newbies who think that they already know how to make games just because they know how to play them.

Actually, Spielberg was a (if not "the") creative force behind Medal of Honor when it was first released on the Playstation. To be fair, I can't say with certainty his involvement wasn't much more than saying "Dreamworks should do a WW2 first person shooter" while filming Saving Private Ryan. Still, he's hardly a 'newbie.'

Re:Not All It's Cracked up To Be...

[Half a dent]

"Also, you have to consider that gaming and movies are different mediums, with their own strengths and weaknesses. The fact that Spielberg is good at one form of creative endeavor does not mean that he is automatically good at another."

For evidence of this you only need to look at Chris Roberts and his Wing Commander movie:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0131646/ [imdb.com]

The games became more and more film like (although the game play didn't really improve that much). The film was really a major disappointment while the original game was pretty ground breaking.

It really comes down to the differences in the media - movies are about telling a story, games are about living that story. We also get bored if a movie is more than 90 minutes and annoyed if we can complete a game in less than a weekend. If Speilberg can make a great game then cool, I'll be happy but I certainly wouldn't take it for granted that he can.

Re:Not All It's Cracked up To Be...

[bWareiWare.co.uk]

To be fair Carmack's role is more along the lines of cinematographer then director.
He may be the headliner at ID, but he is the technical lead, not art/design.

Carmack would certainly not have any difficulty in working on movie CG technology, and would probably be a considerably better camera man than the average Jo.

Similarly the is no reason that a good director should not be able to handle the art direction on a game as easily as a film.

On the other hand the writing of a film is in no way comparable to the design of a game. However Spielberg doesn't write his film's and the is no reason to suppose he will try and design a game without expert help.

May well be

[Moraelin]

Actually, a pet peeve of mine with games, although I a fan of story-drive RPGs, is that most game devs just have no fucking clue how to tell a story. Yes, we occasionally get games like KOTOR or even Oblivion, but they're the exceptions in a sea of sub-productions which just can't tell a story. (And if you look at what, say, Penny Arcade had to say about Grandia 2, and Tycho's resulting rant about japanese RPGs as a whole, you'll see that at least I'm not the only one who sees it that way.)

"Consider the reverse: John Carmack is a good game developer. Imagine him trying to make a movie."

Yet you'd cheerfully let a game programmer like Carmack write the story for a game, eh? Because that happens every day. Some guy who's been a talented programmer, or maybe an artist, gets promoted to "game designer" instead of to management, as would happen in the enterprise world. He's now a "veteran of the industry", has worked X thousands of hours on implementing other people's ideas in Y games, so he just _has_ to be just about ready to design one, right?

Actually, "Peter's Principle" says he probably isn't. Scripting other people's scenario doesn't make one good at writing an original story, any more than hauling bricks for a cathedral makes one an architect. He can maybe even know how to design a good monster or an encounter that can be scripted well, but telling a story is just not his forte. (Though translating one into C++ or Python might be.)

I remember reading a Clive Barker interview after Undying got released, and basically he mentions some of the uninspired stuff the original game design had. Like the coaxing he had to do to get the devs out of the idea that, basically, "scary horror game == a bigger end-level boss with predictable attacks." As Clive Barker said, that's actually the _least_ scary thing you can possibly put into a game.

And having played enough games to have enough info for an opinion there, I'll 100% side with Clive Barker on that one: there's no freaking way a giant boss battle can possibly invoke horror. It can cause an adrenaline rush, it can cause frustration, it can do lots of things, but fear is one thing it _won't_ invoke, no matter what you texture that boss like.

That's just the thing: they just keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again, and don't even realize when it doesn't fit the story or theme at all. People who worked on coding or painting a giant boss for the end-level since the Atari 2600 or NES, assume that telling a story is all about having a giant boss with predictable attacks at the end of the level. That's what they've learned, that's what they've played, that's what they've been asked to code over and over again. At some point it gets mistaken for the _only_ way (or at least the _right_ way) to tell a story in video game format.

So basically, you know, I'm not that scared of seeing someone from the movie business have another try, for a change. In fact, I'm really looking forward to it. At least some of those guys _do_ know how to tell a story. Not all, but enough do. Sure, they've done it in another medium before, but it still beats seeing someone stuck in a Super Mario Bros mentality trying to write a story.