Listened to a great podcast from GDC which is an interview with author and Halo screenwriter DB Weiss. This is a quote from the interview which I found particularly interesting as we’ve been talking a lot about the games/film relationship lately. Particularly interesting for production design, design of storyworlds and virtual environments. Click here to download the whole podcast.
I think games have as much if not more to do with architecture as they do to do with movies even though it seems like the current trend is to think of games as movies. I think there are a lot of extra reasons for that trend not only to do with what games are really about but rather people’s desire for some of the acutriments of Hollywood and the kind of adding a Hollywood feel to the game world, like it’s more about wanting the Hollywood parties than it is about games themselves. Obviously anyone who works in games design knows how much time is spent actually building spaces and working with the way your characters navigate those spaces. And to me that’s one of the things I enjoy most about games, something that movies will never ever give somebody, you’re never going to be able to explore a movie.
Next New Media is a start up who are launching niche video services on the web with a business model built around advertising. Some big names from the early days of MTV, Nickelodeon and Time Warner are on board as are some of the investment companies which backed the original foray of MTV onto cable. I’ve previously blogged about Fred Seibert who is one of the founders of the new company and the exec producer of Channel Frederator, a podcast success story which, funnily enough, is going to feature as one of the Next New Media channels. Chris Anderson has been telling us about the long tail for a while now and it looks like Next New Media may be one of the first well packaged offerings that begins to explore the territory on the fringe of cable. The founders certainly inspire confidence and they’ve found a gap in the advertising market that You Tube and My Space don’t seem to be able to capture. Can’t help wondering if they’ll push it far enough – niche content is fine but I’d be curious to see how the new services interact with their audiences.
Apple’s Steve Jobs has called for the record industry to abandon digital rights management for all online music stores. He has posted a statement on the Apple web site which argues the case for abandoning a system about which Apple often takes flack from consumers. The main complaints are its restrictions on 5 copies and the fact that songs bought via the iTunes store can only be played on Apple iPods (not other brands of MP3 players). Another major plank of Job’s argument is that music sold on CD’s is not copy protected and this represents 97% of the music sold.
There was no mention of the film and TV industry in Job’s statement but the implication is that it equally applies to digital moving pictures. HD DVD and BlueRay DVD DRM systems have both reportedly been cracked which means that pirating video content is set to continue unabated. So what are the solutions? Is it widespread litigation, fighting the scourge of piracy until they are all banished to eastern Europe and western China? Or could a blanket licence agreement that is hammered out between internet service providers, the artists, the studios and the tech companies be a possible way forward. Why not charge a levy to everyone with an internet connection to let them freely download from an archive of content – with guaranteed quality of service in image quality and download speed. Then there would be no point in downloading pirated material. This is an interesting idea that was raised in an interview with Peter Jenner, famous manager of bands including the Clash and Pink Floyd. He predicts that in three years time these agreements will be widespread and that DRM will be behind us. Let’s hope so.
I was lucky enough to speak at a panel tonight with director George Miller about the future of film. George lamented the fact that good stories just aren’t surfacing as much any more in cinema – either because studios are averting risk by financing sequels (rather than original content) or maybe because we have mined the major historical and mythological themes of our time in 100 years of cinema. He also talked about the shifting sands of film language and how quickly it is evolving with audiences. His example to show how pervasive this was is the fact that young children watch and understand movies before they can read.
The panel session started with a recorded message from Peter Jackson who alluded to what he saw as a staleness in film storytelling – and a prediction that a younger breed of filmmakers were about to take over with renewed purpose and vigour. In my estimation these are two of the most eminent filmmakers of our time and I was a little blown away to hear confirmation of their dissolution with the status quo and their view of the future.
For what it’s worth, my view is that good stories haven’t gone away, they just beg to be told in new ways. I agree with Peter Jackson that a new generation of filmmakers will see things very differently and bring new energy to the medium just as he did with ‘Heavenly Creatures’ or George Miller did with ‘Mad Max’. George’s analogy of the child watching movies before they can read is recognition of the power of the medium but also its ultimate reliance on its audience. Young audiences are spoiled for choice and films are just one course on a menu of games, www, mobile media and DVD. These parallel media are already impacting on the language of cinema through a wider audience feedback loop. While the 80’s spawned the MTV generation the noughties are spawning a generation of media consumers who crave participatory experiences. I would love to see directors of the calibre of Miller and Jackson create a game because that is just what the games industry needs to push it to the next level: emotional engagement.
Read an interesting article in Fortune magazine which has just come out explaining the phenomenon of 2nd life. While investors are obviously looking for the next MySpace or YouTube, the article profiles how IBM are using 2nd life as a business tool and see great potential in this space. My first introduction to 2nd life was seeing a Sydney University project which studied how architects and designers used 2nd life as a collaborative design tool. Some very interesting results came from this study and the idea has obviously taken off. You can see the power of the technology as another arsenal in the IM, video conferencing and corporate communications tools within a global company. It’s not all virtual sex and shopping malls.
The future of filmmaking – and of entertainment media in general – is murky indeed. Ran a course with my colleagues from LAMP today with incoming students at AFTRS. We profiled a range of new entertainment formats and got the students to brainstorm and pitch back ideas of how they would combine them with some familiar filmic stories. Got me thinking about Peter Jackson’s well publicised comments last year about establishing Wingnut Interactive to develop new forms of interactive entertainment for the XBox 360. Although the Halo film that Jackson was producing now seems to have fallen over, I can’t find any updates on Wingnut interactive since it’s launch last October. Found a great interview with Jackson at gamespot – audio and transcript from his appearance at a conference called X06 held in Barcelona. The panel called The Future of Storytelling is an interesting read. Jackson is a seriously forward thinker (we knew that) and is taking a lead that many of us media educators need to start pushing harder. In two years time our grads are going to find golden opportunities in this murky area between games and film and it’s up to us to throw them in.
While the games industry is growing strongly it is enlightening to read about some of the same problems faced by the AAA publishers and developers as the feature film industry. Digital distribution is changing everything and the 3 year + production times of a AAA game or a feature film are a big problem in a market looking for instant gratification. Warner Bros has now made over $200 million on Happy Feet for eg. but you’ve got to consider it was a four year long production process. Compare that to the 8 million subscribers of World of Warcraft paying over $15 per month each to access this MMORPG. It doesn’t take a maths degree to see where the better investment lies.