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Peter Jackson on the Future of Storytelling
Via VoodooExtreme, an article on Team Xbox covering a panel at X06 on the future of storytelling in games. Along with Mr. Jackson, industry veterans Peter Molyneux and Greg Zeschuck weigh in on this issue. The meat of the article is a video of the presentation, which is regrettably in .wmv format. The Escapist has some highlights of the conversation up in their news section. "'I've got to the stage now where I just end up catching something on DVD and I'm more excited about games coming out in the next 2-3 months than films,' said Peter Jackson, director of Lord of The Rings and founder of Wingnut Interactive, an offshoot of his movie studio. 'That created an awareness in me of the shift in entertainment options out there, and if I'm feeling that others are too.'"
Even though I'm not much of a gamer anymore, I totally see what Jackson is saying here. I could maybe invest 9 hours of my life into a typical 90 minute movie (though there are only a handful of these), while I imagine FF VI alone has lasted me 90 hours in its replaying over the years. One of these things is just not like the other.
This is exactly why one of my friends is double majoring in CompSci and English: to write good stories.
Any good writing class should teach you about developing characters, rising action, falling action, keeping readers interested, etc. That's the sort of stuff that needs to be applied to gaming, not graphics.
I'm not bitter, I'm just unsweetened.
That created an awareness in me of the shift in entertainment options out there, and if I'm feeling that others are too.
I'm feeling, Peter, that you're feeling influential enough to generate feelings among the hoi-polloi, the better to feel your wingnut investment a bit heavier on the hip.
Just a feeling.
illegitimii non ingravare
"Peter Jackson on the Future of Storytelling"
Come and listen to a story about a man named Jed...
I'm not saying books are better than games or movies, but I do feel you live with them differently. Movies and games are an outward journey into somebody else's imagination, and books are an inward journey into your own.
Quoth TFA:
I can truthfully say that although I enjoy films, and I do play an occaional game, I have not been excited about any upcoming films since, oh, the first time Return of the Jedi came out. But there are magazines for which I eagerly await each issue, and there are authors from whom I am constantly awaiting a new book.
All I can say is thank God for Terry Pratchett and Elizabeth Peters. If an author is good, then he or she should have the decency to be prolific.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
So, in the future, games will consist almost entirely of gratuitous superrr sloow-mooo to create completely artificial drama and any character development will consist of said characters sitting on a rock and talking into the camera?
Personally, I'd be far more interested in hearing about the future of storytelling from someone who actually knows how to tell a story.
I grew up watching westerns, as did many of the kids I grew up around, and I can remember countless hours playing cowboys and indians with our cap-loaded six shooters. It was just fun to be a part of the story, as much as you could in your pretend games.
Games could bring together both of those experiences, the depth of a meaningful story and the experience of becoming part of that story by playing the role of the main character. In my opinion, the best single player games were those that built upon that dynamic.
When I was playing through Halo, I can't tell you how many times the repetitive gameplay frustrated me (what! another room with suggestive arrows on the floor. what! I have to go back through those same rooms again!), but the story that was being played out engaged me enough to push me through to the next mission. I hope that games get even better at storytelling, while at the same time improving on the visuals and the gameplay to add to the immersion.
There are alot of people who would like to be me. I just haven't met them yet.
Is it hard to get into the game industry as a writer, or do you have to be a programmer and a writer?
I know mod makers can get in really easy, but we have such an abysmal dearth of well written games that it suggests that good writers (and there are a lot out there) simply can't submit an idea and get a developer audience to chew on it.
Once the writers start getting as much respect as the coders, and actual story lines start weighing in more heavily, we'll see a major shift in the way games are made.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I remember when interactive fiction was the best thing ever. You could tell the computer what you wanted to do and it would do it. Now instead of going to a film that I basically watch for 2 hours and forget I now have the option of playing a game with similar graphics, more interactive story, and a feeling of accomplishment, rather then being force fed a story with nothing to do but watch.
We have big screen TVs, we have voice chat over game consoles, we have the world at our fingertips for the internet The world has moved on, movies and theatres are just dying. Except for the teenagers who want to make out, but then enjoy the extra privacy they have.
I go to 1-2 movie a year for a reason (this year it was superman returns) because when I can play xenosaga get over 2 hours of movie, 60 hours of interactive story and action, and actually have characters that grow rather then have a life span of 2 hours, what use is a movie?
That's not to say every game is better than movies But let's factor in TV as TV does play a part too. Alias, Lost, 24, all captivate my attention and last twice as long as even the director's cut of all three lord of the rings for just 1 season. When they have 6 seasons of these shows all with character development what use is a 10 dollar 2 hour movie when for 40 bucks I can buy 24 hours of entertainment and have a chance to "preview" the whole dvd at home as it's broadcast there first!
DVR to allow us to watch them when ever we want? Why go to a movie theatre when you get TV on your schedule now.
Movies were good for a period but it was a step on evolution of entertainment, it's time to expand the movie to a series, or make them more interactive. Because that's where our attention is going.
The only thing he knows about storytelling is how to take a good story and fuck it up.
If it's adventure games we're talking about, it's about damn time somebody realized that there's an entire segment of gamers that have been left with nothing to do since Lucas Arts switched to Star Wars only.
If we're talking about interactive movies --- no thanks. I don't have the patience to sit through half the cutscenes on FPS Xbox titles nowadays, so if we're talking about a choose your own adventure style Lord of the Rings title, Tom Bombadil or no Tom Bombadil, forget it.
I don't want a Hollywood director to preach about interactivity because that's a spell for disaster. A conventional film director knows zilch about interactivity, except bossing people around apparently. Of course we need more creative types to join the gaming industry, but without companies like the old Sega and Nintendo to take chances and invest in new concepts, we're going to see the same sequels in Kaz Hirai's hilarious presentation over and over again, each time drawn in more polygons and using better textures. The industry is in a very sorry state, creatively speaking. Just look at the Japanese and American charts. Simply pathetic.
Peter Jacksons' version of LOTR was utter rubbish - how fucking dare this monkey re-write the ending!!! unbelievable
all i can remember of it was loads of slow motion and that fat sam git pleading with frodo. PISS OFF jackson you cock.
that said, nothing prepared me for KING KONG
skull island looked like it was made from bits of scenery left over from mordor, the ape looked crap and just about everything else about the movie was a disgrace. JACK BLACK hang your head in shame- ok the lines were bad but why didn't you try acting, or else walk off the set FFS?
so at last peter jackson wises up to the fact he can't make good films and decides to try something else.
of course the truth is that there are more than enough thickies out there that reckon he did a good job with his fuck-awful movies - these tards will buy anything with his foul name on it and keep the scumbag in business, whatever he does
Peter Jackson was heavily involved with the making of King Kong. I'd say he knows at least a little bit about the gaming industry - definitely a more than me. I'm willing to listen.
So yet again, we have someone talking about interactive storytelling in games as if he's the one inventing the concept, seemingly unaware that the Japanese figured it all out several years ago. I bet he's never even heard of the milestones like 'Kanon'. If you want a story which couldn't have been done in "conventional" media, you can go and get 'Ever 17' right now, you don't need to sit around waiting for whatever faltering first steps he's going to be taking.
Most good game stories actually have plenty of words. They're not frequently called 'visual novels' for nothing.
I'd love to roam about the house in space as psycho Derek wielding a chainsaw, searching for that head alien so I could drop on him from above, come out his rectum and utter, "I'm born again!"
If more fans of LOTR and King Kong had any f*cking clue about the movies he used to make do you think they'd give him nearly as much credence? Personally, I'd prefer if he took about ten-thousand steps backward and returned to the kind of story telling he used to engage in before he had hundreds of millions and an army of CGI goons. The kind where a middle-aged momma's boy's momma gets bitten by a disease ridden monkey, dies, doesn't realize it and ends up commanding a zombie horde while her son tries to get a date. Pfft!
"I'm a Derek. Dereks don't run."
If "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and "it was beauty that killed the beast" then "please stop staring at me".
How do you come to that conclusion? Books are every bit as predefined as movies, your only term of interaction consists of page-turning, every word is prewritten by somebody elses imagination. Games, while often also heavily limited, at least offer you to interact with the world that is presented and not just consume it in a passive way.
Now I am not saying that books are bad, they have some nice advantages as being very cheap to produce, being producable by a single person and limited for most part only by the imagination of the author, not by the budget for special effects. But for most part its really more a cost and marketing issue than, then any deeper philosophical one, I could after all have a black screen with narator simply read me the book after all, not very easy to sell to the cinemas, but very doable. The main throuble with book to movie adoption is simply that they have to squish a 10 hour book into a 2 hour movie, so no supprise that some stuff gets lost in the translation.
I don't think that videogames are a stable enough medium for companies to be willing to risk sizable profit margins on 'originality' yet. Probably the big draw of these movie producers (like Jackson) is that his creativity makes money. Like it or not, money is the primary motivation for these videogame companies; if it takes big name movie producers to try to encourage the big companies to be creative, than I'm all for it.
Note that there's the Blade Engine and Ren'Py for those who want to make these things.
I'm struggling to figure out how important the graphics and interactivity are, having played a few of these things and having writing but not artistic skill. The most visually impressive "VN" game I saw ("Ori, Ochi, Onoe," sic) had me clicking hundreds of times to advance the text and making only a few, apparently trivial decisions. How can we set the audience's expectations so that they don't think they're playing an FPS game and get frustrated, but still not have the gameplay consist of clicking the equivalent of "next line of dialogue please" over and over?
Revive the Constitution.
Wow. Good stuff. The limitations of the game engine definitely limit the depth and breadth of the story itself. It's impossible to do a major Chronicles of Narnia battle in a day and age (thankfully long past) where you have the average computing power of the Commodore VIC-20 (though I'm not thankful the VIC-20 is long past).
I have blueprints for full scale personality matrices that I'd love to patent, but the computing power simply is not there; this is all too evident when too many sims are present at one time in a Sims 2 game. Also, stopping to load levels is a huge ding on suspension of belief. Characters having extensive and complex memories - and the ability to react uniquely based on them - is a big hard drive, cpu and memory hog. I even have pseudo code for responding to "canned" stimuli from the environment. Again, cpu, memory and HD space restrictions, make all this impossible. For now.
But think about this - your iPod has more computing power than the world had a few decades ago. If Moore's law holds up, we'll have more power in our little Vox (you heard it here, it's my name for a future uber iPod!) than we have in today's Cray. Then the real story lines will come out to play.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!