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Sopranos' Creator Doubtful of Game Meaning
Stephen Totilo, over at MTV Games, has up an article talking with David Chase, the creator of hit HBO show The Sopranos. Mr. Chase believes firmly in the creative and dramatic potential of television, but isn't so sure that videogames can mean all that much. Despite the new 'Sopranos' game, you'll never see the TV show bleed into gaming, or vice versa. In his mind, games have very specific goals. From the article: "'Games have a function,' he said. 'It's a physical function. The character has to go from here to there, has to shoot that, has to drive this, has to knock that down, has to jump up here. ... That's how a game works. So cooking dinner, going to Lamaze class, there's no way to figure that into a game at this point. Maybe somebody else can do it and maybe somebody will, but that wasn't really what this game was about. It was supposed to be a story about a kid who wants to be a gangster -- a punk who wants to be a gangster -- and so that's what we did.'"
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"So cooking dinner, going to Lamaze class, there's no way to figure that into a game at this point." - I've figured it out Xtreme cooking (like Xtreme ironing) and Vitrual Lamaze where you have to balance the mothers breathing and all the other fun that comes with virtual lamaze, buy it now at walmart, only $5.99
Now there's a guy who clearly knows nothing about gaming. Can't work cooking dinner or Lamaze into a game? Is he serious? Has he ever heard of...Japan? Has he played a game since 1985?
You mean there's a difference between passive and active entertainment? Who ever would've guessed?
This guy's the limit!
Stephen Totilo, over at MTV Games, has up an article talking with David Chase, the creator of hit HBO show The Sopranos. Mr. Chase believes firmly in the creative and dramatic potential of television, but isn't so sure that videogames can mean all that much.
Oh wow, old guy X doesn't believe new technology Y is as good as the good old days!
That's so shocking! What a great coincidence that we age and die, so new generations with more open thinking replace us.
Honestly: the guy may be talented, it doesn't mean he's adaptive. So deal with it.
I guess I'm in the minority here, but I completely agree with that. I prefer games that have specific goals and an end. I like the feeling of accomplishment I get from beating the final boss, jumping over the flagpole, etc.
Waiting around a game for something to happen, aimlessly collecting money, fighting endless boring monsters to gain experience, none of these things really feels like "fun" to me.
Someone get this guy a DS and Cooking Mama
I don't think Totilo has really used his imagination with this one. Think about a movie about, say, an underdog football team, or a champion chess player playing a computer, or a boxer, uh... boxing.
The human drama, which is what the story is, can play itself out in the context of a game, just as it can play out in the game-like atmosphere of a business or a relationship.
In a nutshell, the story theory is that the protagonist faces a challenge that shatters his world -- he can't go back to his world they way he used to live it. Think Luke after his parents were killed by stormtroopers. He can either hook up with some crazy old man or wander around Tatooine, but he just won't be helping Uncle Owen farm moisture tomorrow.
Same thing when the star quarterback steps out onto the field for the championship game or the chess player sits down in front the the computer. They are either going to become a champion, or blow the biggest chance of their life. Either way, they can't go back to the anonymity they used to live everyday. What a better set up for the human drama?
Us here on slashdot have seen this played out a million times in almost every game. The crisis might be a little hoakey or even flat out weird -- resucing Dr. Light from Dr. Wiley, or eating all of the pellets without getting caught by a ghost. It is a challenge, and there is no rest for the protagonist. They must make their way into a brave new world.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Star Trek the new generation made a great game with a lot of TV series references. So did it's sequels.
Simpson's hit and run and "crazy taxi" take were both fun consolers.
Band of brothers was a very successful Made for TV movie port to game.
That's off the top of my head. What is this guy talking about?
Doesn't every soprano's episode have a plot and something the characters need to do for the episode to progress?
Sounds like another person downplaying the importance of the gaming market because they just don't know what they are talking about.
It probably shouldn't make me mad that what he says feels like a personal attack on one my of favorite past times.. but it does.
It seems as though most games are action or violence oriented. There's also a nonviolent video 'game', called the internet, whereupon a person may learn lamaze, cooking, or whatever via web sites. Perhaps the very definition of video game is action or violence, and the other computer 'applications' are the nonviolent 'games'?
GTA 3, same premise, small thug works his way up through the mafia, failed miserably.
He's totally right.
Honestly? no.
If they show up in a piece of fiction, I would realy hope that the focus was on the characters AS they are involved in these activities, not on the activity itself.
For a nice quick example, take GTA:SA. You have your characters, and you have the character advancment they go through, most of it is take up by cut sceans between missions, and the random commentary durring missions. I would not be that hard of a streach to have CJ walk into his brothers house and get a mission from him when he is making dinner.
Meh, I personaly think that a video game CAN be just as great a piece of narative as a TV show can be.
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
Wow, news flash. Crappy formulaic games aren't as meaningful as ground breaking dramatic television. How much do you want to bet that movie producers said the same thing about TV when it first came out? Video games are about where TV was in the late 50's. At least he's not saying it'll never happen, he's just admitting that he's not talented and/or experienced enough in the medium of video games to pull it off.
Each new media changes society through it's innate characteristics. Books, by putting you in your head, are like a daydream. Movies, with 24 frames per second flashed on screen, are like a regular dream. TV, with it's rapidly scanning raster beam is hypnotic. Video games by their nature are interactive. All of them, however, follow the same rules of drama: you must raise dramatic tension by asking interesting questions and lower it by answering them. But what questions are interesting to an audience is at least somewhat inherent in the media itself. Questions that raise dramatic tension in book form may not do the same thing in TV or movie form, and this holds true for video games as well.
Seeing characters cooking dinner or going to lamaz class may raise dramatic tension while watching the hypnotic medium of television. That does not mean they would (necessarily) do so in the interactive medium of video games.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
He may be a smart man, but he's a damned fool.
I mean, he's right; games can't provide the same narrative as TV or films, but then again, films and TV are also distinct in narrative, so it hardly matters because they're supposed to be different.
I mean, why'd he use cooking and lamaze class as examples? Are they somehow more significant than other mundane events, like brushing your teeth, or taking a shit? There we go! In order to be accepted by clueless, geriatric jackasses, Half-Life has to have a sequence where Gordon Freeman has to stop running from the Combine chasing him, find a secluded spot in the wilderness, and just squat, and he has to do it before the patrolling Strider nearby notices him and rains death upon him. To make it even more intense, he has to run around the woods looking for leaves to wipe his ass with!
In all seriousness though, it sounds like he has a narrow-minded perspective as to how games are. I mean, the fact that he hasn't even touched them since the NES days because he sucks at them speaks volumes.
Perhaps sometime in the near future, someone will make a game so good and rich in narrative that EVERYBODY will just stop watching television and movies altogether, exchanging their satellite receivers and DVD players to get a Wii or an Xbox 360. Meanwhile, this guy will be looking desperately for a job, or maybe he'll just say "Fuck it." and retire. Who knows?
" there's no way to figure that into a game at this point. Maybe somebody else can do it and maybe somebody will, but that wasn't really what this game was about.
He deliberately left open the possibility that maybe in the future someone will make a game with the kind of depth and narrative he's talking about. That seems pretty open-minded to me. (OK, so he ignored the possibility that there might be a game like that already that he just didn't know about, but that's a minor oversight.)
I think he did a good job of being diplomatic about the possibilities of computer games, while trying to explain why, in this particular case, he doesn't want this game to end with Tony Soprano walking out as the final boss and you having to dropkick him, becase it will make his drama look ridiculous. That's his real point.
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Pot meet kettle. Everybody knows that Television is a low-class form of entertainment for the masses, and doesn't have the same cultural significance as books or stage plays.
Pretty much what he says was also said of television 60 years ago.
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"Meh, I personaly think that a video game CAN be just as great a piece of narative as a TV show can be."
I'm surprised they didn't look at Liberty City Stories and derive some inspiration.
Oh well. Sorry, I'm not trying to dry-hump your 'Insightful' post. I'm just surprised. If it weren't for the cut-scenes in this game, I doubt I'd have the interest to keep playing it.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
....big deal, what puzzles me is why anyone is talking to him about games. HBO put the game idea out there. He doesn't seem to know squat about games. I bet I can find other people who don't know much about games and interview them.
No narrative, gimme a break, although it sucked Enter The Matrix tied in with the movies and gave people a narrative that expanded the movies (or made them suck at a larger scale depending if your a fan or not). Cripes, even the mundane stuff that he doesn't think would make interesting gaming is all over the place in games - Sims, SimCity, Sim blah blah blah, any city building game, a ton of little games i don't care about. I'm not so much into those games myself, but they exist. hell, look at Second Life, although you could argue that isn't really a "game" it has wonderfully exciting crap like visiting a museum and sitting in halls listening to people give speeches on topics like CC. This man must never have seen Final Fantasy, where I spent time signing autographs for kids for the mundane side and epic stories for the narrative side.
Article could be shortened by just saying here is the Sopranos main writer, he doesn't know anything about games, he writes TV and nothing else, the end.
Metal Gear Solid. Kicks the shit out of anything I've ever seen on the Sopranos.
From the article: "Games are the new frontier, the way to enlighten an audience and immerse them. How can a guy like Chase be so disinterested in that?
Well, he's not a gamer, he admits."
So someone who doesn't know much about games can judge them? Fine. I've never seen the Sopranos but I can tell you I think it is boring, lame and cliched. Oh Italian-Americans, they must be in the mafia, right? How original. And I bet there is lots of killing people when they make each other mad. Wow, how ground breaking. Television is a vast wasteland which simply recycles plots and cliches from other television shows and movies.
As I said, I've never seen the Sopranos but I've seen the dvds sitting on the shelves at the store and Goodfellas was on cable the other night. Television shows and movies like the Sopranos have a function. It's a sedentary function. You watch a mobster go from here to there, shoot that, drive this, knock that down, jump up here. That's how the Sopranos works. So cooking dinner, going to Lamaze class, they can figure in. Maybe somebody else can do it and maybe somebody will, but that wasn't really what a game was about.
The act of watching a movie or a TV show or reading a book, God forbid, you're seeing someone else's story and you can go through their story and learn from it or feel with it or laugh at it without having to go through any of the pain or the adventures. The game is different: There is accomplishment, really, any emotional sense of accomplishment. You do feel the pain of failure and the feeling of adventure. Where in the Sopranos is the sense of accomplishment that you get at the end of a game? Where is the challenge in playing? Where is the skill?
See how easy it is to criticize something you don't like and don't know anything about?
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Have been done in Japan looooooong before the U.S. release of "Cooking Mama".
In Japan just about ANY aspect of life has been explored in a game. From graduating high school to bathroom functions to driving a train.
It really makes me wonder why there's so little creativity in the U.S. gaming market. The Sims touches broadly on lots of things, but it doesn't give you an in-depth simulation of anything.
I wish I could somehow zap the world's population with instant Japanese language skills, so everyone would be able to easily see what they were missing. ^^;