http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/offage.htm
(showing the decline in teen violence) is one of the most interesting web pages I've seen in a long time. I'm sure you could draw a mirror line showing the rise in consumption of video games.
Question is, where is the games industry's PR team? Where are the full-page ads showing this data? Why aren't they going out and claiming that video games are saving the nation from teen violence - by allowing teens to harmlesslessly burn off their aggression?
Even if most people didn't beleive it, at least it would create another end to the debate - at the moment politicians can use games as an easy thing to rant on about, because the games industry won't say boo to them. Even saying "well, we only sell them to adults" implies that this stuff is like porn - it's obviously vile, but at least we don't pollute kids. This is the perfect set up for politicos to compare games to cigarettes.
(One problem for the PR team of course would be that that so many entities profit from creating a climate of fear in which everything appears to be getting worse. But that's another topic.)
Even the title of this excellent article - "don't blame the games, blame the parents" - plays along with such a trend, because it implies there is a growing problem for which a cause must be found. In fact there seems to be a declining problem - so who should we thank?
Come on games industry - think about something other than piracy for once, and use this data to start defending yourselves properly...
This piece is tagged "missing-the-point" presumably because the point is that we all hate online video ads, and prefer text links, so WTF is Google doing.
But there's another way that this plan misses the point. It's in having a two-minute limit on the video.
Why is this a problem?
30-second ads are based on the interruption ad model: you don't want to watch, so they keep it short. Interruption ads don't work online, which is a choice-based medium (or should be).
Google's plan is the some people will want to click on these things to watch the videos. But by limiting it to 2 minutes, they drastically reduce the amount of interesting content that could be offered.
For example, corporation X could offer you a bunch of videos from a band you like; their logo's at the end, but otherwise, it's just the video. You might be tempted to click to watch - but of course you'll be irritated, because the song will have to cut off after 2 minutes.
In other words, this plan is the worst of both worlds - it doesn't work under the hard-sell interuption model of old advertising, or under the new choice-based model, which is "do something genuinely interesting for me and I might actually watch it - in which case it should be as long as I want it to be".
What does Grandpa Sony still cry about every night? About losing the VHS vs. Betamax war back when he was a lad.
The way to understand Sony's otherwise inexplicable behaviour is this: games on PS3 are just a means to an end. For Sony (and for MS/Xbox), the prize is not to control gaming; the prize is to own every home's entertainment computer, and the format it uses to show movies.
As they say in the interview, Sony have clearly decided that they will still sell five million PS3s, even at this price. And let's face it, when you count the Japanese market, they're probably right.
Sell 5m PS3s and they establish a user base for Blu-Ray - and kill HD-DVD. Thus they hope to win this decade's version of the Betamax vs. VHS war. Thus Grandpa Sony can stop crying at last and young Mr. Sony feels heroic.
That may be the strategy - but of course that doesn't mean it'll work. Sony's repeated desire to corner the market with a new content formats (UMD etc) has led them to disaster before, and may do so again. Perhaps in years to come young Mr. Sony will be crying every night about destroying the PlayStation franchise...
I propose a competition for the story for Mission Impossible IV; this shall revolve around PCs which collect data for an evil foreign power; competition is to find best scenario.
My suggestion (based on M. Williamson's great piece):-
* Components which scan for certain types of data, collect them when they do. * Then send a signal via networks or if that fails via RF.
* If that fails, Evil hack team then physically collect data from components (either dressed as cleaners - Charlie Sheen in Wall Street - or in stretchy black outfits - Tom C in M.I.1).
Once this has been made into M.I.4, expect to be adopted for a real-life remake with your tax dollars by Dept of Homeland Security.
"The Japanese system of competition for education, career and social esteem, Dr. Kimura explained, forces young people to obsess over self-presentation, which costs them both fantasy and anonymity, the privileges of childhood... The Gran Cyber Cafés now serve this purpose, he said. "Nobody cares what you do, which enables you to be absorbed in whatever fantasy you want to indulge in through Net surfing, Web games or manga. Yet you can satisfy your timid desire to belong."
In other words, the basic argument of this article is "the Japanese are sick and manga cafés like this are an interesting symptom of the disease - by comparison with the robust health of Western culture". What nonsense.
Two key elements...
* the seamless blending of sexual content and other forms of entertainment
* the enthusiastic embrace of new forms of culture ...I consider to be a symptom of the health of Japanese culture as opposed to US/ UK culture where...
* sexual content lives in a ghetto in which only those who are talentless or desperate will work, while ultraviolent content is fine
* new forms of culture are treated with suspicion - even games, for God's sake, after all these years are still disdained.
So my response is please stop treating this sort of manga café as a kind of boil that reflects some underlying disease, and let's open a chain of these in the west right now.
But of course, I only think that because I'm sick...
I suggest the key thing to consider is that for Sony (and for MS/Xbox), this is not just about games; it's primarily about owning every home's entertainment computer, and the format it uses to show movies.
Sony have clearly decided that they will still sell millions of PS3s at this price - thus they establish a user base for Blu-Ray, and kill HD-DVD. Thus they hope to win this decade's version of the Betamax/VHS war.
Having beaten HD-DVD, in following years they can cut the price of the PS3. If more 360s or wiis are sold early on, Sony don't care too much - because there's much more than gamers at stake.
That may be the strategy - but of course that doesn't mean it'll work. Sony's repeated desire to corner the market with a new content formats (UMD etc) has led them to disaster before, and may do so again...
One way that youtube or the youtube wannabes could differentiate themselves:
Let you upload your own.swf files, rather than forcing you to upload linear videos files only (QT, AVI,etc).
Why? Because then you could upload videos with your own interactivity added.
Yeah, but why? Because the internet is an interactive medium, and linear videos on it are as unsatisfying as early silent movies, which put actors against a theatrical backdrop. They haven't adjusted to the medium.
You mean like [insert name of 80s/90s laserdisk game - dragons lair, etc]? Who the hell wants to do that?
No, I mean like Subservientchicken.com, or the interactive video stuff being done by Tate, British Film Institute, National Theatre, etc (links at http://www.activecinema.com/ )
Letting people add their own interactivty is a great way to let people raise their game and make pieces that are more playful without being just silly - and it also gives people a way to make something that stands up next to the mega-budget productions pirated off TV.
I respect your impatience with the generalisations that Westerners are prone to make about Japanese culture, but can you really imagine the US or UK equivalent of "The Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy" unveiling a machine such as this? Surely not. Politicians and bureacrats involved would instinctively know they'd lose their jobs over it.
Furthermore, descriptions of robots as friendly and/or sexy are so much more common in Japanese sci-fi Manga and Anime than in Western sci-fi that I think you can argue that there must be a different perception of such devices in Japanese culture (and extend that argument to Korean culture, though obviously it's different in many ways).
I think it's fair to say that Japanese culture (and I assume Korean) is a lot more comfortable than the US/UK with the idea of a friendly, sexy robot. And so it's unsurpirsing that the first small steps towards such a device should come from Japan and Korea.
I notice in the article it says, "In Thompson's engrossing memoir...Thompson explains the moral, legal, ethical, and racial implications of this battle" (i.e. the battle against Satan's own game industry) - but Racial implications? Don't suppose anyone's actually read the memoir and can explain what on earth he claims the racial implications might be?
Fair comment and you may well be right. But if you want to see some more positive examples of interactivity blending with film/video, check out the nominees in the Webbys "best use of video/moving image" category...
Has anyone seen any estimates of how many 360 owners actually plan to buy the HD-DVD add-on? If HD-DVD's big hope is an optional extra to the 360, looks like they'll lose...
Meanwhile, it certainly looks like Sony are going to be able to use the PS3 to drive through a huge installed base of Blu-Ray machines.
From an experience point of view, why should we care? Well, I was at a conference in London where the dreaded Bill Gates spoke, but he did say something I found interesting: he said that "soon, the difference between TV/Movies and games won't be black and white, as it is now; there will be a spectrum of shades of grey in between".
I believe that Blu-Ray will enable some "playability" in movies - customisation, simple interactivity, etc. This could produce dreadful rubbish, or just be ignored, but it might produce some interesting new hybrids in a medium which is getting pretty stale. Not as a replacement for games, but as an enhancement for movies. Now I know what you're thinking - "Dragon's Lair" - but hey, it might be better this time round, mightn't it? Or not...
Anyway, I believe HD-DVD offers no such flexibility - so it's odd that Bill backs the format that doesn't do what he thinks will start happening to movies sometime soon...
The key question with adding ads to software or content is this: does the user get anything extra because of the ads?
If the user getting content for free because of an ad, then users will put up with it, as they have historically done on TV; they may skip the ads, but they don't necessarily complain about it too much because they perceive it as part of a deal.
If the ad makes the content more real (e.g. ads on the side of football pitches) don't think many people would object.
BUT - if the user IS paying for the content, and its price is not coming down because of the the ad, and it's not adding to the realism of the content - then you have a situation where users will start increasingly to rebel at being forced to watch ads, and cease buying products because of them.
You might say that corporate greed will win - but this is not necessarily in the ad's favour. As I recall, someone from EA (I think in an IV in Edge magazine) recently pointed out that their revenue from ads is under 2% of their total revenue. They are not going to risk failing to sell Halo X for $XXX because they want to squeeze in a couple of ads which will generate a tiny amount of extra revenue.
However, the ad industry desperately wants to beleive that in-game product placement has a huge future. That does not mean it's going to happen. But some ad guys have clearly caught Microsoft's ear. Time will tell if MS wins from this purchase. Personally, I doubt it.
A note for the tagging beta people: I suggest you need a new tag called "sex-bad-violence-good". This article should be tagged with it, along with yesterday's one about the scandalous "sex scenes" in Oblivion, the shocking hot coffee mod etc. It's such a huge issue. It's the elephant in the living room of games culture. Or maybe there are two elephants. And God knows what they're doing together, but you better not make a game out of it.
The DS Lite is the "svelte brother to the bulky, yet handsome DS"?!?!
Hello!? Like totally everyone knows it's the svelte sister to the orginal DS. Still not sure about my pink original DS, though, in this area it seems somewhat conflicted...
Well said! I'm currently encoding stuff for digital cinema in Flash video, and it looks great on the big screen, with zero picture quality loss from QT.
However, lipsync is an issue, and you need a pretty high powered machine to keep it playing well.
Also, the great plus of Flash video is that it allows interactivity, so for drearily linear TV pieces like the series ABC are putting up, I'm slightly surprised they chose Flash rather than drearily linear formats like QT or WMV...
Cinema Interactivity may work - we just don't know
on
Why Game Movies Stink
·
· Score: 1
I am usually a big fan of Mark Kermode, who wrote this piece. But this piece dismisses something he can't possibly know about - because it doesn't yet exist.
He says that most movies based on games have been rubbish, and that focus-grouping a movie threatens its integrity. True enough (though I wait with interest to see Peter Jackson's forthcoming film of "Halo"). However, he then makes an unwarranted leap from this to saying that "interactivity...has no place whatsoever...in the cinema", as if the first two statements prove the third - which they clearly do not.
The poor quality of movies based on games is a problem of translation from one medium to another. To imply that it proves that interactivity in a cinema won't work is like saying "movies based on musicals are rubbish; therefore movies must not have music".
The problem with focus-grouping movies is one of respecting the filmmaker's original vision; to blame it on interactivity is like saying "colourising Casablanca is an outrage; therefore movies must not be shot in colour". One implication here is the ancient idea that bringing interactivity into cinemas means "choose the ending" movies, which would obviously not work. But that doesn't mean you can't do anything useful in a cinema with interactivity - or with its more powerful sisters, customisation and randomisation.
Of course there are no great examples of interactivity in cinema yet, because the digital cinema technology that makes it possible is only just rolling out. But audiences have changed since Casablanca, and cinema must change too - to make movies which are less predictable, which are not one-size-fits-all, and which are part of the age of participatory culture - rather than a hold-out against it.
Like what? If you want me to put my money where my mouth is, in February I shot a short interactive film for digital cinema for the UK Film council, which was screened successfully at a conference at BAFTA, and by invitation at another conference in Hollywood. It's online at http://www.activecinema.com/bunny/ (which is just my own site, so if too many people try to watch it, it'll crash). It's a short, silly, no-budget movie - but it has successfully demonstrated a few basic principles of cinema interactivity which I hope to develop further. My own efforts are however irrelevant to the basic point, which is this...
Technical innovation is forcing change on all media - newspapers, TV and now cinema. It is not helpful for critics as smart and influential as Mark to try to rule out in advance one fundamental way that cinema could adapt in response to this change. By doing so, they only help doom cinema to increasing irrelevance, and to a further decline in quality of the sort that he deplores.
The advertising industry in a state of panicked paralysis. Lots of smart guys who've had a great ride for 30 years are terrified that it's going to end. Product placement, whether on TV, in films or in ads, is one solution they cling to, like Leo di Caprio clutching that bit of wood at the end of Titanic. Didn't do him much good, and it won't do them much good either...
Key issues include:
* does the user pay for the content? If not, as on TV, and users perceive that they are getting good content for nothing because it;s paid for by ads, then users will put up with it, as on TV; they may skip the ads, but they don't necessarily complain about it too much.
* is the user getting the content for less because of the ad? Again, if so, then users will put up with it - and a lot of the slashdot posts reflect this.
* does the ad make the content more real? e.g. ads on the side of football pitches; don't think many people would object.
* BUT - if the user IS paying for the contect, and its price is not coming down because of the the ad, and it's not adding to the realism of the content - then you have a situation where users will start increasingly to rebel at being forced to watch ads, and cease buying products because of them.
* another poster wisely commented that corproate greed will win - but not necessarily in the ad's favour. As I recall, someone from EA (I think in an IV in Edge magazine) pointed out that their revenue from ads is under 2% of their total revenue. They are not going to risk failing to sell Halo X for $XXX because they want to squeeze in a couple of ads which will generate a tiny amount of extra revenue.
* Stories about product placement's huge future are generally fuelled by people in the ad industry who need it, to save their industry. That does not mean it's going to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/offage.htm (showing the decline in teen violence) is one of the most interesting web pages I've seen in a long time. I'm sure you could draw a mirror line showing the rise in consumption of video games.
Question is, where is the games industry's PR team? Where are the full-page ads showing this data? Why aren't they going out and claiming that video games are saving the nation from teen violence - by allowing teens to harmlesslessly burn off their aggression?
Even if most people didn't beleive it, at least it would create another end to the debate - at the moment politicians can use games as an easy thing to rant on about, because the games industry won't say boo to them. Even saying "well, we only sell them to adults" implies that this stuff is like porn - it's obviously vile, but at least we don't pollute kids. This is the perfect set up for politicos to compare games to cigarettes.
(One problem for the PR team of course would be that that so many entities profit from creating a climate of fear in which everything appears to be getting worse. But that's another topic.)
Even the title of this excellent article - "don't blame the games, blame the parents" - plays along with such a trend, because it implies there is a growing problem for which a cause must be found. In fact there seems to be a declining problem - so who should we thank?
Come on games industry - think about something other than piracy for once, and use this data to start defending yourselves properly...
This piece is tagged "missing-the-point" presumably because the point is that we all hate online video ads, and prefer text links, so WTF is Google doing.
But there's another way that this plan misses the point. It's in having a two-minute limit on the video.
Why is this a problem?
30-second ads are based on the interruption ad model: you don't want to watch, so they keep it short. Interruption ads don't work online, which is a choice-based medium (or should be).
Google's plan is the some people will want to click on these things to watch the videos. But by limiting it to 2 minutes, they drastically reduce the amount of interesting content that could be offered.
For example, corporation X could offer you a bunch of videos from a band you like; their logo's at the end, but otherwise, it's just the video. You might be tempted to click to watch - but of course you'll be irritated, because the song will have to cut off after 2 minutes.
In other words, this plan is the worst of both worlds - it doesn't work under the hard-sell interuption model of old advertising, or under the new choice-based model, which is "do something genuinely interesting for me and I might actually watch it - in which case it should be as long as I want it to be".
Very good point - as you say, they decided at some stage that the PSP would create a user base for UMDs, and they were wrong.
However, Blu-Ray is at least a decent format, as opposed to UMD. But we'll see how it pans out...
What does Grandpa Sony still cry about every night? About losing the VHS vs. Betamax war back when he was a lad.
The way to understand Sony's otherwise inexplicable behaviour is this: games on PS3 are just a means to an end. For Sony (and for MS/Xbox), the prize is not to control gaming; the prize is to own every home's entertainment computer, and the format it uses to show movies.
As they say in the interview, Sony have clearly decided that they will still sell five million PS3s, even at this price. And let's face it, when you count the Japanese market, they're probably right.
Sell 5m PS3s and they establish a user base for Blu-Ray - and kill HD-DVD. Thus they hope to win this decade's version of the Betamax vs. VHS war. Thus Grandpa Sony can stop crying at last and young Mr. Sony feels heroic.
That may be the strategy - but of course that doesn't mean it'll work. Sony's repeated desire to corner the market with a new content formats (UMD etc) has led them to disaster before, and may do so again. Perhaps in years to come young Mr. Sony will be crying every night about destroying the PlayStation franchise...
I propose a competition for the story for Mission Impossible IV; this shall revolve around PCs which collect data for an evil foreign power; competition is to find best scenario.
My suggestion (based on M. Williamson's great piece):-
* Components which scan for certain types of data, collect them when they do.
* Then send a signal via networks or if that fails via RF.
* If that fails, Evil hack team then physically collect data from components (either dressed as cleaners - Charlie Sheen in Wall Street - or in stretchy black outfits - Tom C in M.I.1).
Once this has been made into M.I.4, expect to be adopted for a real-life remake with your tax dollars by Dept of Homeland Security.
"The Japanese system of competition for education, career and social esteem, Dr. Kimura explained, forces young people to obsess over self-presentation, which costs them both fantasy and anonymity, the privileges of childhood... The Gran Cyber Cafés now serve this purpose, he said. "Nobody cares what you do, which enables you to be absorbed in whatever fantasy you want to indulge in through Net surfing, Web games or manga. Yet you can satisfy your timid desire to belong."
...I consider to be a symptom of the health of Japanese culture as opposed to US/ UK culture where...
In other words, the basic argument of this article is "the Japanese are sick and manga cafés like this are an interesting symptom of the disease - by comparison with the robust health of Western culture". What nonsense.
Two key elements...
* the seamless blending of sexual content and other forms of entertainment
* the enthusiastic embrace of new forms of culture
* sexual content lives in a ghetto in which only those who are talentless or desperate will work, while ultraviolent content is fine
* new forms of culture are treated with suspicion - even games, for God's sake, after all these years are still disdained.
So my response is please stop treating this sort of manga café as a kind of boil that reflects some underlying disease, and let's open a chain of these in the west right now.
But of course, I only think that because I'm sick...
I suggest the key thing to consider is that for Sony (and for MS/Xbox), this is not just about games; it's primarily about owning every home's entertainment computer, and the format it uses to show movies.
Sony have clearly decided that they will still sell millions of PS3s at this price - thus they establish a user base for Blu-Ray, and kill HD-DVD. Thus they hope to win this decade's version of the Betamax/VHS war.
Having beaten HD-DVD, in following years they can cut the price of the PS3. If more 360s or wiis are sold early on, Sony don't care too much - because there's much more than gamers at stake.
That may be the strategy - but of course that doesn't mean it'll work. Sony's repeated desire to corner the market with a new content formats (UMD etc) has led them to disaster before, and may do so again...
One way that youtube or the youtube wannabes could differentiate themselves: .swf files, rather than forcing you to upload linear videos files only (QT, AVI,etc).
Let you upload your own
Why? Because then you could upload videos with your own interactivity added.
Yeah, but why? Because the internet is an interactive medium, and linear videos on it are as unsatisfying as early silent movies, which put actors against a theatrical backdrop. They haven't adjusted to the medium.
You mean like [insert name of 80s/90s laserdisk game - dragons lair, etc]? Who the hell wants to do that?
No, I mean like Subservientchicken.com, or the interactive video stuff being done by Tate, British Film Institute, National Theatre, etc (links at http://www.activecinema.com/ )
Letting people add their own interactivty is a great way to let people raise their game and make pieces that are more playful without being just silly - and it also gives people a way to make something that stands up next to the mega-budget productions pirated off TV.
I respect your impatience with the generalisations that Westerners are prone to make about Japanese culture, but can you really imagine the US or UK equivalent of "The Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy" unveiling a machine such as this? Surely not. Politicians and bureacrats involved would instinctively know they'd lose their jobs over it.
Furthermore, descriptions of robots as friendly and/or sexy are so much more common in Japanese sci-fi Manga and Anime than in Western sci-fi that I think you can argue that there must be a different perception of such devices in Japanese culture (and extend that argument to Korean culture, though obviously it's different in many ways).
I think it's fair to say that Japanese culture (and I assume Korean) is a lot more comfortable than the US/UK with the idea of a friendly, sexy robot. And so it's unsurpirsing that the first small steps towards such a device should come from Japan and Korea.
I notice in the article it says, "In Thompson's engrossing memoir...Thompson explains the moral, legal, ethical, and racial implications of this battle" (i.e. the battle against Satan's own game industry) - but Racial implications? Don't suppose anyone's actually read the memoir and can explain what on earth he claims the racial implications might be?
Fair comment and you may well be right. But if you want to see some more positive examples of interactivity blending with film/video, check out the nominees in the Webbys "best use of video/moving image" category...
s on=10 (& scroll down)
...just because video+interactive failed with early 90s technology, it shouldn't be ruled out for all time IMHO. But time will tell.
http://www.webbyawards.com/webbys/current.php?sea
Has anyone seen any estimates of how many 360 owners actually plan to buy the HD-DVD add-on? If HD-DVD's big hope is an optional extra to the 360, looks like they'll lose...
Meanwhile, it certainly looks like Sony are going to be able to use the PS3 to drive through a huge installed base of Blu-Ray machines.
From an experience point of view, why should we care? Well, I was at a conference in London where the dreaded Bill Gates spoke, but he did say something I found interesting: he said that "soon, the difference between TV/Movies and games won't be black and white, as it is now; there will be a spectrum of shades of grey in between".
I believe that Blu-Ray will enable some "playability" in movies - customisation, simple interactivity, etc. This could produce dreadful rubbish, or just be ignored, but it might produce some interesting new hybrids in a medium which is getting pretty stale. Not as a replacement for games, but as an enhancement for movies. Now I know what you're thinking - "Dragon's Lair" - but hey, it might be better this time round, mightn't it? Or not...
Anyway, I believe HD-DVD offers no such flexibility - so it's odd that Bill backs the format that doesn't do what he thinks will start happening to movies sometime soon...
The key question with adding ads to software or content is this: does the user get anything extra because of the ads?
If the user getting content for free because of an ad, then users will put up with it, as they have historically done on TV; they may skip the ads, but they don't necessarily complain about it too much because they perceive it as part of a deal.
If the ad makes the content more real (e.g. ads on the side of football pitches) don't think many people would object.
BUT - if the user IS paying for the content, and its price is not coming down because of the the ad, and it's not adding to the realism of the content - then you have a situation where users will start increasingly to rebel at being forced to watch ads, and cease buying products because of them.
You might say that corporate greed will win - but this is not necessarily in the ad's favour. As I recall, someone from EA (I think in an IV in Edge magazine) recently pointed out that their revenue from ads is under 2% of their total revenue. They are not going to risk failing to sell Halo X for $XXX because they want to squeeze in a couple of ads which will generate a tiny amount of extra revenue.
However, the ad industry desperately wants to beleive that in-game product placement has a huge future. That does not mean it's going to happen. But some ad guys have clearly caught Microsoft's ear. Time will tell if MS wins from this purchase. Personally, I doubt it.
A note for the tagging beta people: I suggest you need a new tag called "sex-bad-violence-good". This article should be tagged with it, along with yesterday's one about the scandalous "sex scenes" in Oblivion, the shocking hot coffee mod etc. It's such a huge issue. It's the elephant in the living room of games culture. Or maybe there are two elephants. And God knows what they're doing together, but you better not make a game out of it.
The DS Lite is the "svelte brother to the bulky, yet handsome DS"?!?! Hello!? Like totally everyone knows it's the svelte sister to the orginal DS. Still not sure about my pink original DS, though, in this area it seems somewhat conflicted...
Well said! I'm currently encoding stuff for digital cinema in Flash video, and it looks great on the big screen, with zero picture quality loss from QT. However, lipsync is an issue, and you need a pretty high powered machine to keep it playing well. Also, the great plus of Flash video is that it allows interactivity, so for drearily linear TV pieces like the series ABC are putting up, I'm slightly surprised they chose Flash rather than drearily linear formats like QT or WMV...
I am usually a big fan of Mark Kermode, who wrote this piece. But this piece dismisses something he can't possibly know about - because it doesn't yet exist.
He says that most movies based on games have been rubbish, and that focus-grouping a movie threatens its integrity. True enough (though I wait with interest to see Peter Jackson's forthcoming film of "Halo"). However, he then makes an unwarranted leap from this to saying that "interactivity...has no place whatsoever...in the cinema", as if the first two statements prove the third - which they clearly do not.
The poor quality of movies based on games is a problem of translation from one medium to another. To imply that it proves that interactivity in a cinema won't work is like saying "movies based on musicals are rubbish; therefore movies must not have music".
The problem with focus-grouping movies is one of respecting the filmmaker's original vision; to blame it on interactivity is like saying "colourising Casablanca is an outrage; therefore movies must not be shot in colour". One implication here is the ancient idea that bringing interactivity into cinemas means "choose the ending" movies, which would obviously not work. But that doesn't mean you can't do anything useful in a cinema with interactivity - or with its more powerful sisters, customisation and randomisation.
Of course there are no great examples of interactivity in cinema yet, because the digital cinema technology that makes it possible is only just rolling out. But audiences have changed since Casablanca, and cinema must change too - to make movies which are less predictable, which are not one-size-fits-all, and which are part of the age of participatory culture - rather than a hold-out against it.
Like what? If you want me to put my money where my mouth is, in February I shot a short interactive film for digital cinema for the UK Film council, which was screened successfully at a conference at BAFTA, and by invitation at another conference in Hollywood. It's online at http://www.activecinema.com/bunny/ (which is just my own site, so if too many people try to watch it, it'll crash). It's a short, silly, no-budget movie - but it has successfully demonstrated a few basic principles of cinema interactivity which I hope to develop further. My own efforts are however irrelevant to the basic point, which is this...
Technical innovation is forcing change on all media - newspapers, TV and now cinema. It is not helpful for critics as smart and influential as Mark to try to rule out in advance one fundamental way that cinema could adapt in response to this change. By doing so, they only help doom cinema to increasing irrelevance, and to a further decline in quality of the sort that he deplores.
The advertising industry in a state of panicked paralysis. Lots of smart guys who've had a great ride for 30 years are terrified that it's going to end. Product placement, whether on TV, in films or in ads, is one solution they cling to, like Leo di Caprio clutching that bit of wood at the end of Titanic. Didn't do him much good, and it won't do them much good either...
Key issues include:
* does the user pay for the content? If not, as on TV, and users perceive that they are getting good content for nothing because it;s paid for by ads, then users will put up with it, as on TV; they may skip the ads, but they don't necessarily complain about it too much.
* is the user getting the content for less because of the ad? Again, if so, then users will put up with it - and a lot of the slashdot posts reflect this.
* does the ad make the content more real? e.g. ads on the side of football pitches; don't think many people would object.
* BUT - if the user IS paying for the contect, and its price is not coming down because of the the ad, and it's not adding to the realism of the content - then you have a situation where users will start increasingly to rebel at being forced to watch ads, and cease buying products because of them.
* another poster wisely commented that corproate greed will win - but not necessarily in the ad's favour. As I recall, someone from EA (I think in an IV in Edge magazine) pointed out that their revenue from ads is under 2% of their total revenue. They are not going to risk failing to sell Halo X for $XXX because they want to squeeze in a couple of ads which will generate a tiny amount of extra revenue.
* Stories about product placement's huge future are generally fuelled by people in the ad industry who need it, to save their industry. That does not mean it's going to happen.