Gamertell

Recently, in an interview Yahoo! Games, film director and part of the development team for Boom Blox Steven Spielberg let the public know about the different problems he’s had with game cinematics.

In the interview he made it brutally obvious that he has been a long-time gamer bring up some of his past with gaming going all the way back to Pong. One of the ways he brought it up was toward the end of the interview where he is quoted as saying, “I thought Pong was the Woodstock of videogaming.” Being that it was one of the first big games of its time, that analogy is pretty accurate.

Spielberg also noted the failing of game cinematics and brought up that a lot of cut scenes try to tell a story. However, due to the obvious switch between gameplay and cut scenes, some gamers take a blind eye to what the cut scenes are trying to show.

To illustrate his point, he brought up the Medal of Honor and Call of Duty franchises saying that the cut scenes don’t work well as story telling devices. Then again, this is coming from someone who had more experience as a film director than game producer. That’s not necessarily something that would discredit him since he knows how to tell a story in a cinematic way.

One of Spielberg’s complaints with the storytelling aspect of cut scenes is the same as most gamers have: Stuff in the cut scenes often isn’t possible in the game. He used first-person shooters as an example, saying:

They go to a lot of trouble to do these [motion-capture] movies that explain the characters. And then the second the game is returned to you and it’s under your control, you forget everything the interstitials are trying to impact you with, and you just go back to shooting things. And that has not found its way into a universal narrative. And I think more has to be done in that arena.

Spielberg noted that game developers should be applauded in their attempts at telling the story. It just seems like he’s saying that if the cut scenes are to continue, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done before they really are a viable option for storytelling.

He also noted that a lot of film makers are learning quite a bit from video games and are starting to present more movies in the style that game developers try to tell the story of their games. To illustrate this he brought up the movies Wanted and The Bourne Ultimatum.

Quite a bit of Wanted does look like it should be a video game cut scene since, in terms of the action and special effects, it comes across following the look of different action games in general. A lot of the camera work for The Bourne Ultimatum was similar to the presentation of a lot of different games, like the Syphon Filter games

Read [GameDaily] Also Read [Yahoo! Games]