Pirates of the Caribbean director says designers should have ideas which make executives "shit themselves"
Gore Verbinski, director of Pirates of the Caribbean, has rallied some of the games industry's senior execs to find auteurs in gaming.
Wired's Game Life reports that in his keynote address at DICE in Las Vegas last night, Verbinski said: "On a design level, you need someone to carry the vision. It is time for the auteur of gaming," and that "Homogenisation of voice" was threatening creativity in both his field of film and that of gaming.
Verbinski said he stands his ground in creative meetings, and that game developers should do the same: "I fight tooth and nail for my opinion because I cannot stand watching a film that has too many of them." He added that game designers should have ideas that make executives "shit themselves".
"Games are no longer dismissable by those who call it a hobby," he said. "Yet it is so full of potential, and therefore so empty.
Licenced titles specifically are "flooding your market" he said. Verbinski's his critical eye didn't waver when it came to the Pirates of the Caribbean games.
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"We created value out of nothing," he said of how the film was born from an under-appreciated show at Disney World. "And then I watched as they created nothing out of value," he added of the Pirates-based games. Verbinski added that we wanted a MMO Pirates game to coincide with the films' release, but "it wasn't in their business plan".
Verbinski added that games and films were influencing each other, saying, "that is exciting and dangerous and in fact a little bit mad." He added: "this is a time for madness, a time to go down dark alleys."
"Our audience wants us to surprise them. They demand it of us. When they see something that's new, they will champion it because they discovered it."
He later added: "Let's not make games that remind us of a better version of the same thing. There is so much potential in this room. You haven't even scratched the surface of what is possible in terms of the human experience.
"We are at the precipice, and an epiphany is about to occur."
What a great sentiment. Let's hope some dev's begin to stick up for themselves and their ideas.
I would be interested to know how the director job works in the film industry. I get the impression that in the games industry, the creative team end up having to make concessions for financial/business reasons, because the company is a whole, and they could lose their job or the company could go out of business.
The movie industry seems to make much bigger celebrities of the director, so production companies hire the director because they know he is skilled and people want to watch films by that director. Here, the creative forces seem to be "just another member of the team".
