‘I love it when devs say, “we have 800 lines of dialogue”. I mean, who fucking cares? That's a standard?'
Ken Levine rejected an offer to co-develop a game with a talented Hollywood film director, the BioShock Infinite creative lead has revealed.
And in a new interview with Develop, Levine explains why he’d turn the opportunity down if asked again, and why the game industry needs to grow out of being “star-struck” from the film industry.
“I was offered the chance to make a game with a film director. A very talented film director,” he said.
“[The Hollywood execs said] they really liked what I was doing and wanted to share it – that this project with creative leads from both game and film – was going to be amazing.
“My feeling is, why? Why would any game designer want to do that?
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“What’s the point of having two creative leads together, and why would I want a film director to help me make a game, any more than they would want me to help out with their films?”
Levine, who in his earlier years tried and failed in pursuit of a Hollywood screenwriting career, said games shouldn’t be seen as subservient to film.
“I think there’ a sense in the entertainment fields that videogames are seen as the junior varsity,” he said.
“There’s this feeling of ‘oh one day you can come up to our league’.
“And of course film directors can jump through the game industry’s open doors. Guillermo del Toro – who by the way is an amazing film director – recently signed a deal with THQ to make videogames.
“And I’m thinking… he’s never made a videogame.
“Maybe he’s got a genius for it. But games are really, really hard to make well. In our industry there’s too many people star-struck of the movie world, jumping into deals with some big movie director just because they’re big film directors.”
In Levine’s most personal and candid interview yet – available to read here – Levine slams the game development industry’s obsession with quantifying value.
“I love it when developers say ‘in our game we have 800 lines of dialogue’. I mean, who fucking cares? That’s a standard? ‘We have 600 hours of cut-scenes’. So? As a writer, bulk is the easy part. I could have you 800 lines of dialogue tomorrow.
“Making content is easy. People got pretty great at it way before us. It’s making it work; leaving enough out, making it work as an interactive piece, that’s the designer’s real challenge.”
A successful game is reliant on no other number than one. One good idea, one good development team, one good game.
It's like those people that say "I filled a Blu-Ray disk, and I could have filled more". Really? I've got a cushion that's filled with horse hair, doesn't make it a better cushion because it's full... it just makes it full. Just the same as it doesn't make a better game, simply because the BR disc is full.
There's an obsession with bigger = better, more = better, and it's wrong. Bigger = bigger, more = more, it's that simple!
Remember 1 + 1 + 1 = 1.
Erm I think you mean 1 * 1 * 1 = 1
The guy sounds peeved cause he didn't make it in Film so he's basically bunnin(UK speak) them..
I don't think its a bad idea for The computer games industry to work along side the movie industry and when the Next NextGeneration versions of the Xbox360 (Xbox720?), PS4 and the Nintendo Wii (WiiHD, WiiVR?) come out you'll see even more of a blur between the work done for high-end HD3D by the Hollywood Visual Effects Studios and the work done on HD3D computer games..
Eventually when you by the BluRay Film(or whatever betters it in the future to become the new defacto standard) A version of the Computer/console game will already be on there..
Call it what you will, but as sure as light = day it's gonna happen
Especially by companies such as Sony who have vested interest in both Movie creation and high-end video game development.
IMO of course ;D
True colloborations between film and games are uncharted, exciting territory that require 2 mutually compatible creative leaders, one from either industry to make it happen. The truth is the way the project is structured, in terms of the way it's component parts fit together needs to be dictated by the games guy. However once the film guy has grasped this, it is important he is given greater directional control of the majority of the content providing it always conforms to the structure and numerous protocols imposed by the games guy.
However for regular games Ken is bang on the money. Pre 1993 the value of advance paid for a game was calculated based on how much the publisher was willing to pay to secure the services and talent of the development team, regardles of the size of the game (similar to the way a 70s or 80s music act might be signed up for their next album).
THIS WAS ARTIST POWER
From 1994 onwards this was replaced by the model of having to justify the cost of everything, which was introduced by the new raft of big hitting publishers of the time (Sony, Warner, BMG etc) who knew next to nothing about what a good game was, but sure as hell knew a lot about how to control aproduvtion process. They offered inflated advances to a lot of very new dotcom style start ups, who were made to justify every penny they spent in order to justify those advances.
THIS IS PUBLISHER POWER
What precious few of the post 1994 publsihers or devleopers were willing to admit was that
value is in quality, not quantity. Meaning that some people in games have the ability to conjure great things form nothing and some people haven't. We are not all equal, you cannot learn these skills at university, they are either in you or not, the world isn't fair and some people are creatively or technically more equal than others.
The value of a game prior to it's release can't all be quantified on a balance sheet. Publishing is a gamble and the publishers job is to back the right horse, not to throw more many into training the wrong horse, in horse racing as in games the ends justifies the means and success is everything. Also making the most amount of money from the least amount of initial outlay is also prudent business... and smaller games generally cost less to make
