.jpg?i=1302087902 "Houser: Art debate is for time-wasters")
Rockstar's VP of creative offers his perspective on the games industry's ever present deliberation
Dan Houser, vice president of creative at Rockstar Games, has stated his belief that the 'games as art' debate is one that is largely alluring to time-wasters.
"We try very hard to avoid the debate as to whether games are art, as it tends to attract people with too much time on their hands," said Houser in an interview with the The Hollywood Reporter. "That being said, we obviously feel that games are an amazing creative medium that have unique rewards and unique challenges."
Houser went on to suggest that contemporary games are moving towards increased creative maturity, as technology, production techniques and developer ability improve.
"We have tried hard to ensure that in our games, an extra layer of gloss and polish is used to make the interactivity more interesting, the world more vibrant and the characters more nuanced," confirmed Houser. "If we do that, we create an experience that is very engaging for people and entirely unique to the medium of games – the chance to live in a world that does not exist and experience life as someone you are not.
In the interview Houser also pointed to films like The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon, Naked City, Out of the Past, and Chinatown as key influences over L.A. Noire.
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“The game, like many of our recent games, has been an absolutely enormous production,” he said, drawing parallels with film production. “With L.A. Noire, we employed a massive number of actors in the game – over 400 – along with hair and make-up artists, a great television director, and as the game is set in the golden era of Hollywood, a lot of original costumes, props and other research from the studios themselves.”
I understand this attitude, and I have enormous respect for Houser and Rockstar, but when a figure as prominent as Dan Houser makes a comment like "an extra layer of gloss and polish is used to make the interactivity more interesting, the world more vibrant and the characters more nuanced", I just want to scream at him "then hire a decent writer!". Red Dead was a case in point. It had the most gorgeous environments I've ever seen in a game, but I couldn't finish it because of the atrocious writing, which lacked all the qualities he seems to believe you can put into a game with an extra layer of 'gloss'. It isn't only Rockstar, Dragon Age was like bad fan-fiction, and even the best game writing rarely reaches above the heights of an average movie script or a bad novel. The industry needs desperately to either cultivate designers who can write, or attract authors who are willing to learn how to design. I actually believe Dan Houser could be in the best position to do this, by releasing an accessible GTA4/RDR narrative creation tool, with similar functionality to IF-creation software, but LBP/Halo Forge style access to the whole asset set and gameworld rules. It's more work, but I'd pay money for it. Pretty please, Dan?
It's incredibly depressing that the only thing Dan can reference for LA Noire is the standard set of Film Noir standards.
It seems researching the actual era and its crimes and police procedures comes secondary to simply aping cinema with a grab-bag of what's 'cool', which pretty much underlies all of Rockstar's big hits - and I guess why they're over-rated bags of (often) shoddy and anachronistic game design.
