Re: [Fwd: Gamasutra article]

[Chris Crawford <chriscrawford@wave.net>]

Brandon, you really should see Shrek; it's not at all what you expect.
Indeed, it is pointedly anti-Disney. When the bluebird starts singing along
with the heroine, the heroine takes the song so high that the bluebird
explodes trying to keep up with her -- and then the heroine fries the
bluebird's eggs for breakfast. And the graphics in Shrek, while competently
executed, are nowhere near state of the art. By contrast, Final Fantasy's
big selling point was its top-notch graphics. And while you may think that
Shrek wasn't so good or that Final Fantasy wasn't so bad, the public and the
critics disagree. Shrek's box office was roughly an order of magnitude
greater than Final Fantasy's. The critics loved Shrek and roasted Final
Fantasy. Check out the movie websites and you'll see how extreme the
difference between the two is.

I certainly agree with you that tacking drama onto games will never
accomplish anything, and I also feel that the opposite approach (trying to
make a movie and tacking on some interactivity) is just as dumb. Combining
the two strategies doesn't work either -- the solution is not some sort of
arithmetic average between geekdom and Hollywood. We need both the artist
and the engineer, certainly, but they must combine their efforts at a much
deeper level than the article addressed.

If we really can make interactive entertainment as dramatically interesting
as a movie like Shrek, then we really should attain the broad appeal of a
movie like Shrek. But if we fall short of that level of dramatic quality,
we'll just get a money-losing bomb like Final Fantasy.

Chris