It started out simple. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, along Microsoft’s President of the Interactive Entertainment Business Don Mattrick and Julia Boorstin of CNBC, hosted a panel at the USC School of Cinematic Arts to talk about the future of the entertainment industry. Naturally, the discussion veered to gaming.
Then, Spielberg and Lucas decided to get their respective opinions on the medium in. Spielberg criticized gaming for not being able to evoke the same kind of “empathy” as other mediums. “The second you get the controller something turns off in the heart, and it becomes a sport.”
Lucas, for his part, talked about how, “The big game of the next five years will be a game where you empathize very strongly with the characters and it’s aimed at women and girls. They like empathetic games.
“That will be a huge hit and as a result that will be the ‘Titanic’ of the game industry, where suddenly you’ve done an actual love story or something and everybody will be like ‘where did that come from?’ Because you’ve got actual relationships instead of shooting people.”
Hilariously enough, this is already seen in games like The Last of Us, Portal 2 and even Bioshock Infinite which emphasize strong inter-personal relationships and well-developed characters. Let’s not even bring up Shadow of the Colossus for the sake of fairness.
However, why didn’t Mattrick leap in and try to contradict the two? This is where we get to the crux of the argument: that gaming is still yet to be improved because it’s missing something – and that something is very Kinect-like in nature.
“I believe we need to get rid of the proscenium. We’re never going to be totally immersive as long as we’re looking at a square, whether it’s a movie screen or whether it’s a computer screen. We’ve got to get rid of that and we’ve got to put the player inside the experience, where no matter where you look you’re surrounded by a three-dimensional experience. That’s the future,” stated Spielberg.
Hilariously enough, Spielberg is the executive producer for the upcoming Halo The Television Series, which would not exist had it not been for gamers taking the original game and making a “sport” out of it. Likewise, George Lucas will best be remembered for his appalling Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, which placed far more emphasis on “shooting people” rather than trying to be the next “Titanic”.
Oh wait, it did with Padme and Anakin’s romance. Guess how that panned out? (Hint: Not so great)
We’re not sure what to make of all this, save for the fact that gaming itself is imperfect, according to Lucas and Spielberg, and needs to be fixed.
Source: Variety
