Is a revolution brewing and we just don’t know it? Could there be more to Microsoft’s efforts to connect games and TV with the Xbox One, most particularly with efforts like Halo The TV Series and Quantum Break? Alternate Reality Game creator Elan Lee, responsible for creating the I Love Bees ARG for Halo 2, gave his take on the whole thing, stating to Gamasutra that Microsoft is far ahead of everyone else in terms of what they’re trying to achieve.
“In the history of storytelling there have been five or six big advancements that changed the way we tell stories and the way human beings communicate with each other. Things like the invention of Western theatre, the invention of the printing press, the invention of the motion picture camera.
“Every time one of these things is invented we, being humans, scramble about madly trying to figure out how best to use these to convey a complex idea, emotions, narratives. We are, right now, right in the middle of another one of those huge events in the history of humanity’s ability to tell stories – and we don’t even have a name for it.
“It’s sort of the internet. It’s sort of connected devices. It’s sort of a lot of things. But we do understand that there’s this new, always-on, always-connected method by which we interact with each other all day, every day. And to be in a place like Microsoft that has an advantage over the rest of the planet to use that power, those tools, to redefine what it means to tell stories, that’s what gets me really excited.”
“We’ve got this interest now in redefining what storytelling is and to convey these stories across hardware, across a network that’s already established and has this audience. That puts Microsoft years ahead of anyone else out there. And the fact that they are this excited to use that advantage to tell really good stories and to hire a team that can tell those really good stories, that’s just exactly where I want to be in the world.”
Lee also stated that Kinct, along with SmartGlass and social networking has positioned the Xbox One to completely redefine the nature of entertainment, and that, “All it needs now is for a very smart group of people to flip that switch.”
Will that happen within the first year of the Xbox One’s launch? We’ll have to wait and see.