GameSetWatch - What Game Design Can Learn From 300

Ubisoft's game design supremo Clint Hocking has posted an excellent new in-depth blog post called 'Hollywood’s Bloody Ballet – What Game Design Can Learn From 300', and it's a dense, meaty read.

I can't really do it justice by excerpts, but here's a key couple of paragraphs for a taster: "If 300 proves that filmmaking is ultimately, at its core, about low-level visual storytelling, and that the lofty high-level plotting of a movie, while often important, is simply not central to a film, then there can be no real or meaningful convergence between the two mediums."

He continues: "Music is about the low level sequencing of tones. Cooking is about the low level blending flavors. Film is about the low level sequencing of images. Games are about the low level interaction between player and system... Saying that games can learn from film and vice versa – while not entirely untrue – is only as true as saying convergence between cooking and ballet would make ballet taste better and would make meals better express the beauty of the human form. Ridiculous."

[On this subject, actually, the whole convergence thing is being discussed by the 2nd Hollywood and Games Summit, being organized by my compatriots in the CMP Game Group alongside The Hollywood Reporter for later in June. There's some pretty interesting speakers announced thus far, including Jordan Mechner of Prince Of Persia fame, and TMNT director Kevin Munroe, plus Heroes exec producer Jesse Alexander. Not plugging - it's just relevant.]

Comments

Saying that film and games could learn as much from each other as ballet could from cooking is quite wrong.

Games are about the interaction, true, but visual storytelling is also a huge part of it.

Games and movies have a lot more in common than cooking and ballet, so the comparison is not a correct one.

Posted by: zam | April 23, 2007 11:25 AM

Yes, the thing I loved most about SimCity? The characters.

Posted by: John H. | April 23, 2007 2:04 PM

"Yes, the thing I loved most about SimCity? The characters."

I don't think anybody plays a Zelda or FF game for the interaction alone..

Posted by: zam | April 23, 2007 2:05 PM

This is a compelling piece of writing, but dead wrong from the first assertion. Claiming that films are merely about visceral response is like dismissing Shakespeare as a gory rollercoaster. Saying video games are there just to twitch my adrenaline center might have been true of the arcade games of the '70s and '80s, but is no more true of games now than it would be of Classical music. Is Riven merely a gut-level interaction with a system? Is Grim Fandago just a series of mouse clicks? This entire argument is just a series of ad-hominen fallacies against games and game designers.

Posted by: Michael Eilers | April 23, 2007 9:16 PM

I agree about the basic point. When I saw 300, I thought it was the best movie of the year, and it was all very gripping. Then I immediately got for all about it. But a movie like Momento, which hinges on story, stayed with me. I think games depend much more on the idea that you are playing the best thing ever, because it feels like you *are the story, and you are important -- for five minutes, or for 12 hours.

Posted by: John Brandon | April 24, 2007 10:39 AM