Develop: Movies aren't our friends

Matthew Southern of Evolution believes there has never been a proper 'mainstream' videogame, even after 30 years of the industry trying to grow beyond the nerdish stereotype.

At the Develop conference today, Southern argued that it was about time developers stopped looking on enviously at filmmakers and the movie industry and started playing to the strengths of their own field, rather than aping those of another.

Academic theorists and researchers are the key, he says, to recognising these strengths and using other forms of culture as tools to improve the game development process - and the titles that come through from that process, of course.

As one of the leads on the Motorstorm project, Southern recognises how much the actual production of even his game relies on movie-making processes, saying it owes more to TV and film than other motor racing games.

Southern is worried that this reliance on TV and film could be disastrous, leading to gaming being swallowed up by these two older, more established industries.

Gaming still hasn't yet achieved proper mainstream popularity. Southern revealed that Motorstorm has sold 3.5 million copies, but Top Gear, for example, has been watched by 350 million people.

Although not a strictly fair comparison, it does illustrate where gaming is in the overall picture.

Despite the unprecedented technological progress in gaming, 'cultural' progress is in-line with movies and TV. Southern believes accelerating this cultural growth will help the critics accept gaming as a proper art from.

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Southern believes progress can be made by redefining the industries relationship with film, challenging the presumptions that we currently believe.
What are these presumptions? Southern says they are:

• Watching a movie or TV is a passive experience
• Movies are fundamentally a storytelling medium
• Most mainstream movies are dumb
• Movies reflect our times

The first of these 'cinematic cowpats' is that movies and film are a strictly passive experience. Southern believes this is merely one type of viewing, not the only kind.

Watching is an activity, he says, providing engagement, empathy, laughter, tears, rejection, schadenfreude and so on. For Southern, screen media "clearly isn't interactive", but it isn't as passive as some would have us believe.

Games, however, can't just be described as 'interactive'. Southern says they are "voluntary control systems", where different levels of control change the gaming experience.

Southern believes a successful videogame offers the right amount of control and viewing to its target audience.

So, when we take the different definitions of how we watch films, then add the element of 'control' discussed above, games could offer the next mainstream entertainment form.

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Secondly, we have the presumption that movies are fundamentally a storytelling medium. However, in recent times, scholars have realised that movies didn't start as a storytelling medium.

Silent movies, apparently, were never really telling stories. Early cinema involved an 'aesthetic of attractions', showing the technical possibilities of the new medium or the spectacle of human figures.

This, Southern believes, is akin to contemporary videogames, which are also quite often about spectacle - after all, graphics are often seen as the most important thing for a lot of players.

Films 'surrendered' to narrative, losing some of its potential. Games still have the potential to offer more than mere storytelling.

Games such as Flywrench, Crayon Physics, Timebot and The Marriage are described as 'pure games', which make the medium unique, i.e. they don't take cues from other media or forms of entertainment.

Neither films nor games are, says Southern, fundamentally a storytelling medium. Therefore, games shouldn't be 'seduced' by storytelling and should play to the unique strengths of the medium, what makes them different from everything else.

Another point Southern made was asking why there was no gaming equivalent to 'film school', where the likes of Coppola, Lucas, Polanski and so on came out of to forever change cinema.

Mainstream shouldn't always be 'dumb', in both films and games. The term 'casual gaming' is quite insulting, making such titles trivial. This leads to developers producing 'shovel-ware', which could then lead to people being put off gaming by terrible, generic titles, produced through sheer cynicism.

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Finally, Southern believes gaming hasn't got to the point where it can do more than just mirror the society they come out into, whereas some films can go further, changing said societies.

In order for games to mature and begin to step into this new sphere, to be subversive and change views on the world, they need to stop being 'conservative' and start taking more risks.

In the end, gaming can be seen to be at the stage films were in the 1920s, when films coming out couldn't be seen as being aimed strictly at adults only. Likewise today, games are still seen as being for everyone, that they are all aimed at children.
Southern believes this needs to change.