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I’m going to say the day was a success, by managing to be continuously entertaining, drawing in several big names, and the fact everyone taking part was enthusiastic. Despite this, festival itself was failure, and I think this is because of the complex the games industry has about film.
Seamus Blackley’s talk was worth it for his discussion of the constant comparisons between gaming and film. How did this start? Film didn’t spend the first 30 years of it’s life yelling ‘I’m cooler than books!’ only to spend it’s nights at home, crying into a pillow about it’s inability to score with girls beat book sales with box office receipts. If you’re interested, the 2002 numbers are
10.5 Billion dollars videogame sales (including hardware and peripheral sales)
Vs.
9.1 billion dollars box office receipts+$8.4 billion dollars video rental+$8.3 billion dollars DVD sales.
But who really cares? Something clearly obvious from the festival was that everyone in the industry cares. They want to beat film, and as ‘Hollywood or Bust’ demonstrated, they want to do this by aping cinema. But to quote Stephen Deutsch quoting Kubrick quoting Nietzche –
‘What is ape to man? A pitiful and disgusting thing. As is man to superman.”
The insanity is that superman thinks that he’s an ape. Games are an interactive form of entertainment, and by that very mark any comparison is meaningless. I think games aren’t going to move on until they start believing that they’re interactive, and getting past the idea of cut-scenes. What’s the point? Tim wanted the Metal Gear Solid remake to lose the codec screens. I’d go further – when I’m playing it, I NEVER want to lose control of Snake. Snake has to reassure Meryl about killing in cold blood? Discuss it while I’m going somewhere. Hell, let me pace a room, or get involved in an exciting ‘how many fags can Snake smoke before cancer gets him?’ minigame. If Psycho Mantis asks Snake to remove his mask, then I’ll bloody well do it – don’t do it for me. Aren’t you bored of when characters stand still and talk for hours? How long were the cut-scenes in GTA3? A couple of minutes? CAN YOU EVEN REMEMBER THEM? Or were you to not paying attention and busy playing the game? Get rid of this shit. I don’t think the story has to be removed – but there’s a million innovative ways to have an un-interactive plot in an interactive game and it doesn’t involve random encounters. Move on. Games are not Cinema. Games are better.
I think I could blame a lot of our complex about cinema about always being thought of as being ‘you know, for kids’. You can hear gaming again, whining ‘but I’m an adult!’ Cinema, for it’s first 30 years, was ‘you know, from Satan’s asshole’. But cinema had pornography. Games have Lara Croft and DOA: XBV, which are the cultural equivalent of Carry On movies without any of the jokes. I think these are gamings attempt to find it’s pornography. But it’s a turn off for women, and it’s costing the industry essentially 50% of the possible market, even when they do have great gameplay. If you're put off by the marketing or the theme, you'd never know. Everyone loves the GBASP, right? It’s being advertised with the tagline ‘For Men’ in the UK. It’s foolish.
That’s not to say that women themselves are not to blame - Aleks Krotoski placed a fair amount of blame at the women’s magazine industry, which remains steadfastly against covering anything to do with games, in an industry dominated by males but with many strong, successful females (including Reiko Kodama, of Sega), she noted this was absurd.
And Session 5 was entirely about exploiting the IP of films. Seamus had already shown that game IP far outsells, and it far more profitable, than external IP. So why do games do it? It’s easy, and it doesn’t require any creativity. And it’s obvious from this fact that there are very few licensed games that manage to be creative, or even actually any good. As great as KOTOR, it’s just Neverwinter Nights with the Star Wars licence bolted on. Doing this isn’t going to get games anywhere – and neither is over exploiting home IP (I can’t say Lara Croft deserves 6 games, really). The festival needed to discuss learning ideas from the film industry, such as creating structures to support creative flexibility, and increasing time spent in pre and postproduction. Techniques must be honed from the Hollywood template. The characters of Alias and Bond, games that attempt to be cinematic, looked like mannequins compared to Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, a game animated using traditional hand animation.
Finally, there is no reason that the sessions I watched (and for which audience members paid £175 ($350) to see) could not have been viewed by the public in larger venues for a fraction of the price. There is not a single session in the entire Edinburgh Film Festival guide that only industry members can view. If gaming it to ever be seen as valid as film by the public, then it needs to be more inclusive. The ‘Game Over Film’ event was a brave attempt – that torpedoed itself with the definitive demonstration that members of the games industry in public are far too self-depreciating about gaming. One slide stated ‘Computer Games are a childish pastime for spotty young boys who can’t speak to each other and cinema is grown up and important’. The idea that games can transcend this idea completely is never touched on.
The games industry needs to say ‘Games are a mass-market form of entertainment like any other. They are unique by being interactive – but are not nerdy, or too complex. They are entertainment. And by that are already as valid as films in every way.’ But no one established this fact – and so the Edinburgh International Games Festival failed at the only discussion it held for the general public, who would have been more interested in a debate about the difference between games and film, rather than a desperate beg for validation.
Next year, I hope it will be different, as this is an entirely deserving part of the gaming calendar.
EIGF Awards Party, Opal Lounge
I got there only shortly after the doors opened and the place was jumping – maybe because the games industry isn’t fashionable enough to arrive late, but probably more to do with the free drink (including the ‘Shambles’ - a mix of Vodka, Red Bull, and Moet and Chandon. Que el fuck?)
A short movie played listing the shortlist for the Edge award for Excellence and Innovation –
Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (Nintendo, GC)
Eternal Darkness (Silicon Knights, GC)
Ikaruga (Treasure, GC)
Battlefield 1942 (Digital Illusions, PC)
GTA: Vice City (Rockstar North, PS2)
Metroid Prime (Retro, GC)
A heavy bent towards Gamecube software, and despite the Scottish heritage of GTA, Metroid Prime won, with David Gosen accepting the award graciously on behalf of Retro Studios.
I, thankfully, didn’t have to stand around like a lemon in a room full of people all getting off their tits on the rich man’s equivalent of moonshine. I first spent some time discussing games with some female web designers who had attended the day – I will admit to being surprised that they were gamers (I’ll admit to being surprised that there were any women in the room at all). They’d barely played a game since the most recent Tomb Raider - that had actually gone as far as nearly putting them off games completely. The funny thing is it was more because of how bad the game was than the continued objectification of Lara.
I’d been putting it off all day, by that point. I’d have kicked myself if I didn’t do it, considering the close links between IC and EDGE. And so I walked across the room and introduced myself to David McCarthy, deputy editor of Edge. I was actually looking for Ste Curran, the ‘Editor at Large’ but had come up against the problem that I had no idea what he looked like. David is reassuringly noticeable, not exactly the terrifying bear of a man Gary Penn is (who I imagine you can spot from space), but easy to find. He was literally standing in front of Ste, who I’ll certainly notice from now on.
“David, you’ll never believe this – this guy reads our magazine and he isn’t a c**t! He hasn’t even asked us why we gave Halo 10/10! And even better – he thinks everyone on our forum was a c**t!”
The funny thing is that it never even crossed my mind to ask why Halo was given 10/10… Who even cares? Scores are meaningless when journalism is performed with passion. I think an even funnier thing was that Ste was quickly accosted by an, ahem, forum c**t to complain about them being shut down. Anyone reading this who cares can be aware that Ste fought to keep them open. “What are the chances the next question will be ‘why did Halo get 10/10?’” I wondered.
edit: Ste would like everyone to know that he doesn't think all all readers are c**ts, just the people who continually pester him about halo getting 10 out of 10, trying to pimp some tired conspiracy theory and casting aspersions about the magazine's morality. same goes for the forum users.
[next: Appendix]
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