Month: November 2013

From the Guardian: Videogames Have Transformed The Movie Industry

Andy Serkis: There was probably a time when people in the games industry wanted to emulate films, but now it’s very much the other way around: the technology is driven by video games. So, for instance, virtual production, pre-vis, many of the tools we use in the film industry have come out of the games industry.
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I was listening to Classic FM this morningand the third top-ranked piece of music created uproar, because it was from a video game. It just goes to show where convergence is at. Video game technology and video games are acknowledged by Bafta now, and are rightly getting credit for what they are, which is extraordinary pieces of art.

I’ve said this constantly for years. Games are different. They’re not books, not films and not music. They’re not the web, they’re not just software. In truth they subsume all media. They are the ultimate expression of the digital media industry.

I was surprised the first time I saw a 3D scene rendered and how “raw” it was. The scene was designed to be viewed from a certain angle and there was no need to produce planes and shapes more than could be viewed. everything else was invisible. It reminded me of a legend that two craftsmen could produce cabinets of astounding quality, using the best materials but the observer could determine which was the master by inspecting the back of the cabinets. The artisan who decorated the reverse of the cabinet, the part that would never be seen, was the one who had the greatest pride in their craft.

Tools like 3D games and, in particular, those designed to work with tools like the Oculus Rift mean you have to pay attention to the back of the cabinet. You cannot determine whether or not the viewer will be looking from one angle or another. Players will find emergent ways to experience your media. Movies don’t have this problem because films are all shot from one point of view. We know that movie sets are balsa wood and we try to ignore every time we see a tombstone or a TARDIS door “wobble”. This is the back of the cabinet being seen for what it is: plain, undecorated and flimsy.

In games there are bugs that permit the viewing of material from slightly different points of view. This is the equivalent of “wobble”:

For obvious reasons these would never be seen in a movie. Though a lot of the scenes seem eerily reminiscent of “Gravity”.

These antics may be “glitches” but they highlight an experience that movies and books simply cannot replicate. A book that went into this level of unpredictability would be a farce. But games are a new medium; a new method of expression. And it’s necessary to treat them as games and not as movies.

This is short, awe-inspiring and, at the same time, makes me a little sad.

This is a longer, feet on the ground, video:

From MA.TT (Matt Mullenweg):

If Microsoft did this a decade ago we’d call for the DoJ to reopen their investigation. Apple has the best phone, best tablet, and in many ways the best operating system — we should not give them a pass for this blatantly self-interested and user-hostile stance. Defaults matter.

Emphasis mine. Keep that in mind.

And the DOJ would reply “Come back to me when they have a monopoly. Any monopoly. Of anything” because someone as smart as Matt Mullenweg should understand that you don’t get the DOJ involved when it’s just something you don’t like. You get them involved when there’s a problem with how a company is obeying the law.

Also, on the subject of defaults, Matt seems to be new to the Mac. Defaults are something that Apple has always been shy of. Sure, on the Mac they permitted you to set defaults for things they don’t care about (like which app to open a JPG with) but outside of that? They’ve removed most of the defaults over the years and this is not because they’re user hostile because if that were the case, their users would leave. No, it’s because they have figured out that the vast majority of their users actually do not give a damn. Further than that, the vast majority of their users would actually be adversely affected by apps that demanded to be the defaults.

If there is a problem with defaults then why doesn’t the “power user” community entreat developers to provide defaults in an agreed way? Apple isn’t going to cave on this because they’re shifting more product and making more profit than god these days. And it’s still open to interpretation that they’re right.

But you’re right. Apple should kowtow to the alpha geeks who demand defaults. These same alpha geeks who would be just as likely to switch to Android or Windows Phone if the new and shiny appeared. If “in many ways“, the OS on those handsets and tablets improved. That’s a valuable market to be sure.

I will until my last breath remember the past and the struggles my generation made to build this country into a civilised state for the working and middle classes. If we are to survive as a progressive nation we have to start tending to our living because the wounded: our poor, our underemployed youth, our hard-pressed middle class and our struggling seniors shouldn’t be left to die on the battleground of modern life.