Interactive experiences can offer players new ways to escape reality

Oct 25, 2013 00:01 GMT  ·  By

Eric Hirshberg, the chief executive officer of Activision Publishing, says that video games should focus on their transportive capabilities and abandon any ideas of copying the genres and the main ideas of mainstream movies.

The executive tells Edge that, “When I think of games as an art form, they start with being transportive. Because they’re interactive, because you are more involved in the experience than in any other form of entertainment, it all starts with being transported.”

The best video games are those that manage to take the player out of the real-life situations he is experiencing and put him in a role that he cannot experience on his own.

Eric Hirshberg is clearly referring to the biggest Activision and Blizzard products, talking about the alternate realities offered by Call of Duty, World of Warcraft or Skylanders.

The CEO believes that video games cannot deliver the experience of a romantic comedy because they lack the mechanics to make players feel invested in such an experience and cannot generate the same amount of emotions.

He adds, “There’s this strange desire to morph games into movies or have them behave more like movies; I don’t share that desire. Games are wonderful as they are and do different things better than other forms of media.”

It’s unclear whether the Activision leader’s comments are linked to the recent launch of Beyond: Two Souls, the Quantic Dream and Sony title that many have called an interactive movie.

Activision is getting ready to launch Call of Duty: Ghosts, a shooter that will be offered on November 5 on the Xbox 360, the Wii U, the PC and the PlayStation 3.

The development team at Infinity Ward has at times referred to the single player of the game as offering a cinematic quality, something that the CEO would probably disapprove of.