Pirates of the Caribbean Director Talks Games

Gore Verbisnki is the director of Pirates of the Caribbean, the movie that made hundreds of millions of dollars on the back of an old pirate story twisted by the mind of the director. And recently, the same Verbinski has given a speech at the DICE 2008 summit in which he encouraged game developers to go a little "crazy" when they are developing games. Drawing on his experience in movies and in re-inventing old narratives to reach new audiences, he said games need to find new ways of telling stories, ways that are not directly borrowed from movies or other media.

Now, Verbinski has declared that he is very interested in getting into game design. The Los Angeles Times quoted him as saying that: "After working seven years straight on five movies back to back, I picked up my game controller and started playing. I just was blown away by the potential. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I feel that we are on the brink of something phenomenal." He said he respected the adrenalin rush that most games aim to create, but he wished games could also have made the player experience extreme loss and pain.

The Pirates of the Caribbean director again trashed the games based on the movies he directed, saying that they were little more than accompanying merchandise to the movies. Games needed to distance themselves from traditional storytelling and traditional presentation and come up with "zero and anti-narratives," which apparently means that stories should be either user created in their entirety or told not from the perspective of the player, but rather from the perspective of the world the player goes through. You know, sort of like how BioShock presented much of the story through the art and the design of Rapture rather than through explicit text and narrative.

Verbinski sure has a lot of ideas and his approach is non-conventional to the core. Whether he can actually get a team up running and create a game, maybe even a Pirates-themed game, employing all his ideas is a different matter altogether.