14 DAY TRIAL // A lot of people play games, that's a fact, but even those one would not usually associate with videogames, like big Hollywood directors or producers, are into this form of entertainment. Steven Spielberg, one of the most popular film producers in Los Angeles, who also worked on Electronic Arts' Boom Blox title, now comes to share his thoughts about the whole industry and what games he personally likes.
He says that, although his family is really into casual and music games, like Rock Band or Guitar Hero, he personally is a fan of action games, because he really likes to spend time playing Call of Duty 4 or Half Life. He also spoke about the first games that he ever played and cited the 1970's title Pong as the “Woodstock of video gaming” for the innovation it brought to the world.
Putting his filmmaking expertise to work, Spielberg criticizes the gaming industry for its use of low-quality cut scenes. The popular filmmaker says that the feelings from the cut scenes aren't kept in the action of the game, especially in first person shooters, where you get back to fulfilling missions.
“You know the thing that doesn't work for me in these games are the little movies where they attempt to tell a story in between the playable levels,” he says. “That's where there hasn't been a synergy between storytelling and gaming. They go to a lot of trouble to do these motion-capture movies that explain the characters. And then the second the game is returned to you and it's under your control, you forget everything the interstitials are trying to impact you with, and you just go back to shooting things.”
All in all, some pretty interesting remarks, which are backed up by the fact that some players tend to skip the cut scenes altogether and, by doing so, miss out on a story that took the development team a long time to create and place into the game. Let's just hope that gaming studios will try to make the cut scenes in their titles a bit more high quality, so that gamers would enjoy them.