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Beyond Machinima: Rudy Poat and John Gaeta on the Future of Interactive Cinema
The cineractive is a very simplistic passive adjunct to a game, but if you step back one layer it could be an interactive cineractive. The cineractive can be photo realistic at one point and the game could have a match fidelity to its cineractive and you're almost to what I'm talking about here. It all has to do with whether you can have precise match fidelity, so that the experience is contiguous and immersive. In a way it lends itself more to games that tend to be more ambient, and less information heavy. Shadow of the Colossus is a good ambient, cinematic type game. That's the type of game that would interweave in this way if we chose to do that. Leading back to my experiment with Rudy, which was a really small project, is trying to get people to imagine that there is a market for hybrid formats like this. It's going to happen, because we see all the machinimist experimentation. The new generation wants more interactivity out of their story content but we can't do that in a way that breaks the fundamental, structural needs of storytelling. Every time we try a chaos story mode, people feel that it's too open ended and it doesn't have the emotional impact or weight as if someone has weaved this labyrinth for you to travel with a destination in mind that isn't expected. It's like knowing how the movie The Others ends before you get there. I feel that as the new guard comes into film making and a lot of them now have experience on the gaming side, I believe they'll begin experimenting. The first tier will be visualization as a technological link that overlaps all the right people and tools for the first steps. GS: Ok then. JG: How's that? GS: That's great. JG: You've just experienced the classic John Gaeta spiral out. It's my favorite way to talk. I apologize, I tend to do that. I kind of let the idea ravel out. GS: Oh, no, really, I'm the same way. JG: Some people think I'm an engineer, but I'm not an engineer at all. I deal a lot with technical concepts. I really like re-arranging building blocks. I like to take very bright folks and pool them together. I give them a slightly augmented goal, thinking that they can take it somewhere. That's why I'm less qualified to talk to you about the mechanics of Rudy's materials than what objectives I've set out for him because I knew he was capable of certain things. I've known him for ten years now.
GS: You mentioned Shadow of the Colossus earlier, and I know that with Bullet Time you've inspired numerous game mechanics over time, have any games inspired your work? JG: Oh yeah. Yes. I'm not sure how to quantify this, I'm not a hardcore gamer, but I obsessively watch games and people making them. I've gone to GDC the last six years. I've met many people who have made games and I've had friends who have gone over. I've had my friends take me through games, but I'm kinda feeble when it comes to controllers. That's created a little inhibition in me, a little bit, to get into certain games too much. That doesn't mean, though, that I'm not observing the action. I'm very fascinated with algorithmic action beats and evolving algorithmic action beats. How people create climax, how you build your way through achievements and how you die, live again and pass your virtual self to a deeper place. It's a very interesting concept. To me, it's the staging ground for virtual reality in general and how you can think of yourself as an avatar that can live and die several times over. |
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