What are the difficulties of bringing a game to life?

YL: Well, it's actually a difficulty that exists with every movie. You have to create a series of compelling characters, especially your lead. And you have to create a compelling story that gets people to feel and gets people immersed in the story and in the experience of that character. When you are starting with a video game, you are starting with a context but you're not starting with a character that really has an arc and humanity and empathy. So you have to write that for the character for the movie.

Games also don't have a complex story with emotional turns in a classic three-act story structure. The audience, to a large extent, demands a beginning, middle, and an end when they go to a movie. A game doesn't have the same structure because there are a series of escalations. There's a trial and error, there is an interactivity that is very different than -- here's how the story opens, here's what happens in the middle and here's how it concludes.

Reversing that, the question is: did you create a world in your movie that's compelling for the audience to engage in by themselves? We have a game right now at Sony Online Entertainment called The Agency, which taps into appeal of the espionage genre. Alias, James Bond, the Bourne films, and 24 each have put their own stamp on spy thrillers.

We're putting our own fresh twist on the genre with The Agency by creating an online game in which players actually step into the role of a fledgling agent in a mercenary world. We're stretching the MMO genre with this game and breaking out of the "men in tights" world and introducing the "men in tuxedos with silencers world." What Alias or James Bond or the Bourne films do is create an espionage world, which is a very interesting context for the game player to actually exist in.

What has the video game industry learned from Hollywood?

YL: I think that the video game industry has applied a lot of techniques of filmmaking into the game experience to make it more visceral and to make it more real. I'd say the first one is cinematography. If you look at the evolution of the video game business -- of the video game experience -- the whole notion of the first-person shooter category evolved as a function of somebody saying, "Oh, look, first-person camera, I can give you a different emotional experience." I don't think they said, "Oh, I'm copying something I saw in horror films." But there are certainly a lot of slasher movies with first-person camera where you saw Jason from his point-of-view as he was about to kill somebody by the campfire.

You saw that on film before you saw it in Doom. What they did in Doom was take that first-person camera technique and apply it to the shooter genre and then upped it a notch. And so cinematography, basic environmental design, basic character design -- a lot of essential effects that make the game experience more real -- come from people looking at movies and saying, "I want to translate that experience into my game," whether they do it consciously or subconsciously.

How have video game marketers mirrored Hollywood?

YL: Certainly, one of the things Hollywood does really effectively is sell you on a story in 30 seconds, or 60 seconds, or two-and-a-half minutes, depending on the format. Game publishers selling video games through trailers or 30-second spots definitely borrows from Hollywood. But I think that for the most part, that isn't what sells video games. What sells movies to a large extent is word-of-mouth. You can have a opening weekend in either business, but the reason Halo 3 and Halo 2 before it had huge opening weekends was because Halo is a great gameplay experience not because they cut a bunch of really cool spots.

What are your thoughts on Hollywood actors migrating to games?

YL: I think you'll see more of this because it's a much larger medium, so there's an economic opportunity for them and many of these actors actually play games. With Surf's Up, we had a partnership with Ubisoft for a game. A lot of our cast was pretty young, Shia LaBeouf, Zooey Deschanel and Jon Heder, and they were glad to voice themselves in the game because they wanted to play the game themselves. So I think that there's that aspect of it.

Also, from an animation standpoint, when you voice a character, you create a character games are a great extension opportunity. The translation of animation from film to game is a little bit purer because it's a digital character to begin with. So if you are Cody Maverick, our hero in Surf's Up, he looks the same in the game as he does in the movie.