Comments on: Prayers For Kane

By: Grand Text Auto » Blog/Forum Posts of Note

Grand Text Auto » Blog/Forum Posts of Note — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 18:56:30 +0000

[...] ture Clash suggests Shadow of the Colossus is videogaming’s Citizen Kane… hmm, I’m not so sure about that. [...]

By: Grand Text Auto » Game Lit Links

Grand Text Auto » Game Lit Links — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 00:25:21 +0000

[...] Not your grandmother’s game, indeed. At last week’s Tokyo Game Show, echoing his remarks from last March’s GDC, Neil Young of EA again suggests the game in [...]

By: Chris Crawford

Chris Crawford — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 16:31:01 +0000

“digital games already seem to me more diverse in form than where things were with cinema in the late 1930’s”

Boy, do I take take exception to that! I suspect that the crucial factor here is our different interpretations of the term “form”. I use it in the sense of the set of emotions evoked or addressed by the game. That interpretation suggests that games have steadily narrowed since the mid-80s. What sense are you using for the term “form” in this statement?

By: Kenneth Stein

Kenneth Stein — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 08:37:19 +0000

The Citizen Kane moment will happen when a game is made that expresses what it is like to be a person. A game that explores questions that endure. Imagine a first person WWII shooter. You shoot the enemy and as you run past he grabs your pant leg, pulls you down to face him, reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a letter addressed to his wife and children at home. He asks you to send it off and then dies. And all over the battlefield there are people struggling, suffering and dying. And they feel the pain, they experience these last moments. You can see it in their eyes, and in their movements.

By: Mark Bernstein

Mark Bernstein — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 00:12:59 +0000

I think it’s significant, though puzzling, that the example cited here is Citizen Kane.

As Pete and Matias observe, Citizen Kane isn’t very early, and it wasn’t exactly unexpected. By the time Citizen Kane appeared, we had pretty much all of Chaplin, Keaton, D. W.Griffith. The Academy Awards were old enough to vote. We had almost all the Marx Brothers, all of Garbo.

By: miscellany is the largest category

miscellany is the largest category — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 22:59:20 +0000

Canon Formation
Andrew Stern, over at GTA, puts forward a comment made during his panel discussion at GDC this year: One of the comments that came out during the panel discussion Why Isn�t the Game Industry Making Interactive Stories is that the…

By: mattiasL

mattiasL — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 10:21:57 +0000

An interesting point might be that Citizen Kane was produced in 1941, but was seen as a flop and did not become famous until much later.

By: Pete C

Pete C — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 00:53:07 +0000

I don’t think we’re likely to see a gaming Citizen Kane simply because, as you said, it’s far to broad an artform now. Different platforms and genres mean that there will frequently be classics that change peoples perception of what a game can be (GTA 3, Deus Ex and Half Life for example) but these just tend to signficantly raise the ante rather than completely resetting expectations.

But then again, who saw Citizen Kane coming? Maybe you can never discount the possible future emergence of a truly genius games design.

By: ctate

ctate — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 23:59:19 +0000

Dan Sandler has linked to some other GDC material that is relevant here, including Greg Zeschuk from Bioware talking about storytelling in games, and Peter Molyneux talking about B&W 2 vs. B&W 1’s lack of structure.

By: mark

mark — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 18:54:48 +0000

I do think a really successful example would trigger a lot more interest in interactive stories, although it might not be on the level of Citizen Kane. My impression is that every time people have promoted a game as having interactive story, the results have been at best mediocre, so the conventional wisdom is that successfully putting truly interactive story into a successful game that people like is not likely to happen in the immediate future. Even some of the more successful games like Black & White weren't really knockouts in the sense that they really wowed people; the reactions I've seen are more along the lines of "well, that's kind of cool, but it doesn't seem to work right a lot of the time." The reactions to Fable were even less gushing...

By: Isaac

Isaac — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 06:03:47 +0000

I hope so too.

In that session I was struck by a comment from Warren. He was making an anology between silent films and talkies: audio technology was pitched as a means for emotional expression but that was already possible in the silent medium. His point seemed to be that sound didn’t really afford any more expression than silent films. But he let the analogy trail off with a “…maybe that’s not the best analogy…”

What struck me about his analogy was the potential for comparing game designers with the silent film era actors, some of whom were unable to survive the transition to a more expressive medium.