September 25, 2004
My Chat with Mr. Spielberg
I had the opportunity to talk with Steven Spielberg last week at the big EA event, and he had some interesting things to say about the future of interactive entertainment. The conversation went roughly like this:
MIKE: Mr. Spielberg! Hi, I'm Michael Steffen and I'm a 2nd Year Interactive Media Student.
SPIELBERG: Good to meet you. What kinds of things are you working on?
MIKE: Well I'm really interested in interactive narrative and story-driven games.
SPIELBERG: That's great! That's exactly the kind of thing I want to see in the future. I want to see games with a 3-Act structure, that are driven by emotional beats. And I want to see story development & character interaction operating on as many as fifteen different levels.
MIKE: Yeah, I totally agree. In fact, I'm planning on making a character-driven interactive drama for my thesis project.
SPIELBERG: Sounds good. I'd be interested to see that when it's finished.
Comments
Umm... how can you quantify story development and character action into these alleged fifteen different levels? What does that even mean?
Whatever it does mean, I'm quite sure that it didn't apply to the video game version of Minority Report. Did anyone else play that? Ugh. To Mr. Spielberg's credit, The Dig was a classic of the Lucasarts adventure game era.
Mike, you should have asked him what his favorite recent games are. I have a sneaking suspicion that he doesn't play them.
Posted by: Aaron at September 26, 2004 05:42 PM
Yeah, unfortunately I didn't get a chance to ask him to elaborate--I was pretty stoked that I got to talk to him at all. Hmm, I think I'll look into how actively involved he was in the Minority Report video game...
Posted by: Michael Steffen at September 26, 2004 07:24 PM
Yeah, well, if Mr. Spielberg is smart (and I do believe he is) he knows that translating film script into games is pretty much always a bad idea, and stayed clear of that. Unless The Dig was based on a movie (Tremors?), then I've made no sense.
Posted by: kellee at September 26, 2004 09:08 PM
No... it was about an archeological dig... ON THE MOON!
Posted by: Aaron at September 26, 2004 09:39 PM
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