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LucasArts Interview [Source: boomtown.net]
In this exclusive interview, we discuss the future of gaming with LucasArts President Jim Ward.
Jim Ward is President of LucasArts and Vice President of Marketing and Distribution at Lucasfilm. He began his career in advertising and was responsible for the promotion of Apple's Powerbook. Now heading LucasArts, he's responsible for bringing such franchises as Star Wars and Indiana Jones to the gaming public. In this exclusive interview, we ask Ward how LucasArts aims to succeed in the current market, where the future of gaming lies and how the company views the next generation of consoles.
Coming from the movie industry, you must be pretty happy about what the new gaming consoles can do graphics-wise?
I'm more excited about what the next generation consoles allow us to do in what we are focused on which is revolutionizing the ideas of storytelling and character development. With the raw power and capacity that those consoles have, that will allow us to do our job better.
Is there still room for a revolution?
Oh, absolutely. Right now there is no story in games. Gaming right now is about button management, basically. Take for instance Grand Theft Auto, a great game, I love it and play it, a fantastic game. But the story of that is just simply a broad context, you drive around some places and shoot people. But there is no real compelling story telling, very rarely you see this in good games.
In Half-Life, there was an attempt. But we need to infuse story into those games and make them compelling because every kind of entertainment, if it's a movie, a play, whatever it is, is all based on story and characters.
We need to figure out ways in which to make the story compelling in terms of humour and suspense. So that maybe whatever I'm wearing has an impact on that storyline and ripples through and changes on an infinite branching base what the story meant to be.
And then on the character side, tell me the last character you played that you fell in love with. That happens very rarely, right? It's not like going to a movie. So we have to change that and there are a couple of levels to that. One is on a more mechanical level, where the character has to, through AI, feel real. And the other is a more Turing level AI, so if you interact with a character, they ARE real. This is the Holy Grail and we've got to achieve that. The next generation platforms will help us along the way.
Isn't it much more difficult to tell a story in a game than in a movie because you have to tell an infinite number of stories in a game?
Absolutely, but that doesn't mean it cannot be done. There are some noble attempts. But that's the question, what does story mean in interactive games? We have to figure that out. And that's why we take this to be an art form and make it even more compelling and more engaging. That doesn't mean to reduce gameplay or action.
But my gosh, people want to have a great story, people want to play a game because that character is so fun to be around. Today we have NPCs that say five words and then they are gone - as the gamer you don't relate to that, you don't develop a relation to them. [...]
