AnimFX Part Two: Interview With Joseph Olin

We interview Joseph Olin at AnimFX.

Joseph Olin is President of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, an organisation dedicated to the fostering of excellence in the art and science of game development. Joseph's continuing legacy is the raising of consumer awareness of well-known video game publishers and properties, as well as pushing for and nurturing innovation and creativity within game-making. The AIAS host the annual Interactive Achievement Awards every year, the gaming industry equivalent of the Academy Awards.

Joseph's passion and drive is not only palpable, but infectious, and our conversation bounced over almost every aspect of the gaming industry.

NZGamer.com: The AIAS seems focused on innovation as much as quality, yet IPs only make up a small percentage of the retail and digital market at the moment. Whereas with film, it seems that experimentation is far more accessible to the average consumer. Do you see think this is a fair observation?

Joeseph: I think that’s a very accurate observation in terms of where we are in interactive entertainment today, but I think that’s going to change. We launched a program this past year – the Indie Game challenge – and through that, we’ll have about 100 games that will ultimately finish QA, and we’ll put out, and we’ll hold our first Indie game festival, and try to promote the independent spirit that lurks within all people who want to build creative enterprises. And it may take 10 years – whether it’s our indie game challenge or through other festivals – to get to the point where people look towards the next idea coming from the independent channel.

I think, within our awards structure and professional world of game makers, innovation is held more highly than almost any other attribute. I think last year's awards probably demonstrate that, where LittleBigPlanet took nine awards, and I think it won more so based on its innovation than craft. Everyone in the room who built games professionally knows that whatever they build or publish today, the day they submit, they know 15 things they want to change and improve and wish they had tried. That’s why Gears of War 2 was ultimately a better game than the original, but didn’t win any awards because it wasn’t viewed as innovative. It was viewed as a great team with great resources, and the fact that it was incredibly commercially successful speaks to how well the original franchise had done and how it resonated with an audience. But from a game maker's perspective, seeing someone come up with something completely fresh that changes how you construct and communicate makes you ask yourself, ‘why didn’t I think of that?’

Do you think innovation resonates with the hardcore gamer crowd? Do you think it is important to them?

Yes, although I’m not sure in the same way. I think there’s a big difference between being a fan of something and being able to create something you are a fan of. As much as the hardcore believe they know so much about the process of game making, in reality I don’t believe it’s the case. Most hardcore fans posting on the forums know why there were 180 people working on Gears and what each of those people did, and that’s alright. But I think it’s important to have that veil of mist that separates being a great fan and someone who understands the craft.

Games are constantly coming under scrutiny by the media for being ‘morally questionable’ or ‘morally reprehensible’. As the gaming industry grows and grows, what is your opinion on the moral culpability of game developers?

Games – if you go back over history – were done for purely commercial reasons… but we’ve evolved in terms of the types of challenges we can offer – and I think that the ability to picture more story, more so than through the physical play mechanic, changes people’s perceptions of what games can do. And as you have a generation who have grown up with the narrative medium as their inspiration, games finally have the ability to convey narrative in a way that I think, if not purely comparable with film, has elements comparable with film. Games will continue to be able to demonstrate more and more.

In terms of being morally questionable? Well, if you’re a parent, you get to set the tone for the morals in your household, and I always urge parents to know what games their kids play, or want to play, and then draw the line. I would never let my teenage daughter play “Grand Theft Auto”. I wouldn’t let her go see “The Wedding Crashers” when it came out, even though she said ‘well Dad, I know what sex is”. Well, thank you for sharing! The point being, what makes (The Wedding Crashers) funny is for the ability to transpose between your own experiences – because there is always some truth to humour – to get there. Of course, you know, six months later when it came out of DVD, she went over to her friend's house and watched it. And I think that is above and beyond our control as parents, but we still have a responsibility to set the tone as to what’s acceptable.

I do think that most children and adults today can draw the line between fact and fantasy. “Left 4 Dead” is incredibly violent, but I don’t think anyone really believes that the world’s about to be taken over by zombies. Just because I see guts explode at 1080p all over my 60 inch screen, doesn’t mean I’m going to go out and buy 12 gauge shot gun shells and lay waste to the neighborhood. People forget that two thirds of games sold in the states are rated E for everyone, and the levels of violence in those games are no different from the cartoons that our children watch on every day TV.

It seems natural – especially in this setting - to draw comparisons between gaming and film. Film is seen as a medium that entertains – yet also provokes us to think about challenging issues - do you see video games as provocative? And if not, do you ever see it growing as a provocative medium?

Absolutely. I’ve seen examples, although they aren’t commercially accessible. There was a game called "Holy War", made by a group of computer students who had formed their own small studio in Portugal. The game’s conceit was open warfare, where you could either elect to be a terrorist, who had to recruit other terrorists, and get people to become suicide bombers, or an agent within the Israeli army, who had to stop them. They were using fully rendered scenarios of major cities in the Middle East. It’s all network play, it’s incredibly violent, and it’s commercially untouchable.

But, when I asked them why they did it, they said it was because they were so frustrated with the situation in the Middle East, and that they think war is stupid. But nobody wants to touch it because of the emotional timbre of the question of who’s right and who’s wrong within the Middle East, whereas these guys are trying to say ‘it doesn’t matter who’s right and who’s wrong’. Ultimately that’s the moral of this game.

Do you envision a future where a game with a clear political agenda could be commercially viable?

Yes, but I think that for a game to demonstrate a political point of view you need to have a voice and vision that is willing to express a political point of view.

I think that film has always been granted the ability to express different points of views, as long as it is done in an entertaining manner. I think back to films of the 70s and 80s, like "The Parallax View" with Warren Beatty, which was about political theory and manipulation. Of course having Warren Beatty at the peak of his good looks and stardom certainly made it commercially accessible, but there was a moral to it.

Game makers are at that point where they recognize that they have the ability to convey those kinds of things as well. But it’s a choice as to whether you want to or not, and part of that choice is whether you believe there is a commercial audience to do so, because of the cost involved in making a very compelling game. For example, if Bioshock had more of a political narrative, as opposed to just the pure fiction of Utopia gone awry, I don’t know that 2K would have been able to get the funding.

You mentioned the 1970s, which are widely regarded as a ‘Golden Age’ in film. Do you think that gaming has had a ‘Golden Age’ yet? Are we in it?

Maybe because of my own age, I look at the first ‘Golden Age’ of gaming as being the arcades. I think that they were the first truly interactive experience, where people would go to be challenged. And there were the social elements as well. Where did you play arcades? You played arcade games in physical arcades, or in pubs and restaurants while you were waiting for a table. Everyone took turns, and it was only fifty cents for two to four minutes worth of entertainment.

If you look at the renaissance, or the explosion, of social games or casual games, you’ll see that they’re just a modern expression of what arcades were in the first place. Two minutes, two bits, and a few minutes of fun, and hopefully you’ll want to come back.

People talk about the Playstation 2 as a high point of gaming, and I think in certain ways it was, because it was the first platform that really allowed an honest to god graphic representation of the real world in a virtual manner. But, now we’re over that. It’s like looking at the transition from black and white to colour in film.

The colour palettes, how things were art directed, and the production design in some of those early colour films from the 30’s and 40’s were really only there to show off and say “look at us, we are in colour!” But films that won awards for best picture, for their craft, were still done in black and white.

Similarly, we’re finally becoming comfortable as a medium in acknowledging that there are other things that are important in terms of how you express, and that photorealism is overrated. Bioshock had a real style to it. And the world Jeremy Bennett created with Half Life and Half Life 2 was very stylistic, and displayed a painterly craft. Learning how to use the tools to be more human, or allow more human expression, is just something that takes time and patience.

The advent of television in America was a real challenge. Filmmakers were saying ‘we’re screwed, TV is going to kill us all’. So that led to the development of widescreen, Panavision, Cinerama, and, low and behold, TV didn’t kill film. If anything, film became more vibrant. Nowadays, we’ve been exposed to so much content – we have the internet, three hundred channels of TV, all these different things that are interesting to us – and we have to find a way to marry them all together. I think that is what is so great about some of the games from Zynga. You know, I hate Mafia Wars, it’s a game that’s not a game, but I still play. That points to the next golden age.

I have a friend who is a comedy writer. He asks me all the time, ‘why aren’t there any funny games?’ And I said that I’m not sure that there is a market for them, because games are really about physical interaction, and humour is not as much about physical interaction, and more about the juxtaposition of truth and fiction.

I think that humour works within a shorter format, like Portal, for example, which was hilarious from beginning to end…

Portal was great. I think there are dialogue elements within the Halo Universe, and even in Gears, where there’s humour there. As a species, we’re always looking for ways to fray tension through humour. But, trying to build a long form game on humour is very very very difficult. In the same way that long comedy films tend not to be very commercial, because they’re just not funny. But then, a universe where it is only bleak twenty-four hours a day? You know, Left 4 Dead is very funny, and a lot of the humour comes from the conceit in the first place: zombies gone awry. But, most of the humour comes from us playing together, and the back channel chatter, as we’re all trying to be comics, and providing our own narrative.

Right. It encourages telling your own story, and adding to the banter.

You know, we need more musical games, as opposed to music games. The musical as a movie format hasn’t quite made it to games yet.

That’s probably a good thing.

“Singing in the Rain: The Game”.

“Cats”

“Starlight Express”

Oh, see, now that would be a great game.

I don’t know that games have to be so ubiquitous with communication devices or entertainment devices that we have to embrace their formats, although I think that we have to respond to them. But we don’t have to take on the responsibility of having something for everyone, in terms of the broad milieu of entertainment.

We have no "Long Day’s Journey Into Night" (a classic play by American playwright Eugene O’Neill - LOB) in games, but I’m not sure that you’d want that. I mean, watching a great performance of "Long Day’s Journey Into Night" is particularly emotionally wrenching, and I don’t know that I want that with a game. Although, someone is going to attempt that – who knows when – and probably make me change my mind.

Horror and terror is much easier to accomplish in games because of the way that we can manipulate you. Especially now with the quality of the visual graphics, and the way we can control the camera. Although our cameras don’t control narrative in the way film cameras can.

Right, because it’s often player controlled, and/or limited by the game.

Right. And, within each studio, within each design group, ownership of the camera changes. Within some shops it’s the level designer, within others it’s the lead physicist, with others, the game director. Although, one of the things that Uncharted did reasonably well in its first iteration, and does even better in its second iteration is use the camera to convey more of the narrative, of how you feel as young Drake.

And the terror that you feel in Dead Space: I had to stop. I had to turn on the lights, I had to turn the machine off, go pour myself a drink, and go walk around because I was so freaked out, and I love that. I think that’s great. Is that cheesy? Is that a cheap manipulation of my emotions? Absolutely. But that’s still a big leap forward from when all emotion that is brought forward from me as a player is to complete the rest of the game.

Let’s talk a bit about games journalism. Do bad reviews dictate a game’s success?

Ok I’ll say this for the record – I liked "G.I.JOE The Movie". But its completely forgettable, and I don’t need to own it on DVD or Bluray, but I’m glad that I saw it. It was commercially successful enough, and good for Hasbro, good for the producers, good for everyone involved. I think that, sometimes in the world of cultural journalism, games are held to a higher bar for no reason.

Brutal Legend didn’t receive as many good reviews as I thought it would. A lot of these reviews are unfair. Not that the game doesn’t have flaws, because most things made by humans have flaws, certainly in entertainment. But it’s not a game that’s meant to change your life, or change game making. It was done because Tim Schafer (the head of Double Fine) had a very interesting story and wanted to make an interesting game to match that. By taking those risks he did some things incredibly well, and some things are just OK. But: ‘it’s such a disappointment’!?

Unfortunately I don’t know that good reviews dictate a game’s success either. Katamari Damacy won Family Game of the Year and the Innovation Award five years ago, and at the time they’d sold only 150,000 games in America. And that’s when the games were priced at $19.95. Unfortunately there were 500 games that came out at the same time, and also, Katamari had a premise that people just didn’t get: ‘but all I’m doing is rolling around in a box!’.

With Brutal Legend, there weren’t 50 other games that came out the same week, but there are always other choices to play, and games unlike film have a greater level of permanence in terms of your ability to access them. A film that opens poorly is gone from public distribution pretty quick, and its still going to be six months before you see it on DVD, because of the windows that are pre-negotiated. With games, its now or never. That hurts. Sure, that disk lives on, and you’ll see it at your favourite game store for quite some time, if you look for it. But, by then, marketing and advertising will have you looking for something else.

Games are growing fast, and anyone with access to a screen that’s powered by a computer probably plays games today. It may be a Facebook game, as opposed to a core game, but it’s a game. That said, most of those people are still going to spend more times consuming other entertainment than they will games. We haven’t quite yet figured out how to market to audiences above and beyond core game audiences. But that’s changing. It’s not that we’ve failed; it’s just that we have not figured out how to be as successful at it as we would like to be. Its tough, the rules have changed, how to respond is a challenge for all of us.

Tell us how The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences is helping to move the medium forward.

We hold our DICE summit, which is where we have the awards, and that is the best conference for interactive entertainment. We have the top people in the industry and we invite top leaders from outside the industry.

It’s easy to become tunnel-visioned. You get your blinders on when you’re in the middle of a three year, thirty million dollar project, and its good to take time away from your project to talk with other smart people who have suffered the same life that you do, and to exchange ideas.
We run the Indie Game Challenge, we have a scholarship fund, and we have a programme called ‘Into the Pixel’ for digital artists. That keeps us reasonably busy, but we’re looking at a few other programmes to try and expand what I believe an organization to promote talent should be doing.

I think that we have a responsibility, and our board and our stakeholders agree, to try and codify more the process of craft. We need to try to figure out a better way to educate young adults to the craft. Cause we don’t have too many people coming out of university today that are game makers.

One of my messages is that games are a legitimate form of culture, that it's time for people to be able to stand up and say, ‘I’m proud of the fact that my son makes games’. Another generation from now we won’t have a lot of the arguments about what games are or not, because screen based interactive entertainment will just be so ubiquitous, in the same way that passive entertainment is today.

A huge thanks to Joseph Olin for this interview opportunity, and all those involved with the AnimFX conference.