http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=9637&Itemid=59
By Matthew Jeffrey
Technology drives forward at such a rate and brings changes unimaginable a few years back.Turn back the clock even a few years and remember how film was seen as the glamorous career destination for top talent. Film professionals saw gaming as that awkward cousin in entertainment. Frustrated by the constraints of last gen consoles, CG Supervisors, VFX artists, audio engineers, producers and script writers saw their natural home as film and laughed in the face of gaming as the preserve of the geeky young male playing in their bedroom.
How film talent used to revel in telling us how their special skills could not be utilized in gaming as system and memory restraints severely limited what they could achieve. 'How can my effects wizardry be included in game when I only have 2.5k of ram to play with', was the oft heard cry.
Fast-forward to today when gaming, driven by technology, innovation and creativity, has perceptibly not only woken up film industry talent to the career potential they can have in gaming, but shaken the industry to its core.
How things have changed especially with the advent of next gen consoles and high end PC's, film professionals are flocking across into games. Less inhibited by memory and system restraints, they have the opportunity to work in a living and breathing online universe. With each generation of hardware technology, gaming continues to leap forward in not only its graphical quality but its ability to entertain and bring fun to people’s lives. A game can provide over 40 hours of entertainment for the same price as a family going to the movies. Film can’t compete for value or entertainment.
It is by no means an exaggeration to say that gaming has come a long way in the past 25 years. Remember classic games like Pong, Pac-Man and Space Invaders? They were games so graphically basic yet at their core utterly addictive and always 'one last go'.
Over the past 25 years games have sprinted forward, helped by new technology and also learning from other industries. Film has been a great mentor for games to learn about the art of storytelling, CG graphics and the creation of emotionally believable characters.
The technical challenges of the gaming industry are becoming more and more appealing to film industry talent to apply their experience in a new medium. Look at the technical achievements of games like Crysis, Assassin’s Creed, Grand Theft Auto IV, World of Warcraft and Burnout. Crysis ensures that every part of nature that can respond, does respond. It includes simulated foliage and ricocheting bullets, dynamically generated ocean waves, volume rendered clouds, a dynamic HDR sky, and dozens of additional real-time graphical elements. Gaming is just scratching the surface of interactive film-like effects. The challenge for gaming is creating real time dynamic effects in worlds and placing interactive environments at the control of the gamer. Gamers demand natural forces at their control and environments that respond. Our talent relishes being given huge technical challenges like these and then not only meeting but exceeding expectations.
'Burnout Paradise' provided many challenges for Criterion Games. Creating the scale of a city 30 square kilometers, populated with realistic modeled buildings, bridges, and countryside all with no loading screens. Add to that real time traffic with realistic AI computer controlled competitor racers, accurate physics with stunning car deformation in a game running at 60FPS, which can transform into an online game with eight opponents at the click of your fingers. That's a real technical feat and one that film talent is realizing that comes only in gaming.
So why do I commit to the bold statement that gaming rather than film is the career destination for top talent?
Don't get me wrong. Film is a great experience but albeit very linear. The film director shows you what he/she wants the audience to see and then takes you through a rollercoaster of emotions, controlling and manipulating you all along. Gaming puts the games player into the role of film director. The games player can control characters, cameras, objects, lighting, be faced with decisions that affect storyline and ultimately lead to multiple endings. The transformation of turning a core gamer into a story director is a creative challenge and something we should all celebrate across the games industry in achieving.
Interestingly, the best is yet to come from the games industry. Looking at film the big 'WOW' moments, - the ones that made cinema goers gasp, rock back in their chair and wonder how such visuals were achieved -, have come and gone. I remember the pivotal moments of many well-known films. In 'Clash of the Titans', with the stop-and-go motion of the evil demagogue beasts by the legendary Ray Harryhausen or 'Tron', the first real CG film with the light cycle chases. In 'Star Wars' with stunning space battles, 'Terminator 2' with the stunning effects of the liquid nitrogen Terminator, 'Jurassic Park', with realistic dinosaurs which scared viewers witless, and who could forget 'Toy Story', the stunning first CG animated feature from Pixar. The list goes on….
Those were all stunning moments in motion picture history. But today, we are all used to the trickery of the special effects houses; we’re move savvy, more cynical and are taken less by surprise, in fact we demand and expect the best in special effects. A film like 'Transformers' had stunning visual effects but as film-goers we did not see anything new; the special effects of an entire decade of film-making had already been firmly established.
Yet gaming, by contrast, has not even broken sweat in its potential of achieving 'wow' moments......and the best part is that we, as game players, have control of deciding when, where and how often they occur. All the control is in our hands.
The disparity between gaming and film visuals is quickly closing. Today, the perceptible difference between a video game car from Need for Speed, a CG Car rendered for film and a real life car, are getting noticeably more difficult to spot. Certainly to the untrained eye, the three are very similar.
Now gaming is not going to suddenly catch up to film visuals tomorrow. Just even considering a film is rendered, shot by shot, individually, on a huge rendering machine costing over $4k, over many hours, compared to a $200-300 games machine. But when you take into account this price point and then consider that games can run at 60fps in true 1080p hi-def resolution, that is a technically impressive achievement to work on.
Gaming has really learned from film the art of creating emotionally believable characters. Key is for gamers to be able to suspend their disbelief and emotionally connect with a character. This does not mean that a games character has to be photorealistic. Who would have believed that a talking fish or rat would generate such emotion amongst cinema audiences. But Pixar did just that with ‘Finding Nemo’ and ‘Ratatouille’. Gaming has the challenge of encouraging gamers to suspend their disbelief and feel emotion for games characters. Not easy especially since gamers control character interaction. But the challenge for technical artists, AI engineers, animators and software engineers is so compelling and within reach.
EA was founded some 25 years ago on the premise of a computer game that could make you cry. So far games have found it difficult to make you cry in the same way as movies, but as we see the suspension of disbelief becoming more commonplace more emotional connection will be created. The question of whether a computer game can make you cry is close to being answered by a game being developed by the world's greatest storyteller, Steven Spielberg.
Gaming is also replacing film as the choice form of entertainment. In revenue terms gaming is already bigger than film, bigger than the Hollywood box office. That’s a phenomenal achievement. People will always love film, for its escapism. Whether they will go to the cinema in the future to view the latest blockbuster is a different matter, with people’s desire for home entertainment in hi-def insatiably increasing. The games industry is driving forward in what it offers as a form of entertainment. It is critically important to recognize that consumers want to be in control of how and what entertains them.
If you are a sports fan, what better way to escape from everyday drudgery and play as Tiger Woods at Pebble Beach in an online game, with players in the USA, China, Canada and Germany, in real time? That’s an awesome form of entertainment for a golf fan. What I am illustrating here is that in film, the film director is in total control of everything you see. In games you are in control and that is really immersive. The Sims put you in control of little characters that you care and nurture through their lives, imagine that in online worlds……gaming’s very own reality TV. In Harry Potter, film does not have the time to show Hogwarts in its glory and when we developed the game we had to work from blueprints designed of Hogwarts, of which very few rooms have been seen in the film. That is real immersion and extension of interactive entertainment. Giving people the chance to play a film and immerse themselves into different worlds is utterly compelling.
There is no doubt that gaming, not film, is the future career choice for creative talent.
