Last week we reported on JJ Abrams and Gabe Newell’s keynote address at DICE, where the two announced plans to collaborate on either a game or film project. The video of their discussion has now gone live for us all to pick apart with our quote tweezers, looking for the most attention-grabbing phrases we can find. Hence that fella up top, JJ Abrams says “games are better than movies at telling stories”.
That and more in the video below.
It’s a fascinating discussion, even if none of the points they make are new, they make their arguments well. For years the strength of film and television is that good examples from those fields are finely crafted, honed stories that aim to elicit a specific response from the viewer. Games lose that linearity, providing the player with agency, creating a space for a player to be active and make their own decisions about the pace and direction the story will go.
As we said last work, and as I repeated up top, at the end of the talk Newell and Abrams speak of a collaborative project the two are discussing. That is the real takeaway from this talk, that having now had these discussions about what the different mediums can offer, actually engaging to try and create a project informed by both disciplines is the next step. An exciting step.