7 hours ago, BHXSpecter said:

I still say no. Other mediums are never a necessity for game development, but they can be used to draw inspiration from. As I stated before, you have to be careful though as it can have a potential pitfall depending on your creativity level. Some can watch a movie or read a book and think "I want to try that in my game!" and just do an almost verbatim translation of it while some can do it and then think of creative ways to extend the idea and make it their own. For example, compare the Metal Gear Solid cutscenes from the original Playstation and the Gamecube remake Twin Snakes, the team behind Twin Snakes were fans of the original, but were creative and came up with interesting new ways to make the scenes different, but still feel true to the original MGS where as me, a less creative guy, would have likely done an almost mirror copy of the original MGS just with better graphics. The point of my rambling is that it depends on the kind of developer you are and that you should know your strengths and weaknesses when pulling from other mediums for inspiration, but it is by no means a necessity to use them.

You're right, in a sense, but it's counter productive. There's an opportunity here to share how film watching can benefit the game developer. In your example of how some can benefit, you've only touched the surface of total potential.

In my original post in this thread, I hinted at the potential. The key is to understand cinema, watch better cinema, and learn how to interpret cinema. That process, which has a learning curve, is also one which aligns to some degree with the art of filmmaking, which gets you pointed in the right direction.

Notice, in your post, that you're thinking in terms of cutscenes. Forgive me if your examples go beyond that. For all other readers here, please follow along. I made a more specific post regarding application of these ideas in this thread: I need inspiration from my fellow writers. My post is the second post in that thread. Note, however, that I did not illustrate to what aspect of a game said techniques can be applied. That thread was about writing, and I was sharing how the ideas can be applied to writing. But there are many other ways to apply what is seen and discovered in cinema. The key is, as I noted above, is to learn what you're seeing. I enumerated several examples from the post in the other thread. There are other elements that I did not mention.

So, how and where might we apply such elements? I'll say they can be applied to not only cut scenes, trailers, and writing, but to gameplay, the feel of gameplay, the tone of gameplay, the art direction of gameplay (color palettes as one example), the rhythm and timing of gameplay, the ambience of gameplay, the genres of gameplay, metaphor within gameplay, methods to get players to feel empathy for game characters, puzzles for gameplay, designed ambiguity for gameplay, out of left field elements within gameplay,  noir like elements in gameplay, etc., etc., etc.

We can get more specific, and the possibilities are endless. I think anyone might be a fool to not dig deeper. Cinema has about an 80 year head start on computer/console game development.

The problem is, I can guess most game developers (certainly there are exceptions) have a sole experience with cinema that is Hollywood centric. That's to be expected, because most here haven't the experience of exploring cinema further. Hollywood's marketing muscle drowns out everything, and appears to offer a lot. However, Hollywood only offers a small subset of what cinema can be, and it's all very much the same.

Let me bring up the kitchen analogy. You have a kitchen, and in the pantry is sugar, flour, vanilla, chocolate, food coloring, and a few other items that will let you bake cakes and cookies. Your chef only uses those items and bakes you cookies and cakes, and that's all you've ever tasted. That's Hollywood. Another chef comes into your kitchen , opens the refrigerator, and sees produce, cheeses, meats, sauces, and beer. In the wine cellar he sees wine. In the back of the pantry he finds pasta. Suddenly, he's making you lasagne, prime rib dinners, stir fried vegetables, protein drinks, salads, soups, tacos, salmon dishes, and so on. Up until now, all you've had were cookies and cakes. And now your world has opened up big time. That is the discovery of great cinema, past and present, domestic and foreign, art-house and so on. Learning starts there.

Some films coming out of Hollywood are verging into the realm of true cinema, but they aren't common. Two recent films I've seen recently have a slight art-house feel to them. They are Dunkirk and Bladerunner 2049. Of course there are others, but your best success will come from looking farther afield.

Let me move on to a specific example. Do what you want with it, but the point is to illustrate how tuning one's perception to cinema can lead to new ideas to apply. In most of Ozu's postwar films, notably his color films, he began establishing a rhythm and tempo that seemed to alternate from mild comedy to mild melancholy, scene to scene. As with his prior films, pillow shots showed between scenes, and often scenes ended with a camera angle looking straight down an empty hallway. I have written much on the meaning of Ozu's empty hallway shots, but that's not what I'm focusing on here. I could go on, because Ozu's films are loaded with wonderful and often unique aspects often not seen elsewhere. But let's focus on the alternation between mild comedy and mild melancholy. This is subtle, and many would never notice it. It could be applied to gameplay in a way, where each successive level switches from the tone of the prior level: mild comedy to mild melancholy and back to mild comedy. How one establishes a tone that has that feel is of course up to the developer. As mentioned above, the possibilities are endless, if you broaden your scope of film viewing, and learn how to watch films on a deeper level. I could write a hundred pages right here on this topic. By the way, I venture to guess most here haven't heard of Ozu, the reason being due to Hollywood's marketing drowning everything else out. For the record, directors worldwide voted one of Ozu's films the greatest film ever made. Critics worldwide voted the same film the third greatest ever made. Critics worldwide voted another Ozu film the 15th greatest film ever made.

Great cinema is out there. Go find it, learn from it, and find new ways to make games more rich.

I think it is important to keep up with current movies, and popular culture in general, if you are going to be writing story/lore for games.  The audience is young, and your references to Willma Dearing, for example, are going to fly right over their heads.  You have to keep up with their more modern stories so that you know who Rey is, because the younger audience has probably never heard of Colonel Dearing.

The danger is when you try to make your game work like a hollywood writer thought that thing worked.  They don't need to know how it works, so they don't.  You can create a lot of problems for yourself trying to make something work how hollywood says it works, because how a writer thinks something works often has nothing to do with reality.  For example, if the US and Russia followed hollywood's advice with regards to nuclear weapons the planet would have been mostly destroyed a very long time ago;-)

19 hours ago, Kavik Kang said:

I think it is important to keep up with current movies, and popular culture in general, if you are going to be writing story/lore for games.  The audience is young, and your references to Willma Dearing, for example, are going to fly right over their heads.  You have to keep up with their more modern stories so that you know who Rey is, because the younger audience has probably never heard of Colonel Dearing.

Forgive me, but my curiosity gets the better of me. To whom are you addressing your post to? You mention someone is referencing Wilma Deering. I searched the whole page for the name. No mention of the character. I had to google the name to see who she was. A Buck Rogers character, apparently. The correct spelling is Wilma Deering, actually.

19 hours ago, Kavik Kang said:

I think it is important to keep up with current movies, and popular culture in general, if you are going to be writing story/lore for games.  The audience is young, and your references to Willma Dearing, for examp

My post above was truncated, and I cannot edit it.

Below, is my post in full.

18 hours ago, Kavik Kang said:

I think it is important to keep up with current movies, and popular culture in general, if you are going to be writing story/lore for games.  The audience is young, and your references to Willma Dearing, for example, are going to fly right over their heads.  You have to keep up with their more modern stories so that you know who Rey is, because the younger audience has probably never heard of Colonel Dearing.

Forgive me, but my curiosity gets the better of me. To whom are you addressing your post to? You mention someone is referencing Wilma Deering. I searched the whole page for the name. No mention of the character. I had to google the name to see who she was. A Buck Rogers character, apparently. The correct spelling is Wilma Deering, actually.

With regard to your point though, in a sense, I'm glad you made it, because I'd like to share my viewpoint. One of the great sins of story development, filmmaking, and I would have to say, game development, is to let your passionate ideas be diluted and changed because of the potential audience. It's called dumbing down your material. Hollywood is one of the great sinners here. When I say Hollywood, I'm referring to the studios. Studio meddling is the act of making sure what might have been art becomes something which meets the least common denominator defining the audience. Stories don't begin that way. They end up that way for purely monetary reasons. Artistic intent is lost.

Are you familiar with auteur theory? It is the idea that a director's signature style is identifiable within a film. If you are in general familiar with the director's work, you could walk into the middle of a film by said director, and not knowing of the film before that moment, and identify the director. Obvious ones are Stanley Kubrick, Wes Anderson, and Quentin Tarantino. They're rare in Hollywood precisely because of the studio driven system and Hollywood's general methods. Other great directors that hold the auteur status are Bela Tarr, Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Andrei Tarkovsky, Michelangelo Antonioni, Wong Kar-wai. That's where the learning starts. Their films. And other auteurs.

18 hours ago, Kavik Kang said:

The danger is when you try to make your game work like a hollywood writer thought that thing worked.  They don't need to know how it works, so they don't.  You can create a lot of problems for yourself trying to make something work how hollywood says it works, because how a writer thinks something works often has nothing to do with reality.  For example, if the US and Russia followed hollywood's advice with regards to nuclear weapons the planet would have been mostly destroyed a very long time ago;-)

 

Nobody is really saying this. Or perhaps they are. It sounds like you're trying to take the meaning and intent of this thread to mean that developing your game like a Hollywood screenwriter might is not something to do. I'm not saying that. Yet there is some merit to it. I have described in more detail than others here how to approach game development with a better knowledge of cinema. I enumerated specific examples.

Boxes. There are a lot of boxes here, and the naysayers have placed themselves in those boxes, in this case of their own making. One must think outside the box. As an example, it appears one of the boxed methods of thinking is to apply cinematic inspiration strictly to cutscenes or trailers.

It starts with a greater scope of cinematic experience. Your eyes will open.

I wasn't disagreeing with you, just pointing out another reason why a game designer might want to keep up with movies.  As you get older you will become out of touch with the younger audience that generally plays games.  Colonel Dearing/Rey was just the first example that popped into my head.  Most of the audience knows who Rey is, they don't know who Wilma Dearing was.  By the time you are designing games, you are probably a lot older than the audience.  You have to keep current with what they know speak too them.

4 hours ago, Kavik Kang said:

I wasn't disagreeing with you, just pointing out another reason why a game designer might want to keep up with movies.  As you get older you will become out of touch with the younger audience that generally plays games.  Colonel Dearing/Rey was just the first example that popped into my head.  Most of the audience knows who Rey is, they don't know who Wilma Dearing was.  By the time you are designing games, you are probably a lot older than the audience.  You have to keep current with what they know speak too them.

While I appreciate that you are not disagreeing with me, let me point out that you are disagreeing with me, and in turn, I hope you can appreciate why I am disagreeing with you.

To begin, your advocacy of keeping up with current films is a subset of my advocacy of discovering cinema, past and present. Discovery vs. keeping up are two different concepts. The former can be enlightening, the latter, merely falling in line with pop culture. Colonel Deering is new to me, Rey is not. More in line with my point though is the fact that if a hypothetical member here was passionate about Deering, rather than Rey, they will put their heart and soul into such a product rather than stooping to the lowest common denominator of pop culture.

I strongly recommend to go the heart and soul route, and not the lowest common denominator route. Directors considered to have auteur status typically write or co-write their own scripts, and thus are more willing to pour their heart and soul into their material. I used to run a filmmaking group, and I occasionally ran into those who only wanted to write scripts. I strongly urged them to learn the art of filmmaking and proceed to make their own films based on their scripts. I certainly did not want to make them. If I was somehow coerced into such a thing, my heart and soul wouldn't be there for the making of the film. I'm interested in making films from my own scripts. One such short film is currently in pre-production.  Additionally, the reason I didn't want to make films from the scripts from others was because their scripts were terribly unoriginal, and obviously their inspiration for their scripts only came from a limited exposure to cinema.

Lastly, you've concocted an example in which the hypothetical member is taking content (a character) and placing that character into the game, whether as an homage or as fan based content. I don't necessarily discourage such a thing, but it's not part and parcel of what I'm encouraging. My second post in this thread explains in pretty good detail exactly what I'm encouraging, and it has little to do with older films vs. new films (which you might claim are more relevant). I point out that the type of films I recommend actually provide more learning. more food for thought, and more diverse grammars, where I argue the ideas are.

I understand what you are saying, but computer games cost millions of dollars too make.  If the company doesn't make more money than they spent making the game, they go out of business.  I am not a student of cinema as you obviously are, I just like movies (like most people).  But I understand what you are saying through music, which is a good example here.  The most talented bands are never the most popular ones, but they are the most enduring.  Rush, Frank Zappa, and Yes for example all share something in common.  They are filled with virtuoso musicians.  Frank Zappa and Geddy Lee are probably the "great composers", the Bach and Motzart of our time.  Their music will endure, and people will probably still be listening to bands like Pink Floyd, Rush, and even Frank Zappa 300 years from now.  Talent endures, "mass market tripe" does not.  But that "mass market tripe" is what makes the most money upon release because "average music for average people".  Madonna, Depeche Mode, and New Kids on the Block have much larger audiences... but will soon be forgotten.  It is the same thing with movies.  Citizen Kane is a better made movie that Back to the Future, and people like you who are students of cinema can explain in detail why that is... but most people today  would roll their eyes at the suggestion that Citizen Kane even deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with Back to the Future.

When a game company needs to make millions back just to break even on their product, they can't take a chance on Citizen Kane/Frank Zappa.  They have to go with Back to the Future/Madonna.  Citizen Kane/Frank Zappa could put them out of business, even though they are "art" and Madonna is not.  Endurance doesn't keep them in business, mass sales in the first year does.  When it comes too music, I'm with you.  I can't even listen to pop, it's Rush, Yes, etc for me... but notice that these are "cult bands", because "average music for average people".  

Citizen Kane. No.

Anyway, it's been bumped down.

Kavik, yes, things cost money. So do films. But that doesn't stop the artistry in cinema. You just need to search farther afield. But you're barking up the wrong tree. None of the things I suggest cost money. However, they do need an investment in imagination. Perhaps those who want to imagine need to also learn to imagine ways to imagine. As mentioned earlier, the naysayers have put themselves in boxes, and are having trouble imagining how knowledge of film and sensitivity to the art of cinema can take game development past its immature state. Did I say immature? Yes, I did. Game development is about where cinema development was in 1910. It's fixated on technology. I'm a tech fan too, and I'm always up for more triangles per second, more sophisticated global lighting techniques, facial muscle simulation, and so on. And with film, I'm always interested in the latest Alexa camera from Arri, or what Freefly has to offer in camera stabilization, etc. But there's more, and it's less. It's humanism, empathy, rhythm, timing, color palettes, grammar, observation, etc. 

Kogonada.

Who's that? He's a film scholar that works for the British Film institute. Essentially, he writes articles, essays and makes video essays on great cinema. He analyzes and distills down great directors' grammars. He's also a huge fan of many of my favorite directors, such as Edward Yang, Yasujiro Ozu, and Wong Kar-wai.  He even keeps a blog entitled Missing Ozu. In fact, kogonada is a pseudonym derived from Ozu's co-writer, Kogo Noda.

In fact, one of his video essays is extraordinarily enlightening with regard to how Hollywood cuts a film as compared to the different potential aesthetics you can discover outside Hollywood. His example may be old, but it applies equally today. Please give it four minutes of your time.

Why do I bring him up? Because he had never made a film. He studies great films, I mentioned. But that knowledge, something I advocate for everyone, allowed him to make a film very recently. A film that has received immense praise. A film that does the great things I say that comes from those directors that will be discovered if you search beyond Hollywood. To your credit, you're right. It only received limited screening, and grossed something like less than one million. But I bet he makes another film. Greatness is recognized and rewarded.

On the other hand, Fifty Shades of Grey had huge box office success. Yet we all know it was junk. I haven't seen it, nor would I bother.

And I haven't seen kogonada's Columbus yet either, but very definitely will, and I'm sure it's as great as it's said to be. In the trailer, I can see the influences from the directors he admires.

See the trailer for Columbus:

I'm with you... Rush, Frank Zappa, Yes... But we are a small audience.  Frank Zappa is better than New Kids on the Block in every way, but even Joe's Garage came nowhere near selling at "pop music" levels.    300 years from now, people (musicians, at least) will still be listening too them.  NKOTB will have been long forgotten.

The people paying for you to take that chance don't care about how long it will endure, only how much money it will make in the first few years.  Much more importantly, that it makes at least enough in those first few years to have been profitable.  Madonna is far more likely to do that that Frank Zappa.  The people paying for it far are more concerned with not failing than creating art, they don't know it will even succeed at all going into it.  So they take every precaution they can not knowing if it will even succeed at all.

It's like that former network executive who played a character on Murphy Brown said... "It's the game BUSINESS.  Little game, big BUSINESS."  The best doesn't sell the best, because "average music for average people".  In fact, the best is usually "cult"... a small but loyal audience.  And they know this.

I am all for "games as art"... or movies, or music, or books, or even... art.  But since the days of the masters and their patrons, this has always been an issue.  The artist wants to create art, the patron wants to make money.  If the artist doesn't make money, they won't have a patron for long.  As James Brown would say... "What it is, is what it is."

And since we are posting art, take that NKOTB!!!