Robert McKee interview: Part 7
Interesting 7-part interview between a young entrepreneur Sramrana Mitra and screenwriting guru Robert McKee. The questions have a business slant to them and yet McKee always pulls through them the commerce side of things and back to his central focus: Story.
Here is an excerpt from Part 7:
SM: Is there anything else that you want to add to this conversation? An industry which has become a large one, and which I feel would do well with stories, is the electronic gaming and virtual world industry. Do you have any thoughts on it?
RM: In the past I have gone up to Microsoft and Sierra Online and given my story lecture to people who are create video games. They have ambition to create far more complex, content-rich video games, but they always hit the wall. It is not possible because they are not art, they are games. When you have interaction between the work and the audience, you ask the audience to make decisions of their own. When it becomes interactive it stops being art; it is a game. Games, by their nature, cannot be rich, subjective, and have all the other qualities of art. The problem with games is that they have to find wonderful new variations of the same very rigid story model. I am afraid that they are stuck there.
RE video game companies, if by “always hit the wall” McKee means a wall full of cash, he’d be right as video game sales in the U.S. hit a record $21 billion in 2008. Compare that to the domestic movie box office in the same year which was $9.8 billion.
But, of course, McKee is not talking about the business of video games, but rather judging them by his standard of ‘art’ — and for McKee, specifically because they are “interactive,” that by his definition means video games are not art.
Okay, fine. For the moment, let’s accept that assessment. Do any of you who are active video game players agree with this comment:
Games, by their nature, cannot be rich, subjective, and have all the other qualities of art.
I don’t — and I’m only what I suppose you would call a ‘secondary’ video game player through time spent with my sons over the last 15 years. One aspect that stands out to me with game franchises like Zelda, Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, and others is how immersive the experience is. A significant part of that is the richly detailed articulation of each of their story worlds — and a large part of that comes from writing.
Moreover if one of our primary goals as screenwriters is to create audience identification with characters in order to shrink the distance between the moviegoers and the screen, try to pull viewers into the movie, arguably video games by their very set-up can do that more effectively than any movie — precisely because of their interactivity. Instead of the viewer trying to project themselves into the role of a movie Protagonist, imagining along with the character what they are experiencing, in comparison while playing a video game, the user actually participates in the process, potentially a deeper immersion into that story and story world.
Here’s where McKee may be showing his age. Within a decade, there will nearly 80 million Americans between the ages of 10–30, a bigger generation than even Baby Boomers. And all of them will have been touched in some way by video games. To think that they don’t consider the games they play to be ‘stories’ is ludicrous. Besides every trend in Hollywood on the studio side is pointing toward more convergence of movies and video games. And while what results might not qualify as ‘story’ to McKee, what does that really end up meaning if a gazillion consumers think otherwise?
Story is organic, not rules etched in stone, but principles and form which are elastic. Story has survived innumerable transitions in platforms: oral, written, plays, radio, silent films, talkies, TV, Web, and now video games. And the form of story is undoubtedly being stretched as we speak.
Shouldn’t we as storytellers be curious about and even embrace the adaptive possibilities that are right now in the process of emerging, as opposed to decrying new narrative technologies?
For more of Part 7 of the McKee interview, go here.
For Part 6, go here.
For Part 5, go here.
For Part 4, go here.
For Part 3, go here.
For Part 2, go here.
For Part 1, go here.
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