ã Copyright 1997 Noah Falstein

I’ve had a fascination with Hollywood and the moviemaking process, a fascination shared by many in this industry – and loathed by others. Here is a collection of tips from a game designer’s perspective with years of experience in the interactive divisions of Lucasfilm and Dreamworks SKG.

Some issues that people from the game development community experience are generic. I’d even say they can be Universal, but I wouldn’t want to give the impression that any one studio is Paramount in my view.

The biggest roadblock encountered with people from the Hollywood community is a lack of respect. Happily this problem has been decreasing over the years, but it is still a frequent impediment to the best efforts of movie studios to incorporate computer game groups. Often it takes the form of hubris, where the writer (or director or studio exec or… you name it) says something like, "Maybe this game stuff you’ve been doing is fun for kids, but we deal in the big leagues. Just do what we say and you’ll learn something about real entertainment and storytelling." Unfortunately, I have never found an effective counter to this attitude. Some people simply don’t believe that interactive entertainment is now or will ever be in the same class as movies and television. If your work brings you in contact with people like this, the best thing to do is to try to minimize interaction with them as much as possible. The relationship is doomed to failure.

A related, less serious difficulty can be disinterest. Many people from outside the games industry have never played computer or video games and never expect to. That’s not a fatal problem, but it can make things awkward. If that person does not have a creative role in the game development process, it’s probably irrelevant or at least manageable. If they do have creative input it is a good idea to start by playing a few relevant games with them to provide a common ground for discussion. A director doesn’t have to play games in order to shoot video that goes into one, but if that director knows first-hand how video elements can get in the way of game play you’re much more likely to get useful footage.

More insidious is the person who likes to play games, but can’t think like a game developer. This is only a problem when the person in question doesn’t realize they can’t think like a developer. The easiest way to recognize this issue is when you keep hearing suggestions along the lines of "I think we should make this adventure game more action-oriented like Doom", or "but that’s not how they did it in Doom, let’s do it that way", or "don’t you think it would be better to add in a really big machine gun like in Doom?" Of course for Doom substitute their favorite game of the time. This is chiefly a problem when they cannot accept that their tastes are not universal. Often this can be fixed with some education and analysis of just why, for example, you think it would hurt sales to add a really big machine gun to your storybook version of Peter Rabbit.

Geography itself can be an issue. Los Angeles is a big city, spread out over a large area. Hollywood proper is not a very large area, but many of the major studios are not in Hollywood. Game companies wishing to deal with several specific production houses, writers, editing studios, etc. would be well advised to find out just where they are in relation to each other.

One of the most pervasive and difficult sources of conflict is culture clash. Much has been made of the cliches of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. There’s a lot of truth to the stereotypes which can show up in interesting ways. Communication problems arise when the Hollywood person refuses to check email (or doesn’t even have email access) while the computer game person is never in during normal business hours to be contacted by phone. Another subtler problem can be language. At Dreamworks Interactive, we ran into an interesting conflict about the term Development. The movie people thought it meant the initial pre-production phase of the project. The non-Microsoft game people thought it meant the entire production phase. The Microsoft people thought it meant what most of the other game people called programming or software engineering.

Finally, an offshoot of the culture problem is that of guilds. Hollywood has many of them, guilds for writers, actors, directors, editors, and others. The computer game business has almost no group representation. The CGDA is a notable but relatively small exception, with no collective bargaining powers and a full-time staff of about three people compared to the Writer’s Guild with over 100. The guilds do a good job of looking out for the best interests of their members, which means that until recently when interactive projects started paying significant amounts of money, the guilds in general did not pay much attention to them. Now the Screen Actors Guild, the Directors Guild, and the Writers Guild have standard interactive contracts, and the Writers Guild in particular is very involved with placing their members in interactive projects. Despite this, the extra expense and negotiation necessary when dealing with guild talent has been a hurdle for many software developers.

Working with Agents

We’ve all seen the stereotypes of agents: sleazy, unscrupulous, money-hungry land sharks, out to do anything for their client, or perhaps out to do anything to help themselves despite their clients. I have to admit that I’ve met a few of these. But taken in total the dealings with agents I’ve had have averaged out to be fairly neutral. A few rare agents actually have taken the time to understand the workings of the interactive world, and these can make the job of finding appropriate talent much easier. Others get in the way of negotiations, spoiling deals that their clients would rather make. But overall the agent system works, and if you want good quality people, it’s a necessary part of dealing with Hollywood. Since the agent is likely to be a filter between you and their clients, it is a good idea to try to get to know the agent’s scope of interactive experience and possible biases.

Working with Writers

I’ve done a lot of this, and I could go on at length, but for this article I’ll be brief. A frequent pairing of Movie People and Game Developers is a writer working with a game designer. More games today are using actors speaking dialog, whether in voiceover or in video. For that it makes sense to get an experienced film or TV writer. All of the pitfalls mentioned in the generic issues above apply to writers, so it pays to be wary, but writers more than any Hollywood group have acquired an understanding of the interactive world (with the possible exception of computer graphics artists). Writers however are NOT game designers simply because they have figured out how to write branching scripts. You’ll most likely succeed by finding a writer who is interested in games and is willing to learn about game design while applying the skills of storytelling that they have honed over many years. Writers who are analytical in their approach to their craft are easier to work with than writers who are primarily intuitive are. Writers who actually play the kind of game you are making often are easier to work with than ones who play other kinds of games, or no games at all.

Working with Directors

If you are doing video production, there is a tremendous amount of work and expense involved, and a paragraph in this article is insufficient to deal with the details. But it pays to note a few specifics here. Film directors and television directors have different skill sets and are used to different time scales and budgets. Each type has strengths and weaknesses where interactive titles are involved. Film directors are good because they are used to planning and budgeting an entire piece themselves, while TV directors that have only worked on series often have less experience in these areas. But TV directors are used to working more collaboratively, particularly under direction from the head writer of a series, and because of this may be easier to work with than film directors, who are used to being the final creative word on a project. Even better is to find someone with a variety of different types of directing experience, like Film, TV, and Theater, both because they can combine the strengths of the different forms. They have also shown a willingness to learn the differences between those forms, which bodes well for learning about interactive as well. Directors, particularly film directors, can be particularly prone to the "let me handle everything" attitude, and may change your design to suit their idea of what is right.

Working with Actors