Clive Barker's Jericho, developed by Mercury Steam and published by Codemasters
In Part I of our four-part Q&A with quadruple-threat Clive Barker--he writes novels! he directs movies! he paints! he designs videogames!--we discussed the sources of inspiration for his just-released videogame Jericho and the "bigotry" of certain critical attitudes towards the medium. Today, in Part II of our interview, Barker explains which aspects of the horror novel can't make the leap to horror games; recounts his own dealings with the British Board of Film Classification (which recently upheld its ban of Manhunt 2) and the Motion Picture Association of America; and his experiences working in multiple media.
Looking at the medium that you're most known for--the novel, the horror novel--and the values that typify your work in the medium: mood, pacing, you have access to interiority and things like that. You can give the reader a sense of multiple characters. And it's an older medium so there are many more models that you can follow.
Yeah.
How much of that do you find useful to bring across to games, where the nature of interaction, the nature of what the audience of players experiencing is much more direct? They're conditioned to want more action. There are obviously strong horror elements throughout Jericho. But at its base, it's a shooter. So which of those values that you've developed for years in the novel and brought over to other media that are in some ways more like the novel--like comic books and the movies--which of those values transfer over to games and which do you say, "You know what, I have to get rid of that, or translate it into something else entirely?"
Well, the first big thing is the interior life. I mean, it just goes out the window. Again, games don't deal with that yet. Will they? Yes, I think they will. I think we'll find ways to design the screen. It may be that we eventually will end-up playing on three screens simultaneously, but there will be history being played out that is directly related to--who's got a pen in their hands?
Female publicist: I do.
Just--would you just write--
Female publicist: Oh, yeah, absolutely.
I just had a good thought. Real good. [Dictating to publicist.] So, yeah...use....game as...history...of characters--I'll know what that means; just make sure I get it.
Female publicist: Okay.
It occurred to me as I was saying that to you that to actually make a game with a strong metaphysical shape or nature like this one, dependent upon an understanding of character's history--which you would then have to sort of jump back in time to understand--would bring you much closer to the state of a novel. And that interior life we were talking of would simply become history.
You could take the members of this squad and next time we do this we spend the first part of the game choosing the squad, so you then spend time dealing with pivotal episodes in each squaddie's life. And then I think we'd be much closer to what we can conventionally think of as the strengths of the novel. It's about people who are doing things in the now, but when we need to know about the then, all the authorial voice has to do is shift a little. It's not quite so easy here, but that isn't to say that it can't be done.
Right.
I think it's a very--it's irritating and frankly ignorant, I think. Ignorant to what the game actually is right now and is becoming. And even as a visual spectacle--as though you can't have anything but a visual spectacle, as well. As a spectacle....When I first got involved with this, the idea of having images on the screen as beautiful, as physically beautiful as these images was nowhere near where we are now. It's exciting to me as a painter, for instance, to be able to talk to my guys--the guys doing the designing---and to be able to reference painters and to give 'em a bunch of not even painter's names but very specific paintings.
This game is designed by people in Spain. So they can go to the Prado and see all the Goyas. And I actually reference Goya a good deal. This is a very dark game in lots of places; a lot of really nice, moody environmental stuff. I gave them a list of painters; Goya, amongst them, not even knowing at that stage that I think it was going to be a Spanish company that was going to end up doing the work.
I'm curious to know your thoughts about something that's playing in the news right now, which is what happened with Rockstar's game Manhunt 2; that it's been denied a rating from the BBFC--
Right, right, right.
--which effectively means it's banned in the UK. And it's not being released over here. If they had made it for PC, they could release on PC in North America with an AO-rating, but it's for PlayStation Portable, PS2 and Wii, and Sony and Nintendo don't allow Adults Only games to come out on their systems.
Yeah.
Now, before the rating come down in the United States, the first thing I did was looked on the BBFC's website and saw that they had approved Postal. Not Postal, the--gosh, I'm spacing on the name--"Hostel." "Hostel" and "Hostel 2" had been approved and--
The BBFC were never consistent. [Laughs.]
And it just seemed--I haven't played the game yet. I will be playing it today. And I was just sort of stunned and sort of saying--obviously, again, I haven't seen it--maybe there's something they saw there that was so shocking and so revolting--
Are you talking about "Hostel" now?.
No, about Manhunt 2--
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
--something so shocking and revolting that you and I who are adults have to be protected from. But there's something about it that just seems very bizarre.
Well, the BBFC is a British organization; and therefore, prone to inconsistencies. One of my first lady friends was a Liverpool lass who became a member of the BBFC, and she would tell me the kind of things that they would debate at their meetings. At what point was a penis actually erect? If it flopped around still in a sort of half-dead fish kind of way, could it possibly be removable? And I was given rules by those guys.
[My husband] David said this so many times about only being allowed two consecutive buttock thrusts in my sex scenes in "Hellraiser. Actually, that wasn't the BBFC. That was the MPAA. I was allowed to have thrust-thrust and then cut to something else; cars going by, a bus. Then back to thrust-thrust, and then daffodils, the lamp. Thrust-thrust. It's a losing battle these people are fighting because of the nature of technology now. Technology--we haven't even begun to taste how our world is going to be changed, I think, by almost infinite access to almost everything. You can't really keep games down in banned versions or other, any other versions.
Now, do I think that's a good idea? No, not particularly. I've always side I write my horror fiction for adults. I don't write the "Books of Blood" for kids. On the other hand, I did write "Thief of Always" knowing that I wrote it for the ten-year old boys who's still alive in me. The Abarat books which are easily my most successful books; they're in 42 languages. Those books are for any age. The only problem will be the lower end where language is concerned--how complex the language was--but otherwise, it's for any age. And there I've used 120 oil paintings per book to marry-up painting. Not just ordinary painting, but oil painting--proper painting. I wanted to take young, impressionable, imaginative minds and say, "Look, this is what oil paintings look like. It is worth going to your local gallery even though you have to wander around like it's a *** library and you can't whistle if you're happy." And I think that will go as time goes by as well. It's only a matter of time before people start to play music in galleries, just as bookstores have become over the last 20 years much more user-friendly. When you were a kid or I was a kid certainly bookstores were pretty uptight places.
Right.
Now, you know, they have carpet on the floor, they have seats where you can sit. Coffee, right? Everything is there to make you want to enjoy the experience.
The other thing is where these media start to produce offshoots of various kinds, which really do confuse the Roger Eberts of the world. It's difficult for art critics to get their heads around my oil painting when I'm making it for books: how seriously should they treat this? They'll find any number of complications when it really is only about "Well, are you enjoying it yet? If you're not, tell me why, and if you are, well, hey tell people. Now, you know, next question."
When you look at this span of time over which you've been making games--the machines are more powerful; they can presumably more approximate the visions that you have in your head.
Much more.
One of the things that people get hung-up on is the idea that games originated from a relatively youthful place. They were originally, in some ways, primarily intended for young audiences. And it's almost like they refused to let them grow up. So, there's this kind of aesthetic where--
The same with comics.
Exactly. So how do you approach making games? Do you have to hold yourself back and say, "Well, if this were a painting, I'd give myself free rein, but obviously I can't go as far in making a game?"
Every medium has its strengths and has elements that you're just damn grateful are there--and limitations. There are times when I get up from my writing desk--middle of the afternoon, late afternoon--and prepare to go next door to paint when I feel this sense of release. "Okay, I can now put down the pen and go and do something which is very non-intellectual; doesn't really use that side of my brain at all." And I can put my music on really loud. I can't write to music because my writing takes on the rhythm of the music. Do you write to music?
I used to. Not so much now.
My writing suffers as a consequence. But I believe that each of these media--when I get up from my desk and I go next door to play my music and paint my pictures, I get--I lose some things. I lose that interior life of the characters again. I mean, where I'm much closer to this medium, in fact, in lots of regards except that painting is--Hockney says it is a work made in time and therefore is a little time machine because you're watching the process of everything that happens from the first mark that you put on the canvas to the very last you put on. And I've done a few experiments with setting up a camera and watching the way I paint something by doing a speeded-up version of the whole process. And these are big canvases. The biggest of the paintings is 23 feet x 12. The smallest of them are 4 x 5 feet. I don't sketch anything out. I don't prep anything. I just start to make marks and --
Male publicist: Don't you actually have three of the 20 footers that are in a row or--
Yeah, I do.
A triptych.
A triptych, yeah. I don't always do that, but yes, I put the three in a row. But what I'd like very much is the idea that each of these media, there's some gains and some losses, and I just have the singular pleasure of being able to do a bit of everything. I get to play in all these waters.
Next: In which Barker discusses the past, present and future of horror. To read Part I, click here.
