N'Gai Croal
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Oct 25, 2007 01:12 PM
Clive Barker's Jericho, developed by Mercury Steam and published by Codemasters
In Part III of our Q&A with Clive Barker, whose videogame Jericho is now in stores, we spoke at length about the past, present and future of the horror movie. In today's final entry, Barker explains why he's so optimistic about the future of videogames, and offers some advice--as one cultural outlaw speaking to another--to the folks at Rockstar Games in the wake of the British Board of Film Classification's ban of Manhunt 2.
I'm guessing that most of your peer group doesn't play videogames?
Yes, that's true with this--not proviso, but with this addition: when they do it's always the unlikeliest ones.
Okay. So why were you so drawn to videogames? And why are you so optimistic about where the medium can go in the future?
I think it's a damn fool artist who doesn't walk in all the media that are available to him or her and see whether there's something they can contribute to the process. And for me it's also a way of-[Jericho] would not make a good novel. It's way too complex for a movie, in terms of the intricacies of it: how do you really get five civilizations into a picture? You can't do it. It's out of the question. Though I don't think we're very far off the point when you'll be able to do it. With cinema driven by CGI pushing in one direction and games pushed by a hunger for reality in another, eventually then they're going to meet.
In the next five years it's going to be impossible to tell which is which. It's like the scene at the end of "Animal Farm": They looked from man to pig and pig to man, and couldn't tell one from the other. It's going to be the same. We are going to be have such visually sophisticated games and movies that are so dependent upon a spectacle that only CGI can supply.
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