They’re Lying to Us

A friend sent me a link to this video of Crysis, the new game from Crytek Studios. In his words, “they’re lying to us”: Crytek is not making a game, they’re making a movie. I’m not a certified prognosticator, but what if he’s right? Action movies and first-person shooter games will certainly be the first two genres to merge. Actually, many AAA games already have a better plot than the average action movie.

So image a future in which you put a disc into your entertainment system and are presented with the following choice: either you can play a game on your own, or you can watch one of several prepared “movies” which include voice-overs by famous actors and camera work by a pro gamer. Essentially, some types of movies will become machinima, and some types of machinima will go mainstream, like Red vs. Blue already has to some extent (and presumably “sell out”, though no one seems to know what that really means). New “movies” of this kind could be distributed electronically through existing services such as Xbox Live.

Note to content producers: this does not mean that Doom was a good idea!

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