Does gaming need "outside talent"?

David Cage said gaming should hire "outside talent" showing a picture of Ellen Page with some shit on her face during some confrence thing. With Guillermo del Toro... Steven Spielberg and Bruce Willis... does gaming need "outside talent" in order to improve? I dono what the fuck he even means since alot of voice actors for video games are also actos to begin with. What the fuck does he mean?

Outside talent can be helpful, sure. Gaming is always in need of more voices and more variety. You need many angles to make new things and not just keep things as they are. While I don't think hollywood actors and actresses are exactly the best to add something, they certainly can. I'd say writers, artists, and specialists in other areas of society have a lot to offer to gaming as a growing medium and industry.

I think he means using actors likeness in games, not just their voices.

Also, why do you italicise last names?

Need it? Of course not. He's a little biased, isn't he? It's funny that he goes from using VA's who can barely speak english in Heavy Rain to Canada's Hollywood sweetheart. If anything I think using celebrities might create dissonance... But Willem Dafoe is in it as well so count me all the way in.

bruce willis isnt that good of an actor.

yeah, i said it.

For story ideas, perhaps. For actual execution, no.

It's hard to really compare it any other artistic medium.

Movies have a lot of outside voices without even trying. Most films are adapted from books, and there are a zillion of those written annually. Fiction, non-fiction, etc.

Musicians often benefit from fresh perspectives of producers or collaborative writers. A new producer can sometimes challenge a band by taking them out of their comfort zone, using different recording methods and pushing an overall different sound.

I guess it depends on how expensive it is to create a 3D model from an actor as well as capture their expressions as well as voice work. As long as they're not bobble heads like in LA Noire I'm fine with it.

Mind you great talent is tailored to a specific field. I don't know where the fuck videogames find actors. RIght out of acting school? But most the Star Trek captain were found in theater and were classically trained.

The outside talent they need to hire are good managers. Especially Polyphony Digital. Designers are awful at production management it seems in this industry.

Someone coming from a different discipline might have new perspectives when it comes to game design, narrative, things like that. I think, for example, if people with a legitimate interest or academic background in art and literature were involved in game development it could be a great thing. I imagine most people who grow up wanting to make games aren't particularly interested in art or criticism/history of art for example (forgive the generalization). But they are very interested in games being accepted as a valid form of art on the other hand. I don't think he's referring only to voice acting but if he is your right about most voice actors being actors anyway, so it would be a stupid point.

+1

Going off his track record when he isn't on about polygon count. It usually games need to be more mature in his usual ham fisted manner.

Gaming needs talent in general. Literature and film are more established story-telling mediums with greater pools of talent. Of course the gaming industry should try to use some of it.

Neither is Chuck Norris. So that's why we don't go around focusing on what they're not good at, but rather on what they are good at. Which is killing things...with their thumb.

As for outside talent, directors and writers sure, actors only for voice acting. I already see them in movies don't really understand why I'd want to see them in my games as well.

But then again, it's not like we don't have some amazing talent in our industry when it comes to writing. Games like The Witcher, Fallout, Torment, Deus Ex, Walking Dead, Mass Effect, Max Payne, Alan Wake, Arcanum, Vampire The Masquerade - Bloodlines, Stalker, Spec Ops: The Line. They all have amazing writing talent behind them, and those are just off the top of my head. The true problem with our industry is that it's easier, and often times more profitable, to make a CoD clone than it is to truly create something great that can stand the test of time.

Which brings me to my next point. The reason why we can't have nice things is because a lot of people play games just for fun, they couldn't give a toss for anything other than that, and that's okay. Literature and films obviously need to rely on quality story telling a lot more in order to be successful than games do.

The industry brings in outside talent all the time. It's called a new generation of programmers, artists, and people in general. That's why game design has and will always evolve. Let Steven Spielberg stick the thing he loves to do, make movies. As for David Cage, Sony let him make a movie instead of letting him waste 40 mil trying to make a game into a movie. Let games be games and evolve what they currently are. That doesn't mean you can't have a mature narrative, it just means you have to work harder to explore new ways of telling that narrative.

Except then you end up with a game that isn't very fun to play(aka Heavy Rain), cause that's what happens when a person who doesn't understand that a game is supposed to be played not watched.

Chances are a person who is making video games has some artistic background, especially if they went to college for it. There's either doing a technical CS major(Math or Physics minor) or artistic CS major(Art or writing minor). As far as the whole game is art bullcrap, art is something that gets an emotional response. Do you get an emotional response from playing a game? Then its art. But in the end does is really matter if some person who has never played a game thinks that games are art or not? No it doesn't and I really don't get why the video game crowd is so worried about it.

Though, I will say I don't think "games are not art" is a thing that developers complain about. It's being taken seriously and as a legitimate entertainment industry that I think they care more about. Being able to tell family or friends that you're a video game writer/programmer without being looked at like some super-sized child. Stuff like previous Spike TV awards and booth babes is a whole lot more dangerous to the game industry's perception than whether or not its art.

No, you don't need outside talent. How just about more talent?

People with more good ideas and the ability to implement them.

im not going to pretend i have any idea about how games are made, but that won't stop me having an opinion.

yes

It doesn't need, but it also doesn't hurt.

In order to determine whether the game industry needs to consult "outside talent," we first need to agree on what constitutes "inside talent." Video games are collaborative efforts from start to finish. Of course they involve artists, programmers, technicians, business men (marketing, management, PR, advertising), lawyers, etc. etc., but--and we might take a note from Bruno Latour here--the efforts of entire other industries contribute to the causal chain terminating in a video game.

What would greater interdisciplinarity actually look like in video games? Games, we should observe, obey different principles than other art forms. For instance, an architect works according to values that, if applied to, let's say, a dungeon in Zelda, would result in a rather poor playing experience. There is no need for a structure in a game to possess sound engineering.

If we look at some historical instances of interdisciplinarity in games, we will also observe that other disciplines' contributions are meaningful precisely because those disciplines are already interdisciplinary, including elements pertinent to game design. Bioware, for example, was founded by two doctors; however, if medicine today did not have a good deal of overlap with LIS (e.g. bioinformatics), I doubt any such collaboration would have occurred.