DICE Keynote on Creativity in Gaming

Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski spoke as a keynote at dice, waggling his finger at the industry to stop letting risk minimizing mess with the creative process.

“Here lie my first words of caution” thundered the Pirates director. “Beware the path! With the Pirates of the Caribbean games [the big studios] killed something unique. Our audience wants us to surprise them. They demand it of us […] When they see something new, they will champion it because they discovered it. Serving them leftovers will never succeed!”

Obviously influenced by his time in Hollywood, the director’s words drew strong parallels between the world of video games and the world of movies while painting a cautionary tale for the audience:

“In my industry, instinct is nearing extinction. I look to you as creators and storytellers to pick up the baton. […] This is not a debate between active and passive engagement. A novel requires active participation by imagination. A film used to do that, but now it just reminds people of that other film. Let’s not do the same thing with games. You haven’t even scratched the surface of what is possible. The collision between gaming, film, internet and animation has just occurred and things are still mutating… this is the time for madness, for brilliance!”

Verbinski also chastised the big publishers who have contributed to the problem by clamping down on the creative process in order to minimize the possibility of risk. “Managing risk by producing something audiences have already seen always puts the studio behind the wave — never the creator of it,” he pronounced. “In order to be fiscally responsible you must operate outside the data, you must have some madness.”