Matthew Wayne Selznick

I'm interested in video games in the abstract, I admit — I don't own any consoles (but that Godzilla fighting game is tempting me toward a Wii) and I very, very rarely play computer games. Still, I appreciate the art and craft involved in designing and creating them… and Grand Theft Auto 4 is truly compelling.

A question for the forum community: the line between feature films and video games is getting very fuzzy — watching my co-workers at Mahalo.com stream live play of GTA4 shows me that. Will video-games and movies merge as some new kind of art form / entertainment? If so, how long will that take, and what form will it take?

Nobilis said:

Mass Effect, if you trim the action scenes down to what would be cinematically interesting, would be a terrific movie. Heck, it would be a terrific trilogy of movies… there's easily six hours of cinematic content there.

I heard that GTA4 has forty hours of game play and another twenty of side missions… I watched a lot of it while the video game team at Mahalo.com built walkthrough (drivethrough?) videos… so much of it is story! It boggles the mind the planning and coordination that go into making something like that.

I think we have some people who actually work for video game companies in this community… shed some light! Is it more like scripting or producing a movie, or programming a if-this-then-that game these days?