BAFTA Nominated Journey Director Jenova Chen - Interview

Chen is obviously an incredibly creative and intuitive guy, and it didn't take us long to talk about gaming as a medium. Everyone I have ever spoken to associated with thatgamecompany have always championed how much they want to push gaming. "If you compare video games to the first 30 or 40 years of film, I think we are still in Black and White film," he says hopefully.

We aren't even there yet. My professor Chris Swain, he talks about how video games haven't even got to the sound era in film yet. The way to look at Journey is to look at it almost like a silent film. What is that in equivalent of sound to our medium? That means that the player can talk to the game and the game understands them. Think about it, right now all the player's input is through some thumb movement. A physical push. That's all we can tell the game and that is all the interaction we can do? That is so limited! If we can talk to SIRI for example and SIRI can think, if I can talk to a character and he can understand me completely, imagine how wonderful the game is going to be. We aren't even there yet.

However, it hasn't always been so hopeful for games. "Unfortunately, since 3D graphics, there is a lot more challenge for the female audience." Appealing to girls as well as adults is important for the art form to progress out of its emotionally stagnant ditch. Things are of course looking up with the introduction of socal games, but as Jenova points out, even that isn't the end of the conversation.

When it was arcade games, the ratio of men to women was pretty even. Even during the early 2d Famicom time, girls played Mario, they played Tetris I think. But ever since the 3D era, we have just dropped female interest. For the last 20 years the industry has begun focusing on 3D graphics, which is naturally more interesting to males. It comes back though with social games and mobile games, so in fact we still have a pretty even distribution between all gamers. In fact the age of gamers keep getting older. A while back I was talking to one of my colleagues and I was talking to him saying, "when can we get everyone interested in playing games?" He said, "You don't have to worry about it. Soon the people who don't lay games are going to die out, they are going to be done." Pretty much everybody who is born today has played games in some way. So when we have a society that is filled with people who play games, I think they will take games more seriously.

But what of AAA gaming? What part do they play in the advancement of the medium. Is it possible for a AAA game to be a wonderful artistic experience?

Well in the past I thought it was very very difficult to direct where you have hundreds of people working on various things. But you know, Hollywood did it. A masterful film can be made where there are hundreds of people collaborating. But I hadn't seen very many highly coherent video games put together for a really long time, but then I saw Uncharted 2. The game felt like a singular voice. So it is possible.

Jenova praised Naughty Dog and professed his excitement for their next game the Last of Us. I think it i important to really think about our mainstream nd what it says about us, even if it has challenges going to need to face going forward. But in order to do that, we must reflect on where we are? For me, that is where the good work of the British Academy Games Awards comes in. Jenova agrees.

I think it is very important. Particularly for Academy Awards they don't typically award the best selling game or film. They award the most important thing that pushed the boundary of the medium, that really brings something new. I think the public deserve to know what is going on. There are so many people who just think games are violence. They don't consider that Angry Birds or all of those games that they play on their phone and their tablets as games. They go "Oh we don't play games, we play apps" They associate games with what they see in advertisement There are so many different kinds of games they don't know. All they know are the AAA games that can afford advertisements in additional media. That is kind of what is going on right now. Then you have BAFTA who are the crown jewel of traditional media awards in Europe actually including video games and letting the public know what is going on in this field. I think this is very important. Too bad that the Academy Awards are not doing that. The fact that the Walking Dead and Journey were nominated and actually won quite a few awards...I mean first off I feel really really gracious that the game that I really love and I have put my effort in is loved by others. It is kind of like someone else loves my child that I would love. I also thought it was a very watershedding moment where a small game made by small teams, not with AAA budgets, topped these commercial games. That is very encouraging. For Journey it just started with 7 people, 12 people in the end to finish the whole game and these big studios had that much man power. I think it has made people believe that it is possible. It is not about huge 100 million dollar budgets. It is about how it feels. Like in The Walking Dead, it was emotionally intense. That is why I think they win so many awards. It is not about how long your game is or how many guns you had in your game. It is not about that. It is the same in any media. It is about emotional impact, emotional depth and what you remember. I mean that fact that these games are out there...I mean even Far Cry. It is a AAA game that attempts to do something deep. Peoples expectations in games is going to get higher and higher and very soon the traditional ways of gaming won't satisfy the crowd.

Through my talk with Jenova it occurred to me that his voice is a very important one in the medium. Thatgamecompany's projects are on course to be massive giant killers and the possibly the game that are going to be remembered when we look back on the era. His company is becoming the face of 'artistic' games. (Not a title I would use, but one that is used often enough) His voice feels like one that is not only important, but essential to the medium. Having a developer create a game that has the sole purpose of pushing the emotional spectrum of gaming towards a more satisfying, adult experience is what the industry needs now. That is not to say I am a great fan of the mainstream. Chainsaw bayonets, kill cams and plasma grenades are part of the DNA of gaming and satisfy narrative purposes too. But to have a creative director examine that DNA, play with it and finds a way to improve it, that is the kind of person who will make everyone view gaming as a legitimate art form. For me, that is Jenova Chen's greatest gift to gaming thus far.