GDC 2008: Jamil Moledina: Probing the Mind of GDC, Part Two

TE: Do you think the industry ... obviously this has been a banner year ... according to the NPD, 19 billion or so odd dollars spent at retail, which is the biggest year yet for games. As an observer of [the industry] for such a long time, do you feel like we're at a peak, or perhaps a bubble ... and do you feel like the industry's going to continue to grow? Do you have any concerns of that nature at all?

JM: I try not to predict the future ... it's never a clean exercise.

However, from what we see at GDC, there are over a thousand submissions to talk at the show, and it gives us a way to kind of see into the future the next six to 12 months of what's happening in the industry. And based on that, we do have a sense that we are poised for tremendous expansion in the types of games that we are making, and with that I think we are well positioned to be recognized by the greater audience of people that are out there who don't consider themselves gamers.

Nintendo has been kind of pioneering the latest surge here by creating games for people who are five to 95. Sid Meier has been at this for a couple of decades, which is why we're showcasing an interview with him to kind of give us a sense of how this has been down and how everyone can kind of get on the bandwagon.

But, considering that our billions have been kind of incrementally growing year on year by appealing to a core audience, I think we have a very good position to springboard that to appeal to everybody who enjoys entertainment, because essentially, film, television, radio, Facebook - if I can make that a category all by itself - and the game industry are all competing for the same attention span of the same people. And at the end of the day, there's - as you pointed out with SXSW - a growing appreciation and growing recognition of what these various entertainment forms can do. And I honestly do feel optimistic about the growth of our industry, especially considering the potential recognition among those who aren't gamers yet.

TE: I know a lot of people have, at various times, predicted a sort of amalgamation of entertainment forms: TVs becoming more like games, games becoming more like movies, etc ... is that something you can imagine at this point, or do you think the future is something else?

JM: Well, I'm inclined to think the future is something else, because that sort of talk has been around for a long time, and not to say that that isn't been happening on some level ... for example, Jesse Alexander is doing a talk at GDC about using videogame writing-thinking in writing the show Heroes. And Flint Dille is doing a transmedia talk ... he was the original creator of the television shows G.I. Joe and Transformers ... Flint actually killed Optimus Prime; you can give him a hard time about that if you're so inclined. And he's been doing a lot of game writing and game creation now, too.

So this does happen, but not to the extent that I think people would imagine it to have happened. People are much more interested in creating a property at kind of an abstracted level, and then seeing what are the best places for it to live. There are a couple of examples of this: Jason Rubin, who's hosting our choice awards, has created a comic book called Iron and the Maiden. There's also an additional linear content thing attached to that. Jesse Alexander is a great person to talk to about this because they've got a lot of different things living under the Heroes umbrella like a web community and upcoming games.

So I do see there being much more of a sense of what the ultimate incarnation of that story is going to be at the creative phase. For example, with Heroes, you have all of these alternate universes that are created at any given time. That is potential for a game world; it is potential for an entire game. And it doesn't necessarily interfere with the narrative of the main story, it just provides an additional outlet for people to experience that part of the story. I would say we will be seeing more and more of the uniquely created experiences. I could kind of go on but I'm not sure if you'd want me to ...