Interesting Quotes

I feel these two quotes deserve highlighting in relation to what I'm doing on this blog. They both highlight the belief that a critical approach to games should be approached with interdisciplinarity in mind, and how games develop in relation to other forms of media, including narrative based ones such as film and prose fiction: 

"It would be unreasonable to assume that gaming as a medium has developed in a vacuum as it would be to ignore that it is in many ways a medium apart. Games are a product of a blended, synthetic culture. Modern movies incorporate aspects of interactivity and gamesmanship, just as the classic Atari games invoked cinematic spectacle. And games like King's Field and  are nothing if not interactive references to high-fantasy literature. You are welcome to argue that narrative can sometimes take precedent over gameplay; the mistake would be to argue that the two are somehow self-contained in all of modern gaming. Some games, yes. Not all. And even those games that lack distinct narrative possess undeniably literary or cinematic qualities. Video games are what they are because of their relationship to previously existing media, not in spite of it. Literature, comics, film... all sorts of classical narrative development... are inextricable from the DNA of video games."

(Matthew Kaplan discussing Demon's Souls and Uncharted 2: Among Thieves on gamecritics.com: Click here to view whole article) 

"There is no example in the history of mankind of a new medium created from scratch and not getting inspiration from anything else. The first photographers were inspired by painting, the first movie makers by photography and theatre, the first TV series by movies, and you can take every single creative art and find its roots in other arts. There is nothing wrong about that, just a simple and logical rule: nothing is created from nothing. 

This idea about games existing by themselves and not getting inspiration from anywhere else is a little bit naïve. Interactivity, like literature or cinema, is a platform to trigger human emotions. Human emotions don’t belong to any medium." 

(David Cage, director of  Fahrenheit, interviewed by 1UP.com: Click here to read the interview)