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PS2 | Action | Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure

Boxart for Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure
Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure 48 screen shots
  • GRAPHICS: 3.0
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  • AVG USER SCORE 4.8
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Feature: Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure--Page 2

Feature by GameGirl | 07/29/2005 | 14:59:57 PM PST

GP: The speech you gave at the DICE [Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain] Summit earlier this year was really kind of a call to arms to the industry. You were saying that the industry needs to wake up and make culturally relevant games.

ME: In the challenge of being culturally relevant, a lot of these game publishers operate like they're selling pharmaceutical goods, rather than creating emotional entertainment products. And there are alot of conventions and conventional wisdom that have the gaming publishers handcuffed.

Today for instance you have these gigantic, titanic-sized publicly held companies that are scared to go against conventional wisdom, and the bar for what's culturally relevant is much lower than what it is for any other means of entertainment out there...because their appetite for risk is less.

And that's why hip-hop is just now emerging in gaming when in fact the rest of the world has been making huge business off of hip-hop for the last fifteen years! They're just kind of getting around to it.

A lot has to do less with the gaming industry having been discriminatory, as much as it's been incestuous. It doesn't like outsiders. It only likes people that are on the inside, in the know. And they haven't been able to speak necessarily the same language as, you know, a film studio, a television studio, certainly a music studio. It kills me that the music industry doesn't synergize with the gaming industry, it just kills me, you know, because it's so obvious, the opportunities... it would be so cool, for pop culture, it would be cool s**t, it would energize music, and it just doesn't happen.

That was at the core of my call [at D.I.C.E.]: that your complacency with success is often what could have you arriving on the doors of failure the next day. Being complacent once you've arrived at what you think is success...you constantly have to think you're number two even if you're number one.

And people will be like, what are you talking about? They're doing The Godfather! The Godfather is f**king thirty years old! So what? It might be hugely commercially viable, but I'm talking about pop culture, man. I'm talking about creating pop culture that 15 years from now people will remember when they get nostalgic. What? Is it only going to be Rockstar? It's like Grand Theft Auto and Tony Hawk, and that's it.

First of all, the moniker "games" is a problem. When I hear "games" I think of f**king Monopoly and Life and Yahtzee. Those are "games" to me...but there's definitely a blurring of a line between emotional entertainment that you could immerse yourself in and something that's a puzzle. Blend it together. And for me, that's where my head's at, trying to tackle that.

And the interesting irony in that is, there was a [legal] ruling that...deemed video games as art, not just as games. The ruling could potentially allow games to do satire, right? There are no games right now that do satire. You look at like Shrek, and all these brand references, and all these send-ups of famous brands. I don't know a game publisher with the appetite to take that risk even though the laws would protect them to do that. There's no precedent.

All these things--it's not a board game, it's entertainment, it's emotional entertainment, it's art.


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