HEAD BLOG

So, here’s an interesting challenge. You have a game which, as part of its key strengths, features a cast of thousands of fully animated and destructible Zombies. That’s something you might want to tell people about. It’s a pretty impressive message to relate.

It’s not enough. Of course it isn’t. Every publisher wants to create a character, an aspirational figure in whom the consumer will place all their love, affection and spare cash. Dead Rising 2 is no exception and the developers have Chuck, a biker who seems to have cracked the knack of taping objects together in order to form weapons of mad destruction. So he has to go on the pack somewhere.

It’s shaping up to be a crowded mess of a pack really. All too often, games packaging tries to tell the complete story. Look, it says, in one glance you will see that I have cars, gangs, spaceships, soldiers, cats and humour. I have streets you can walk down and buildings you can enter. Yes, all too often, the front of box seems to be unaware that there is, in fact, a back of box to inform.

So the challenge, whenever Head First designs packaging, is to balance everything and make sure the impact isn’t swamped by detail.

The sweet spot of this pack is bang on the centre, on the hero. The title isn’t lost but nor does it dominate and the thousands of zombies… well, they are carefully shepherded by the stadium lights so that they remain as detail and texture.

Above all, the pack retains clarity. The real test, of course, will be in six months when it is lying on a shelf next to twenty other packs. Will it still stand out without a marketing spend to clear away the competition?

Jonathan Jones makes a wonderfully high minded claim that todays Leonardos (no, Turtle fans, that’s as in da Vinci) can be found alive and well and working at Pixar.

I can’t argue with that.

What I would add, however, is that the same drive, the same talent, can be found alive and well within the games industry.

If the search for experience, and giving people the ability to access and understand that experience isn’t just as worthy of the “art” tag then I’ll be Pollacksed.

Bioshock, Red Dead Redemption, Modern Warfare – these are brave strides into understanding and relaying the human experience in a way that can be accessed by millions.

Everything in life can be boiled down to a scene within a movie. Worse still, everything can be gently steered towards a scene within a movie.

This simple, but invasive truth is colouring every move I make.

When a friend tells me about teaching English as a foreign language I immediately think of the scene in Good Morning Vietnam where – well, if you don’t know it then chances are you should probably leave this blog for now.

Similarly when I’m mid-flow in an argument I might say something straight from a film. I do. I can’t help it. If the time is right then it just has to play out that way because it felt so good when I saw it played out by Pacino or, ummm… Cage.

It doesn’t stop there.

I’ve even steered an argument towards being able to deliver a line. I haven’t yet managed the “sell crazy someplace else” line but I know exactly how I could push someone towards it.

Clearly, there’s a problem.

The thing is, life and relationships are one thing. It’s easy to start arguments just to be able to deliver a killer line. Life and relationships aren’t serious enough to take steps to prevent myself from doing it.

But creativity, dear god creativity, is.

Imagine my horror, yes, the horror, the horror, as I stare at a piece of copy I’d spent five WHOLE minutes on writing only to realise that somebody else had written it before me.

It’s embarrassing is what it is.

It’s also an area to be keenly aware of throughout the creative process. Sometimes an idea can feel so good, so reassuringly familiar, that it must have been done before. And often it has.

Death is not the end of course and our culture is filled with talented people who make use of this creative saturation and make it their own. Look at Spaced – filled with snippets of other works it remains decidedly its own creature throughout. Self-awareness, keenly expressed, is its hallmark and its creative territory.

Then there is the love-him-or-hate-him Tarantino whose oeuvre is built upon references to popular (and not so popular) culture. Again though, it’s his own spin on these things. His own experience which is brought to bear upon the subject matter that makes the difference.

And that, in the end, is key. It is experience which guides our hand in all these matters. Personal experience. And that’s something that turns a mediocre argument into a divorce settlement.