Hollywood & Games Summit: Clive Barker is scary
Clive Barker was the keynote speaker yesterday at the Hollywood and Games Summit in Los Angeles, and Joystiq was there. You know that it's just a normal day in Hollywood when you have to stumble through a crowd of teenyboppers attending a Hannah Montana / Miley Cyrus concert, fight through a forest of lounge chairs bearing bikini-clad girls, and make your way through the labyrinthine Hollywood & Highland complex to find a conference about video games.Barker, who sounded like he'd taken a chainsaw to the throat recently, rasped his way through a lot of information about his upcoming Clive Barker's Jericho game, which he's been involved in developing based on one of the "millions of ideas flying around in my head." He made it a special point to talk about Roger Ebert's now famous quote, where he states that video games are inferior to literature and movies, and cannot be considered high art.
Shortly after Barker began slamming this quote, there were extremely loud noises behind the stage. Barker paused and said, "He's outside! Let's leave him there." Later, the apparently clumsy waiter backstage dropped a huge tray, or possibly a box full of hubcaps, and Barker said "He's gonna get in! He's passing himself of as a waiter ... coming around the side door!"
Hilarity aside, Barker waxed and waned poetic about his involvement and apparent love for the gaming world, but also proclaimed himself as a Luddite who writes out his novels in longhand. "My relationship with technology has never been comfortable." He appreciates the artwork and cinematic look in video games, but he doesn't play them himself. This makes you wonder ... can you design a great game without being a game player, at least on some level?
He went on to talk about how Jericho came to be. He said that he has to sort through all of the ideas that he comes up with and decide if it's a novel, a comic book, a video game, a movie, or something else. When he came up with the initial concept for Jericho, he said "That would make ... a fuckin' terrible novel." But he decided it might work as a game and began going down that road.
He also talked at length about Umberto Eco's studies in hyperreality, and the fact that people study the "defecation processes" of different nomadic tribes in order to find out more about their culture. He posits, "If shitting is worthy of study to find out about a culture, then why not video games?" He hopes that one day there might be a gaming "War and Peace" that will prove that games are high art, and put the screws to Roger Ebert. "We're just at the beginning of the gaming world, and who knows what will be possible later?"
When the event wrapped up, he said about his game "It'll scare the shit out of you, I guarantee it."
You can also check out Gamasutra's writeup of the event as well, where they get into more of his development theories and link to dear old Joystiq as well.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
ferrarimanf355 @ Jun 27th 2007 7:06PM
I'm so preordering this game. :-)
miles foreman @ Jun 27th 2007 7:18PM
With pants like that, you gotta be a scary-ass muffucka to keep the douchebags at bay.
Jericho sounds pretty neat.
Thief @ Jun 27th 2007 8:40PM
Clive Barkers Undying definitely got me a number of times at the game, and his voice-acting for one of the sons was excellent as well.
Cant wait for Jericho to come out =D
Ken @ Jun 27th 2007 11:05PM
Clive Barker is awesome.
I purchased Undying a while back (probably more than 5-6 years ago) and I've yet to beat it. But I regularly install the game.
It's so damn scary.
Fester @ Jun 28th 2007 7:10AM
Yeah, Undying was a very intense/atmospheric game. One of the best of it's time on PC.
gamer12 @ Jun 28th 2007 8:47AM
The comments are funny but umm Roger Ebert is suffering from cancer and from the looks of him recently on TV he's not going to make it. He can't even talk so for me not as funny.
rDr4g0n @ Jun 28th 2007 9:10AM
if you dont play games, you dont really know what gamers expect. this can result in something new and awesome, or something waaaayyy off target... we shall see.
and ya, i loved undying
Steve @ Jun 28th 2007 9:40AM
I read the Books of Blood 20 years ago, and Clive's been scaring the shit out of me ever since.
Namssorg @ Jun 28th 2007 10:40AM
I don't know what's up with Mr. Barker's voice- but the past few years it seems to be getting worse and worse. I'm glad he's still working though- Can't wait for the next book in the Abarat series.
As scary as some of his work is-- that imagination is INCREDIBLE when it comes to creating worlds, scary or not.
BIG Reub @ Jun 28th 2007 12:06PM
@gamer12
We're all gonna get old and/or sick one day and then die. That doesn't absolve us from having our ideas called on the carpet and in fact does him a service for by allowing him to be remembered in totality.
Clive didn't attack him as a person or his illness. When I get close to the end I want all my friends to keep teasing me about the dumb stuff I've said over the years.
Jose @ Jun 28th 2007 1:00PM
You think Ebert will drop any good loot?
Mojo @ Jun 28th 2007 5:47PM
@Jose
That is terrible and hilarious.
Clive Barker is friggin' awesome. He's definitely a crazy sonnabitch, but if there's one thing he excels at far beyond the scope of his peers, it's creating fantastic worlds and creeping the bejeezus out of me. If you have any doubt about this, check out "The Great and Secret Show" or, if you're not doing anything for a while, The Imagica series.
Did Demonik get officially canned? That was looking awfully cool.
Blackmanfu @ Jul 24th 2007 4:37AM
Barker's the man!
Oh and as for the question: "can you design a great game without being a game player, at least on some level?" Of COURSE you can! The designer of Katamari damacy (Keita Takahashi) is actually not a gamer. In fact, I believe in an interview with him (a year ago?) he stated understand why people play video games so often, and that he crafted katamari just because he wanted to see something different out there, something someone like him may actually want to play.
That article was from way the hell long ago so i may have terribly misquoted him, but the gist is that Takahashi really isn't much of a gamer.
So either Clive Barker's Jericho is gonna be complete crap, or it'll be imaginative and different from what we've seen before, a la Katamari. I'm hoping it's the latter... minus the rolling things into giant balls.
Unless they're giant balls of DOOM