I think the only point where I disagree is with his call for video games to be more ‘cinematic’. There’s a place for cinematic, lush, narrative driven video games, but to work well these tend to be expensive productions. Not only are expensive games not the answer to lack of original IP, aping or overlapping with the cinematic experience is not the best way to jostle video games into an equivalent position to the other media industries.

I think playing up the unique aspects of video games is more useful – interactivity, playabilty (I’m running out of words already because we don’t have a developed language for video game concepts). Trying to make movies with a degree of interactivity is best left to 1st party studios and big budget developers. The problem for the rest of us, both in terms of economic survival, and improving the industry as a whole, is best solved by making smaller, cheaper, uniquely video game experiences, rather than wasting all our money trying to look like hollywood movies, and following the red-herring of ‘narrative’.