LucasArts Interview

Jim Ward is President of LucasArts and Vice President of Marketing and Distribution at Lucasfilm. He began his career in advertising and was responsible for the promotion of Apple's Powerbook. Now heading LucasArts, he's responsible for bringing such franchises as Star Wars and Indiana Jones to the gaming public. In this exclusive interview, we ask Ward how LucasArts aims to succeed in the current market, where the future of gaming lies and how the company views the next generation of consoles.

Coming from the movie industry, you must be pretty happy about what the new gaming consoles can do graphics-wise?

I'm more excited about what the next generation consoles allow us to do in what we are focused on which is revolutionizing the ideas of storytelling and character development. With the raw power and capacity that those consoles have, that will allow us to do our job better.

Rebellion?

Is there still room for a revolution?

Oh, absolutely. Right now there is no story in games. Gaming right now is about button management, basically. Take for instance Grand Theft Auto, a great game, I love it and play it, a fantastic game. But the story of that is just simply a broad context, you drive around some places and shoot people. But there is no real compelling story telling, very rarely you see this in good games.

In Half-Life, there was an attempt. But we need to infuse story into those games and make them compelling because every kind of entertainment, if it's a movie, a play, whatever it is, is all based on story and characters.

We need to figure out ways in which to make the story compelling in terms of humour and suspense. So that maybe whatever I'm wearing has an impact on that storyline and ripples through and changes on an infinite branching base what the story meant to be.

And then on the character side, tell me the last character you played that you fell in love with. That happens very rarely, right? It's not like going to a movie. So we have to change that and there are a couple of levels to that. One is on a more mechanical level, where the character has to, through AI, feel real. And the other is a more Turing level AI, so if you interact with a character, they ARE real. This is the Holy Grail and we've got to achieve that. The next generation platforms will help us along the way.

Telling stories

Isn't it much more difficult to tell a story in a game than in a movie because you have to tell an infinite number of stories in a game?

Absolutely, but that doesn't mean it cannot be done. There are some noble attempts. But that's the question, what does story mean in interactive games? We have to figure that out. And that's why we take this to be an art form and make it even more compelling and more engaging. That doesn't mean to reduce gameplay or action.

But my gosh, people want to have a great story, people want to play a game because that character is so fun to be around. Today we have NPCs that say five words and then they are gone - as the gamer you don't relate to that, you don't develop a relation to them.

In which LucasArts games will we see that kind of story telling?

Well, that's the Holy Grail, I cannot promise that yet. We are working on next generation games, we have a new Star Wars game and we are talking about that new Indiana Jones game in 2007, but absolutely, we are striving for that Holy Grail.

Lucas DNA

Do you create some kind of screenplay for these games?

I don't think it's a traditional screenplay because of the infinite nature of the story branches. But we are developing characters as you would in any other type of entertainment, we are developing an overarching storyline that is evolving and we have to somehow translate that into physical gameplay in real-time, that is the challenge.

Does it help that you can base your characters on characters already known from movies?

That helps, and it also helps that we can create our own. It also helps that the fundamental DNA of LucasFilm is story and character. So if they are able to do it, we'll have to follow.

Games without borders

Is story telling something international or is it different for local markets?

I think we have great examples of great stories like Star Wars or Indiana Jones that have impacted the culture around the world. If you look at what's happening with Star Wars today, it was breaking all first day records. This is happening around the world because people have engaged in a story that transcends national walls and cultural idiosyncrasies and touches us all in a deep way. I think that can happen in gaming as well.

Will there be a day when a universe created in a game will have a similar role in culture as, for example, the Star Wars universe from the movies?

Yeah, absolutely. What we do is create an opportunity. By having LucasFilm, ILM and LucasArts all together, we are able to come up with great ideas. If we come up with a great game idea, that happens to extend beyond the game, then we have our animations division in Singapore that can create a movie out of that or a TV show. We are definitely trying to create those synergies, we don't care were the idea comes from.

Cutting costs

Does creating this type of games also bring higher cost?

That's always an issue. At the end of the day we have to also be smart about how we use the money, not be foolish and certainly not fall in the Hollywood studio trap where we pay exorbitant prices to do voice-overs and all this stuff.

We need to be very smart and efficient from a production stand point. We also have to figure several things out, like in animation; we can have AI take over that so we have three weeks of animation that can be traded of for 30 seconds work of AI. We must make sure that rising production cost does not make it impossible to create great games, and everyone who celebrates that as a great thing, they are crazy.

Stretch out with The Force

Will you also reach new audiences with gaming?

Absolutely. One of the things that we have done over the past year, just in the way of the games that we will come to market with around the world with our great partners like Activision, was to go broader. We know there is a certain amount of hardcore Star Wars gamers. But if that's all we talk to, we would always sell maybe 500, 600 thousand units.

But we go and talk to a broader range of Star Wars fans that are predisposed of Star Wars but maybe haven't played as many video games. And that's how we are on our way to three and a half million units of Battlefront. We need to extend beyond that. And the interactive gaming business needs to extend beyond the hardcore gamer in a big way.

New consoles

Do you have any preference on the new gaming consoles?

We learned it the hard way. We celebrate all new platforms, we will support all new platforms, and we will be on all platforms. When you watch a game, we will do it on all of them as best as we can. You can surely talk about all those pros and cons but to the degree that consumers buy a certain platform, we want to make sure that there is a LucasArts game for it.

Does portable gaming play a role for you?

Yes, sure. Battlefront 2, that's going to be on the PSP, we have a number of other titles in development that we haven't announced on PSP and DS, this is a fantastic market.

Online worlds

What about online games? Currently, maybe 10 percent of a game's buyers also play it online. Will that change?

I think Microsoft and Sony would very much like to. They are creating new business models, with micro payments and so on, that could potentially be a great benefit for the gamer but also be a revenue stream for us all. So we like to see that grow, and you are absolutely right, multiplayer is about ten percent of the market place, and while it's a lot of fun, we cannot forget the rest of the 90 percent of the market.

So there will still be single player games without online component from LucasArts?

Oh, I think they will all have multiplayer capabilities, but again, a lot of people prefer playing in single player modes, I do, I love to play single player and then if it's a great game I play multiplayer. So that single player experience will and shall never be forgotten when creating a game.