Erich Schaefer

One was a former music producer. Heck, I co-hosted a podcast with Richard Garfield for a while. And I assure you that in addition to being one of the greatest game designers out there, he is very much a math professor.

And over the past 5 or so years, there have been a lot of candidates from game design/animation/etc. programs. And--not across the board, but definitely as a trend--when I'd ask them their favorite book, they couldn't name one.

We had a round of candidates for a cinematics director position. So, basically who directs our mini-movies in the game. Only one of the candidates was able to name a favorite movie director. It was Michael Bay.

We had animation candidates who couldn't name a favorite animator. We had environmental artists who couldn't name a favorite style of architecture or type of biome.

Their entire field of reference was other games, sometimes anime and manga. Sometimes movies, but not *critically.* They had trouble articulating what creative choices they liked about particular movies.

And that's a BIG problem. Because games haven't been around that long. Like, whatever creative field you work in, you should be drawing inspiration from outside it. But that's doubly true for games, because there's *not that much to draw from.*

Game cinematics haven't really developed their own language yet: they're still mostly cribbing from movies. So when other games are your examples for how to do a cinematic, you're deriving from something that's already derivative.

And--while I'd like to see the visual language of games evolve to be something different than that of movies--at this point, they're mostly just doing what movies do but not as well. If you're a cinematics director or lead and haven't studied film, that's a problem.