People everywhere have this egotistic tendency to look at the work someone else does and say “hey, I could do that, it’s not so hard. I should do this and earn some easy money”. This is probably the kind of thinking that got Uwe Boll into the movie industry. Spielberg has recently elected to create a video game, Jerry Bruckheimer has created an ‘incubation studio’ where the focus is on creating ideas and then giving them to someone else to actually do the hard work of creating the game. The latest to assume they’ll be successful in the gaming industry despite no prior involvement is Gore Verbinski, the director behind the “Pirate of the Carribbean” films. He got interested in video games in the early days of Pong, but has been unable to play anything for the past seven years. Discovering the beauty and complexity of games these days has prompted him to want to get involved with the industry. As is typical of someone peering into the world of gaming from the perspective of a relative outsider, he makes some assumptions that aren’t quite true and a few observations that are a bit off. He hailed Beautiful Katamari for not placing the player into the shoes of a character. Unfortunatley for Mr. Verbinski that’s not the case. Everyone of course remembers Pong, that cylindrical-headed fellow and protagonist of the game. He also said that he wants to make games that elicit a response of sadness from the players. Someone should point out Final Fantasy VII. I’d never even played the game and I was saddened when I was sitting on a friend’s couch and saw the cutscene where Aeris was killed. I was majorly saddened at the end of Halo 3 when Master Chief, Cortana, Johnson and Keyes were all killed. He also seems to want to explore the idea of ‘narrativeless gaming’, which already exists: it’s called casual gaming. In his favor however is his criticism of the “Pirates of the Carribbean” games released by Disney at the same time as the movies. He (accurately) accuses them of simply being made for the sake of pulling in a little more money and laments what the MMO could have been if made by people with a little more imagination.