An interview with Danny Ledonne, part I

Filed Under Interviews, Video Games 

I recently had the privilege to meet and befriend the illustrious Danny Ledonne. A filmmaker and MFA candidate at my school, Danny is best known for his controversial game, Super Columbine Massacre RPG, which is regarded as one of the first influential interactive narratives. (And as I’ve said before, I’m very interested in the emerging form of interactive narratives, probably because I’m a fan both of video games and good journalism.)

Danny was nice enough to agree to an interview with me in late December. From his ranch in Colorado, he offered me insight on the junction between video games, violence, and the media. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be publishing the transcript in parts.

Q: Are video games still an emerging medium?

A: Yeah, I guess you could ask yourself what benchmark one would have to set to say that video games have come into their own and that they’re no longer emerging… Just last, no Friday night, Avatar screened in theaters and people were saying, “Oh this is this new direction that film is going in,” and you know the question is, “So is film still emerging?” and in some ways probably. So I think that the real definition that people talk about when they say that video games are an emerging medium is that they, unlike film, have a very restrictive understand based on what audiences expect them to do and what the general public thinks they are capable of. And so a game like ‘Columbine’ really revealed that games aren’t there yet because films and books and other contemporary forms of discourse were able to look at a subject like Columbine and video games just weren’t, at least in this case.

That doesn’t mean that ‘Columbine’ was the best game that could made about this subject, but given that so many people who never played it or really looked at it reacted negatively tells you something about where video games are at and that they haven’t emerged in the sense of being a socially relevant art form. No one would discount the- even Jack Thompson says that video games are art, that video games contain technical and artistic merit and that they can contain stories and ideas and depict the human condition. So video games are probably art. They’re not art like the Venus de Milo, but they’re art in a kind of contemporary digital form. But they haven’t yet emerged in the sense that video games still have a fairly narrow expectation of what we’re supposed to do with them. They’re generally toys that we use to spend a few hours entertaining ourselves. Video games are rarely seen as a way to engage in a socially relevant issue or look at a topic of contemporary importance.

Q: Do you think interactive narratives have become mainstream, or are they still an edgy or unusual way of telling a story?

A: I think they’re still edgy and unusual. I think if you were to go to a film tomorrow night and you found that ten minutes into the film, a little console would pop up and ask you which character do you want to follow next, that would be surprising to you. When that’s no longer surprising to you, I guess you could think of interactive narratives as being a kind of fully realized and mainstream form of entertainment and interfacing with communication. Why don’t you tell me more of what interactive narrative means to you.

Q: A non-linear form where it puts the viewer into a persona and has them interact.

A: I’m thinking about in my own childhood about the first time that term probably entered my mind outside of video games. I read a lot of the Choose Your Own Adventure stories. That wasn’t the first of its kind but it was the most widely published. That was a really engaging way for people to read in a way that felt less linear. I feel in some ways, Tivo and DVR have changed the way people watch television. They can re-watch things if they want. It’s still linear but it would be controlling the flow of the narrative at the viewer’s decision.

Now that I think about it, I do see more and more news stories on the web where I can click and see interactive graphs and links that expand upon the existing story and I don’t know how often people actually interface that as a part of what an expectation is of reading the news. There’s a generation of people who still get a newspaper physically delivered to their door, they pick it up, and then they read through it and that’s really the experience they have, but people who get their news online, they spend less time, research shows, looking at any given article. They kind of jump around more like your own stream of consciousness would do so I can start on Yahoo’s page reading about what the Obama administration is doing, and then I’ll end up on Wikipedia looking up the name of someone who was in the article, and then I’ll look at the source and go to two other links and so I guess that the Internet itself becomes an interactive narrative even though all of or most of the sources its pointing to are in fact static and linear ones. So video games offer that potential inlaid in their design- the opportunity to do that.

If you think about the earliest video game designs, they were barely interactive. The degree that you could control the story and flow of game play in a game like Pong or even Super Mario Brothers was very limited. Think about the original Super Mario- you could really only go in one direction, and you couldn’t go backwards, you certainly couldn’t go up and down, but that still felt like you had a tremendous amount of influence because you could destroy blocks, you could grow big and small, you could attack enemies or evade them, and now you look at a video game like GTA4 and you’re making phone calls, you’re getting on the internet, you’re driving all around town and you decide what you want to do most of the time.

Comments

One Response to “An interview with Danny Ledonne, part I”

  1. John Bowers on January 29th, 2010 12:32 pm

    Wow an impressive interview with an impressive subject. It’s very interesting to think of Video Games as an emerging medium. Personally I’m not 100% sold that the controversy behind Super Columbine Massacre RPG shows that games are not as accepted as a medium because books, movies, tv etc. were able to look at the subject with out controversy. It’s not that Super Columbine Massacre RPG is a game that caused the controversy it’s that you play as the kids, and kill the students then go to hell and fight the devil… If a movie portrayed the Columbine Massacre in such a way I’m sure it would be labeled controversial too.

    That said I think this is a very insightful interview, and I don’t disagree with the stance and views present about games as a medium. I can’t wait for the second half.

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