Quantic Dream

That's a good question. Of course when you try to portray realism, when you try to show emotions, the graphics become extremely important. You don't necessarily need this high graphical fidelity, we've seen it in past games, but when you have it, it helps. Especially when you want to portray, show, and thereby hopefully have people feel the same emotions, subtle emotions, then you need subtlety in the animation, subtlety in the graphics, and so I think in the future we'll be able to really mimic reality in such a way that you won't be able to tell the difference between a CG character and a real character.

The movie Avatar is a very good example where, when I look at Avatar, I'm seeing what the industry is going to be in four or five year's time. It's going very fast. So as technology progresses it also broadens the horizon of creativity and I think that's a great thing.

Most developers I'm talking to right now are really looking at technology in that direction more and more. Before it was trying to do the best possible explosions, environmental effects, and these are important, but more and more studios are now also looking at characterisation.

I was very impressed by Tomb Raider, I saw at E3, it's also interesting to see what the guys are doing at DICE, or Activision on Modern Warfare and Battlefield because although story and characterisation are not necessarily the unique selling points of these games, there's more and more of it. And I think more and more developers understand that the public is longing for meaning and for story and emotion, and that's a good thing.

I think we've seen in the past ten years how TV has upped its game, very much so. Usually, ten or 15 years ago, you're looking at a TV series, crap story, characterisation was weak, actors were bad and they ramped up, and now we have TV series that's production values are fantastic, great stories, great characterisation.

Everyone is going in the same direction and I think it's a real risk for the games industry not to level up, not to get to a similar level as movies or television series because consumers have only so much hours they can spend on their leisure and if there's great entertainment on one side and a bit weaker entertainment on the other, they'll go to the great entertainment.

A few things, if you allow me to. This is something that I think is very important and as the chairman of the EGDF I'm starting to try to educate developers first but also start discussions with publishers about the need, I think, an absolute need for us to change game rating systems.

I think that we've been extremely defensive over the past 15 years. We've created age rating systems that are today far stricter than other media, especially when you compare it with film or TV and I think it has a great number of negative consequences on this industry. Most games that are sold, not necessarily produced, but that are sold, are 18+ products. And when you compare it from a company standpoint to movies, for example, there's a least a two year age difference in ratings, if not more. And I think this is a very important subject.

I think it is high time now for us, after 15 years of defensiveness, to get a little bit proactive on this issue. And especially to have also developers voice out what they think about this and game creators to say what they have to say on game ratings.

Well we do already have to a certain degree with PEGI a unified system. My problem is not with how unified the system should be, my problem is that we're not on par with cinema and TV. Most people play 18+ games. Have you ever watched an NC17 movie? You don't even know what an NC17 movie is! But you know what an R rated movie is?

Alright, so that's 17 and under must be accompanied by their parents to watch a movie. An NC17 movie is basically a porn movie, and that's basically our 18 rating. And so all our games are porn movies to a certain degree. And consumers, one of the reason why people say games equal violence is because its written all over, all games are rated 18, well not all games, but a lot of games are rated 18 and most of the games that people play are rated 18. That's one of the reasons that we need to change this, and we need to change this fast.