Spielberg, Lucas and Del Toro talk games

Famous film directors Guillermo del Toro, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas have all shared their thoughts on the games industry at various events in LA this week, covering topics like immersion, emotions in games and adaptations.

"The second you get the controller something turns off in the heart, and it becomes a sport," Spielberg said on a panel at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, and reported by Variety.

"We're never going to be totally immersive as long as we're looking at a square, whether it's a movie screen or whether it's a computer screen. We've got to get rid of that and we've got to put the player inside the experience, where no matter where you look you're surrounded by a three-dimensional experience. That's the future."

Spielberg has recently signed up for a live-action series based on the Halo franchise and in the past collaborated with EA on puzzle game Boom Blox. He also started work on, but eventually cancelled, another title with EA called Project LMNO.

Legendary Star Wars director George Lucas, meanwhile, thought a game aimed at women would be the next big thing in the industry.

"The big game of the next five years will be a game where you empathise very strongly with the characters and it's aimed at women and girls," he said.

"They like empathetic games. That will be a huge hit and as a result that will be the 'Titanic' of the game industry, where suddenly you've done an actual love story or something and everybody will be like 'where did that come from?' Because you've got actual relationships instead of shooting people."

The panel also featured Don Mattrick, president of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business.

Elsewhere in LA Guillermo del Toro held a screening of upcoming title Pacific Rim, and Polygon reported that while there he spoke about what makes a movie adaptation work, and that in past the mistake has been in treat game spin-offs as an "ancillary product" rather than part of the universe.

"It should really be completing the world that you created in one medium in another," he explained.

"I will do it hand-made in the sense that I would get involved in every stage of it, in the same way that the comic book of Pacific Rim was created with very intense supervision because 99 percent of the time, comic books tied to movies are shit. So if you want it to be good, you have to be on it. The game would be the same."

Del Toro's own game, Insane, was cancelled by THQ before it shut down, but the director has since said he is in talks with a large games industry player to bring it back.

During the talk he also had praise for Irrational's Ken Levine, and the "beautiful cross-cultural references" in BioShock Infinite.

"Two days ago, my daughter and I finished - she finished it before me - Infinite, BioShock Infinite. It's such a great mindf***. It's also beautiful."