Even though many directors clearly play video games-Zack Snyder, Guillermo Del Toro and Christopher Nolan come to mind — and acknowledge them as a creative enterprise, there still hasn’t been a film that compellingly channels the appeal of the medium.
Author/critic Harold Goldberg, animator Bill Plympton and artist Dave Lowery thinks it’s because gamers themselves are missing form the equation. The creative minds have huddled together and launched Playing with Fire, a website where people can collaborate with a horror screenplay that deals with a group of teens playing a “strange, seemingly anthropomorphic fighting video game”. The site will reveal five scenes a day and users can submit their own drawings, trailer and script notes. If your ideas get incorporated into the Playing with Fire process you’ll be eligible for prizes. And glory. Don’t forget the glory.
Goldberg knows the industry from an insider’s point of view having written the cultural history All Your Base Are Belong to Us and worked at Sony Online Entertainment before that. Plympton’s an indie filmmaker whose brilliant, skewed shorts have appeared on MTV and Lowery’s a storyboard artist who’s worked on films like Iron Man and Cowboys & Aliens. So, there’s a chance this thing might actually happen. You probably want to be a part of that, right?
Playing with Fire [Playing with Fire]
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