Well, not really. But the Sopranos creator has a very narrow view of what games can do. He tells MTV News that the Sopranos game won’t have much to do with the TV show, and that he sees the two mediums as quite different:
“Games have a function,” he said. “It’s a physical function. The character has to go from here to there, has to shoot that, has to drive this, has to knock that down, has to jump up here. … That’s how a game works. So cooking dinner, going to Lamaze class, there’s no way to figure that into a game at this point. Maybe somebody else can do it and maybe somebody will, but that wasn’t really what this game was about. It was supposed to be a story about a kid who wants to be a gangster — a punk who wants to be a gangster — and so that’s what we did.” … “It really isn’t — well it is a narrative, I suppose, in its own way — but the act of watching a movie or a TV show or reading a book, God forbid, is you’re seeing someone else’s story and you can go through their story and learn from it or feel with it or laugh at it without having to go through any of the pain or the adventures. The game is different: There is no identification, really, any emotional identification.”
Sounds pretty harsh, but he’s basically right about the current limits of game narrative. Will gamers pile on Chase the way they exploded at Roger Ebert? Or will they be afraid that he’ll track down Furio in Italy and have him come over to teach them a lesson?
— October 4, 2006
Korr Values 