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# Can directors like Spike Jonze bring a new perspective to games?
- URL: https://www.killscreen.com/can-directors-spike-jonze-bring-new-perspective-games/
- Published: 2013-11-15T17:59:13.000Z
- Updated: 2015-11-17T16:13:20.000Z
- Description: You might know director Spike Jonze as the beautiful mind behind films like Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Where the Wild Things Are, and Her, the upcoming film about a man who falls in love with a synthesized computer voice. Or maybe as a guy with a really cool name. Why couldn’t I have been bor
- Author: Jason Johnson
- Tags: News, Film, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2024-07-26 09:39

You might know director Spike Jonze as the beautiful mind behind films like *Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Where the Wild Things Are*, and *Her*, the upcoming film about a man who falls in love with a synthesized computer voice. Or maybe as a guy with a really cool name. Why couldn’t I have been born Spike!

But you probably don’t know Spike Jonze as a creator of games, although he would like you to. During a question and answer session, at the AFI Film Festival, in L.A., Jonze said he and director Megan Ellison (*Zero Dark Thirty*) were considering making a game together.[ Further details were sparse.](http://www.polygon.com/2013/11/14/5103026/report-spike-jonze-considering-making-a-leap-to-video-games?ref=killscreen.com)

The question is, what can minds from other mediums bring to games? Making a game is a different beast from directing a film or writing a book. We can think of author Tom Bissell’s recent struggles to write for Jonathan Blow’s *The Witness*, or his confessions of displacement in penning *Gears of War: Judgment*. “Now that I’ve worked on a few games, I’ve grappled with the degree to which games are not really a writer’s medium,” [he told The New Yorker](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/technology/valve-a-video-game-maker-with-few-rules.html?%5Fr=0&ref=killscreen.com). We can think of Neil Gaimen (The Sandman series), whose work with The Odd Gentleman on *Wayward Manor* involves little storytelling and much puzzle-solving.

Of course the divide is not uncrossable. One of the most successful team-ups between games and celebrity was *Earthbound*, with the Japanese cultural figure and all-around creative guy Shigesato Itoi making that series shine. But it’s hard to think of many movie directors who’ve made the leap to game designer, as Guillermo del Toro (*Hellboy, Pacific Rim, Pan’s Labyrinth*) was interested in doing before his publisher THQ went under. One is a medium where we have things skillfully revealed to us, the other, by skillfully revealing them ourselves. We’ll see what happens with Jonze.