Todd Eckert recently gave a talk on games and movies: specifically, on some of the disastrous creative decisions the movie industry has made, and how games can avoid those pitfalls. It’s an area he has considerable expertise in, being a movie financier who turned producer for last year’s excellent Joy Division biopic, Control, before joining Eutechnyx to head up its North American expansion. We caught up with him to talk about making the jump, and why he did it.

You spoke about adapting cinema techniques to get away from cutscenes – what do you think of the likes of GTA IV’s conversations?

I see the distinction, but it’s just like having a narrator in a movie, it’s laziness. The only kind of narrator that worked in a movie was Sunset Boulevard, because you didn’t know ’til the end that the guy was dead. Maybe not the only time, but for the most part the reason people put it in there is it’s an easy conceit: “Oh we don’t have to explain or show how he got there, we’ll just have him tell you.” So games are on that same sort of easy slide... these devices will be around for a while, but they won’t be around forever.

So, why the switch?

To me the most exciting medium in the world right now is games because it’s so inventive. It seems to me that every other medium is worried: “What’s going to happen to us, are we still relevant, do people still want us?” and games are just like: “Pfft” and surging forward with such creativity and such belief that anything can happen. And that really excites me. I mean, I’ll do more films too but I’m really focused on games.

Some developers would argue that the focus should rather be on letting players create their own narrative.

I think what you’ll find is that people love to have the ability to stylise within context. So I think people want to be given the guidelines – ‘this is what you’re meant to achieve, this is what the experience is meant to portray’ – and now you figure out exactly what it is. As opposed to ‘here’s a character, here’s the deal’ and being left with that. Being able to say ‘I am a police officer’ or ‘I am a not entirely honest police officer’ allows you to assume the role and then begin considering where you go from there.

You’re discussing character customisation in an emotional rather than a visual way.

Because that’s going to really make a difference as to what you’re actually doing. I think in terms of customisation – jackets and haircuts are fine, but they’re not important. I’m saying it can be a bit more than that: what’s important to me is getting into the emotion of a character – that’s what makes the difference.