Cecropia presents: The Act, an interactive comedy

Ex-Disney animators raise curtain on new Act

Toronto Star, Sep. 28, 2006

JAMES LEWIS
EVERGEEK MEDIA

In 2004, when The Walt Disney Company decided to shut down its old-school hand-drawn animation studio in Orlando and move towards all-digital filmmaking, it heralded the end of an era in animation. It also spelled job losses for approximately 250 animators and technicians working there, many of whom had more than a decade of service with Disney, the only real employer of pencil-and-paper animation artists in the region.

But while one corporation cast off these skilled, "low-tech" animators in favor of a digital approach to entertainment, another company–firmly entrenched in the digital world–very much wanted to get its hands on their talent.

Edgar

"Really, before that moment there wasn't a point in history where any amount of money could have bought the kind of talent that we were able to obtain," says Omar Khudari, CEO and founder of Lexington, Mass.-based Cecropia. With a game development pedigree stretching back well into the 1980s, Khudari was no stranger to high-quality graphics: the first company he co-founded, Papyrus Design Group, was widely acclaimed for its hyper-realistic auto racing simulations, including Grand Prix Legends.

Indeed, after selling Papyrus to Sierra Online in 1995 and moving on to become a venture capitalist, Khudari returned to game development in 2001 with a plan to build a new type of game: one based not on photorealism, but the kind of art for which the ex-Disney employees were famous. Thus, The Act was born.

Billed as a "filmgame" by Cecropia, The Act can be described as an interactive, animated romantic comedy. Players take on the role of Edgar, a shy window-washer who, through a variety of different scenarios and segments, must defuse tense situations and overcome his shyness – without being too forward – to win the affections of Sylvia, a nurse. Edgar's response to each situation is controlled by a simple knob – the game's only input device – which dials up his intensity the more it is turned: too docile, and Edgar risks losing Sylvia's attention, for instance; too aggressive, and he turns her off completely.

The Act's use of cartoon imagery isn't the only factor making this video game unique: in this day and age of game developers dealing with an ever-decreasing number of publishers servicing a handful of platforms, Cecropia's go-to-market strategy for the game is somewhat unorthodox as well. "We intend to release it first as a coin-operated game, and then later into the home market," Khudari says.

While the term might conjure up images of long-haired teens circa 1982 in a shopping mall arcade somewhere in suburbia, the coin-operated amusement market is actually doing a respectable trade, Khudari says. "Incredible Technologies is doing $60 million a year with one product, their Golden Tee Golf," he notes, adding that at a couple of quarters a play versus the cost of buying a video game, "the barrier to trial is very low," potentially meaning a wider audience.

Edgar & Sylvia

Khudari was in Canada demonstrating the game at the recent Ottawa International Animation Festival, hoping to interest prospective partners. Among them are the distributors of coin-operated games across North America, who purchase units and place them in locations they think will pay off, such as bars, restaurants and bowling alleys. But without compelling content there's no business model, hence the importance of careful and creative game design. "If you have a machine that can earn well enough, operators will buy it and put it out there in places where people will trip over it," Khudari says.

That's not to say Cecropia and Khudari are ruling out the home gaming market: with a new generation of consoles about to hit the market this winter, the time might be right to re-evaluate offering the game for Sony's Playstation 3 or Nintendo's Wii, Khudari says. Also, he says the distribution channels for digital game downloads are starting to look more attractive for developers, but adds that The Act is a rather data-intensive game and would make for a bulky download at present.

Many of the video game industry's pioneers have been predicting a crisis of the magnitude of the one that almost wiped out the industry in the early 1980s, and exhorting today's hot game developers to move away from violent photo-realistic gameplay and towards more challenging and compelling stories in order to attract more "non-core" gamers (code for "women" as well as "men outside the 12-35 demographic"). That philosophy is shared by Khudari. "The top two problems that we see with expanding the market and appealing…more broadly are, number one, complexity, and number two, the themes of the games," he says.

Edgar & Sylvia

But while other game developers and industry pundits believe casual games – short, cheap, standalone titles that are easily consumed a few minutes at a time – are the way to go, Khudari feels that immersive rich-content game play with a compelling storyline will still woo a sizable audience, just as movies and other forms of narrative entertainment do. The key, he adds, is to make it instantly accessible by cutting down the number of rules, commands and other parameters that need to be learned in order to be successful.

"Most people, [whether] they be experienced gamers or casual gamers, simply can't be bothered with dealing with the learning curve of the very complex content-rich games that are out there, and also the themes of these games are very limited, and that affects their appeal," Khudari says. "It's kind of a vicious cycle, because they're being made by core video gamers for core video gamers, so you tend to get a lot of violence, a lot of fantasy [and] science-fiction."

And while The Act is strictly a single-player experience at present, the potential for exhilarating success – and crushing embarrassment – offers something for observers as well, Khudari says. "It's really a group game even though it's not a multiplayer game – it's like a party, social experience," he says. Nevertheless, video games, even the most well-thought-out ones, won't appeal to everyone; as a result, Cecropia has arrived at what they feel is a satisfactory non-completion rate. "No more than a third of the audience should quit and give up at any point, and so we adjust the difficult of the scenes to try and hit that target," Khudari adds.

In a new media world where many trumpet the non-linear storylines of interactive media, including video games, as a major advantage, The Act is somewhat of an anomaly: it is, unrepentantly, a linear story. In fact, Khudari says it should take about 90 minutes to get through – roughly the same amount of time as many motion pictures. However, he says, "I'm religious about linearity: I think that the truly mass market is just not interested in deciding what the ending is, in really controlling the story."

He notes that a core gamer is the type of person who can happily play Dungeons and Dragons at a kitchen table, ignoring his or her rather conventional surroundings and the constant impositions of tasks such as rolling dice to remain in a fantasy world. The mass market, however, needs a simple and seamless entertainment experience that they can immerse themselves in for a few hours, with little intrusion from the outside world.

Edgar & Sylvia

"To me, the biggest challenge is how do you make something interactive without ruining the suspension of disbelief, and that's where this whole idea came from about how it was just a simple knob," Khudari says. "You forgot about what you were doing, and you were just thinking about the relationship between these characters – you could stay transported."

Given the kinds of rewards that the video game industry has lavished upon the unconventional and the rebellious who go against prevailing wisdom, Khudari could be onto something.

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