The video game BAFTAs are tomorrow night, and for the fifth year in a row they're being hosted by quick-tongued comedian Dara O'Briain. He's often mined his gaming hobby for stand-up material - his Grand Theft Auto bit is classic - and we sat down with him ahead of the awards to chat about the past year in games.
Was 2012 a good year for games, do you think?
These things come in fits and starts – you’d have to say that, looking back over last year’s nominations, where you had Skryim and Batman and Portal 2… there aren’t good years and bad years, but there are great years and years of transition.
That's a very diplomatic way of putting it.
My experience of it is intimately tied into the fact that I was on tour and I’ve got two little ones, so this was a tough year for me to catch up with everything. I think last thing I actually finished was the second Batman, which was in a previous cycle.
There are some brilliant games on the 2013 honours list, though.
Oh yeah. Far Cry 3 is great, Dishonored is great, we've had the best FIFA ever I think, and actually the most interesting change since the last [BAFTA awards] is that it’s gone very arty. Now it’s all grief and dream sequences, and you can’t have a game now without the protagonist walking through a landscape that moves away from them, and suddenly the walls are bleeding. I’ve only played a portion of Far Cry 3 and I’ve already gone through 3 peyote-fuelled walks through lakes. I thought it was really good - [encountering] Komodo dragons and tigers on the same island is where you have to suspend disbelief. I entirely believe that I am a plumber who can jump eight feet in the air, but tigers and komodo dragons? You people have gone too far.
Did you play much of Dishonored?
you can’t have a game now without the protagonist walking through a landscape that moves away from them.
Not enough - games have become like the DVD industry – everything gets squashed towards Q4. There was a long time where I had time to play games in June and there were no games to play, basically because I got stuck on a really irritating bit of Mass Effect 3 that I couldn’t get past. I found it very pronounced last year, the tendency to stick everything towards the end – there was literally a two-week period where I got Halo 4, Far Cry 3, Assassin's Creed 3, Dishonored and Call of Duty. A fortnight is actually not enough hours even if you played constantly to finish them all.
As a kid you could feasibly play pretty much every good video game in a year. That's not so easy now.
To a certain extent, yeah. On this list there’s always something I’ve not played – a Zelda somewhere, I’ve never done the Zelda thing at all, or a strategy game – for that award I always mumble my way through them.
Dark Souls is a strange entry on the Strategy Game list this year...
Peter Serafinowicz has been banging on online forever abuot how it’s the greatest thing ever – is it?
It pretty much is - it has a tendency to turn people into evangelists. It's the kind of game that makes you feel differently about video games.
I do appreciate the way that things are making us feel differently about video games. Journey I thought was amazing, and Dear Esther too. They defy convention, and are redefining our notion of what is or isn’t a game. That’s fantastic, I can do that for two hours – I wouldn't spend 40 hours defying convention.
One of the healthiest things in the last while has been the shift to different price points – so you can have a 69p experience and a £5 experience as well as a £40 experience. I think that’s going to be very interesting for games as an art form, that you are able to have a different level of investment for the developers and for us in terms of what experiences hold up.
I know this from stand-up – there are some things you can do for 5 mins and some you can do for 40, and an audience’s tolerance is quite different for different experiences. Your one-liner guys can’t go on for as long as the story-teller guys, for instance – your rhythms are different for that kind of stuff. So it’s great to see an industry that is playing with that and using it to go “right, you’re only going to put up with this for an hour and a half, so we’ll just do it for an hour and a half.”
With the next generation of hardware coming up, are there any games from your childhood you’d like to see redone?
Do you know what, I had a brief vogue for the retro thing – I got an iCade, weirdly only available in left-handed joystick mode, but I don’t want to see updated versions. The thing that always pained me was Boulder Dash. It was a wonderful thing, and then they kept making the animation better and making the rocks and diamonds prettier but getting the mechanics wrong. I must have downloaded 8 different version of boulder dash in the past 10 years and really I just want the original, thank you very much. You can over-ornate these things.
How much do you play games with friends?
It’s tricky to get people together [between touring and parenting] – it’s usually about 1am by the time I’m free, so it’s a bit difficult to send up a flare at that stage. I could use Twitter I suppose. Graham Linehan gets people together for Battlefield 3. Not random strangers, a small coterie of actual friends.
What do you play online?
I occasionally put on the headhpones and feel like I’m grooming people, because I’m clearly the oldest person in the room
I occasionally put on the headhpones and feel like I’m grooming people, because I’m clearly the oldest person in the room. I don’t play Call of Duty, I play Battlefield, which is old man’s call of Duty. They got really irritated when I said that, but it’s true. It's the pacing.
There should be a noob room. Not just for COD, for every game. A room that you could just wonder around going, can you pick this up? Oh no, you can’t, that’s just a piece of scenery that you’re wandering around and trying to action constantly.
After five years, are you still enjoying presenting the game BAFTAs?
Oh yes. 5th March, we’ll be handling out gongs - we’d love people to complain about the wrong thing being awarded. That’s always a good sign. It’s a sign that people care. It’s my fifth year doing this – I really enjoy my annual geek fest.
Dara will present the 2013 British Academy Games Awards on Tuesday 5th March 2013. The Awards will be streamed live on Twitch and a highlights programme will air on Monday 11th March at 10pm on Challenge (Sky: Ch 125, Freeview: Ch 46, Virgin: Ch 139).
Source : ign[dot]com
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