Ubisoft Montreal CEO: emotional games, casual and Wii games coming

Bambi, Evanescence, and video games. Bet you can’t find the connection. At the DICE Summit, Ubisoft Montreal CEO Yannis Mallat presented a video featuring Bambi clips set to an Evanescence track in order to demonstrate how games aren’t all about the technology. Rather, technology is simply a tool to express a message, one that produces an emotional response from the gamer. More on this in the full article.

What makes a great game? Some people would look back and remember the best games having great gameplay, some would say it’s the fun factor. For Ubisoft Montreal CEO Yannis Mallat, the best games are the ones that produce an emotional experience.

This was the idea behind his DICE Summit presentation where he presented a video featuring Bambi clips being played to an Evanescence track. His point is that it’s not technology that defines the game, but rather it is only a tool for an underlying message:

The example of Bambi was especially to showcase that emotion goes through art, realization, assets, the way they are put together, and the way especially the game mechanics make the player interact with those assets.

[…] Game development, in my opinion, should focus on making sure that the technology that is behind the game is actually seen as a tool, a means for developers to express their own meaning, their own message.

And that message is often very, very much emotional. At least, this is what we’ve seen in all the very good games.

This doesn’t mean that games that don’t focus on delivering an emotional response aren’t good games. He does go on to say, however, that “all of the […] most praised games […] are actually focusing on the emotional message” from the creative team and director.

But casual games do have their place in gamers’ hearts of course. Mallat says that Ubisoft Montreal will be focusing on the DS with a new casual division. The studio also has Wii titles in the works and they’re “going to be able to talk about [it] soon.”

Via Wired