Lanning on appealing to adults

Lorne Lanning has told our sister site GamesIndustry.biz that games need to appeal to a mass market, and that part of the problem at the moment is failure to appeal to adults.

"No matter what the statistics say, I go by my gut and look in the stores and there's few of the adult population picking up games," he says. "We can't get games executives to play games, let alone the average adult.

"Games are one of the most powerful mediums to ever arrive and we need to evolve them. At the moment it's stuck in a trench because of the cost, because of the lack of innovation and because we cater to a core market with titles that have no appeal to a mass market."

Lanning's company, Oddworld Inhabitants, recently embarked on an ambitious project to create a game and a film pairing - Citizen Siege - that commingle, and he explained some of the thought processes behind that.

"We want to stay on top of it creatively. And we feel better insured to do that if we have the film happening at the same time, because then the publisher knows they won't be spreading the new brand visibility on its own," he explained.

He also had some words for Peter Jackson, who recently announced he was turning his attention to games. He'll have "a very interesting experience working with a technology company and not a film company, and also [learn] hard lessons from the medium," apparently.

"Special effects are one thing, but interactive entertainment that people can break a thousand different ways are another. When everything in your experience is dictated by specific pieces of code it's, not quite the same as making a film and retouching frames if you need to."

For more from Lanning, check out parts one and two of the GamesIndustry.biz interview.