This is an interview that will be linked to a great deal over the next few days on gaming blogs but I don’t mind being part of that stampede because it’s an insightful piece.

In it movie director/ game director Steven Spielberg talks about his experiences working with EA on this year’s Wii title Boom Blox as well as giving some more general thoughts on the medium’s effectiveness as a storytelling tool.

In particular, this comment on cut-scenes (as far as I can tell, particularly referencing those seen in Call of Duty 4) stands out:

You know the thing that doesn’t work for me in these games are the little movies where they attempt to tell a story in between the playable levels. That’s where there hasn’t been a synergy between storytelling and gaming.

They go to a lot of trouble to do these [motion-capture] movies that explain the characters. And then the second the game is returned to you and it’s under your control, you forget everything the interstitials are trying to impact you with, and you just go back to shooting things. And that has not found its way into a universal narrative. And I think more has to be done in that arena.

Indeed. I’m sure that many gamers believed Spielberg’s involvement with Boom Blox, one of the Wii’s most critically acclaimed but worst-selling titles of the year, was perfunctory but this interview suggests otherwise. Spielberg indicates he was involved from concept all the way through to Beta, even using his kids as testers:

The thing I found to be the most heartening was that my kids wouldn’t leave these levels until they scored gold. So they would stay at the same level getting bronze and then silver and finally when they got gold they would move to the next level. That tenacity, I thought, was a good sign.

Because it’s featured on Yahoo the interview’s necessarily short and introductory. That’s not to say that interviewer Tom Chick didn’t do a good job, he absolutely did and because of that I now want to read a more in-depth piece.

That wish can be partially fulfilled at Chick’s personal forum, Quarter to Three, on which he’s posted some additional excerpts from the interview that were cut from the version that Yahoo published. Read them here.

Spielberg’s second game, also created with a team from EA Los Angeles, has the working title ‘LMNO’ and, as yet, no release date.