Saturday, July 4, 2009

Into the Night with Jason Rohrer and Chris Crawford


What an unlikely pair: Franco-German TV arts and culture channel Arte selected two of the most important videogame personalities of different generations and brought them together for their latest edition of the feature Durch die Nacht mit (Into the Night with). Jason Rohrer, the young game designer who is best known for his work in games such as PASSAGE and BETWEEN meets Chris Crawford, one of the world’s foremost authorities on the subject of video game design.

The documentary was shot in San Francisco, the city that hosted this year’s edition of the Game Developer’s Conference – the starting point for this spontaneous conversation. As the night slowly replaces the day, Rohrer and Crawford wander about the city, engaging in a rather deep albeit contagious dialogue about the root of video games and the process of their creation. While I do not endorse these creator’s visions in full, Rohrer and Crawford do raise some pertinent questions. Based on my first impression, this is by far the best television documentary on the subject of videogames ever made: profound and thought-provoking in its casual and unassuming way.

Apart from the small except embedded in this post, I also took the liberty to upload the full documentary in two parts that can be obtained here and here.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you so much for uploading this! I was waiting expectantly for it, so when the streaming didn't work from my IP address I felt confidant that someone out there would hook it up, and that someone was you. It was actually much, much better than I had hoped.

Thanks again.

Jezebeau said...

Thanks much for the upload! I was pretty disappointed at the prospect of not getting to see it.

Chris A said...

Thank you for posting this!

By the way, are other episodes of the show just as thoughtfully produced? Would love to check out more of the series.

Dieubussy said...

It was my pleasure.

If you're interested in the show I think Arte always provides a streaming version of each episode a week after its debut on TV. This is the German version.

http://www.arte.tv/de/70.html

I can't claim to have seen other episodes of this specific show: however, I've watched Arte several times and I was always satisfied with the quality of contents.

Just a month ago I watched a recording from an Arte program where Kissin played Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition concert.

J Tremblay said...

Thank you so much for putting this there, its an awesome interview/discussion/hanging out/etc.