"Hollywood Goes Gaming" Documentary on Starz

Anyone with Starz Entertainment on their satellite or cable set-up can view "Hollywood Goes Gaming" for the next few months. The one-hour documentary about the past, present and future of Hollywood's relationship with games is in heavy rotation now. The show, which I produced with Foglight Entertainment, the New York-based production studio that created "Inked" for A&E and "Driven" for VH1, features some major names from both Hollywood and gaming like Shigero Miyamoto, Jerry Bruckheimer, Uwe, Boll, Paul Anderson, Trip Hawkins, Jordan Mechner, Adrian Askeriah, John Woo and The Rock.

I've been covering the convergence between Hollywood and games for the past decade and I've watched as it went from a niche to this huge entity. Games are on a record pace this year with sales expected to top $18 billion in the U.S. alone. With the Hollywood writer's strike and the upcoming June potential of actors and directors stikes looming, the game industry has emerged as the most steady form of entertainment out there. Hit games like Halo 3 break box office records of blockbusters like Spider-Man 3. Wii has opened up gaming to more people than ever before.

And yet most mainstream magazines and TV shows still ignore gaming. Entertainment Weekly devotes pages to books and stage and rarely mentions a game except for online. "Entertainment Tonight" will cover a game launch once in a blue moon. "Hollywood Goes Gaming" took years to get off the ground--not because of lack of content--we could easily make this a regular series--but because Hollywood networks didn't "get" games. I personally cannot wait until the old, non-gamers who run much of the media world retire and allow games to truly be treated as the mass market form of entertainment that they are today. In the meantime, check out "Hollywood Goes Gaming" on Starz.