Word on the street has it that Sims addict and Scrubs star Zach Braff will be presenting Will Wright his Vanguard award from the Producers Guild of America this year.

Why is Hollywood so enamored with the Sims, don't they live that game?

Variety wrote up a short piece aboutthe award Wright will be receiving and the developer's reaction to the news. (Of getting the award, not having Braff hand it to him.)

The Vanguard Award was once given out to people who used new technologies to change the way they made movies, like James Cameron and Pixar, but then it became a way to recognize Internet execs. This time around the chair of the association said they wanted to honor someone from the video gaming industry and their first choice was Wright.

Wright says he's happy to see that Hollywood is starting to recognize gaming.

"There has been this idea of convergence that is really happening, but not just in the ways everyone thought, like with interactive movies and videogames based on movies," he notes. "There has been a lot of influence on techniques. CG animated movies were in some sense pioneered by the games industry way back. And now people are using the technology in games to make movies through machinima."

Even in making "Spore," he says, he's very consciously being influenced by movies. As players acquire the ability to travel through space, he says he's looking to integrate allusions to some of his favorite science-fiction films, such as "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "The Day the Earth Stood Still."

...

"Creators in movies and TV are storytellers, but I think of myself as a story enabler," he says. "When players talk about what they do in games, they never mention a great cutscene or the plot. It's the unique things that they did with their own free will."

...

"Now that savvy consumers are becoming producers in all types of media, the social dynamics of games and movies and TV are overlapping more and more," the "Sims" creator observes.

I think Hollywood is getting scared, that's what I think. Brian Crecente

Hollywood Org Honors Vidgame Producer [Variety]

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