On this week’s installment of The Media Diet, we talk to Seth Gordon, director of the documentary King of Kong. King tells the story of Steve Weibe, a mild-mannered middle-school teacher/Donkey Kong phenom who attempts to set the Guinness World Record for highest recorded score on the arcade version of the game. Steve has only one obstacle, and that’s charismatic fast food employee/”Gamer of the Century” Billy Mitchell, who held the Donkey Kong record for 20 years until Weibe managed an unprecedented 1,000,000 point game. Mitchell and Weibe spent several months battling for the Guinness record, and Gordon got it all on film.

It may sound totally dorky, but it’s also a full-on crowd pleaser. Last weekend, I went to a screening at the Museum of the Moving Image, where the median audience member age is probably 65, and the King of Kong trailer brought the house down. You can see what all the fuss is about on August 17, when Kong opens in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle and Austin (it’s set to expand to additional cities in the weeks to follow; to find out when Kong is coming to your town, go here and click on “Theaters and Tickets” at the bottom of the page). And click through to read Gordon’s thoughts on Uwe Boll, Saved By The Bell, his upcoming feature adaptation of King of Kong, and the Roger Ebert vs. Gamers debate.

Spout: We start every installment of The Media Diet with the standard desert island question: you’re packing your suitcase for life-long seclusion on a tropical island which happens to host a full entertainment system made of coconuts. What records, books, movies, video games, websites, etc do you bring with?

Die Hard, The Art of Memory, The Fountainhead, Paper Super Mario, Dead Kennedys, The Onion, Radiohead, Tribe Called Quest, Defamer.com, and a box set of Saved by the Bell

King of Kong [which premiered at Slamdance and went on to play SXSW, Tribeca and other film festivals] was the second arcade-game doc I saw this year, after Chasing Ghosts [which screened in competition at Sundance]. Are there any other films that you’d recommend to the modern gamer looking to bone up on game history?

Video Game docs are certainly in the zeitgeist. Also worth seeing are High Score, The Way of the Puck, and Darkon (a bit further afield).

What do you think of movies based on video games?

I think the best gaming movies avoid bringing the actual game to life. I think The Last Starfighter is an example of doing it right, where the game is in the story, but you aren’t ‘In the game’ for the entire course of the film.
Does the widely-derided director Uwe Boll (who is responsible such game-sourced classics as Alone in the Dark) get a bad rap?

I can’t speak to Uwe Boll’s rap, but I did notice that Alone in the Dark 2 is in prep, so he must be doing something right.

Is there any game that hasn’t been made into a film that you think should be?

I sort of can’t believe Legend of Zelda hasn’t been done by now, especially in the wake of Lord of the Rings. I think the design concept behind Paper Super Mario is so awesome (flopping between 2D and 3D) that it deserves a movie, too.

You’re said to be remaking King of Kong as a narrative feature for New Line. What interests you about telling this story in feature form?

The story that unfolded was gripping and uncontrollable. The questions posed by the real life circumstances we witnessed could sustain a narrative feature, and could be articulated a bit more powerfully in the remake. I hope for it to be the best of both worlds: a plot with twists and turns you would never expect — because they come from the organic true story — told without talking heads to maximize the drama for the protagonist, in all cases putting him in the situations rather than simply talking about them as we sometimes had to do in the doc.

There’s been a lot of debate on the web in recent months, sparked by a column in which film critic Roger Ebert wrote that in his mind, video games are more like sports than art, because in “fine art” (ie: movies, novels, plays), the narrative is decided by the artist and not the reader/viewer. This suggestion has infuriated some gamers; others don’t think the distinction is relevant; still others agree with Ebert that playing a video game is less like reading a book and more like competing at a sport. Where do you stand?

I think it’s a faulty distinction to divide games into sport vs. art. There’s a huge spectrum of gaming and playing styles that ranges from the ’single narrative, single outcome’ type of game to the ‘every game is different’ type of game and in that sense games are part sport, part art, and part puzzle.

[And] I think it depends on the game. Gaming is such a huge category of entertainment, with so many titles, and so many ways of playing, that it is a bit difficult to generalize. I think in games, as in the ‘fine art’ forms listed, there is a range of what is required of the viewer/user/audience member in terms of their engagement with the piece. Some demand a lot of the viewer/user; most don’t. While I think it’s a meaningful conversation to have, I think games and gaming are so fundamentally different than the ‘fine arts’ that they do not easily compare to any previous medium of entertainment.