“I’m always trying to make the best possible explosion,” is the first thing that Keith Guerrette says to me when I sit down to ask him about Uncharted 3. With a background in the film industry and many years spent working on what is arguably gaming’s most cinematic franchise, I was naturally intrigued to find out how one goes about moving from films into video games. “Film is actually very detail oriented," he says. "It’s all about actual, real physics-based simulations. Games are about cheating it.”

“It’s the equivalent of pulling bunnies out of a hat as opposed to... uh... I don’t know, growing bunnies”, he says. “That’s a terrible analogy. Don’t quote me on that.” Where games come into their own over films, says Keith, is that you can actually make the effects happen quickly. “It lets me be very artistic, without the technical limitations of having to wait six hours for a simulation before I can see it. It’s very iterative, very fast. It’s a totally different challenge.”

Keith is the Lead FX Designer at Naughty Dog, where he’s been working for nearly four years on both Uncharted 2 and today’s release of Uncharted 3. “I was tasked with tearing apart the effects pipeline and the toolsets, and working with programmers, growing a team to finish up the game. I think one of the coolest things to come out of it was that going into Uncharted 3 we knew exactly how our toolset worked, and as we started to custom-fit it for our exact needs we had that knowledge and discipline right at our disposal to go through and tear it all apart again!”

You don’t have to read too many reviews of the Uncharted series before you’ll find somebody calling them a “cinematic” experience. I asked Keith if he felt that this label meant that he’d succeeded in his job at Naughty Dog. “It’s a mix of emotions”, he says. “Coming out of Uncharted 2 we knew we had a good game on our hands, but we were so close, we had so many other ambitions, we had so many things we wanted it to be... we didn’t expect the reception we got. It blew us away.”

“The success of Uncharted 2 just turned into pressure for us. Everyone else was off partying and celebrating all these perfect scores and sales figures, and we’re just sitting back thinking ‘How are we going to be able to top this? How can we make it better?’” As a result, says Keith, the team were forced to take a hard analytical look at their own work, about what he describes as “the language” of the game they had created. One of the biggest goals to come out of this period of self-reflection was a simple mandate: make sure that the action sequences are always in-game. “We don’t ever want to have a sequence with loads of action shown through a cinematic. Why can’t the player play it? Why don’t we just let the player be actually involved in these moments?”

Eurogamer, posting one of the earliest reviews of Uncharted 3, described the game as actually being too cinematic - a criticism I posed to Keith. “Our absolute focus at Naughty Dog has been to create an emotionally rich narrative running through the game,” he responded. “But one of the negatives of that unfortunately is that we do still have to progress the player along a fairly linear path because it is, still, a story. We realise that, we accept that, and we spent a lot of energy trying to overcome that.”

One of the ways that Naughty Dog have tried to overcome that is to present players with choices in how they approach the game’s challenges. “There’s a scenario in a village, lost in the desert, where I have the option to use stealth and traversal to get the advantage and take down enemies - or I can just run in with a gun and terrorise them, or move around and try and use the environment for cover. We’ve tried to make it a really well-balanced gaming experience that switches around between our strengths and lets the player choose how he or she approaches the scenarios.”

As we move the discussion towards the technical capabilities of the PS3, Keith dismisses the notion that they’ve done all they can with the console. “I’d love to add more dynamic lights, more real-time reflections, more physics objects, but I don’t think those really make or break a video game these days. I think we’re at the point with consoles where the impediment isn’t the technology any more, but what the developers are able to do with the technology. I definitely believe that games are going to be more about the type of game running through it, than the technology.”

So does that mean we’ve moving towards a point where narrative is king, and games can be considered a legitimate storytelling medium by the mainstream? “The limits of presentation for games have been pushed a tremendous amount in just the last five years,” he says thoughtfully. “We’re seeing games go out in different paths, different forms of presentation. Some are succeeding, some are failing, but it’s great because there’s a lot of experimentation going on.”

Are games art, then? Keith seems to agree. “Maybe I’m attached to this, but I do think games can actually be somewhat more artistic than movies. I have a tremendous amount of appreciation for what developers are able to pull off on such a limited amount of processing power, time, and... everything. To me, art is being able to take one set of things and make it into something completely different... something otherworldly and unpredictable.”

The Uncharted franchise makes its big leap to the silver screen soon, and maybe it’s because of his background in film, but Keith doesn’t hesitate to say that he’s a bit dubious about the whole thing. “We hope that they’ll be as understanding about the world that we created as possible,” he says. “We’re actually not involved with the movie at all, and that scares us a little bit! We don’t get news, we don’t get any information except through press releases like everyone else. We’re all curiously waiting to see what happens, but we hope they do something worthwhile!”

What’s next for Naughty Dog? “We really don’t know!” he laughs, explaining that the team is taking a break at the moment, throwing their ideas around to figure out what to do next. “We have some more ideas for Nathan Drake and the Uncharted world, and obviously Sony really enjoys the franchise! But we want to make sure that whatever we move on to is worth our time. All of us are way too passionate, too involved in our personal work to just regurgitate. We don’t want to make the same game. We want to make something new, something refreshing, something worth our blood and sweat and tears.”

“And hopefully worth your time to play, too!” he adds, excitedly.

Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception is out on PS3 today.