One of the world's best known and best-selling horror and fantasy authors, Clive Barker's most recent project is Clive Barker's Jericho, a new video game from Codemasters in which a paranormal special-ops force attempts to infiltrate the root of all evil, located at the center of a series of nested cities in the Arabian peninsula's desolate Empty Quarter. We spoke about his fondness for video games as a medium, why film is fascist and what he wants on his headstone.

Playboy: Jericho is not the first game you've been involved with, correct?

Barker: No it's not. I helped create a game called Undying, which EA published. But they didn't support it because they felt it didn't fit with who they were anymore.

Playboy: It was too violent?

Barker: Yes. In fact, according to one very credible source, the game was raised at one big meeting as being "the kind of thing we have to stop doing." Which is distressing when you put two years into a project. Then we tried to do Demonik with Majesco, and that fell apart because the company fell apart. But I believe this medium has incredible potential. It allows you to be a co-creator in stories a way that is very close to the literary experience. If you read Moby Dick and I read Moby Dick they're different Moby Dicks, right? If you play this game and I play this game, they're different games. Film, by comparison, is a fascist medium. It tells you what to see. "This is what you'll see, this is what you'll feel." I wish I were the first to make that distinction, but I think it originated with the author John Fowles. He said film was fascist, as opposed to media that allow you interpretive time, whether it's a book or a painting or touring a castle, different people have different experiences. With something like Raiders of the Lost Ark, it might be genius storytelling, but everything is the same for every person who ever watches that film. What you bring to it doesn't alter the experience very much. The screen will do what it did last time whether you like it or not. In our culture we are increasingly disempowered on a cultural level and on a political level. We are documented, we are photographed, we are pursued by cameras everywhere. Somewhere there are master files of everybody in this country. That worries the shit out of me, and I like media that give us back some agency over how we see the world. I believe that the less passive we can be in the experiences that we have, the better. Books are very inclusive of the reader's creativity. As a reader you're not just an audience you are the co-creator of the experience. You literally take these black blobs on white paper and translate them into meaning and narrative. It's kind of magical. Video games share that quality. Players bring a lot of themselves into the experience.

Playboy: How can you tell what is a video game idea and what is a novel idea?

Barker: Sometimes you have to wait a little while to find out where things want to settle. I've been playing with this idea of this city with rings of dead armies for several years. I knew one day I would do something with the Empty Quarter. And people have told me you could make a movie of this, but the truth is, a movie would horribly truncate the complexity of what we're trying to present. As far as novels versus games, novels work best when the reality of the internal life of the character is contrasted with the strangeness of the exterior that he or she is passing through. In games you see very little of the interior of the characters, there's only an exterior. Because it's a visual medium you can't express the kind of thought forms that a novel presents. In a game, you're certainly inside the experience much more than you would be in a movie, but you're never going to be as much as you are in a novel. So it's horses for courses. When I choose which medium to use I'm really looking at how much of the story is about events and how much is about internal change.

Playboy: Do you have a first love? Is it books or painting or do you now see video games being a focus?

Barker: I want my gravestone to say "He imagined." That'd do me. Whatever forms the imagination takes. It's refreshing to play in all these places. It's like each one is a palate cleanser for the other. After a few days away I go down to my studio and I put on loud music and inhale my cigar smoke and oil paint and get to it. It's a joy after the anal, enclosed world of writing. I handwrite everything so I'm sitting there at my desk with piles of paper everywhere, whereas I paint on fucking huge canvases. It's almost Jekyll and Hyde. The visual on the canvas and the narrative that comes out in the books forms this sort of unholy marriage, you know? And maybe that's what games are, the love child of these two media. It's my storytelling love and my image-making love. My left brain and my right brain. Both sides of my head are engaging at the same time, and I'm having a lot of fun doing it.