Johnny Novgorod said:
What are other videogame-y movies out there, besides Scott Pilgrim?
What game mechanic would you like to see tackled in a movie?
Any movie dealing with virtual reality, ala The Matrix or The Thirteenth Floor, is inherently videogamey. Surrogates deals with possession of avatars as videogames do, except in Surrogates the avatar always closely resembles the human operator.
The reload function as iterative improvement tool is a key game mechanic so it was nice to finally see it more directly addressed than it is in time travel movies.
I'd like to see a movie tackle the interplay between all levels of the system, in a way which is more illuminating than The Matrix, which largely deals with just the three tiers (sleeping humans, awake humans, machine controllers) and is limited by the plot and creator bias. This doesn't need to be a movie though - video games themselves rarely reflect upon their own nature in a meaningful way, so a video game could be made where the protagonist struggles to understand and deal with his own reality, perhaps finally confronting his operator (the player).
In reality for example there is an entire ideology behind the "sleepers" which justifies their existence, whereas The Matrix doesn't believe it exists.
Movies suffer from a serious point-of-view problem - they are largely conceived and made by wealthy people. By "wealthy" I don't mean millionaires - billions of people in the world have almost no wealth, so anyone with even a moderate level of wealth qualifies as wealthy. We get tons of movies ABOUT wealthy people and almost no movies about poor people, and the minds and souls of poor people are completely unknown. A system cannot be understood without understanding all aspects of it, which means that Hollywood will never produce a rational movie, about games or otherwise. This is by design, since poor people are not customers for Hollywood movies so they are treated like a homeless person is by a car salesman. According to Hollywood, poor people do not exist within the system, and therefore need not be accounted for, or if absolutely necessary to the plot are condescended to, as "the sleepers" in The Matrix who are sheeple whose only hope of salvation is through the bravery and beneficence of the special ones, with Neo being the super-duper special one.
The question never asked by the Wachowski brothers is "Who DECIDES the plot of The Matrix?" Who decides the reality which produces the Evil Machine Masters, the Plucky and Resourceful Special Ones, and the Victimized Sheeple? If we translate this to class distinctions, the Masters are the elite, the Special Ones are the middle class, and the Sheeple are the poor. This kind of distinction affects THE ENTIRE ideology of video games and movies - that is to say they are made by middle class (which really means wealthy since it's only "middle" with respect to the vast wealth present in wealthy countries) people who lionize themselves as "plucky, resourceful, brave, beneficent", who view the poor as pathetic sheeple whose only hope is to be saved, and who view the elite as terrible greedy people who must be stopped. RPG hero after RPG hero "saves the villagers" from the dragon, or in other words saves the villagers from their own cowardice and impotence.
The one thing they never take into account is their own bias, themselves. The Wachowski brothers never self-reflect because that would defeat the purpose of The Matrix as an ideological construct. They never consider within the movie that THEY THEMSELVES created the movie. They created the lionizing of the middle class, the demonizing of the rulers, and the condescension toward the poor - The Matrix is not a movie about the true nature of reality, it's a movie about reality as FILTERED THROUGH the limitations, biases, and conceits of the Wachowski brothers and then translated into a movie.
