I've watched this thread since its creation and waited for a fitting time when I could post the following. Now its three pages in, however, I feel like its quite an opportune moment:
?Games don?t need movies!?
Movies need games, though.
Think about it.
You're a studio with a whole team of actors, casters, set producers and animators, just sitting around. No place to go because the forbidden den known as the 'Writers' Room' to some and 'Hell on Earth' to others has become so overloaded by pizza crusts and visits from Beelzebub that there's not a creative mind in the house. What better way to get all these people up and working again than to gain the licence for a game-into-movie. After all, most of these games must have good plots; otherwise people wouldn't play them, right? Plus you have the audience already there who are fans of the original game, and finally a whole, working, visual model upon which to base any ideas on.
We play games to interact with the story, certainly. But personally, I am one of those guys who prefers an exceedingly linear, nicely-scripted plot (HL2, Portal, Bioshock to an extent) compared to one which allows meaningless playtime sucked up into 'free-roaming environments' which fail to accomplish little but add to frustration with irate side-quests and shallow NPCs (STALKER, Oblivion). At the end of the day, I play the vast majority of my collection for the great (albeit faux) character interaction in which the scene is giving the impression of presenting to me as a player. Of course at the end of the day, I'm still being pulled along on a very thick rope to a goal which is imminent and final. But I still have fun on the way by being literally that bit personal with the unravelling drama.
Films based on games are for people like me; true listeners to the story. The problem with movies being used as an alternate medium to connote the message originally put out on the former format is this: It lacks that level of satisfaction and does not provide enough time for the finer details to be appreciated. We all loved the credits of Final Fantasy 8 because you've just spent the last thirty hours of your own life using and learning about those characters whose respective tales are now concluding. I certainly absorbed more of Eli Vance's death sequence in Episode Two of the Half Life saga (sorry for the spoiler if you've been hiding under a rock for the past three months) because of the epic battle that preceded it. Plot and development has always been a way of rewarding players and forcing them to go on just that little bit further with the game. It?s like getting that special text once a week from your beloved. Admittedly you over-analyse and try to gauge some sort of hidden meaning from between the words futility, but it is this patience which is finally praised with story.
Movies are your reward for paying the guy at the counter six pounds for a ticket into the screen and watching a few opening adverts.
A passive relationship with the world does not make for a tale as epic as a (synthetic) interaction with the situation. That?s the simple difference between the film industry and gaming. Unfortunately, Hollywood is more than willing to shave off a few parts of the whole experience in order to cash-in on an already established success. Somewhat ironically, when gaming companies try to reverse this and profit from the other?s fortune (Cough, EA), it tends to flop. Spiderman 2 and Knights of the Old Republic (i.e, Star Wars) are the only two examples I can think of whereby the videogame didn?t turn into some sort of storytelling nightmare, despite many others having a much firmer plot to build a game around from the existence of a motion picture.
Which is mainly why game should not be based from their inferior medium, regardless of how quick the cash comes pouring in when such a marketing tactic is taken. We are witnessing the decline of an ageing art and the rise of the new here, not vice versa.
3scapism plug! [http://3scapism.com]
) Still, the Seven Hour war would make a better game than movie no matter what. In fact, seven hours is just about the right length for one of those episodes Valve is so into these days...
