I recently had a talk with a friend of mine about movies that are based on games, and how to them the two mediums didn’t make sense together. So as a cop-out to a post, I’m gonna just steal my own notes and put them here for you all to peruse, enjoy!
“I am in agreement with you that I feel gaming as a medium is completely seperate from movie/TV and as such trying to adapt it from one to another doesn’t make sense. The immersion of being able to actually make choices in Until Dawn is what makes it a unique experience, making it into a film just turns it into yet another horror film with nothing unique going for it. The Last of Us worked because the game was a narrative-driven game with a singular storyline and the show basically just followed that storyline.
As an excellent example I can give, Minecraft is being made into a movie. Everyone universally hates the idea as it’s purely being made only to make money as the game itself just doesn’t make sense as a narrative-focused experience which is what the movie is trying to be.
Ultimately that’s kinda the point when it comes to movie game adaptations, take the audience from a completely different genre and introduce them to a story that they may not have heard about. In a way that makes it a good thing, as more people joining a fandom is nice, but it can lead to clashes and can really expose bad stories in games. Or they can just ignore what made the games great and just stick to a generic film using game names and appearances to try and sell tickets, see the old Lara Croft films.
To me, good game to movie/tv adaptations are actually those that instead take a look into the complexity of the worlds and the things that gaming can do as a unique medium and showcasing that. An example of which I watched recently was “The Remarkable Life of Ibelin”, which was a documentary film about a kid from Norway with a debilitating muscular atrophy disease that killed him while young, and left his parents thinking that he was a sad, lonely boy who died without doing much in life. However, turns out he was an avid World of Warcraft player during the years where he was degrading, and he made an impact on people’s lives being a digital detective and therapist, and he had entire groups of people holding funerals for him and writing how great of a person he was and how much of an impact he made. To me, that’s an excellent example of a great gaming story, and I think more things like that should be looked into by producers, though that would require them to actually have passion in what they are doing and not just making something to make more money. But who knows, Ibelin was critically acclaimed so maybe it will spur more people into looking into this stuff.
Ultimately, yeah I think that certain games can work as TV shows or movies, but the genre of Video Games is different for a reason and many only work for the sake of telling a good story. There’s actually a show being made by Amazon right now, Secret Level, which is an anthology show that is being released on December 10th that is about each episode being based on a different video game, it seems interesting because many of the choices of games are indie titles that you would not expect and would make for great story adaptation, but we will see if it ends up being any good.”
That’s all for now, and as always. It’s not just a game, It’s a Life.