Serious question: Why do video game movies suck ass?

[slunken]

I'm acutally surprised there haven't been any GTA movies to capitalize further on the franchise

[Order 66]

they're making a world of warcraft movie and they're supposedly taking it seriously. but the prince of persia movie also had big money abd talent thrown at it so who knows.

the only game movie i think i could get behind is an elder scrolls movie because there's an insane amont of lore to draw from. but i'd rather them not do it as naturally it'd likely suck

[Trotskilicious]

world of warcraft lore is just a bunch of stolen shit mashed together

[Trotskilicious]

Originally Posted by Order 66

the crux of the argument is "games aren't art" ... which is arguable.

laughable you mean

[Trotskilicious]

art: stuff people make for the sake of pleasure

yes even the sad stuff is for pleasure

[Trotskilicious]

also dildos are art

[Order 66]

top casinos online art dildo art

[Trotskilicious]

people who try to define art to exclude all of the shit aren't getting art, as far as i care

[Eulogy]

didn't ebert soften his stance a bit toward the end

[Order 66]

i read a rebuttal by hideo kojima (metal gear solid guy) and he says art is used as expression, thus games can utilize art, but they can't be art. but i don't know, idgaf

problem with the ebert debate is people on message board thought "art" = "good" and they were like hurr there are plenty of good games out there and it made gamers' argument look dumb. not that internet forums have ever been dumb or anythign

[Order 66]

Originally Posted by Eulogy

didn't ebert soften his stance a bit toward the end

quite a bit, yeah

[Trotskilicious]

I dont know how that guy says hes not expressing anything. Honestly thats an artist thing to say, re faulkner i jes rite starys about cuntry folk

[slunken]

Originally Posted by Trotskilicious

re faulkner i jes rite starys about cuntry folk

haha

[slunken]

i thought the james franco version of as i lay dying was going to be complete shit but thankfully i was waaaay wrong. great movie.

[Trotskilicious]

faulkner would play that shit up one minute then be condescending intellectual other times

it's just that evasive artist stuff i never played any MGS tho i played metal gear bitd

[redbreegull]

Trots (and banana unfortunately) are right that something like a book or a video game, which generally takes many hours to complete, naturally lends itself more to tv than to a film that must be over in under 3 hours. Especially because both books and games are often episodic in their narrative structure.

I don't buy that games aren't art, not at all. A video game is just as much a piece of art as anything else. Usually when people tell you certain things can't count as art, it's because they are unable to understand them, which is never a good reason to listen to anyone. Trots is right in his point that so many games have no semblance of decent plot and this makes them bad candidates for a non-interactive adaptation. However, I would say 1) video games are still in their relative infancy compared to film, which has been around for over a hundred years and to a great extent utilizes the same kinds of narrative and character devices that have been used in drama for many, many hundreds of years. I'm not sure there is any direct precedent for video games the way that a film acted out on camera is fundamentally similar to a drama acted out on stage. And 2) video games have improved in this capacity a lot in recent years. It's probably useless to try and compare how a video game plot works to how a film plot works anyway, but it seems to me there has been a great effort to make video games more cinematic and plot-driven.

[redbreegull]

Originally Posted by slunken

I'm acutally surprised there haven't been any GTA movies to capitalize further on the franchise

I can't imagine a gta movie being anything but terrible. Stripped of the things that make it great that cannot be translated to a non-interactive medium, an action movie about someone who steals tons of cars sounds like the most boring rehashed idea ever.

also, didn't gta v make more money upon release than any film in history? Yeah, I know that it costs six times as much as a movie ticket, but turning that kind of profit, who needs to dabble in some bullshit half-assed uninspired film that will flop?

[redbreegull]

also, not relevant but I gotta rant, after red dead and la noir, I was hoping for a really cool plot and really well-developed characters from gta v. yet somehow these elements of the game fall flat on their faces. I haven't seen a black character caricatured and this poorly developed since I can't even remember when. also the game paints a horrible picture of women. red dead and la noire both had at least a few strong females scattered throughout who seemed not totally like they were two dimensional, but every woman in gta v is a fickle, hysterical, mercurial, capricious nut case. it's actually horrible, I don't know how they could have reinforced the idea any more strongly that only old, white men are people

[killtrocity]

Plus, GTA draws on pretty much every other artistic medium for cultural references, so a GTA movie would be like xeroxing a summary of whatever is culturally relevant today in film and TV and applying that back to the medium it came from originally but in a watered-down way and without the interactivity. At that point it becomes a shitty parody with no selling point.

[slunken]

Originally Posted by redbreegull

who needs to dabble in some bullshit half-assed uninspired film that will flop?

america's capitalist entertainment industry.

i mean isn't what i quoted 75% or more of all movies made?

[redbreegull]

shrug, it doesn't even seem like a good business decision. instead of doing something shitty that will tarnish the franchise's golden pedestal status and will probably lose money, just put out more games

[killtrocity]

Originally Posted by Banana

Video Games would probably translate better to a mini series on HBO or something. A 20-40+ hour video game being condensed down into a 2 hour movie isn't going to translate all that properly.

Unrelated but I've always felt Harry Potter would be a far better HBO or Netflix series than a movie series. The pace and skipped information never made those movies feel right to me. a 10-12 episode season dedicated to each book would be much better.

Television is more novel-like by nature. Take The Sopranos for example. The pilot was originally supposed to be a stand-alone film. That would have worked. But 80 hours later, you have one of the most loved series of all time. It's not fair to compare movies and TV because what they seek to accomplish and the manner in which that purpose is carried out are different.

The only issue I had with HP were the things that were changed needlessly. In one case, you have integral changes to characters (Snape in #6), and the other, you have frivolous padding such as Harry flying through the air with Voldemort in #7 part 2.

Regardless, the movies are highly acclaimed and liked by audiences. If anything, this points to the fact that it's possible to take a very rich medium and successfully distill that down to it's essential elements in a film or series of films.

I wholeheartedly prefer the books, but the movies were successful in their own right.

Originally Posted by redbreegull

Trots (and banana unfortunately) are right that something like a book or a video game, which generally takes many hours to complete, naturally lends itself more to tv than to a film that must be over in under 3 hours. Especially because both books and games are often episodic in their narrative structure.

With a game - let's take Mass Effect for example - how much of that experience is actual story development, and how much is combat, replays of the same segments, walking from point A to point B, equipping characters, playing minigames, trying to figure out where to go next, and regular exploration? If you look at the big plot elements of Mass Effect, they can easily fit into a 2.5 hour movie. 40 hours of playing times is not 40 hours of substance which equates to an interesting movie. So cramming material into the allocated timeframe isn't necessarily an issue.

A Mass Effect TV series would be awesome. One sidequest per episode, perhaps a few episodes for major quests. But the game is so cinematic already - what exactly is gained by emulating that minus the interactivity?


I think the big problems mentioned so far are

1) Shitty directors and other production elements being allocated for video game films. LOTR would have been a disaster if it were dumped on Uwe Boll.

2) What trots said about narrative and characters

On this note, I think Star Wars Episode I serves as an excellent analogue for a video game film, because it has many of the same flaws. Weak characters and no plot.

Start at 1:52:
Action, sci-fi, superhero, fantasy. All video game movies fit these categories.

[Trotskilicious]

the hbo television program "the wire" was deliberately written like a novel

[Trotskilicious]

Originally Posted by killtrocity

A Mass Effect TV series would be awesome. One sidequest per episode, perhaps a few episodes for major quests. But the game is so cinematic already - what exactly is gained by emulating that minus the interactivity?

nothing, plus the violence wouldn't be that good

i really think the action of mass effect is some of the most fun and visceral first person shooting, it's not that fun when you're not risking a game over with the red lines across the screen, popping out of cover just to blast a dude with a shotgun. i mean fuck it, it's a vidya game, and i'm glad to have it warts and all.

[Tchocky]

A lot of video games would work better as TV shows than movies. Fallout, Mass Effect, Starcraft, LA Noire, The Last of Us, Bioshock, Metal Gear Solid...

But yeah, unless they were on like HBO or something, they would just be bastardized, watered-down versions of the games.

[redbreegull]

something like LA Noire I can't imagine being adapted in motion picture format because the game is basically a noire film in game form. Like GTA, it's almost going backwards to try and adapt it to the format that inspired it. The game goes out of it's way to be more cinematic and less like a game.

[Trotskilicious]

Originally Posted by Tchocky

But yeah, unless they were on like HBO or something, they would just be bastardized, watered-down versions of the games.

they are inherently being watered down with the removal of interactivity

[Trotskilicious]

and from what i can tell, i haven't played LA Noir, but LA Confidential is the movie version, i just thought you guys might to know because people forgot about that movie

[redbreegull]

Originally Posted by Trotskilicious

they are inherently being watered down with the removal of interactivity

yes, this, which goes back to why I basically feel the mediums are so different it would be very, very, very difficult to make a good adaptation

[redbreegull]

Originally Posted by Trotskilicious

and from what i can tell, i haven't played LA Noir, but LA Confidential is the movie version, i just thought you guys might to know because people forgot about that movie

I don't actually know anything about noire films, but I think it draws from a bunch of different "classics" or whatever. it was a fun game to play, the over-arching story was very cinematic and the dialogue was real good. It does have the feeling of leading you though, like they are playing up the cinema element at the expense of unlimited interactive freedom