Video Game Movies

This video just gave me an idea...

The reasons video game movies suck, are the same reasons most movie novelizations suck. Going from the new media and asking to down grade it to the old media is a bad idea. It doesn’t seem to work properly. You can start from a book and turn it into a movie or a video game, but turning a video game into a movie or book just doesn't work as well. It can work, but it rarely actually does unless you take away a lot of the things that make it a game and turn it into something that's almost unrecognizable. I seems you can dumb a concept down, but you can’t really smarten it up without adding on huge amounts of scaffolding.

Partly it’s because if you make a game into a movie, you end up with a B-Movie. Do a death-per-minute count on a game sometime and see what sorts of movies match up to those numbers. It’ll either be a war movie or something direct to video. I’m not saying that this makes games bad, just that they’re not movies and shouldn’t try to be. It’s a separate art form (and it is an art form Mr. Ebert) that follows a different set of rules. We don’t expect a movie to conform to the rules of painting, and I don’t think we should try to make video games conform to the rules of movies.