One of my main heuristics for if a videogame is worth playing is if it only works as a game. As in if you transported it out of the medium, it loses a lot. The adaption can still be good, hell, the game can still be good but I don’t think they’re interesting in the art form that is videogames.
My main example here’d be TLOU. The netflix adaption was pretty much a hit because of course it is. The story is entirely linear, it’s very clearly subdivided into combat -> exploration -> story, allthough sometimes the order changes. It’s all polished to a mirror sheen, the gameplay is fun, hell, the brutality ties in thematically instead of being a back-of-the-box selling point to edgelords (allthough it is also that) but functionally it could be a movie or a series and it is and it works.
So whats your videogame that only works as a videogame, and most importantly, why? I think Disco Elysium is the free bingo square for this community on this one and the reasons are endless, but I’ll start with something that surprised me recently: the new Hitman games.
They have movies but they’re shit, all the comics and tie in novels I assume are for people into hitman lore because the story isn’t really anything to write home about - mostly existing to get you to next location - but the the experience of playing hitman can’t be recreated in another format because the interactivity is such a big part of it. I mean sure, “shoot someone in the head” basically always works. It’s one of my main criticisms about a lot of games I have that give you a whole host of options to tackle a mission which all pale in effectiveness to “have a bit of aim and do headshot with the starter pistol” but somehow it’s way more fun to hoist rich dipshits by their own petard.
The balatro movie is gonna suck
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
The Sims and pretty much any strategy or god-view game.
There’s never going to be a Crusader Kings or Vicky 3 movie.
Outer Wilds. It’s a game with almost no dialogue and barely any characters where for 99% of the game, nothing actually happens. The experience is entirely based on the player’s exploration and curiosity.
Beat me to it. It’s one of those games that really shows what the medium is capable of, and I feel like I’m always going to be chasing that high. Not to mention, it shows that you can make a game that values player freedom and gives you a genuine sense of exploration without needing to spend $500 million making a game world the size of Texas that ultimately just has a bunch of procedurally-generated foliage to fill up the empty space. And in fact, the intimacy of the world is what makes it feel immersive—as you play the game, you naturally begin to learn the contours of the solar system and how to navigate over and between planets, and it’s small enough that you can hold all of that in your head.
Quite a different sort of game, but I played Ocarina of Time for the first time recently, and that same quality is one of the things I really loved about it. By the time I fought Ganon, I knew every nook and cranny of Hyrule and every last NPC, and it was a bit melancholy to leave it behind. I think that intimacy is also what makes the time skip so effective. It was genuinely shocking walking into Hyrule Castle Town as Adult Link for the first time, since it’s a place you get to know well as Young Link.
Any game where player decisions and the weight thereof are tightly incorporated into the narrative:
- Spec Ops: The Line
- Undertale/Deltarune
- Papers, Please
- Pathologic
- Suzerain
- This War of Mine
I’ve never played any of these games but could one not make a movie about one specific decision path? Or possibly a confusing multiple reality looper style one?
just to take undertale as an example I think you could make a cartoon or something that stars the undertale characters but you could not reproduce the undertale storyline specifically in a narrative format without losing a lot of what makes it special because a big part of that narrative is the player making decisions that are inherent to the video game medium and inherent to the jrpg genre specifically and if you just portrayed those decisions as a character on screen making them it wouldn’t evoke the same feeling in the audience as a player gets when they reach the twist at the midpoint.
I listened to the worst of all possible worlds episodes on undertale so i haven’t played it but i do know the idea.
What if the movie was from the evil flower’s perspective or a different main NPC?
I mean I think you could portray the narrative, what I’m getting at is more that the specific meaning would be lost and the challenge for the filmmaker would be that they would have to find a new meaning to create for the audience. that’s basically the challenge of adaptation of any work.
I’m being a bit annoying on purpose so i apologize if it’s grating but does the adaptation with a new meaning still qualias an adaptation to a new medium?
I would say yes. Pretty much any adaptation has to answer the question, “how do we make the core idea of what we’re adapting work in the new medium”. The aspect of undertale that would not translate at all is the bullet hell mechanics, which ties into my thesis I posted elsewhere in the thread about video games being an outdated name for a kind of mixed media digital format.
video games being an outdated name for a kind of mixed media digital format
I think this is why i’ve got such a bug up my butt about this discussion. Thanks for using the words good
I’ve learned that a lot of these “media adaptations” have trained a lot of consumers (not necessarily fans) to be put off by the idea of a new perspective on the same themes and topics of the original work. So many people lose their shit when an adaptation isn’t 1:1 beat for beat, or if the “lore” has to change to meet the parameters or limitations on what’s possible outside of video games. So when a new perspective challenges the original perspective, it’s just not good or even hated. Capitalism cannot allow such risks.
I don’t know much about Undertale/Deltarune but a simple perspective change most definitely can work as a standalone project simply because it’s not trying to recreate something so interactive such as a video game. But who is willing to try it? And who is going to watch?
In my opinion, encouraging people to seek new perspectives can remedy a lot of this negative outlook on media but it’s going to take a lot of effort.
Life is all about perspective after all.
I’m being a bit intentionally cheeky in this thread but yeah this is kind of my point.
You can make a movie about a game without it being a let’s play featuring all the mechanics, in fact most wouldn’t call a let’s play a movie. Something about the game has to be changed to make it into a new medium or else it’d still be the videogame.
It’s a bit of a ship of theseus thing, how many pieces of the game can you adapt before it’s not an effective adaptation?
There is so much potential in the idea of interactive movies that even something such as a “rogue-like” movie theater would be kinda fun depending on the movie.
Doing collective quick time events, dialogue options, item pick ups , or even simply choosing which direction to go would be really cool. If you wanted to be fun and creative with it, different seating arrangements can determine which part of the narrative you vote on. Or collective screenings can shape a community story that is specifically created by that group. I’m imagining things like this can foster discussions and leading to new perspectives by asking the question “Oh, how did your group’s run turn out?”
Unfortunately this would only work in a society and culture that isn’t pushing greed and individualism at every angle of our lives.
Like that one black mirror episode?
I think the closest thing to this is the clue movie where different showings got different endings
Unfortunately this would only work in a society and culture that isn’t pushing greed and individualism at every angle of our lives.
Many such cases
Favoring one specific decision path removes the element of player choice and consequences that is core to the narrative, so no, not without losing a significant part of what makes the narrative meaningful.
So confusing multiverse/timetravel movie it is!
Deltarune specifically uses the medium of “video game” as a narrative device in ways that would translate poorly to film. Like, at one point an NPC tells you to go into the game menu and toggle an option that has (minor) story implications on top of being a funny bit.
Ok that’s cool. Not my kind of game but i love meta stuff
I think spec ops the line could work as a movie since most of the decisions you make have no impact on the story and it could easily be another story in the same world with the same premise
I think you could make a spec ops esque movie, as in the action war movie that asks why you watch this shit, but pulling the trigger - even if given no choice - is such an integral part of spec ops the line
I think the vast majority of games don’t work outside of being games. It’s why movie adaptation of games notoriously suck.
There are entire genres:
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RTS
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Fighting games
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Racing games
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4X games
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Genres where grinding is like 90% of the game like ARPGs, MMORPGs, or some shitty gacha game
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Pretty much any genre that’s top-down or isometric like MOBAs or isometric RPGs wouldn’t work as a conventional movie because the top-down view is absolutely essential to the core game experience. Imagine playing Dota or Disco Elysium with 1st person POV. It would be a cool novelty and perhaps even a good game in its own right, but it wouldn’t be Dota or Disco Elysium anymore.
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Games where resource management is crucial don’t really work outside of games either. So something like old-school roguelikes like Nethack, on top of being top-down POV, have intense amounts of resource management that can’t translate to other media.
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PVP games are also not good for adaptation. Most media don’t have the equivalent of opposing players. You have musical duets, but that’s more like gaming co-op. I guess you have rap battles, but I don’t think you can adapt BW TvZ into some rap battle between the “Terran rapper” and the “Zerg rapper.”
The closest medium to videogames are boardgames. You could have a Nethack the boardgame although I can’t see why anyone would want to play this outside of novelty, which goes back to this boardgame being as poor of an adaptation as Nethack the marble sculpture or Nethack the watercolor painting or Nethack the epic poem. Boardgames, relative to videogames, have simpler rulesets and can’t be burdened by too complicated calculations.
Honestly, it’s a better question to ask what genres can be adapted in other media (walking simulators, VNs especially kinetic novels, rhythms game, 3rd-person shooters, stealth games, 1st-person dungeon crawlers, 1st-person platformers/parkour).
Genres where grinding is like 90% of the game like ARPGs, MMORPGs, or some shitty gacha game
counterpoint: alarmingly large internet fanfiction
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My first thought was rhythm games. Without the gameplay it’s basically listening to music, which obviously “works” but is a completely different experience.
Is playing an instrument a rhythm game? If it’s, you are right, it’s obviously difference experience. Otherwise it’s kinda similar, just that most people I know don’t play instruments for fun at all.
Mario. Illumination never explained the beauty of learning the power of jump like in the infamous level 1-1 as explained in the 7 hour video essay on how Mario teaches players to jump. This made the movie just not work for me.
Mario movie was made by Illumination tho.
I thought I was a real cinephile
I failed the find that emote a couple weeks ago. Where is it from? Why is it named like that?
no idea. I just know that the name of the character is Morshu, and he is from Link: The Faces of Evil.
That’s why you have to watch the superior 1993 Mario movie.
redditers would call this bait, I call this facts
Octo Dad is always my go-to when I was thinking about this same thing a few years back. Games that take full advantage of the interactivity. You could put other similar games in there, but the fact is they can only exist in the context of video games. The point of the game is controlling Octo Dad and navigating tasks with imperfect equipment and ability to do so.
Unless someone is gonna build an octopus mobile suit that is purposefully hard to control, you won’t get that anywhere else
You could make a movie about an octopus dad who has a tough time functioning in the world, though.
you could make a movie about a guy trying to run but what makes QWOP work is context and how it feels to use the inputs, and that’s fundamentally exclusive to realtime interactive media.
you could build a physical QWOP but it would lack the context of other scenarios where you’re more abstracted from moving a puppet or whatever because those don’t exist.
Missile command, unending waves of nuclear bombs raining down on no-name cities in a no-name country. The only narrative is your own reactions to watching yourself fail to protect the cities, as there is no win condition.
that was a vibe I explicitly tried to keep alive in my take on missile command
Games like Shadow of the Colossus wherein the player’s participation is required for the full emotional impact. You don’t feel guilty watching someone else slaughter an ancient magical giant to unseal a dark god, but you sure do if you’re responsible for it
Snake, Rattle ‘n’ Roll for the NES might be pretty difficult to turn into a series or movie.
Its just a snake zipping around a part of a mountain eating pibbles to get big enough to make a bell ring that opens a door to the next part of the mountain, all the while avoiding enemies that will make you shrink, all the ways of falling off the mountain and dying, and the game clock ticking down to zero. Why is a snake doing this? To get to the top of the mountain, hop into a rocket ship, and go to the moon.
Now that I type it out, it would probably make for a pretty trippy anime series.
I would argue that the entire grand strategy genre doesn’t really work outside of video games. You could argue that you could make them work as board games, but they would simply be way too unwieldy basically 1,000-hour games if you tried to play them IRL.
And yes, I am aware that The Campaign for North Africa exists (boardgame), and it has an estimated 1,500 hours to complete a single playthrough. But that kind of proves my point. Super-deep, complex games are better played as video games, since playing them IRL is incredibly time-consuming and cumbersome.
I mean people read all the discworld novels
I dont know what you are trying to tell me with that. No offense.
Fair. I’d argue something taking a long-ass while isn’t a great argument as to why something needs to be a videogame basically. The example being people read like 40 books of discworld and that takes up a lot of time.
I can see where you’re coming from. But board games usually require multiple people. Getting a group of people together to play a super-deep and complex board game seems like a niche within a niche. (Especially if it takes multiple people months to get through)
You’re simply reaching a much wider audience by turning it into a video game, while also making it much more accessible in the process.
Making something more accessible to a wider audience totally justifies its existence in my mind.
This I agree with
I would argue that the entire grand strategy genre doesn’t really work outside of video games. You could argue that you could make them work as board games, but they would simply be way too unwieldy basically 1,000-hour games if you tried to play them IRL.
And yes, I am aware that The Campaign for North Africa
RuneScape. But to some extent it’s not its fault.
RuneScape has a few novels and even a comic book, which is great for worldbuilding and having the story evolve beyond its clunky mmo point and click game.
But the problem is part of its charm is the fact its the funny medieval cookie clicker, and many pieces of its humor revolve around it. You can tell great RuneScape stories outside the game, but you lose some of the scapeyness in the process.
Runescape’s charm was the amount of random storylines that don’t have any connections with one another. Sometimes they do but oftentimes it’s random stuff like fetching ingredients for a cook and such.
Fighting games? Sure you could make an action movie, but watching somebody chain a 15 hit combo is way more impressive
I like the old mortal kombat movie
I think given enough and or cool enough lore you can make pretty banger film adaptions of things. I’d watch the hell out of a STALKER movie because the aesthetics alone rock, but boy would it not be like playing STALKER.
I got all the stalker games in a humble bundle i think, played the first one until there was some forced slow-mo moment where i get attacked or killed idk because i reacted fast enough to shoot the enemy twice before the cutscene part happened.
I’m already not a big single player videogame fan you can’t just take me out of it that fast
It depends on whether you include a different medium just ripping the lore out of the game and telling the story devoid of gameplay mechanics.
Starcraft broodwar, for example, could easily be adapted into a sci-fi war against the aliens type movie but wouldn’t be able to capture anything about how an RTS is played or feels.
A movie about managing resources in a context that doesn’t really apply to anything in the real world (spend all your money all the time any resources left over are wasted) sounds pretty tough to do.
Disco elysium could be adapted into a movie, similarly, if it plucked the story and setting out of the gameplay. All the internal dialogue might have to be cut or turned into a cheap allegory for mental illness like so many movies do these days. Starts off following this eccentric vagabond collecting cans in a shopping bag talking to himself through a drunken stupor until you meet kim and realize harry’s a detective.
What I’m saying is that I don’t think a movie can accurately represent videogame mechanics but probably can represent the storyline from basically any game.
My real answer is VVVVVV
i think sort of bureaucratic drama about resources can work for starcraft movie tbh (capturing both frantic optimization and war itself), either sorkin or tony gilroy style (or less action-y edge of tomorrow), put some clock in the soundtrack to hardwire time limits and you got it.
I would be so into it, honestly. I used to watch pro starcraft every single day
therefore i think mechanics are not barriers to adaptation (because mechanics invoke specific feelings in a player, and that cinema can achieve*), but player choices influence are, so idk how you can make undertale or disco a movie, only with some sort of groundhog day device i can see them both making sense
Bandersnatch or whatever the ‘choose your own adventure’ movie is on netflix. Could be something like that, maybe?
I think I’ve lost the juice for arguing about this though so I concede that the choices affecting the narrative of the game would be tough
