Slashdot Mirror
The Convergence of Games and Film
Gamasutra has a piece on the ever-increasing convergence of games and films. The final chapter meeting of the IGDA's San Francisco chapter this year had an event focusing on, in particular, the preponderance of Star Wars games. From the article: "The convergence of film and game production has been predicted for years, but progress has been slow... cultural, logistical, financial, and computational barriers have kept the two worlds apart. Everybody sees convergence, most want it, but few know what it really means and fewer still have actually tried it."
But.. but.. I thought the convergence were the Mortal Kombat flicks!
Hosting 20G hd, 1Tb bw! ssh $7.95
You know what I want to see? A movie based on Final Fantasy IV (II for you USians). Not a movie that happens to be called "Final Fantasy," but one that's actually an adapted retelling of the story from a REAL, playable Final Fantasy. There's definitely enough of a nostalgia gamer market for such an endeavor to make a decent profit.
There are so many games with rich characters and engaging settings that would be perfect for cinema. Sadly, movie producers go after the franchise crapola games and make franchise crapola movies. Even sadder is that these films make money.
Take a chance! Hell, animate the thing and save money on actors/sets/locations. Buy the rights to an older game for a song. The first one to take a leap and make a good movie based on a good game and catering to the right demographic is going to go gangbusters.
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
Everyone just had to wait for Hollywood. Their screenwriters are so full of dry storylines that they need fresh material. It will only be a matter of time before they ruin games, too.
If this ever happens any way...
If anything it's going to be a grand convergence of suck. Doom anyone? Wing Commander? I'd like to know who the "everyone" is that seems to want this sort of thing, because I haven't heard a single person speak will of this sort of thing. 2 hours of watching someone else play a game? Or even 2 hours of plot in a game I could have played myself. Thanks, but the only convergence I'd like is to be able to go into an arcade (remember those?) and play $10 worth of quarters on a movie theater sized screen. and $10 because that's roughly what a movie goes for these days.
Of course it isn't really convergence. It is more of a 'marketing bundle.' Gamers are a pretty small subset of movie goers. Books, movies, games and, for that matter, toys will always be bundled together to make oodles of money.
Laboratree - Scientific collaboration based on OpenSocial.
...then game makers would just MAKE MOVIES. I don't want interactive cinema. I want interactive GAMES. If the games can borrow some cinematic language now and again (i.e. the motion blur in Shadow of the Colossus) then hey, more power to them. But the things that make movies great and the things that make games great are pretty divergent. This "inevitable convergence" will just make movies a weaker vehicle for storytelling, and it will make games less interactive. Some stories make better games, and some worlds make better movies, but it is a pretty rare thing to find something that makes an equally great game AND movie without one or the other suffering from the relationship.
Even after reading through the article, I still am not sure what they mean by "convergence" between video games and movies -- and I've been playing video games that are based on movies since before a lot of Slashdotters were itches in their daddy's pants! ;)
... TFA said that they were shown a series of works that ILM did, and that the results looked like a video game. I'm not sure that that's necessarily a compliment, but it again blurs the definition as I see it of what "convergence" means with respect to movies and video games.
They talk about a common code base. Okay, so is "convergence" the use of the same graphics engine to create movie sequences and video game graphics? That sounds more like resource sharing, not the merging of two types of media.
Is "convergence" the use of movie or movie-quality sequences in video games? Hell, video games have been doing that for many years. A lot of games, such as the original "Jedi Knight" and the later "Wing Commander" series, used theatrical cut-scenes in the games to further the story along in a more engrossing manner. (I just use those as examples. There are obviously games from before that that used the same techniques.) So, it THAT "convergence"?
But wait
Is "convergence" a game that plays like you're watching a movie? Again, there are many games that took that approach so that action blends seamlessly with cut-scenes and back again. If this is the definition, then is convergence related to the look or the feel or both?
Even looking at the threads here so far, the responses seem to go between video games and movies. So, it doesn't seem as though anyone here really has a firm grasp of what "convergence" entails.
Maybe if the developers/studios would come up with a concrete definition of "convergence", we'd be able to come up with a more credible target for when the two media actually are "converged".
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
True in terms of the number of people, okay.
Since 1996, though, video games have collected more revenue than is made on ticket sales for movie theaters. However, movies sell a lot of ancillary stuff like TV broadcast rights and DVDs, and as an industry the movie studios still take in more money.
Basically this story's one more drip in the "games as an offshoot of movie sales" bucket. I guess my reaction is that the tie-in games are a pretty serious source of revenue that's underdeveloped. Mediocre shooters that get released along with movies aren't the blockbusters in the game world. You need to do more than drop some new textures into a Quake engine to make a decent game. Hey, my kids loved "The Incredibles" but haven't said anything about the games.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Not convergence of the art forms. Not "Doom: The Movie". That kind of convergence is horrible for obvious reasons. Hopefully, concepts converge very little more than they have. Lucasarts knows that they can compromise a story a little to make better gameplay, or tweak a movie scene to make a better spinoff game, and I can't imagine much more integration without runing one or both.
Promote civility: mod down any post starting with 'ummm'.
While I admit that I'm not much of a gamer, for me the Final Fantasy series is the epitome of a combination of a movie and a game. It has all the theatrical, story, action, love, and adventure elements of a movie....and you get the play it (for the most part). That and the fact that they actually did have a movie come out of the series that did pretty well. D
What is a movie? It is a story telling with the camera used to accentuate or even replace words you would use in a book or audio story. The movie willow instead of saying "the band of adventures travelled for many days across the land" instead has a travelling shot.
Movies are told through the camera.
Traditional games like say eh mario game are far different. 99% of the time no story is being told and the camera is just a way to display the action. There are no dramatic cuts and zooms.
Now take a game like GTA. On the PSP there is a jump you can make of a cliff, the moment you do it the camera angle changes to one far below so you see your car/bike flowing overhead in slow motion. That is a think what they mean. The camera changes from the purely functional to a story telling device accentuating the bigness of the jump.
Jedi Knight Acadamy did the same by going do a slow-motion circle whenever an enemy jedi died.
Other games have of course done similar things to greater or less extent.
Doom and later quake always had the same camera angle, doom3 cuts far more to other angles allowing the telling of a story. Simple stuff from cutting to a door you just remotly opened to the complete cutscenes in engine.
It is the change from the purely functional camera view you had in the Space Invaders to the kind of camera views that a director would use to show you what is going on.
The FMV you describe was an early example of this when the ingame graphics were still to poor to pull it off but the recent F.E.A.R. showed what before would have been cutscenes as part of the gameplay.
The mix is both good and bad. Few people will deny that F.E.A.R. has a better story then say Doom where most people never even read the textfile that contained the plot.
On the other hand fear has far less replay value since you know what is going to happen so all the story telling levels are just actionless maze runs now. First level? Just run up to where you get whacked.
I think true convergence of game making and movie making will mean that we no longer simply get a cutscene at the end of a level but where move through a story. So not like the 7th guest but like F.E.A.R. or Deus EX etc. Games but with story telling in them.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Convergence is really just a pretense for movie producers wishing to exert creative pull over games (and thus acquire another revenue stream). John Carmack has done more to make video games look like movies than Steven Spielberg has done to make movies play like video games. I am all for more intelligent and dramatic camera techniques - as long as it doesn't interfere with gameplay. But if you let the moguls have their way every game will be a breathtaking cutscene with a few unplayable, unfun action segments spliced in between.
If the studio heads really believe in convergence, how come there isn't a single A-grade movie on DVD that lets me decide how the movie turns out via remote control? It's possible today. But you won't see one anytime soon. You want to see the 1982 theatrical release of E.T., fork over your cash for the 4-disc collector's edition. Artist's vision - well what about the vision the special effects technician had? When the movie biz was hyping DVDs (because they knew they could get higher margins than VHS) they mentioned multiple ratings on the same disc (as to appeal to families). Today we see the only multiple ratings movies are ones sold separately (even though it only costs $1 to press a disc) and only unrated courser material. They are so concerned about artistic integrity (as long as it's their own), but by-and-large disregard consumer choice.
I will believe that the convergence is a real artistic driven phenomenon when I go into a movie theatre, don my vid glasses and can control the camera angle, jerkiness, and editing style of an pre-rendered CGI movie. And let the audience vote en-masse whether the cute romantic couple gets back together or they both move on. But wait Spielberg will wave his arms and shout, "YOU ARE RUINING MY ARTISTIC VISION!!"
[Note: I don't have anything really against Steven Spielberg. I like his movies. But although he is a director, he is also a Hollywood suit. I trust EA suits to make a good game more than I trust Hollywood suits]