Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

Video games have always had what we might call "movie envy". This young and oft-derided medium tends to measure its success--commercially, mostly-- against the older, more established industry.

This obsession with film extends to way game designers handle narrative. Movie-like "cut scenes"--short, narrative events during which players cannot exercise control--are the most common storytelling device in games. So a player who has reached the end of a given level may find that, before he can battle the big "boss" character, he must first watch a short scene that hashes out the reasons why they're about to fight.  

These scripted moments fit awkwardly with the interactive nature of games (as Steven Spielberg--a video game fan--noted recently). Some designers have worked to avoid these gameplay interruptions by incorporating narrative into the flow of the game itself. Still, cut scenes remain the easiest (some would say “laziest”) way of telling a story precisely due to their cinematic style: players passively consume these narrative moments in short bursts between spells of mostly narrative-free gameplay.

But while designers and players argue over just how much storytelling in games should be based on Hollywood contrivances, the flow of ideas between the two industries has lately become a two-way street. Many top-tier game franchises still take many non-narrative cues from film, including character design, art style and setting (eg, the "Halo" series borrows heavily from the "Alien" films;  the creators of "Dead Rising" recently fended off a lawsuit charging that its entire scenario infringed on George Romero’s "Dawn of the Dead"). And Hollywood has been turning to the world of video games as a valuable new source of ideas and intellectual property.

Unfortunately, this has led to a flood of mostly execrable action-adventure movies, virtually indistinguishable from other brain-dead blockbusters. The "Tomb Raider" films and the "Resident Evil" trilogy, for example, have been commercial successes but critical failures. Fans were treated recently to "Max Payne", an adaptation of a respected and influential game franchise mentioned in a previous column. The result was a disappointment.  

A more subtle sign of cross-pollination between the two industries is the way some films have started looking more "game-like". Unfortunately, this doesn't mean that movies are adopting interesting, interactive innovations, but rather that they are embracing more and more meaningless spectacle in order to appeal to the young, mostly male demographic.

Take, for example, some of the bloodless, computer-generated battle scenes in the recent "Star Wars" prequels, which resemble the original film trilogy far less than they do top-tier "Star Wars" games such as "Jedi Knight" or "Knights of the Old Republic". It’s worth noting, in fact, that both of those games featured better stories than any of the aforementioned movies. And while the original "Matrix" film had a seismic impact on the gaming world (the film's panning, slow-motion effects were adopted so universally as a game mechanic that they have since become a cliché), the last film in that trilogy ("Matrix Revolutions") seems more like a loosely connected series of gameplay ideas (chase scenes, robotic exoskeletons shooting down animated robot squid) than a cohesive film.

Collaborations between Hollywood and the gaming industry are on the rise. Big-name film directors, such as Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, are starting to become more involved in designing games, and games based on successful films are usually worth the licensing fee. Electronic Arts, a big game publisher, recently announced that it would postpone the launch of its latest "Harry Potter" game (pictured above) because Warner Brothers had delayed the film’s release to 2009 --a move that has seriously hurt the game company's annual profit.

Such synergy has yet to yield a truly worthwhile film. Yet there is reason to hope that the upcoming "Prince of Persia", based on a game series that combines breathless acrobatics with strong writing and an intriguing narrative, will exceed (admittedly low) expectations. The directors of forthcoming films based on top gaming franchises--"Metal Gear Solid", "Gears of War", "World of Warcraft"--are spending more time consulting the designers of these games than have most similar projects in the past. Hopefully this means that more of the qualities that made these games successful will feature in these adaptations.

The most interesting of all of the films based on games that are currently in production is "Bioshock". As I've written in the past, this game is one of the most significant of the past decade, with a supremely elegant plot and atmosphere. Yet the question remains: given that the core innovation of the game relies on its interactivity, can any film truly capture the essence of a singularly great gaming experience? Even as gamers wait for an interactive "Citizen Kane" of video games, game-to-film adaptations must wait for their "Godfather" moment.