#19 Why don't good games make good TV?
When I was a kid I always imagined the games I was playing would make incredible films, TV shows and books. Then I was confronted with the reality - from the so bad its good 90s take on Super Mario to the best forgotten Tomb Raider movies of the early 00s. And I could never understand why these stories which engrossed me so much when I was playing with them, felt so weak and unimportant when translated to another medium.
Of course, the question is also true in reverse - for a long time video game adaptations of books, films and TV shows were at best passable and at worst mockeries of everything you loved about the franchise.
That doesn’t stop people trying of course - and we’re lucky enough to have enjoyed some great adaptations of other mediums into games - in the last few years alone we’ve been spoilt by the Witcher 3 and Spider-Man, while The Avengers game offered a decent 12 hours of pretending to be Hulk.
But, things still aren’t going so well when video games attempt to move into other mediums. In recent year, the revived Tomb Raider movies were fine, but nothing special, The Witcher show was great, but is a book adaptation rather than drawing on the games. And the less said about the Assassin’s Creed movie starring Michael Fassbender the better.
Yet adaptations still keep coming - the Uncharted movie has finally started filming and just this week Netflix hit the go button on a live action series of Assassin’s Creed. The internet was immediately sceptical of the latter’s chances of success - particularly as Netflix aren’t knocking it out the park like they used to. Meanwhile, the Uncharted film has been through so many rounds of development hell it’s a miracle we’ve reached this point.
So why are games so hard to adapt? I can think of three main reasons - and none of them are because games can’t tell good stories.
1) False choices don’t make good none-interactive fiction
Most great games are built on the illusion of false choices - that we have control over how the story develops. And while we have some control on the steps on the journey - the endings are almost always pre-determined into good, fine and bad buckets, or worse, no matter what you do you see the same ending regardless. These false choices are fine when hidden behind interactive dialogue sequences and surrounded by compelling game play, but put them in a non interactive medium and their lack of depth is quickly exposed.
There’s no easy fix for this either - so much of the storytelling in games relies on the idea of player agency and control and if you strip this out you’re not left with a story which can naturally fill the demands of a TV or film script. These stories might work better when translated to books - when you can hide choices behind alternating Point of View characters and limit the knowledge of the audience accordingly. But then you run into another problem.
2)Games don’t lend themselves to major twists
Think of your favourite films and works of literature. The chances are there’s some kind of major twist or reveal at some point which changes your perception of everything you’ve already encountered. Games rarely do this - because the player has invested so much in the lead character that it’s almost impossible to pull the rug out convincingly without relying on the tired tropes of mind wipes or amnesia. I can think of just one game which does it well - Knights of the Old Republic, Bioware’s Star Wars epic - and it only works so well here because its surrounded by the trappings of Star Wars to enthral players and give them a reason to go along with the story.
So when you take great video game stories and try and translate them to other mediums, you’re left with a problem. The main character actions are always entirely predictable, and worse, they don’t have secrets. Compare Arthur Morgan, star of Red Dead Redemption 2 and one of the best game protagonists of recent years to almost any film or TV cowboy and the absence is obvious - Arthur doesn’t have depths to work with beyond what you see on screen. There’s no sense that there’s more to him- because the constraints of video game storytelling don’t allow for twists.
3) Video games struggle with shades of grey
Think of your favourite games and there’s almost always a good and a bad, a right and a wrong option. And even in games where you play a ‘bad guy’ you’re given the option to either turn them into a saint, or focus their evil deeds on those who deserve it. These stories are almost always stories of redemption. And that’s fine - most of us don’t want to dedicate 30 hours of our lives to a character who is fundamentally unlikeable and morally bankrupt.
The trouble is, shades of grey are essential to compelling literature and ongoing shows and films. Without them, things get boring fast - you end up with the Superman problem of trying to find ways to doubt or challenge the character.
It’s an area games have struggled with - while Indie games might engage with philosophical issues, most AAA games steer way away from them and let us enjoy being the good guy, without having to worry about the morality of our actions. So when you try to translate these stories to another medium, you’re left with a lack of compelling characters and under developed villains.
As that’s the final problem - games are so reliant on keeping you focused on the main character, there’s almost no chance to build out a compelling world around them and establish the bad guys as anything more than obstacles to overcome. While we may see them occasionally in cut scenes or as bosses to overcome, we don’t get to spend time with them and understand their motivations and fears.
And so when the time comes to adapt them to another medium, you’re left with a central character lacking in uncertainty and antagonists who only exist in relationship to the protagonist. Not the most compelling base to build a film or story on.
None of these criticisms are deal breakers alone, but taken together it becomes easy to understand why most video game stories flop in other mediums. And there’s no easy way to overcome these challenges - while game stories will get more and more ambitious, they’re always going to be limited by the medium. And there’s nothing wrong with that - but it does mean we should temper our expectations whenever we hear that our favourite franchise is about to be adapted.
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