Due to the business reality of the gaming industry there are
many different ways in which the gaming and film industry are blurring the
lines. With both mediums having massive budgets of $200 Million and up it is
easy to see the similarities. Like films, games are made by a studio; creative
people lead the vision and large groups of workers go about creating it. There
are even actors, directors, series’, and award shows. There are huge studios
creating games while others are independent.
If you look at how big games are marketed today you see that
like film, they are focused entirely around character and plot and not the
differentiation factors such as gameplay and mechanics. This began when games
became a real moneymaker in the 1990’s and studios began reaching out to ad
agencies that started out working on campaigns for studio films, hence the
similarity in the marketing style. Even today more and more studios are looking
to up the marketing budget to reach the casual gamer by drawing them in with
extras like a music video featuring a song done for the game by a popular
artist. Eminem has a new video for his song “Survival” that is featured in the
new Call of Duty: Ghost game. In the video he has never before seen footage of
gameplay not only getting fans to watch his video for the song but for new
gameplay footage of their favorite game, that’s a win-win situation.
In my opinion, the similarities should end there at the
business aspect. We should look at the warning signs of merging the two industries. When a video game is adapted in to a film the general consensus is
that it will most likely be a terrible experience. Cases in point Super Mario
Bros. (1993), Street Fighter (1994), and Mortal Kombat (1995). All films that
tanked at the box office because of how bad they were filmed and were panned by
critics.
Vice-versa when a video game is based off a movie it does
equally as bad if not worse consistently. Now here is a point where I believe
that shows how the film industry sees the gaming industry as a cash-cow and not
a legitimate storytelling medium, when a movie comes out a corresponding video
game is created to be released along side it just to generate the film more
money. The problem with these games is that they are given short time frames in
which to create the game and end up generally with a sub par product released
by a second rate-developing studio that just needed the money, instead of
crafting a meaningful experience to tie in with the movie and are just dismal
products.
Now, I have gone on and on about how games and films should
be divided but there have really been some legitimate efforts to bend the rules
for what a game can be. In 2011, Rockstar Games LA: Noire was the first game tobe screened at Tribeca Film festival. This marked a jump for games to be
considered cinema because of the advanced techniques used in unique facial
capture technology that filmed the actors faces using multiple cameras to
create a life like image in the game. This year Tribeca Film Festival invited
Quantic Dream Studios and director David Cage were to screen their game Beyond:
Two Souls, which starred film actors Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe. It is a game
that heavily focuses on plot and storytelling by jumping back and forth to
different parts of the Ellen Page character’s life, becoming more of an
interactive storytelling experience rather than a traditional game.
If more games continue to follow the trend of push the
technology to be able to tell a better story I’m all for it, but if the
entertainment industry is just going to use this to throw a business model of
movies are becoming unpopular and we need jump on video games, count me out. All
that will accomplish is to destroy what made video games great in the first
place by turning it into a money machine and destroy the art like they have
with the film industry.
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