Video Games as
Entertainment, Art, and Film
By Matthew S. Haglund
April 28, 2006 - I did something last Friday that I don’t usually do: I went to a movie theatre to see a film based on a video game. I walked out of Silent Hill that night feeling somewhat confused and somewhat depressed. When my friends asked me what I thought of the movie, all I could say was, “It was okay.” My girlfriend will probably never forgive me for making her come along. All night, I found myself pondering what went wrong with yet another software-based movie; why can no one ever seem to get it right? Why can a wonderful movie like Batman Begins be ripped from the pages of comic books, yet a good, or at the very least entertaining film can’t be extricated from a video game?
Making films out of video games has had a pretty embarrassing history. Although we’ve come a long way since the days of Street Fighter (1994) and Mortal Kombat (1995), a director has yet to even come close to getting it right. I must say, that while Silent Hill was far and away the best attempt I’ve seen so far, it still fell painfully short.
When people ask me if I think of video games as entertainment or art, I typically reply that I consider them both. Just like film or books, my mind easily divides the medium into two separate categories. Sure, there are those games that are strictly entertainment, such as the MarioKart or Street Fighter series. But then there are those games that I consider absolute works of art.
The Zelda games instantly pop into my head as video games that are more than simply entertainment. Resident Evil 4 and ICO are more recent examples. These games have something very special about them that transcends both their gameplay and graphics. They become an experience that cannot be conveyed through any other means. They combine beauty, emotion and story with everything that makes video games fun. For me, there’s a place for Halo, just as there’s a place for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and The Da Vinci Code; they’re entertaining as hell, but at the same time, no one would dare compare them to the likes of Ocarina of Time, Dr. Strangelove or Catch-22. So I state again, there have always been two separate groups in my head for all media: movies versus film, books versus literature, video games versus video-experiences.
So being there is, at least to me, video games that are certainly art, why do they not translate into good film? So far, I think it’s the simple fact that the screenwriters haven’t been willing to stick to the original, brilliant stories. More has been lost in the conversion than just the ability to control the main character; in the attempt to make these movies more appealing to the masses, plots have been rewritten beyond recognition.
The Resident Evil movies are a perfect example of this trend. One needn’t look further than the DVD box art to see that these films have little to do with the original games. Silent Hill is another sad example, turning what I had expected to be an amazingly cool story into a bizarre mother-daughter tale. This would be the equivalent of Peter Jackson replacing the two Hobbits in The Lord of the Rings with two hot women in an attempt to make the films sexier. Talk about blasphemy. Tolkien lovers would have burned the theatres to the ground! Likewise, people who have played Silent Hill should be up in arms.
Another fact that might contribute to the streak of crappy video game based films is that medium-conversions are never easy. Is the movie ever better than the book? No. Will a movie ever be better than the video game? Probably not. Yet good books are made into good movies all the time, so the same should be possible with games, right? Absolutely.
It all comes down to time, money, effort, and talent, and enough of these four things have yet to be put into a software-based film. A parallel can be made with the video games based on films. The only halfway decent ones that comes to mind are the ancient Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and the somewhat more modern GoldenEye, games where an incredible amount of the aforementioned four requirements were invested. Now let’s compare that in terms of lasting appeal to the rushed Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie. Or let’s not.
We are at an interesting point in the history of the video game medium, and just the fact that games are being turned into movies says a lot about their respectability. Amazingly, film was, at one point, exactly what videogames are considered by many today: a silly form of entertainment. Its power as propaganda during the First World War changed this mentality, and likewise, something will permanently change this mentality for video games as well (hopefully not another world conflict).
To me, video games are art. They can move the emotions in unique ways,
take us places we could never go, and let us do things we could never do. That is the very definition of art, if I’ve
ever heard one. But of course, then
there’s entertainment too. And it’s
really, really sad when a movie can turn a game that I consider a beautiful
work of art into nothing more than, well, simple entertainment. There’s a reason these games are
brilliant. There’s a reason we all love
them. Why do these qualities have to be
stripped away? The answer is they
don’t. Please