Why not? (Gaming)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Monday, March 19, 2018, 09:03 (2237 days ago) @ Kermit

First, I understand the impulse to leave a masterpiece well enough alone. That idealistic dream died the day they announced The Last of Us, Part II. The latter will certainly change how people experience the first game. It already has: anyone who has seen the trailer for part two cannot play through part one and experience it the way I did (I'm thinking especially of how unsettled I felt at the beginning of the Winter section).

The Last of Us has a great story that could be made into a great script without much trouble. Get the right talent attached, and that script (like any other great script) could be made into a great film. Sure, the experience will be different without the interactivity or length, but so what? Books engage us imaginatively in ways that movies do not, but just because the experience of reading a novel is often richer and deeper than watching its movie adaptation hasn't stopped scores of movies from being made from novels, many of them excellent.

Sure, we can hope to get people involved who know how to take advantage of the unique qualities of film and use those in the service of the story, but really, what is wrong with bringing great stories to a wider audience? Visual fidelity, schmelity. Not everyone who would appreciate the narrative has the time or the tools to experience it in video game form.

I think a crucial part of the balancing act here is the distinction between adaptation (or retelling) vs taking an existing story or franchise and doing new things with it in a different medium (I'm sure there's a German word for that, right?).

Adaptations are particularly problematic in many cases. Lets take The Last of Us. Why does it need to be a movie? Well one answer, as you mentioned, would be to get it out to a broader audience. But as soon as we go down that road, I ask myself questions like:
a) What makes The Last of Us unique?
b) Would the things that make it unique get lost in the translation to film?
c) If so, is what's left over worth making, or does it basically already exist?

In my mind, if a Last of Us movie gets made, and by some miracle it gets made right... we already have The Road. We already have Logan. There are already great versions of that story done on film. Obviously, they're not the same story, but they're close enough in all the ways that really matter that a movie version of TLoU feels redundant to me in the absolute best case scenario.

Going back to my initial question: why does it need to be made into a movie? I think there is another answer to this question. I think gamers are eager to have this medium that we love accepted by the greater culture, and that requires sharing what we love with others. But we aren't likely to convince our non-gamer friends to buy a playstation or Xbox and then spend 10-15 hours playing a game like The Last of Us just so they can find out why we love it so much. Somewhere in our heads, I think we assume that it would be easier to get them to watch a movie version of our favorite game, and maybe then they'd realize how great it is, and maybe then games wouldn't be stigmatized they way they still are (although not nearly as much as they used to be).

If I'm right about that, it's a bit of a self-conscious desire. And it leads to a sort of false sense of demand to see certain movies get made. I think there is plenty of room to make a great movie in the universe of The Last of Us. Possibly even with those same characters. But to take the plot from the game and turn that into a movie just doesn't make sense to me. It's too much of a square peg/round hole situation. A mini series? Sure. That would be a better fit. But I think its important for storytellers to be realistic about the strengths and weaknesses of any given medium before using that medium to tell a story, and I just don't see how anyone could look at the story of The Last of Us and say "yes, a movie would be a great way to tell that story", regardless of how many more people might watch it. I think one of the reasons the game had as much impact as it did was because Naughty Dog told a story that was truly best told the way they told it, and everyone who played it felt that on some level.