From Max Payne to Mass Effect, what future do movies and games have together?

The trivial relationship that games have with movies has long been a favourite topic of discussion for commentators and the maxim that good games don’t make good movies is one of the medium’s greatest clichés. Shankar Gupta of Mediapost’s Gaming Insider blog as been ruminating on the origin of this phenomena and whether the recent optioning of Mass Effect by Marvel Studios could mean an end to it.

Gupta argues that until very recently Hollywood has been inexplicably in-able to take videogames seriously as a source of original IP. Furthermore, if studios cannot take the source material seriously as an example of a particular genre then how can the resulting movie be of any real quality?

That said, the fact that so many games based on movies are banal beyond belief is not entirely due to the fact that Hollywood doesn’t take gaming seriously and it is slightly presumptuous to assume that the world of cinema doesn’t take its productions seriously when, regardless of how bad they are, they all cost millions to produce. The notable lack of decent cinema based on games, however, obviously signifies that something isn’t being taken seriously and Gupta does allude to this, pointing out that the vast majority of games turned movies are “brainless action flicks produced with the aim of getting males aged 18-34 to spring for a movie ticket when there’s nothing else to watch that summer”.

A recent trend in both movies and videogames is one towards recreation. Whether this is purely a symptom of the post-modern condition or whether there is genuine a drought of good new ideas there is an awful lot of nostalgia driven towards classic titles and great demand to see them re-envisaged with modern technology, just look at the fan boy clamour around the likes of Final Fantasy VII. As a result fresh, new IPs are a rare and precious commodity and it is no surprise that the likes of 'Mass Effect' and 'Gears of War' are being quickly snapped up by movie studios.

When new IPs are a rare commodity studios are understandably keen to capitalise on them and maximise their potential in the marketplace. The misunderstanding comes in appreciating that transposing a title from one to the other isn’t as easy as casting a couple of famous names and scripting up some dialogue that re-imagines the most iconic moments. What studios fail to “take seriously” is that the modes and conventions of interactive narrative do not simply translate into non-interactive experiences. There are things that gamers may stand for from their games such as sparse dialogue that they wouldn’t from cinema purely because the suspension of disbelief works on a different basis.

This is confounded further by the fact that games themselves are changing. The explosion of networked gaming via Xbox Live, PSN and broadband in general means that the scripted narrative often takes a backseat to the emergent narratives that players create amongst themselves. Furthermore games like 'Spore', 'Little Big Planet'and pretty much the entire Wii catalogue have little to no strong narrative to speak of. All of this makes the production of non-interactive experiences based on games near to impossible.

Obviously this is one issue that is far from over. With both industries changing so fast games and movies have a long way before reconciling entirely. Hopefully those most promising examples of games recreated as movies such as 'Max Payne' and 'Mass Effect' will hopefully prove that there is a comfortable, creative and rewarding middle ground between the two media that trancends the cold hard capitalism of its past.