Cracking the Game to Movie Puzzle August 15,2008 - Ten years ago George Romero struck a triumph for the videogame movie, and the possibilities were transformative. The father of several cult horror classics, in what surely seemed like a boon at the time, was announced to helm the director’s chair of the Resident Evil project. Far out of the foreign waters of the $20 million disaster that was the Super Mario Bros. movie (of which Bob Hoskins proclaimed was the worst experience of his movie making career), such pioneers like Romero were cementing capacious inroads that were sure to elevate the notion of a videogame movie to a new, gilded meridian. Mortal Kombat had just grossed $122 million worldwide and $36 million on home video, and Tomb Raider was entering pre-production in what would become a $274 million blockbuster.

But the producers fired Romero ingloriously, believing that the atom-point precision that the script attempted to toe between faithful hardcore and uninitiated would appeal to no one, and nothing since has achieved solidarity with movie goers, as concussive bombs failed to impress both financially – Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within lost around $100 million – and artistically (Resident Evil Extinction). And so we are left to ponder whether the next generation of videogame movies can elevate the curve with Jake Gyllenhaal as the Prince of Persia and Gore Verbinski behind the lens of Bioshock. Quality assurance has one answer – the lack of perceivable talent - but the potential land mines that await games as they migrate to the silver screen are a different reality altogether.

Despite inviting the cinematic model for comparisons, videogames constitute thinking on a different level. Games are primarily grafted around a series of interwoven mechanics which, simply put, give control to the player. This is in almost direct contradiction to the essence of a movie, which is artistic in nature. And this is where I make the distinction between being art and being artful. The art debate is so influenced by principles and interpretations in the moment that it is almost a tattered banner waved over the swelling remains of a wasteful cause, but I make the appeal of artistic integrity in order to illustrate how the decisions of a movie touch the aesthetics of the heart, the mind, and the ears and eyes.

Movies are grounded in conflicts which reveal truths in human nature or at the very least propel the action forward. But games distill conflict in several forms: player vs. level design, player vs. controls, player vs. puzzles, and the most prominent vehicle for conflict, player vs. opposition, whether it be AI or human controlled. The entire structure of a game is necessitated by an obstacle that must be overcome. With that line of thinking it’s no more different than any other active medium.

The mechanisms of a game require skill, critical problem solving, and the ability to think in three dimensions. They are designed to test you and entertain you. But a movie is primarily a harbinger of revelation in human expression. That is why I consider anything that assists in the exploration of that expression as artistic. Compare any game to a film like Casablanca. Rick, who wears his cynicism and laissez faire attitude with pride, seems justified in judging his former love Ilsa Lund for leaving him, each emotional reaction the catalyst of an incomplete puzzle slowly being revealed, and when she finally admits the truth, Rick allows her to abscond with her present husband to America.

How do you reverse engineer this into a game? Where does the constant threat of opposition come from when the conflict is primarily in how Rick faces the truth? What is there to do when you take a scene primarily about revelation and turn it into a scenario primarily about action? Even if you were to come up with a similar plot, a movie meticulously governs what the viewer sees at all times through multiple conventions such as cinematography and timely dialog.

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