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Games Entertainment

The Convergence of Games and Film 18

Posted by Zonk
Gamasutra has a piece on the ever-increasing convergence of games and films. The final chapter meeting of the IGDA's San Francisco chapter this year had an event focusing on, in particular, the preponderance of Star Wars games. From the article: "The convergence of film and game production has been predicted for years, but progress has been slow... cultural, logistical, financial, and computational barriers have kept the two worlds apart. Everybody sees convergence, most want it, but few know what it really means and fewer still have actually tried it."
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The Convergence of Games and Film

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  • But... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Saiyine ( 689367 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @03:40PM (#14249261) Homepage

    But.. but.. I thought the convergence were the Mortal Kombat flicks!

    • Exactly. Movies that branch from video games tend to be terrible and vice versa. Maybe one day the game will get to use the same textures they used in the movie SFX, but how does sharing digital media improve the game or the movie?

  • Final Fantasy IV (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Schezar ( 249629 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @03:50PM (#14249380) Homepage Journal
    You know what I want to see? A movie based on Final Fantasy IV (II for you USians). Not a movie that happens to be called "Final Fantasy," but one that's actually an adapted retelling of the story from a REAL, playable Final Fantasy. There's definitely enough of a nostalgia gamer market for such an endeavor to make a decent profit.

    There are so many games with rich characters and engaging settings that would be perfect for cinema. Sadly, movie producers go after the franchise crapola games and make franchise crapola movies. Even sadder is that these films make money.

    Take a chance! Hell, animate the thing and save money on actors/sets/locations. Buy the rights to an older game for a song. The first one to take a leap and make a good movie based on a good game and catering to the right demographic is going to go gangbusters.

    • Ive heard such things from FF4J (FF2A) fans. It just got released for the game boy advance (today, actually) and i've been waiting on this one. Now, if i could just keep my ps2 working long enough for me to finish FF7 (overrated, but still a good game, imho).

      Thank god for the backwards compatability on the DS, I get to play so many games that I otherwise wouldn't have.


      A REAL final fantasy movie would rule (even advent children was OK, spirits within, not so much)

  • Just had to wait for Hollywood... (Score:4, Funny)

    by jasonmicron ( 807603 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @03:56PM (#14249450)
    Everyone just had to wait for Hollywood. Their screenwriters are so full of dry storylines that they need fresh material. It will only be a matter of time before they ruin games, too.

    If this ever happens any way...
  • If anything it's going to be a grand convergence of suck. Doom anyone? Wing Commander? I'd like to know who the "everyone" is that seems to want this sort of thing, because I haven't heard a single person speak will of this sort of thing. 2 hours of watching someone else play a game? Or even 2 hours of plot in a game I could have played myself. Thanks, but the only convergence I'd like is to be able to go into an arcade (remember those?) and play $10 worth of quarters on a movie theater sized screen. and $1
    • the article isn't really talking about making movies based on games (most of which do suck royally), but its talking about using the same technology to make both a movie and a game at the same time based on the same story. This is not a brand new idea, I can recall Enter the Matrix as a game that was specifically made to be a counter-part of the movie, but I think there is a long way to go before movies and games are made out of the same stuff.
      • Sorry, maybe I didn't rant enough, but I wasn't targetting just movies based on games. I'm also opposed to games that expand on the plot of a movie, nothing bothers me more than having to shell out $10 for a movie that invariably dissappoints, then find out that one of the main reasons I feel dissapointed is that the story line is continued. In a $50 video game. You want an answer to this? Make another movie. Make the first one longer. Make another movie that perfectly paralells the game, but if I'm paying
      • They even filmed scenes that were shown as cutscenes for Enter the Matrix that weren't shown in any of the movies. The idea was cool; it's too bad that the sequels and Enter the Matrix all sucked.
  • Of course it isn't really convergence. It is more of a 'marketing bundle.' Gamers are a pretty small subset of movie goers. Books, movies, games and, for that matter, toys will always be bundled together to make oodles of money.

  • If games were supposed to be movies... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...then game makers would just MAKE MOVIES. I don't want interactive cinema. I want interactive GAMES. If the games can borrow some cinematic language now and again (i.e. the motion blur in Shadow of the Colossus) then hey, more power to them. But the things that make movies great and the things that make games great are pretty divergent. This "inevitable convergence" will just make movies a weaker vehicle for storytelling, and it will make games less interactive. Some stories make better games, and s

  • What REALLY is the definition of "convergence"? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by WidescreenFreak ( 830043 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @04:20PM (#14249744) Homepage Journal
    Even after reading through the article, I still am not sure what they mean by "convergence" between video games and movies -- and I've been playing video games that are based on movies since before a lot of Slashdotters were itches in their daddy's pants! ;)

    They talk about a common code base. Okay, so is "convergence" the use of the same graphics engine to create movie sequences and video game graphics? That sounds more like resource sharing, not the merging of two types of media.

    Is "convergence" the use of movie or movie-quality sequences in video games? Hell, video games have been doing that for many years. A lot of games, such as the original "Jedi Knight" and the later "Wing Commander" series, used theatrical cut-scenes in the games to further the story along in a more engrossing manner. (I just use those as examples. There are obviously games from before that that used the same techniques.) So, it THAT "convergence"?

    But wait ... TFA said that they were shown a series of works that ILM did, and that the results looked like a video game. I'm not sure that that's necessarily a compliment, but it again blurs the definition as I see it of what "convergence" means with respect to movies and video games.

    Is "convergence" a game that plays like you're watching a movie? Again, there are many games that took that approach so that action blends seamlessly with cut-scenes and back again. If this is the definition, then is convergence related to the look or the feel or both?

    Even looking at the threads here so far, the responses seem to go between video games and movies. So, it doesn't seem as though anyone here really has a firm grasp of what "convergence" entails.

    Maybe if the developers/studios would come up with a concrete definition of "convergence", we'd be able to come up with a more credible target for when the two media actually are "converged".
    • I think means meet in the middle + embrace. So where the one takes on elements of the other.

      What is a movie? It is a story telling with the camera used to accentuate or even replace words you would use in a book or audio story. The movie willow instead of saying "the band of adventures travelled for many days across the land" instead has a travelling shot.

      Movies are told through the camera.

      Traditional games like say eh mario game are far different. 99% of the time no story is being told and the camera is

    • I'm with you on this one. Convergence is not really defined in TFA. It sounds like they're largely talking about the quality of effects - the sole factor in what too many journalists are touting as "next generation games".

      These are entirely dissimilar media with one fundamental difference - movies are prerendered while games are realtime. It makes no sense to make a movie in the Quake 4 engine because, by movie standards, it will look like crapola. Short of inviting Sam Jackson to your house and smac
  • Not convergence of the art forms. Not "Doom: The Movie". That kind of convergence is horrible for obvious reasons. Hopefully, concepts converge very little more than they have. Lucasarts knows that they can compromise a story a little to make better gameplay, or tweak a movie scene to make a better spinoff game, and I can't imagine much more integration without runing one or both.
  • While I admit that I'm not much of a gamer, for me the Final Fantasy series is the epitome of a combination of a movie and a game. It has all the theatrical, story, action, love, and adventure elements of a movie....and you get the play it (for the most part). That and the fact that they actually did have a movie come out of the series that did pretty well. D
  • Convergence is really just a pretense for movie producers wishing to exert creative pull over games (and thus acquire another revenue stream). John Carmack has done more to make video games look like movies than Steven Spielberg has done to make movies play like video games. I am all for more intelligent and dramatic camera techniques - as long as it doesn't interfere with gameplay. But if you let the moguls have their way every game will be a breathtaking cutscene with a few unplayable, unfun action segmen

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