Babel Clash

It is exactly that problem, interactive storytelling versus unilateral storytelling, that kills most movies based on video games. Video games, for a wide variety of reasons including cost, development time, and player confusion, can only offer you so many tools for interacting with their world. And in most first person shooters, which is oddly the type of game they most often try to turn into a movie, the primary means of interacting with the world is by shooting it.

So game characters tend to be thin on traits outside of their lethality. Because, when you get right down to it, all games are to some degree role playing games. When a person plays Halo, they become the master chief. They imbue the master chief with their own personality. Game writers know this, so they need only give their character a few iconic moments to establish them, and then they can let the player do the rest of the work. The extreme example of this is the Half Life series, where the main character is literally without personality. Whatever traits Gordon Freeman has are entirely provided by the player and their actions.

But, generally, we expect more from our movie characters. When a game is converted into a movie, there are only two choices on how to deal with this. You can translate the game characters almost directly onto the screen, let’s call this the Resident Evil version. Or, you can attempt to flesh out the character and turn them into a real person, while maintaining enough of the game plot points that people still recognize it. Let’s call this the Max Payne version.

The problem with the Resident Evil version is that video game characters are not interesting. We make them interesting by playing them. By making their choices for them. By suffering when they fail, and triumphing when they win. They don’t have to have deep characterization in order for us to empathize with them, because for as long as we have the controller in our hand, we are them. The Resident Evil version takes the controller out of our hands, and for two hours we watch a basically personality free character run around on screen shooting things. It’s as exciting as watching someone you don’t know play a video game.

And the Max Payne solution is often not much better. When you start assigning a bunch of character traits to a video game character, you run the very real risk that your version of who that character is doesn’t match at all with what the players version was. My version of the master chief, the one that I play, is the baddest mother in the universe, who likes his fellow troops and enjoys the thrill of war. If you make a movie version of him that’s brooding and unhappy, I won’t recognize him and I’ll be annoyed. And let’s not forget the real danger of the Max Payne version: boredom. The movie Max Payne spent so much time trying to be a real movie about real people that there were only two gunfights in the whole thing, and neither of them very interesting. They took a game property that is only about interesting gunfights, and stripped that fighting away. What was left was a cartoonish anti-hero who we’ve seen done better a million times before.

I don’t know what the solution is. But certainly the more sophisticated games get, the less translating they will need to transition to the movie screen. Modern games with rich stories like Bioshock might make a pretty good movie with minimal rewriting. And the Halo movie had at least one writer I respect a great deal attached to it at one point, who knows what he might have done?

Video game novels are trendy. Warcraft, Halo, Gear of War & Bioshock are games with novel tie-ins out or coming soon. So, Brent & Joe, to hypothetically assume the luxury of spare time, is there any franchise out there for which you’d want to write a novel?

Or, even better… Joe, is there a video game novel that Brent should write? Brent, how about a video game novel for Joe?