The Adaptation apocaylpse

Too many movies; take 'em back!

I think that as a gaming community we really missed our moment to push back on the Hollywood vultures as they desended down on our industry with their fingers on adapting everything that moves. Not that I could tell you exactly when that moment was... sometime after the lethargy inducing Assassin's Creed movie and before the 'largely missed the point' Uncharted film. Perhaps Sonic and it's actual success was the tipping point, or something else even more seemingly insignificant worked it's way in there. I believed there was still a chance, that the utter rejection of the awful Halo and Resident Evil series, (shows that exist purely to parade around the façade of better constructed franchises) would have some sort of effect on the coming slate of Hollywood. But it was a pipedream. There is no alternative hope at this point. The Adaptation Apocalypse is coming for gaming. 

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, this is the trend of movies at large. The creative powerhouses of yesteryear who knew how to come up with a great story and direct it are mostly dead or gone crazy; making practically every film an adaptation of some movie, book or historical event nowadays. And the adaptation slate of movies had hit their stride with Superhero adaptations, but given that there's only two major superhero comic monopolies, that well was going to be finite too. Now we've got a generation of talentless hacks being funded by spineless desperate looking for anything with a pre-established audience for them to leech off like insects. And what better is there for leeching than the one Entertainment medium which is eclipse theirs in revenue earned- but gaming?

Of course, if these guys were smart they'd go for where the real money is and figure out some way to adapt Candy Crush Saga; but I think we've already established that Hollywood at large is lazy, not creative. Instead we're being threatened with more crappy adaptations than we can shake a stick at, and of course the game companies are happy to sell of the rights to these people because it's free money for doing literally nothing; games companies love easy money. (Just ask the state of our monetisation ecosystems.) We're looking at a long in-the-works adaptation of Metal Gear that is apparently still on the slate, a God of War movie because we never learnt the 'Uncharted' lesson, a Mario Cinematic universe, The Last of Us series which is coming very soon, and then there's the Fallout series. Those are just the one's we're hearing about now, imagine how many series the really desperate companies like Square Enix or Konami are juggling!

And I think we all know that the majority of them are going to be trash. They're going to ignore what made the game likeable and replace it with a lacklustre factory-made script which the 'Hollywood' factor spat out, because that's just what pretentious showrunners do. I've said it before and I believe it; these writers and producers don't look at video game creators as real storytellers. They consider them talentless hacks that cater for an audience of gormless clapping monkies that are impressed by a little fireworks show. They think actual narrative storytelling is an aberration of the video game world. Look no further than the showrunners  of The Last of Us, remarking about how they're telling 'The best story story ever told in video game history'. Really? No competition, huh? What do these people think other games even are? Candy Crush with cutscenes? It's insulting. 

I often repeat this, but video games tell their narratives in a plethora of ways. Some lack stories, to be sure; others attempt to do what films and the rest of the visual media does, but with interaction. Comparisons are invited there, and I enjoy making them myself. Video games also find ways to tell narratives in ways which films and Television can't. Which even books can't. Not just because they're long, but for the very immersive nature of what a video game is. The environmental storytelling of Souls games wring players dry as they try to deduce ever significant detail based on something as miniscule as a missing statue that would have sat on a, now empty, plinth. Stories told through other stories that coalescence into one total story. Like an anthology but driven by a natural and immersive purpose.

Those layers of narrative complexity, in any of the manners of video game storytelling, are not idle or simple vectors. They may require different rules to what television and movie script writers work with, but that makes them no less valid. Writers for video games can be some of the most imaginative and talented creative minds working in entertainment, and you can look no further than Hideo Kojima for that. A man who could have very easily been making movies if he took a right instead of a left at some point in his life. Kojima is an independent superstar who is currently on his rock-star arc of making utterly bizarre, but compelling and interesting, video games that both embrace the interactive nature of the medium and tell a great sweeping narrative which touches on everything from cosmology to evolutionary myth making. His work is sublime. And it's better than half the crap which get smooshed all over the TV today!

I suppose what I'm trying to say is, if we can't stop this tidal wave of adaptations which are going to be headed our way, the least we can do is twist the arms of the adapters to try and treat the material with some respect. Although, we passed the concept of 'source material respect', now haven't we? Projects which were once fronted by reverent super fans who worshipped the original content have now been replaced with money making ventures fronted by showrunners who see the source material as an obstacle that needs to be fixed in order to secure the most amount of revenue. Why agonise over the order to present the Lord of the Rings chapters in order to stay true to the heart of the books whilst condensing the narrative into a trilogy when you can instead umm and ahh about how few messy love triangles that Sauron goes on, and then seek to rectifying that with eye-watering fanfiction level revisionism. That is what 'adaption respect' gets you nowadays.

As far as I'm concerned, the only games that should getting adaptations are those that could potential have something different to present in a film form. I am happy that the Fallout isn't going to just adapt the shows and am utterly galled there's people out there who called that 'A shame'. (Although to be fair, those 'people' were Games Journalists; which really speaks for itself.) I think that, even if it were to adapt the events of a game or two, a TV adaptation of Yakuza would be incredible. There's so many different gags and overly dramatic techniques that could be employed to really nail the 'Like a Dragon' sweetspot and I'd love to see that adaptation come to the big screens. But alas we're getting the big names. We're getting Resident Evil, Halo, Mario; and so far we've got 2/3 of these adaptations sucking the life out of the franchise they borrowed from. Which I guess just goes to show you the priorities of these adaptors, now doesn't it?