From Newsweek today:
Why did Harry Potter and Twilight become so cool, when Dungeons & Dragons was never cool? Not to play Joseph Campbell here, but it seems that for fantasy to be acceptable, the fantasy can’t come first. A story has to earn its street cred first – the reality has to feel really piercing, and then put the child in a situation of unusual responsibility.
Indeed, and I immediately applied this to video games. Video game movies suck, by and large, because they are based on a medium that have shallow stories and stupid, predictable characters, in predictably stupid scenarios. Like when you’re asked to shoot up a civilian airport as part of a marketing effort to generate buzz about your boring FPS, for example.
The irony is the hardcore gamers who love these games so much and want them to become movies think they’re perfect, worthy of the “art” category, and think they can serve as a legitimate discussion points in an argument about the importance of video games in popular culture.
But they have no story. Other than shooting things with guns, I mean. Hardcore gamers are the Dungeons & Dragons players of our time. They have no story.
I would say that VG movies actually suck because they are incompetently made and deviate too much from the source material.
Max Payne, for example, was a tongue-in-cheek noir story that was pretty well-written (excellently written by VG standards) and had a lot of personality, but the movie made a number of unnecessary changes and turned the whole thing into deadly serious generic grimdarkness (Wahlberg wasn’t a bad choice though). Worst of all, the few gun fights that the movie had were rather uninspiring. Had they made a faithful adaptation of the game and included tons of action in the vein of John Woo (the game was inspired by his movies after all), it would have been a solid action movie.
You are also incorrect in saying that “hardcore” games have no story. Modern Warfare 2 clearly has a story, but it’s just poorly written and told. When you’re just moving along with your teammates the writing is good, but the actual storyline… not so much. The misplaced ambition of the writers exceeded their abilities by far.
Dragon Age has a story… a very boring story that I couldn’t care less about, but certainly there is hours upon hours of story there for anyone who wants to hear it.
Practically any game these days has a story, but whether the story is good is another matter entirely.