We often hear about how video games are an art form and about how its revenues exceed Hollywood’s, yet film and television remain the undisputed king and queen of the entertainment landscape. Video games get attention, but not the kind of broad mainstream attention that films get. “Making a video game about something” does not have the same cultural shine as “making a film about something.”
There’s a simple reason for this: Film and television remain the most accessible mediums by far.
You do not have to play a movie to get the full emotional impact from it, you only have to hit the play button. Where a game takes days to beat, a movie only takes a couple of hours (and while television shows do take hours, you don’t have to die and respawn innumerable times.) A lot of video games have only the pretense of interactivity while film doesn’t bother with it at all.
Video games work best when delivering interactive or competitive experiences — in short, when they act like games. The stark moral choices of Undertale and the multiplayer mayhem of Super Smash Bros. cannot be replicated by any linear medium.
Meanwhile, film and television are best at telling emotionally gripping stories. Nothing moves people quite like an image; it is rhetoric in its purest form, untainted by explanation and understandable even to the sub-literate. Add sound and you’ve brought it to life and made it that much more vivid. A picture is worth a thousand words, but a film is worth a thousand pictures (thus a film is worth a million words.)
There’s a reason Youtube has conquered the world.
Speaking of Youtube, I have made my own foray into film via my animated short Defeat the Witch!
One way to support me is by purchasing a copy of my novel Shining Tomorrow Volume 1: Shadow Heart.
