I think that's close to the mark, but not quite there. To quote Sid Meier, "A game is a series of interesting choices." It's hard to make a good game with a great plot: the better the plot, the more you restrict the player's choices. It's not impossible, but it's hard.

Plenty of games have great characters and excellent world-building. Quite a few pose interesting questions, make you face hard dilemmas and leave you pondering long after you're done playing. Several make you immerse yourself in the world and identify with the characters so much that a particular event in their plot will provoke very strong feelings.

But none of those have a plot you can take and make a good movie out of it. Hollywood could very likely pick one of these games and make a great movie based on it, but not by focusing on the plot.

For example, I would be thrilled to watch a movie based on Dragon Age or Fallout. I might like a movie based on Borderlands, perhaps. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't enjoy a movie based on The Last of Us or Uncharted or The Talos Principles. And all of those games are among my favorites precisely because I enjoyed their world, characters, themes and choices.

I think BioShock Infinite probably proves your point, too. Compared to the other two entries it limits the player's choices even further and simplifies gameplay even more, but has a much more compelling story. Unfortunately, the story would probably not be as compelling were the player not led by the nose through it.

FTR, I had the most fun playing BioShock 2, but I still like Infinite the most.

Especially with the DLC, Infinite is a classical tragedy, so of course the player character doesn’t get to make any meaningful choices.

There are plenty of good games that dont give all that much choice to player. Which is why I dont like the "A game is a series of interesting choices." framing. It is true only if you limit definition of games to rpgs or strain definition of "choice" to pretty much anything.

Whether games have great characters is of course subjective, but I have to say that I did not seen them. The best ones tend to be comparable with average book character. (Which is ok, I don't play games for writing, I play them for playing.)

I think that restricting the word "choice" to narrative choices is an overly narrow interpretation of Meier's definition. I see no strain in applying the word "choice" to gameplay choices.

Maybe the solution is to have a video game movie that highlights the choices taken by the character. Make the decision points important to the movie, rather than remaking the overall storyline.

The video games that do have a decent plot often have a plot that just can't be squeezed into a movie. I've seen some decent anime conversions of some video games, which were arguably interactive anime anyhow (i.e., Persona 4), but at roughly 8 hours (call it 24 20 minute episodes by the time you're done with commercials, opening, and closing) and still feeling a bit squeezed at times, that's not going to be a movie any time soon. From a more western perspective, good luck getting Planescape: Torment into a movie format.

I supposed if Hollywood had some confidence about making video game movies they might be very excited about getting a pre-made trilogy, but since their lack of confidence is well-founded in fact I don't see this happening any time soon.

"From a more western perspective, good luck getting Planescape: Torment into a movie format."

A Game of Thrones-style "Sigil: City of Doors" series might work. Don't reuse the Nameless One or the plot of the game. Maybe reuse some characters like Annah. Like the game developers did, use the setting and make up new characters and plots.

Maybe before the show airs, put a series of entertaining shorts up on YouTube that introduce the city, the unusual beings resident there, the factions, and finally the main characters of the series.

Maybe they should make TV shows instead.

Random people all over the internet have already done that. It's called "let's play".

How is a Let's Play a TV show?

It's a sequence of videos.

I disagree. You have games like The Last of Us, The Uncharted Series, Yakuza 0, and even the latest Wolfenstein game having very well made and engaging stories which I think can translate well on film.

I'd go back to GP's "why" question.

I thought that The Last of Us was an absolutely fantastic game. Honestly, its one of the few games I've managed to stay engaged with all the way to the end. It works as a game. It's wonderful within its medium. A movie can't give you moral choices (did you guys kill the doctors at the end??), nor the time required to really get aquainted with the characters.

The narrative works best in the medium it was designed around. As a movie, I Dunno, what would the medium bring to the table? I suspect it'd just be another throw away zombie movie

At the end of the day I think therein lies the difficulty. The entire point of a movie based on a video game in my opinion would be to allow fans to explore the world further in another medium. It's to enhance immersion, not replace it. A great video game movie probably wouldn't be very good for someone who hasn't played the game.

I think a good example of this is the Warcraft movie. Pretty terrible reception overall. But as a Warcraft fan I really enjoyed it and would love another.

There are definitely games that I wish I could get the "cliff notes" experience. GTA comes to mind - 4 had an interesting enough (if generic) story, but just took forever to finish because of its million mostly copy-paste go-here-shoot-things quests. Same goes for Final Fantasy & most other JRPGs - there are some interesting themes and story in there, but it's padded out so much by turn based combat that I usually burn out half way through.

I can imagine something similar for games like The Last Of Us, although I haven't played it personally. Sometimes you just can't be bothered to deal with the not-plot parts of the game for 25 out of 40 hours.

That's what series are for! I could see The Last Of Us as a series.

All of the repetitive missions in games would work well in a series. I mean most TV shows follow that formula, you know at a certain time in a cop show they will figure out whodunnit and proceed to the thematic close of events.

> Yakuza 0

There's a yakuza movie, as it happens! It's directed by Takashi Miike, at one point you could find it on Netflix under the title Like a Dragon. The Japanese title is "Ryu Ga Gotoku: Gekijoban.

I've watched it, it's a fun flick. The yakuza series is essentially a soap opera at heart anyways, but the film did a really good job of capturing what's weird and crazy about Kamurocho.

Uncharted are some of the most cinematic games I’ve played, only topped by horizon zero dawn, but I think their storylines are just a little too flat to translate into an interesting movie. It would be like an indiana jones knockoff.

Horizon on the other hand... The opening sequences you could translate scene for scene. It would make a great movie.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

Absolutely. Better written than any of the movies.

I really enjoyed playing the last Wolfenstein game but the story is an incoherent mess.

Uncharted and last if us are really poorly written imo. They are full of the clichés, they just cover it up with good voice acting. Uncharted makes Indian Jones look like citizen kane by comparison.

There are ~~absolutely~~ fantastic stories in video games. There are plenty of games that you play for the story and the gameplay is just meh.

> There are ~~absolutely~~ fantastic stories in video games.

Not really, not compared to books and movies. If you're in the mood for a good story, you would not look to games.

But it stands to reason, the medium is not well suited for it. Books and movies are excellent vehicles to tell a story. You have full and precise control over timing, pacing, what the end user is experiencing at all times, etc. Plus they've been honed for generations. Additionally, if your goal is to tell a story, you wouldn't make a game to do it (generally).

Maybe we just haven't figured it out yet with games. It's a young medium.

> There are plenty of games that you play for the story and the gameplay is just meh.

Right, but that doesn't mean it's a good story. The desire to want to know what's next is just that strong. That's why there are cliffhangers before every commercial break in a TV show. Think about how many times you've been disappointed by the result, but kept sticking around to see what happens.

Story is often just a tool in game design toolbox that is used to get players to play beyond the point they otherwise would. It works, even with bad stories.

The old Goosebump novels were great at this. Every chapter, some sort of cliffhanger. Most of the time it was the character overreacting or mis-seeing something.

But eventually one of them leads into the heart of the story.

Such as? Besides adventures games Infocom or Sierra style and their descendants...

The first Mass Effect honestly felt like playing through an interactive movie for me.

How well it would do as a movie is beyond me but it couldn't be any worse plot wise than that terrible Valerian and the whatever 1000 movie that got released last year.

I would say that the looking glass games (thief, systemshock, etc), and the games that they inspired are a good place to start (deus ex and its sequels, the bioshock games, everything by Arkane right now [Prey is great]). The witcher games are incredibly rich, but since they do have books as source material I don't know if I would include them as much. I always thought the Psychonauts story and writing was great and an example of something that didn't have to be gritty, dark and dramatic.

I think games with the best stories often allow a lot of freedom to the player and just like in books, we all put some piece of ourselves into the protagonist. No movie will ever quite do justice to the character take part in creating. Add to that the fact that a lot of great story based games allow for choices that reflect our version of the character and it becomes impossible to have one vision that encompasses all of that.

That Dragon, Cancer; Portal 2; Grim Fandango; Her Story; What Remains of Edith Finch; The Vanishing of Ethan Carter; Papers, Please

And just to make the point: the only games on this list I have played and finished are Portal 2 and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. The others, I either know of the story because people liked it so much I learned it second-hand, or the gameplay was so boring that I just quit halfway through but I put it on this list for the story anyway.

Edit: I gotta throw Paratopic in here. Played that one through twice, it's less than an hour.

Papers, Please doesn't have a story per se, only a setting. You don't really beat the game, you just get one of several different endings which depend on more than just making mistakes and playing "badly". Getting a "bad" ending doesn't count as losing the game.

But that's what makes it perfect for an adaptation (for a different reason you were arguing about). Its movie script won't break a plot that doesn't exist, won't mess up any character development because there isn't one (recurring characters are secondary), and all it has to do is get the setting right. Writers can go anywhere from there.

Yeah, but the incident that interrupts you early on (level 3?) in Papers, Please is pretty famous. You're right that "story" is not the only interesting criterion, because some games make scenarios where lots of interesting stories can play out, and others just evoke make a mood/vibe without much of a story going on. Those would also be good options for movie adaptations.

Papers, Please actually did get adapted as a short film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFHHGETsxkE

IMO it's an example of how to do a game-movie adaptation right: it gets both the mechanics and the themes of the game across effectively, and it uses the medium to set up scenes that would be hard to convey in the original game (e.g. the moment after Elisa leaves)

The Witcher 3. Part of the problem is that often your story-heavy games are really telling dozens of different stories. In TW3 for example, the main story is good but not amazing, yet several of its "secondary" stories are fantastic.

Many of the Witcher 3 substories seem to be reincarnations of the various stories told in the original books - I mean, Witcher is not a "game story" but an adaptation of novels, and these novels have also been adapted into movies and IIRC a TV series some decades ago;

Oof. Which ones? After the ten thousandth person recommended the game to me, I recently played through it and never found a plot that I didn't find pretty flat. Plus, I couldn't tell if the terrible dialog and gratuitous cringe-worthy softcore CGI porn sequences were supposed to be a self-aware in-joke.

There are lots of great side quests in The Witcher 3. The wolfman one, the one with the ghost and the oven, the one that takes part in a tower in an island in a lake, the one where you finish tracking down some witches...

Not to mention, part of the appeal of the game is not knowing if those quests are going to end well or not. Some quests don't have good endings, while others depend on your choices, making you responsible for what happens.

And regarding "softcore porn", it's only simple bed scenes, like in any movie. It's totally normal, and given that there is a huge romance plot with 3 different endings, not counting the expansions, it would be silly to tell such a story without mention to sex. In any case, it tells a lot that people are so scandalized by sex, but not by the continous gore, violence, inequality and misery that The Witcher 3 portrays continously.

I’m not scandalized by the sex. I just find myself eye rolling at the hamfisted treatment of the topic. A couple of lame pickup lines and every woman you encounter practically impales herself on you.

Not to mention the tedium of the cut scenes where sex is depicted. But you’re right that I have a double standard in one regard: I’ll put up with lengthier cut scenes with magic explosions and plot advancements than I will put up with cut scenes that are herky CG sex.

>I’m not scandalized by the sex. I just find myself eye rolling at the hamfisted treatment of the topic. A couple of lame pickup lines and every woman you encounter practically impales herself on you.

Ah, I'd suggest you check the digit on your game install again. It appears you've played The Witcher (the 1st game of the trilogy). That was indeed a bit ridiculous. On the other hand, it's not like being strong, handsome, famous and famously infertile is a bad strategy for getting laid. That said, most of the sexuality/romance should probably be kept out of scene unless it contributes to the plot in some way, which is what Witcher 3 does. Whenever you can have sex with someone it is because this either advances the main romance plot or because it reveals an interesting facet of a person.

My goodness, you mean the Witcher 1 was worse? I only managed 45 minutes before stopping the first one.

If you played through the entire game and didn't find any of the stories compelling, all I can really do is shrug and say apparently it wasn't the game for you. I'm curious what games you've felt were "non-flat" and well written?

If you do want examples of great stories from Witcher 3, they are (IMO):

* Main story from the Hearts of Stone expansion

* Bloody Baron sub-plot

* Main story from the Blood & Wine expansion

* Triss Merigold sub-plot regarding mages in Novigrad

* Haunted tower quest from Kiera Metz

* The first 75% or so of the base game's main story is good, but it's complex and hard to get invested in if you aren't familiar the characters and backstory

Hm, do you like any fantasy at all? It sounds like it might not be your genre. Hard sci-fi more your thing? In that case The Talos Principle is pretty good, if fairly gameplay heavy.

Loved The Talos Principle, but also enjoyed Skyrim. Skyrim’s quests and side quests felt a bit thing-collecty at times, but I feel like you could get into it as a nationalistic boy scout viking barbarian, or an angry lizard thief, or an elven mage and play three different games.

With the Witcher 3, I felt trapped in a character whose demeanor I found insufferable no matter what options I chose.

I wanted to like the game, and recognize the technical achievement, but it left me pretty blasé about quite a lot.

Firewatch has an amazing story.

Firewatch isn't really a game so much as an interactive story. It's basically a movie to start with.

You can't actually lose Firewatch can you?

I did really enjoy playing it, although I thought it was rather expensive for a game that I finished in about 3 hours.

Supergiant Games in general have quite a nice, concise story. Bastion in particular still sticks out.

I'd even hesitate to put Transistor on the list because I liked the gameplay so much. I played it through 4 times to get a platinum trophy on PS4. But the story is pretty cool, and I dreaded that ending every time.

Metal Gear Solid.

Edit: also overwatch has a HUGE lore behind it.

Knights of the Old Republic

The Last Of Us.

> Mostly because videogame plot lines aren't as good as we give them credit for.

As a friend of adventure games and visual novels I have to disagree. Here are some games that in my opinion have great stories:

- The Longest Journey

- Zero Escape: The Nonary Games (Zero Escape: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors; Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward)

- the Blackwell series

- To the Moon

> Mostly because videogame plot lines aren't as good as we give them credit for.

I wouldn't agree with that. Sure, AAA-level blockbuster video games have simplistic, unoriginal and derivative stories and that's what most gamers play unfortunately, but there well-written games are definitely out there.

Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2 were both better written than any Star Wars movie by a long stretch.

Planescape: Torment is probably the best written game I've ever played, and playing it almost feels like you're reading a novel at times because the world-building and especially the dialogue is so fleshed-out and thoughtful. This game takes a huge dump over the writing in most movies I've seen.

I mean, that's just two examples. I'm a huge sucker for games with a great story regardless of the genre, but genre is a limiting factor in well-written stories.

You generally don't get much of a story in an RTS for example. You are most certainly never going to get a good story from a beat-em up like Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter.

Agree, and on top of that isn't it interesting that the more successful game movie adaptations are in those areas where the game plot was thin or non-existent. Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter both fit into that - Little to no plot for the games, then movies come along and are probably successful because they're not so constrained.

> Mostly because videogame plot lines aren't as good as we give them credit for

Same with movies, books, comics, ... but the top is good. The Last Of Us ffs...

I would argue that average mainstream comic, book or movie have much better plot, characters etc then mainstream game. They however completely sux if judged by standards we normally judge games. (By which I want to say that games are not inferior all things considered, just that plot is not their strong part.)

TLOU is basically a movie. I played a few hours and got bored because it felt like I was watching mainly cutscenes with gameplay interspersed. Interesting movie, just not a great game.

Play in a higher level of difficulty then

Hmm, I don't play video games, but I do play board games. People that play board games say the same thing - you don't play a board game for the theme, you play it for the gameplay or the game mechanics (though a fun theme doesn't hurt).

"Settlers of Catan: the Movie"...

Any takers?

On the other side: I know a few games, like TLoU, have tried to go the "movie-esque" route, with mixed success. TLoU was quite successful, but I don't think there have been too many other video games that have done well with the "movie-like" approach.

I think you're right that video games often sacrifice storytelling for gameplay, which I definitely don't mind.

Depends which game. FF7, Baldur's gate and portal have great plots. It's just that good plots take a lot of time and don't make as much money. So producers request them to be removed from games, movies, tv shows, etc.

Why would you bother making a plot when you can make bank with Transformer ?

> Mostly because videogame plot lines aren't as good as we give them credit for.

I would phrase this differently. The interesting parts of the game stories emerge from actions and choices made by the player, not the parts of the story that are actually written. I don't mean that the writers on games aren't doing a good job. Just the opposite, actually: they know how to write the right bits to keep the game interesting, and to help the player work with the game to create interesting stories.

I disagree with the "mostly", without some quantified support. Unless you mean that most of the games selected are substandard stories, but I didn't see a list of the 35 mentioned.

I would posit that perhaps the filtration system of making a wide audience film has more impact on how the screenplay is adapted and I haven't noticed that being discussed.

>disagree with the "mostly", without some quantified support

Yes, it's not merely "mostly", it's nearly all.

Except if we talk about some old-style adventure games (and even those aren't any narrative masterpieces either, they barely make it into "adult fiction" level), video games are just some very basic plot skeleton -- as opposed to a plot.

If they have nuance and atmosphere, that's in their visual, audio and interactive elements (as opposed to the plot and narration).

So you're pointing out that Tetris, Asteroids, and Angry Birds don't have plot and narration?

Taking a complete list of every interactive program that qualifies as a video game and saying 99% of them don't have a plot seems similar to saying 99% of books don't have a narrative or plot.

Perhaps I should have been more specific, but I thought the parameter of -games that were intended to actually narrate a story- was heavily implied in this thread.