Watch or play: The interplay between films and computer games

A woman tries out a game at the German Film Museum’s exhibition, Film and Games, with a warrior figure behind her.

By Tobias HanrathsIn the 1983 movie War Games, Matthew Broderick searched the net for new war games — and almost caused a real nuclear apocalypse. A year before Jeff Bridges had explored the virtual world in Tron. Interplay between cinema and computer games has been around for decades, but in recent years that creative relationship has become even tighter.It’s a relationship that’s being examined in a Film and Games exhibition running at the German Film Museum in Frankfurt until the end of January 2016.One reason for this convergence is technical progress — for a while now, games have looked just as good as movies. Another factor is that the games industry first caught up with Hollywood financially and then overhauled it.According to a forecast by market researcher IHS, this year around 92 billion dollars will be spent worldwide on games — more than on films (62 billion) and music (18 billion) combined.No wonder then that famous computer game characters such as Super Mario and Lara Croft have turned up in movies. It goes the other way too, with games that are based on movies.However, such titles don’t have the best reputation: “They are often very disappointing, because there was not enough care taken,” says Andreas Rauscher, curator of the Frankfurt exhibition. For the makers it’s often been more about getting a rapid financial return than making a good game.Memorably awful was the hastily produced game put out to cash in on Steven Spielberg’s 1983 box office smash ET — it flopped so badly that it not only damaged the game’s producer, Atari, but also the whole games industry.Countless unsold copies were dumped in a desert landfill in New Mexico and only recently rediscovered. One of them can be seen in the Frankfurt exhibition.Equally, the films made out of computer games are often more embarrassing than exciting, one common reason being that the filmmakers didn’t really understand the game.”The film version of Super Mario Brothers for example had little to do with the game,” says Rauscher. Instead of the colourful comic-book world of the game, the 1993 movie was a gloomy sci-fi adventure.The relationship between game and movie works when the exchange is more subtle and the creative elements of both formats are embraced. Game episodes where the player just watches can work in a game. In the game Metal Gear Solid, players can sometimes put down their controller for 30 minutes or more at a time to just watch.Games make use of elements from movies, Rauscher says, and often in a creative way. The successful titles from Rockstar Games for example are not based directly on any particular template. Instead the company’s games such as Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption are a colourful mixture of various elements from gangster movies and Westerns, including settings, characters and plots. Out of these set-pieces, a new story can be woven.The exchange also works the other way, with game techniques turning up in movies. This can be seen in particular in the camera work. “Video games offer a different experience of the space, something which is coming slowly into films,” Rauscher says. “The first person perspective was frowned upon in films for a long time. Now there are films, mainly horror ones, that use it.” The surprise 1999 hit The Blair Witch Project was one of the first.Some movies even borrow directly from the game format: In Edge of Tomorrow, Tom Cruise fights the same hopeless battle against alien invaders again and again until he learns how to defeat them — something familiar to any gamer who’s had to play a particular game level over and over.In the final analysis both media forms benefit from the exchange. This holds true not only for games and films, but books too. “There are now even games that take on literary subjects,” says Peter Tscherne, managing director of the Digital Games Culture Foundation in Germany.For example, the apocalyptic adventure The Last of Us contains more than a few connections to Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road.Then there’s the game Spec Ops: The Line which borrows generously from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a novella which also inspired the classic 1979 movie Apocalypse Now.  — DPA