Since we’re going to see a lot of video game adaptations into movies and series in the future, let’s get a few things straight.
Video games were—and still are—the only form of entertainment that a large portion of the public considers inferior to the rest.
Even today, when many people have been moved to tears while playing games, and others have cried watching their adaptations (like The Last of Us), you’ll still hear people say they’re “for kids,” “just silly fun,” or “a waste of time.” You don’t hear the same about music, movies, TV shows, or books.
Sure, there are games made for children, just like there are kids’ movies and books. And yes, video game narratives haven’t yet reached the depth and complexity of literature (or even cinema, I’d argue—but that’s more debatable). Still, the disdain is uniquely and unfairly targeted at the medium of video games.
And before you say it: yes, Fortnite’s audience is largely made up of kids. But that doesn’t make it “nonsense.” That’s a shallow take. It’s hard to talk about Fortnite without acknowledging its value—at least from a technological standpoint. But that’s a topic for another time.
So, games continue to be seen as inferior entertainment—even now, as they become the next big thing in Hollywood. The American mainstream cinema is taking a break from comic book adaptations to cash in on successful video games.
To some extent, the medium itself is to blame for its reputation. Video games are still stuck on some outdated principles: they try too hard to mimic cinema and still rely heavily on violence.
Now, I don’t mean violence has no place in art or entertainment. What I’m saying is this: games often force violence into places it doesn’t belong. They still believe the main way to entertain us is this: give the player a weapon and have them kill bad guys.
It’s honestly kind of wild: other media offer plenty of works with no violence at all—comedies, musicals, romantic films, dramas, thrillers. But in video games? Only a few specific genres let you do something other than fight. Especially in the mainstream, commercial scene.
Too often, an otherwise interesting game becomes tedious and thematically shallow during gameplay, just because it can’t find another way to fill the space. Too often, you control a regular person who ends up killing hundreds of enemies—when, narratively, they’re not supposed to be a killing machine—just to give the player something to do and avoid boredom.
In cinema, you get all kinds of genres—rom-coms, action flicks, psychological dramas, horror, police thrillers—and they don’t all rely on death or violent conflict (at least not always bloody ones). Games can offer the same variety: there are comedies, romances, dramas, mysteries. But most of the time, you’ll still be slicing through enemies with chainsaws, swords, or machine guns.
Some games have tried to do this better. Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II (which I didn’t love, personally) treated every battle as a major, separate event—it didn’t have you endlessly fighting throwaway enemies. It tried to use combat as a narrative tool. Other games—which I find more interesting—tell their stories without borrowing the cinematic language: they use interaction with the world, rather than dialogue or cutscenes. These kinds of games would be very hard to adapt to another medium (and maybe they shouldn’t be).
So what are we left with? A medium that does tell stories—but those stories are often overshadowed by violence as the main entertainment method. (Again, it’s not that violence is bad as an artistic choice—it’s that fighting doesn’t belong everywhere, all the time.)
We’ve moved far beyond the Pac-Man era. Today, many games are deeply narrative-driven. And now, production companies see the potential: there are iconic heroes, memorable stories that have spanned generations, emotionally powerful moments, and massive commercial success.
Naturally, those companies want to adapt these stories for a wider audience—people who don’t play video games. Fair enough. That’s exactly what happens with book adaptations. (And by the way, as games age, their tech becomes outdated, so a lot of younger people won’t play older titles. An adaptation helps keep the story alive.)
But here’s the key difference between adapting a book and a video game: books don’t have gameplay.
A book tells its story in one way—through words, placed in a specific order, punctuated just right. It’s “easy” to bring those pages to the screen. All you need is a solid creative team who can make the right decisions: trim what doesn’t work cinematically, restructure the material to fit the time and format of a movie or series, and make sure it’s entertaining as a film or series, not just as a book.
A video game, though, is mostly gameplay. And often, the storytelling happens while you’re controlling the character. So how do you translate that?
Let’s not forget: when you play a narrative-based game, it doesn’t feel like a child’s toy. It feels like you’re immersed in a story. You forget about the buttons—you feel like you are part of the narrative, often even more so than watching a movie. Because in a game, you are part of the action.
So here’s what’s important: the adaptation shouldn’t try to replicate the feeling of holding a controller. It should adapt the story in a way that works without gameplay, even though gameplay is often a storytelling tool itself (for example, characters talk as they move through the world, and exploration reveals the story).
The Last of Us was a solid effort (as was Fallout), but there are still problems. The show cuts down on action so much (at least in season one) that the world feels less dangerous. The game “had” to include more fights and intense action to stay engaging. The show couldn’t follow that same path, or we’d have Ellie casually killing dozens of infected solo—and that would break realism and believability.
That said, it's good when adaptations change things, bring in new elements, because otherwise it’s harder to hook fans who already played the game. It’s not like adapting a book, where the reader might be happy just to see the characters come to life. Gamers already saw them.
Creators need to understand that video games have their own storytelling methods and tools—and these need to be properly adapted to work in a different medium.
The interactivity of a game simply can’t be transferred as-is.
Why did Uncharted, Assassin’s Creed, and Halo fail as adaptations? Because gameplay is their core, and the rest fits around it. I need to feel what it’s like to be in that world—and that takes more than copying scenes. A first-person view like in Doom doesn’t cut it. Big-budget set-pieces like in Uncharted don’t cut it. They don’t capture the feeling of the game. You need to make me feel what the game makes me feel—but with different tools.
How do you translate the essence of an interactive medium into a passive one? You need to understand why a game is successful—find the core behind the battles, the graphics, the storytelling tools—and bring that over.
It’s always kind of ironic: a medium that’s trying so hard to be like cinema and TV gets adapted into cinema and TV. Recent game adaptations have been better because modern games themselves have moved closer to those formats: in how they tell stories, present visuals, use actors, and invest in production.
Games like The Last of Us are relatively easy to adapt—part of them is already built on cinematic principles. A game like Fallout? Much harder. It’s entirely first-person, filled with sprawling dialogue trees—it doesn’t lend itself to adaptation easily. Without interactivity, Fallout theoretically loses everything (while The Last of Us doesn’t—though it still loses a lot). Yet Fallout succeeded. Not because it was full of game references, but because it understood what made the games great and translated that essence using the strengths of television. It made that essence accessible to anyone—whether they game or not—without retelling old stories.
Another example: in The Last of Us series, the first season eventually steps away from the main characters and gives us one of its best episodes, focused on someone else entirely. That’s exactly what a show should do—use its own unique abilities. The game does something similar by changing structure to introduce Abby. The show, however, can shift perspective much more easily, leave its leads behind for a while, and still keep the tone, the spirit, the essence—everything that made the game what it is. That alone justifies the existence of game adaptations.
Still—video games haven’t yet found the perfect way to tell their stories. Nor have other media found the perfect way to adapt them.
But we’re getting closer.
