Book and movie adaptation done right

I've long been curious about the best way to create crossovers between games and films. Other media have figured it out for the most part. The book is always better than the movie, etc., but Hollywood's approach to adapting books and plays for the silver screen is, by and large, pretty solid.

Of course, movies based on games or games on movies are usually utter dreck. There are good theories out there about why this happens. One I like is that for years most Hollywood execs had never played a computer game before, and that that is all about to change as the elite of tinseltown is permeated by people of my generation who have grown up playing, loving and understanding computer games, just as comic book movies quite suddenly got good in the last few years. Another theory is that games are fundamentally unfilmable. How can we make a film about a character who carries fifteen different rifles, which you can't see when they're holstered, who has adventures with multiple outcomes in a branching storyline with a duration measured in the tens or even hundreds of hours. In any world, isn't a single strand of that story, a simplification just a cheapened experience?

One of the biggest book to film adaptations in the last couple of years was The Hunger Games. I read the book about a year before the film came out and loved it. I reckoned it could make a great film, and thankfully I was right, they did a really good job.

When I heard the studio was bringing out an iOS game to go with it I couldn't help but eyeroll. "FFS, when will they LEARN?", but sometimes it's nice to be wrong. They took a page from Deus Ex: Human Revolution's narrative director Mary DeMarle, who believes that the best way to adapt a computer game to another medium, is to not to adapt it at all, but to play to the strengths of different media and explore the world and characters with a different story and experience; separate or intersecting. With Deus Ex, that meant releasing a (surprisingly good) novel that acts as a prequel to a parallel story to the main thread – still with me? – an experience that enriched the main game, and was in turn enriched by it.

With The Hunger Games, instead of creating a shallow narrative experience, they boiled the game down to a simple mechanic that did more for your understanding of who Katniss is than a clumsy cutscene ever could have.

In The Hunger Games: Girl On Fire, you play as Katniss running through The Arena, firing her bow and arrow at a steady stream of enemies. It's a game about constantly running, and fighting against an endless stream of enemies. It's an elegant stylisation, totally embracing the medium and platform it's running on. It's a small, fun game with polished gameplay. It doesn't do much to enrich the experience of reading the book or watching the film, but it does nothing to cheapen it either. We can only hope that this is the way things are going.

In The Index: The Hunger Games: Girl On Fire | The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim | Deus Ex: Human Revolution