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Every time I hear about the games industry being compared to the other mediums, I usually find that people say it is a lot like the movie industry. It's funny because games, unlike movies, generally take several hours to complete, and even for those games with short campaigns, their multiplayer modes can take dozens of hours to complete. I don't know about you, but that feels a lot more like the television industry to me, where you see a story take place over several seasons of episodes. And that's how it should be.

If games are going to remain highly replayable, especially with their stories, game developers need to model them more after TV shows than movies. As far as I'm concerned, movies nowadays are very lacking in writing, whereas the TV industry is now in another golden age, with shows like The Sopranos, Battlestar: Galatica, Dexter, Mad Men, etc. Writers are given more freedom to work with TV shows than with movies, which explains why they are usually more fleshed out.

Make no mistake. Lots of TV shows out there are far from perfect, but there are probably less mediocre ones than the number of bad movies that exist. That's why I find myself clinging to TV more and hardly ever going to the movies to watch what might be another really cliché experience.

Are movies always worse than TV shows? No, but I think that the TV industry has now finally caught up with movies, in terms of technology and acting. The 90s were really the last decade of the movie industry's dominance over every other medium. Where we get countless zombie movies that are predictable, we have a new TV show, The Walking Dead, which aims to be a much more dramatic, well written story. This is one of the reasons why TV feels more appealing to people today than movies.

http://open.salon.com/blog/steven_axelrod/2010/07/20/why_tv_is_better_than_the_movies

I don't think people compare the game industry to the movie industry because how the medium is digested, but more because of how it's created. In movies, as with the major game industry, people have specific jobs to do and these jobs relate to each other in a way. Cinematographer, writer, director, costume designer. Also the comparison comes from the amount of money it takes to make a game (re: you're average AAA title), which is similar along the same lines as making a movie. The comparison also comes in regards to the amount of revenue that games bring in.

You could use TV as a comparison to games, but the difference between tv and movies is pretty negligible when people are using the above as the point of comparison.

I think tv is too similar to movies in terms of a medium. If game developers want to look to another medium for inspiration, I think they'd be better off looking at things that are vastly different in there components. Like music, paintings or to a lesser extent theatre. 

Yes, games can follow other mediums besides just movies and TV, but I still think that TV deserves more recognition from game developers than movies do. I guess that there could be more variety in game concepts if art, music, and theater are less overlooked, but story-wise, I feel like books and TV are the closest thing to games. Plus, is theater really any more creative than TV? Has every possible idea been explored within it? Or do most plays still model themselves too closely to Shakespeare, with the majority of them taking place in the pre-Modern era? How many are hybrids (science-fiction/horror/drama), and are there any well written sci-fi or horror ones?

Good article. I like your thinking.

I agree with sugarbeard, it's a lot more like a movie in the production rather than in the end-user's experience, but why are people comparing the production? As long as the game is made, shouldn't it be enough to please people?

Why do some compare to a movie? Why do some compare to TV? Why don't many compare it to books, paintings, music, etc.?

Because a game is much more than a single medium. It's an experience through many different branches of art, much like movies or television.

First, there are visuals. Captivating visuals, they show in screenshots, and they are generally the biggest eyecatcher for the game. It's the first thing you see.

Secondly, there is the music. This is generally pushed away, but it really takes the game to the next level. The music separates a good movie/game/TV show from a great one.

Story is my favorite part of a game/movie/TV show. Without it, even a small one, just a setting, it is nothing but a boring time-waster. The player/viewer wants to feel like he's busy. Like they're doing work for something. But enjoyable work. Few people have a job they enjoy, but why do they enjoy it? Because it's fun work. It's like a game to them.

What separates a game from a movie or a TV show is the gameplay. This needs to be the most fleshed out part, for obvious reasons.


Each piece is an integral part of an entertaining experience.

I think most games already are closer to TV and books in their narrative structure.  :shrug2:

Also, now that I've seen Twin Peaks, I can't really watch TV anymore because every other show pales in comparison.
;)

alan wak and dedly premonitioninobwatever and hevy rain and watever of cours theyre folowing tv

Games are the only interactive medium, why can't more developers use this to create original concepts and experiences?

Fuck that, Games Industry Should Follow Games More

I think sugarbread pretty much hit the nail on the head here. The exception to his argument are those who compare games to movies in an attempt to bring some sort of legitimacy to games.

I don't really think that we should be looking at TV for inspiration. TV is very sensationalist, rarely challenges its audience and just keeps your mind in a state similar to that of hypnosis. There are always exceptions but our society has become accustomed to zoning out infront of the television instead of engaging with it deeply. The shows on television reflect this.

Something else to consider is that there is a limit to how deeply you can convey a message when you are interrupted regularly with advertising. Movies and games don't suffer from this. Of course there is commercial free television but most shows would probably be made with this constraint in mind.

What I was going to say. Why should games be following any other form of media?

Games should follow Nietzscheism more.

Maybe we should put in 3 minute ad cutscenes between levels.

comparing games, movies, and tv brings up another point. in future, will episodic games become as distanced from regular games as tv is from movies? will the making of small game portions from a base engine become streamlined enough that you could release weekly segments??
TUNE IN NEXT WEEK TO FIND OUT

Nooo, just cut off the level every 5 minutes. Return the player to the start if he doesn't finish in time.

It's like Ubisoft DRM on an unstable network!
And those game demos on some phones that let you play for a minute before telling you to get the full version.

That article is really silly. TV writers have more creative freedom than filmmakers? What the hell are you talking about?

No.. just no.  Games should NEVER follow Movies, and i'll tell ya why.  Many movies today are just plain dumb.  Too much action, too little story.  Plus, when people watch a movie, often they watch it because some dumb actor named "Tom Cruise" or "Eddie Murphy" or "Cameron Diaz" is in it.  Rarely does the credit go to the director, who is almost the most important part of the movie.  But games... people don't play games just because it's made by a certain company.  A game is a work of art, people play it because it's good.  Unlike movies, where people just watch it for the "hawt" actors in it. Eh, that's it im done with my rant. >:(

If you've ever picked up a Game Informer Mag, I'd like to think that you know the games industry should STOP following anything.

That's all it stinkin' does is follow itself, movies, and music; it's ridiculous.

Directors get tons of credit. Writers are the ones who are on the short end of the stick.

Movies are designed to have a closed narrative structure (IE: they have "endings"). TV shows, on the other hand, are designed primarily to have an open narrative structure (for instance, "cliffhanger" season finales). Sure, trilogies and series of movies exist, but that's simply done by TV-style execution with movie marketing; and you have things like a miniseries (a movie made for TV time slots and multiple-part viewing as opposed to a cramped, one-shot sitting), but those are generally the exceptions rather than the rules.

The type of game you're making factors into this massively. If you're making an action game, with the goal of selling as many copies of as many action games as you can, you're going to go with a movie/trilogy structure. If you're making an ever-expansive music game, on the other hand (hello RockBand!), then you ARE going to set it up with TV-influenced marketing scheme (a new DLC pack or three a week). Putting a "music game" into movie format would just suck. So would executing a puzzle game as part of a "miniseries."

The structure is nearly always more about optimized marketing than about end-user preference. Could "Super SF IV" have been designed as add-on DLC for SF IV? Yes. Would people have liked SF IV better (a LOT) if they did? Yes. Did it fit the marketing structure associated with Street Fighter games? No it didn't, and that's why it didn't happen like that.

Indie/freeware games generally have completely open-ended structure; because the majority of them aren't designed with marketing in mind. Like, at all! Many "best games" are like that too, and that's part of their appeal; but using game creation to produce income (as opposed to simply producing fun titles) is totally different than that. The Madden series is a perfect example. It's copypaste shovelware for a good reason: there's usually very little work involved (except in game-changer years like '95, '99*, and... whatever the first PS3/360 one was), and a lot of people still pay money for it on an annual basis.

*Madden '99 was a pretty good game, though overlooked by many. And rightfully so, because Blitz was a considerably better, funner game. I never bought it, and for that reason; although I did play it a time or two at a friend's house.

(off-topic)I've also noticed that "westernizing" games in particular tends to have this effect a LOT. As soon as something becomes a hit, POW! A cavalcade of overhyped, overmarketed shovelware soon follows. Look for instance, at PokeMon, Final Fantasy, and even Call of Duty now.

Disgusting as it might be though, you can't really blame the industry for doing it. Because sadly, it works. It's simple, cheap, and enough people get so into it that they throw thousands of dollars into the stuff. I just wish they reinvested more of that income into producing more good content, and less of it into producing more "get rich quick" junk.(/off-topic)

Well, one reason they did Super SFVI is that the programming structure did not support DLC beyond texture swap, and that have serious limitation. Super address this and allow character pack with entirely new geometry and move lists. Super, therefore, could not be a dlc of vanilla SF4.

I agree with your sentiments, but this certainly seems to be the direction that most of the major game studios have settled on (and TV studios, for that matter). That's one of the reasons I became interested in indie games in the first place: they seem to be more focused on exploring the possibilities of the medium and trying new things, rather than just producing something safe and marketable.

I think if we're comparing games to films and TV it's important to talk about public perception. Movies have been around long enough that they've "matured" as a medium. Despite the large volume of braindead movies, if you told someone that you don't watch movies, they're likely to think you're uncultured because movies are accepted as a serious art form. Games and TV aren't quite there yet. Regardless of whether it's true, it is widely believed that they're both only good for mindless entertainment and nothing more. In fact, most poeple would think of you as sounding more cultured if you told them you didn't play games or watch TV. In that regard, I think games are closer to TV than films.

The thing that immediately grabs me about Flying Dove's analogy is it seems like movies tend toward being all about making "blockbusters", whereas tv production tends to be about figuring out what can be "recoup"-level successful on a budget.

Commercial video game companies more and more want to be making "blockbusters" all the time. But there can only be so many "blockbusters" and a lot of the "blockbuster" slots are earmarked for whatever the next Halo, COD, Mario game is. So you get a few blockbusters and a lot of broken hearts and dead studios.

Indie is filling the void, the recent surge of "aaa indie" seems to prove that. Casual gaming is getting hi production value too and more complex gameplay and fit the TV standard.

Seems weird to say that game production as a whole should be more like _____, whether it's TV, or film, or music, or comic books, or whatever - different games should get different treatment.  Some games are as different from each other as Krazy Kat is from I Love Lucy, and comic books and TV are gennnnnerally seen as belonging to different mediums.  I mean, the differences between Civ IV, Bejewelled, Bulletstorm and Bubble Bobble are huge - 'genre' doesn't seem to cover it.  
For the most part, these differences seem like they are already well understood in modern development, with different platforms being seen as more or less appropriate delivery mechanisms, so.

Interesting note (I haven't read this thread at all, but saw this post):

Genre, outside of games, generally refers to the feel and setting of a story; western, drama, comedy, etc.

Games have an entire, and quite separate, "extra-genre", which shows how you take in the plot; a "puzzle comedy" (light-hearted fun puzzler), a "puzzle drama" (more realistic, tragic puzzler), and a "shooter drama" (tense, intense, combat drama) are very distinct terms, but 2/3 share something, which says a lot!

Games, then, have a point no other medium really has; the way you EXPERIENCE the information radically alters the subject itself! While, obviously, people do experience stories differently (speaks to them in different ways, etc.), games have a much tighter, and more tangible, control of that experience. I can make the person feel "chaos, distress, losing control" by adding a slight delay to the beginning and end of actions, or feel "intense concentration" by making everything slow down and give the player a powerful, more tight control.

And the groups of game genres, like "shooter" and "puzzle", are really like prefixes, appended to an existing genre; defining it in a way unique to games.

Interesting stuff.

People remember the last disaster alone in the dark?

I'm not a huge movie lover, and I don't watch a lot of TV. Why must my games try to follow other forms of entertainment?   :(  You don't see books trying to be paintings or stuff like that.

No, no, totally not. So you propose that interactive audiovisual entertainment should follow the standards of non-interactive audiovisual entertainment? Why should a bunch of cutscenes and completely linear plots be considered "games" when there's no form of different results.

Is films games? Because if not, it can fuck off.

I dare you to say that to, say, Marvel or DC. ;)

The only thing videogames need to do is appeal to a wider audience by tackling numerous mature topics in AAA titles. Politics, religion, sexuality, social comments, and such are issues that most AAA games are shy to touch with a ten feet pole. Just look at the whole EA vs Taliban in Medal of Honour stuff. If the medium wants to be taken seriously, big players need to stand their ground and back their creators and not their shareholders. By standing by the creators they hire, large companies tell them to go creative, push the envelope in their own creative ways, allowing the medium to step forward in many directions.

Painting, books, music, sculpture, films, whatever. Creators can take inspiration from whatever field they want to. As long as they can do what they imagine and do not feel like they are being punished by their boss from being creative, the medium will grow. Indie games are where creators can do the games they want and tackle any issues. We all know a bunch of titles that do that. But indies don't get large press coverage and the attention of the medias. If an indie makes a game about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a bunch of journalist will talk about it but it won't get coverage by major game websites. One would say "but they don't sell as much". To this I reply: "Don't you mean that they don't sell as much as games targeted at young male adolescent ranging from 13 to 18?" I feel like major game coverage should cover all types of games, not just those that they are paid to cover by large companies who don't want to take risks.

Sure, games cost a lot to create and the business must make some money or studios closes. But a bloated studio using the latest technology isn’t required to do a game; it is only required to create a large scale, world-wide appealing, extremely high polish game. Large companies can easily start smaller studios under a different banner and inject a bit of money (around 100k instead of 100 millions) in them and let this studio try new things. If it makes money, it’s cool. If not, the loss is much smaller than botching an AAA game. The only field where videogame should look up to films, music, books, tv or whatever else medium is investment and funding. Most mediums have been around for almost 100 year each, except videogames which only has a 30 year life-span. Heck, I’m older than 98% of the video game industry’s biggest mascot. Music has numerous ways for an artist to get money in order to fund their work. Movies have multiple revenue sources. Books have been around for so long, they found many ways for writers to get a pay-check without always writing blockbuster 60 000+ words novels.

Anyway, I’m semi-ranting and not getting very detailed on each topic. So in short, like it was mentioned before; video games should be like video games. It’s creators should act mature and the business people back the creators instead of treating them like childs.