Film and Game Industry Convergence Part I

US film and gaming industries creatively converging - Yahoo! News

Hollywood and the video gaming industry seem to think that the best way for their industries to converge is to work together on the games made into movies or movies made into games at the start of the process rather than at the end. Is that really going to make a huge difference? If the gaming industry has input into movie scripts in the pre-production phase this won't make their games better, it will make the movies worse. Likewise the movie industry getting in on the ground floor of video games seems unlikely to make the movies any better. "Pre-awareness" is just an excuse for not making something original.

This isn't a bad deal for the gaming industry which can just generate more buzz for a video game. But Hollywood has spent the past five years making CGI-based summer tentpoles that already seemed like non-interactive video games and losing audience because of it. Moving more in this direction isn't going to help them much.

There are some great possibilities in blending the lines between the movie and video game industries. But I'm not sure that simply cross-platforming properties in pre-production is the most visionary approach.

More soon.