Hi! I’m Colin. Welcome to Storycraft. This is our new column on the intersection of storytelling in film, television and video games. As a screenwriter and screenwriter, I know a lot about story structure, authentic dialogue, and how to bring something to life from the page. How video games attempt to replicate film and television storytelling techniques (but often fail), how film and television are influenced by games (either directly through adaptation or trending). ) by tracking.if you have read my work One take camera gimmick god of war or how Dead Space The remake’s writing helps make it scarier than the original, you have an idea of what I’m trying to do. thank you for reading!
This article contains spoilers Last of Us For episodes 1-5.
Before HBO Last of Uswere there any “good” video game adaptations? good.
For me, the closest I’ve ever come was Christoph Gans’ 2006 film adaptation. silent hillA fan of the game, Guns’ love of the series’ iconography hurts the adaptation.Including Monster Pyramid Head makes no sense silent hillSpeaking of which, he’s the mascot of the series, so he has to be there.
Adaptation is difficult.Written by Charlie Kaufman whole movie about it. do not change anything. If you change too much, you run the risk of losing something worth adapting the original text in the first place. The best adaptations maintain the essential elements of the original while making changes to suit the new medium of adaptation.
A good example of this is Zoraturned a ridiculous Twitter thread into one of the first great movies of the 2020s. Zora, the film takes the bones of a viral story written in the first person and blows it all up into a raucously funny crime comedy while exploring the underlying threads of the original story. Sex work can be fraught with danger.
Video games aren’t Twitter threads or novels. It’s not one person’s vision. Many video game adaptations feel like they were put together by a committee.It was like a group of producers and marketers walked into a conference room and wrote everything down on a big whiteboard. Hello Must have. In order not to alienate hardcore “fans”, it is often encouraged, and even rewarded for harmful behavior, that the property they feel connected to “betrays” them. please.
And be careful, the story is not good! Video game stories are usually pretty bad, even the good ones.in the movie three pillars: story, acting, image. If one is weak, the whole picture is weak. But in the game he has a million pillars. While we also have to worry about story and acting, the “image” of a video game includes things like visual design, graphic style and fidelity, and cutscene production. pillar.
It’s not that the game doesn’t care about the story. Many have spent thousands of hours crafting an absolute modern narrative sequence. assassin’s creed Games—but for what? Is Eivor’s story memorable? godfatherHell, is it memorable con airat least i can tell you what happens con air!
The best “video game movies” aren’t based on games at all, but they’re inspired by them.movies like Scott Pilgrim, edge of tomorrowand John Wick It takes video game themes as a medium and applies them to familiar cinematic structures. 2015, mad max You’ve got a new movie and a big-budget open-world video game. path of anger It feels like one of the best action movies ever made packed with all the good parts of video games, but the game is an overlong scrap-collecting slog with decent car combat.
then why Last of Us Does it succeed where other video game adaptations have failed? Theme. Yes, they adopted the game’s recognizable characters, design, and plot, but Zorathey looked deeper than ‘What Happens’ and used the medium of HBO’s fame drama as a canvas to explore far beyond what the game would allow.
i already have mine thinking in the first episode of HBO Last of Us, So I’m not going to restate it all here. However, the pilot thought it was a waste of opportunity and forgot to cook the meal, worrying about setting the table.
Episode 2 Throwing away all the crappy plot injections and weak character moments to tip everything towards video game bullshit. Is the stairwell collapsing preventing the character from returning? Check. Do you want to push your character over obstacles so that doors can be unlocked? Check. A stealth sequence with clear rules? check.
Episode 2 adds some very interesting things. Last of Us, also provides a gruesome death scene for Tess, like shedding spores in the mycelial network that connects a large group of infected people. Tess panics and becomes overly fixated on a broken lighter instead of every grenade she finds around, letting herself die from being kissed by a mushroom zombie.After the selfish first episode, it’s a much-needed clash of action and video game silliness, but it doesn’t quite extend the ideas the game spawned in so many different directions. It felt like an adaptation — and at least Mortal Kombat was fun!
after that Episode 3 happened.
Episode 3 takes the bones of Bill and Frank’s story and deepens them in every conceivable way. In the game, the player, as Joel, rebels against Bill by setting some traps. Game Bill is similar to his Show Bill at the beginning of the episode. The game lets you explore a fair amount of Lincoln, Massachusetts. It’s fairly dense, with buildings filled with traps and overlapping barricades. In Shaw’s version of Lincoln, a sprawling town linked by small streets relatively unchanged since the Revolutionary War, the building’s home in Lincoln is his home, a few shops, and a church. looks like a little over a block of. and Frank.
In the game you will not meet Frank. We hear about him through Bill’s lines and notes scattered here and there, but he’s not really a character — he’s a storytelling device that serves two purposes: Bill is gay, and the 2013 video To firmly establish what is a very rare character trait in games and Bill is a pain in the ass for everyone. In Frank’s suicide note, he confesses to Bill that it was too difficult for him to live with him, was bitten by an infected when he tried to escape, and tried not to hurt Bill when he turned. hanged himself. It’s pretty gory, and there’s certainly evidence that Bill and Frank were lovers, but the game doesn’t make a big deal out of it. He’s a real thug, and by the end of the hour or so you spend with him, you too I am ready to leave him.
Bill was a very richly developed and presented character by video game standards in 2013. Hell, by modern video game standards. was Naughty Dog’s secret sauce that made their characters so compelling. He was not a person.
This is a textbook example of how to write an interesting character. It takes a weird survivalist archetype with tons of guns and a big beard and puts an unexpected twist on it. In this case, his homosexuality. The game isn’t about buildings or post-apocalyptic lifestyles, so you just get the hint. It’s the ultimate badass with a heart of gold, a power fantasy about making Molotov cocktails out of lying alcohol and punching guys in the face with a pipe.
what made the game Last of Us The balance between the fantasy of power and the themes of violence and narrative exploration was very appealing, but it was still a video game made for PlayStation 3 owners. Mainly men aged 20-38 — So the investigation was superficial. The game’s story offers no answers and forces players to commit horrific acts of violence to see how it ends. But it slows down at times to present its violent consequences, even superficial ones.
HBO does not create content for male gamers between the ages of 20 and 38. The prestige drama TV format isn’t his YouTube “Let’s Play” of zombie apocalypse power fantasy. The game has more dialogue than usual for an action-adventure game, but still spends most of its time running, hiding, hunting, and killing.The characters on the show spend most of their time Chattingwhich allows the stereotypical caricature of Kooky Old Secretly Gay Survivalist Bill with a twist to become a real human being.
But the magic of Episode 3 isn’t just that it’s a beautiful short film. It also moves Joel’s storyline forward.Bill is gone, so finding Tommy many More importantly, Joel may be the only one who knows he’s still alive. Had episode 3 been just a slight detour in the story it would still have been nice and commendable, but the fact that it serves a greater purpose in pushing the season’s story forward is just good writing .
the show did it again episode 5, when Henry, Sam, Joel, and Ellie discover a children’s shelter in the Kansas City sewers. It’s another effective gut-punching moment in the game about how terrifying the apocalypse can be, but the show uses the opportunity differently. A tough man who made tough choices and even committed murder. With Tess and Bill gone, Joel needs a little extra push to take care of Ellie.
Last of Us It was an obvious candidate for adaptation. It was a huge success, much loved, and was created specifically to bring more sophisticated storytelling to video games. Many games have good storytelling bones, so it shouldn’t have taken this long to create something interesting from video game story material.
we should have been sick Hello Instead of bloated, confusing, self-serious TV series, it’s now a war movie.Should have had an entire series of Saturday morning cartoons – stupid Mortal Kombat A movie instead of the overly complicated mythological controversy of recent movies.And with superfan Christophe Gans return to director’s chair,Finally silent hill More concerned with scaring us out of crap than explaining the film itself.