How Video Games Will Replace Film

   I woke up this morning with only one thing on my mind: "it's time to make a crazy-ass prediction". Mind you, I don't mean a crazy-ass prediction that is crazy for the sake of crazy, or an implausible prediction that you'd expect to see emblazoned next to a headline in Weekly World News.

 Satan has been known to throw up the metal horns whenever threatened

No, this prediction is not only plausible, I can guarantee it will happen one way or another -- maybe even before 2032. My prediction is that, within the next twenty years, video games will replace film entirely. That's not to say that we're going to stop wanting to watch entertainment; it means that the way we interact with and observe entertainment will merge into one form. Stop and think about that for a second.

We're already beginning to see this trend emerge organically, though admittedly, it is primitive. Interaction and immersion into games has never been so deep and nuanced as it is today. If you have the right setup, some games can completely suck you in. I've even had moments where I've been "jarred" back to reality by someone knocking on my door or a sudden loud noise while playing a game that I was completely enraptured by.

I've learned that fire alarms can be pretty damned obnoxious

As our technology becomes more powerful, our entertainment will become far more immersive as well; this sort of stuff is obvious even to someone who doesn't pay much thought to the entertainment industry. What isn't so obvious is the main symptom of all of these different forms of entertainment making leaps in what they can do technically. As, say, video games become more and more powerful in what they can do, a funny thing happens: they start to compete with film. This is already happening.

The next step in the advancement of the video game medium isn't immediately intuitive but, nonetheless, it is real. One day soon the technology will make it possible to not only play out a full cinematic experience with all the bells and whistles -- including actors, some of whom will be real "players" and some which will be simulated, and full stories that will be directed by an adaptive system that changes the experience based on your actions -- think Holodeck or Quantum Leap-style.

Unfortunately, the future still cannot make you as "sexy" as Scott Bakula

Once this level of immersion becomes technologically possible, video games will evolve into their new form: "interactive entertainment". When this paradigm shift occurs, the film industry will not so much be destroyed, but more likely absorbed. You see, this new form of entertainment will create a dynamic system where, even if you don't want to interact with the action, you could just sit back and watch someone else live out the experience in front of you. Acting skills won't be necessary because the experience won't make you pretend. It will seem absolutely real to you.

This new chimaera of entertainment will open up brand new possibilities. Want to laugh at your best friend as he tries to fend off a T-Rex with a lightsaber? Maybe you would just prefer to watch some "intellectually-handicapable" celebrity attempt to solve a murder mystery. Do you somehow have a thing for Christian Bale? Why not, then, have a simulated version of Christian Bale play every role in what would probably be the most ridiculous version of The Lord of The Rings to date.

 -The Dark Lord Sauron right after he has slain Isildur's father

To quote an overused phrase, "the sky's the limit" when it comes to the new medium. The mechanics of the devices that will have the ability to create this kind of visual and physical involvement are harder to predict, but it'd be a safe bet that by 2030 they will exist in some form. The only uncertainty, I think, is whether we'll have the right creative minds that will be necessary to truly create the sort of content that would be needed to truly bring this kind of stuff to life.

What do you think? Will my prediction come true, and if it does, what would you like to do with it?

Hall of the Great Unmade Games: The Twilight Zone

   It can be said, quite easily, that certain properties lend themselves better to different creative outlets. For example, Christian Bale might be the world's best voice-based paper shredder, but he also happens to be the world's finest narcissistic bag of loose phlegm.

    "HELLO THERE, I'M CHRISTIAN BALE AND I CAN'T REMEMBER IF THIS IS HOW MY VOICE IS SUPPOSED TO SOUND" -Christian Bale gurgling razorblades

 This is a very well established fact. Sometimes something that is incredible in one form will suck a bag full of dicks in any other. This phenomenon can be easily demonstrated by almost any professional actor that decided to branch off into a "musical career".

While this typically holds true to most forms of entertainment, one of the only notable exceptions to this rule of "quality properties staying in their genre" might be the video game industry. Now don't get me wrong, the game industry has had its share of shit-stain crossover titles -- most infamously the film-to-game genre. I would argue that the issue with even those titles, in almost every case, wasn't a problem with the concept of the games but with the team that developed them and the studio that had been trying to turn a dime out of the property by cutting as many corners as possible.

Games, if created by the right people with the right mindset, have the potential to not only hold onto the quality that the original product had, but also to increase it in a number of ways. You can almost throw anything out there and it would conceivably work as a game. Albert Einstein's Biography the Game? Hell yeah, it could work.

Assassin's Creed with numbers

Video games have this versatility because of the core concept of what makes a video game a video game: interactivity. Being able to interact with something always creates more immersion than something that is passively observed. On the flip side, if that immersion is lost --through any number of horrible design decisions or lack of creative talent-- the game will become an unsaveable failure. The unfortunate truth about video games is that the good ones are fantastic and the bad ones are painfully shitastic; that's just the way the medium works.

Here comes the interesting part: if you could, what game would you to choose to have made? Imagine if you had the ability to assemble a dream-team out of the best developers in whatever genre you would like the game to be made in, and then could be absolutely assured that it would turn out great no matter what. What ideas would come to your mind? Myself, I would choose The Twilight Zone.

Games like L.A. Noire have already blazed a trail through the old-timey TV and Film territory. Why not have a full budgeted triple 'A' title based on an early 60's TV show? A game like that would even be able to resurrect the old fashioned video game level format without beating you over the head with a "retro feel". With the right set of writers they could open up brand new stories, both interesting and terrifying, for a modern audience. With good writing it would create an excellent opportunity to tell stories with a moral interpretation attached, which is something very few developers have succeeded at doing correctly. Even better, they could replace the dated special effects of the show's time with more believable fare.

 Back when the SFX industry was based on Playdough and good intentions

Everyone has their own dream game. Some people want a return to form like, perhaps, a long dead game to have a returning sequel that does justice to the original. Some want a game that has already been made, done better; like a Halo franchise that actually tried to create some sort of emotion in the player besides rage-induced tea bagging.

In the end, even though all of these are still dreams, what would you want to see?