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I just read that Ubisoft bought Hybride Technologies - a large video game company buying a medium-size visual effects house.  The article had a lot of talk about the future of video games and movies and seemed to miss the point when it quoted recent reviews of "Beowulf" that said it was like a "long video game scene".

The point was that wasn't a positive statement...

But it got me thinking: there's been so much talk about how video games will become as good as movies - and it's a pet peeve of mine that writers can be so ignorant.

What??? You say?

Sure.  Video games will eventually look as good as what you see when you go to see Hellboy this weekend.

But when that happens, movies won't look like that any more.

Now eventually, and we're not talking in the next year or two, we're talking a decade down the road perhaps, video games will start to look a lot like what you see when you walk outside (except of course that there will be zombies or terminators in the video game and may or may not be killer cyborgs and diseased undead prowling your real-life neighborhood).  By then, feature films may well be predominantly 3d - but your video games probably won't be.  Another five or ten years and then maybe the playing field will be levelled.  Except that the movie theaters will have vibrating chairs, a better sound system than you're likely to have at home, misters and blowers and scent generators, actuators to lift and tilt the chairs.  Oh - and even better 3d and higher res displays than consumer televisions can deliver (what, you thought HD was the best it got?  Please.  Not even today.  But don't count on a 4k home television standard any time soon.)

Oh, and their screens will always be bigger than yours.

The constant talk about video games 'replacing' movies on some level just sounds like people talking 100 years ago about radio replacing books.  The internet hasn't even replaced books - though it has put printed encyclopedias out of business, but then how many people ever kept a consistently updated set of encyclopedias in their homes?  If you ever even owned a set, chances are you owned one that still talked about the USSR and the apartheid government of South Africa.  If the internet replaced *that* bookshelf dominating monstrosity, I'd say that's not even surprising.  Public libraries had been replacing private encyclopedias for decades already.

Ubisoft's purchase of Hybride is motivated by the same thing that's making companies like Digital Domain say they want to get into video game production: fear. The fear that they won't be prepared if things go that way.  The fear they're going to be missing out on something.  They see something like the release of the new GTA and it looks like video games are the road to making billions.  It's just not true, any more than a small multimedia house in New Orleans should look to Wall•E as the future of their company.  Ubisoft doesn't need Hybride to understand how to make better CG. And the guys at Hybride probably can't help much with getting their ideas into the game engine: because that's an entirely different discipline.

My point is, video games will change.  But I don't think they'll "converge" with feature films any more than television "converged" with feature films.  Television is still a poor substitute for going to the movies and as much as we make the decision to sometimes catch something when it comes out on television/pay-per-view/dvd/bluray/what-have-you, as a society the rise of television has done nothing to diminish movie attendance.  Now we just expect more entertainment, and predominantly entertainment that we can enjoy just by sitting on our ass with a bucket of popcorn in our lap or a plate of nachos on the coffee table and no video game controller anywhere in site.  A theater full of people aren't going to be strumming their Guitar Hero guitars or thrashing around with their Wii controllers, and next year's Batman installment isn't going to require you to learn to drive the batmobile.

Unless of course you want to.

1. Video game convergence | SL Blogs said...
   6:08 pm - July 12th, 2008

   [...] View original here: Video game convergence [...]

2. 
   Carl Schröter said...
   1:13 pm - November 18th, 2009

   Truly said! Exactly my thoughts.
   I stumbled upon your blog yesterday and it´s a good read.
   Greetings from Germany.