Summary
Games and film are related but fundamentally distinct media. Their shared territory — visual storytelling, characters, narrative — often leads to confusion about their relationship. Steven Poole argues the key distinction is interactivity: in film you watch, in games you do. Attempts to translate between the two media consistently fail in the same direction: game-to-film adaptations lose the interactive core, and film-to-game adaptations attempt to replicate cinematics in a medium defined by control. Neither medium will replace the other; each has a domain where it is irreplaceable.
(Poole, Trigger Happy, see source-trigger-happy)
Summary verdict
Film excels at authored narrative and cinematic experience. Games excel at agency, decision-making, and interactive presence. They share visual language but differ fundamentally in the relationship they create with their audience. Neither is superior; each is suited to different kinds of experience.
Comparison table
| Dimension | Film | Games |
|---|---|---|
| Audience role | Passive viewer | Active player |
| Core value | Authored experience | Interactive experience |
| Narrative | Linear, authored | Branching, emergent, or authored |
| Engagement mechanism | Emotional investment in characters/story | Agency, challenge, mastery |
| Authorial control | Total | Constrained by player input |
| Replayability | Low (same experience) | High (decisions change outcomes) |
| Learning curve | None — you watch | Players must learn systems |
| Typical length | 90–180 minutes | Hours to hundreds of hours |
The translation problem
Games adapted to film
Game-to-film adaptations have historically struggled. Poole argues this is structural, not merely a production-quality issue: the compelling elements of a game are procedural and interactive. A cinematic sequence of a game’s events strips out precisely what makes those events meaningful — the player’s ownership of them.
“The pod-racing sequence was nothing more than an extended advert for the actual videogame that was based on it. You couldn’t play the movie, so it was far inferior in terms of high-speed thrills.” — Poole, Ch. 4 (re: Star Wars Episode I, source-trigger-happy)
This is not a production quality critique. The movie pod-racing sequence was technically impressive. The problem is ontological: the experience of doing something fast and dangerous is categorically different from watching it happen. Film cannot reproduce that experience.
What adaptations change, element by element
Poole’s principle is general: the procedural, interactive core is what is lost. The table below breaks that core into specific design elements. The “what film does instead” column is interpretation built on Poole’s argument, not a claim from his book; examples are given only where a source supports them.
| Game element | What it does in the game | What a film or series does instead | Sourced example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scarcity and resource management | The player makes trade-offs (spend the last bullet or sneak past) and feels the cost of each one | Scarcity becomes a stake for the characters: we see them run short, but nobody in the audience chooses | — |
| Failure and retry | Death, reloads and repeated attempts are how the player learns the system | The story shows one successful (or one tragic) path; there is no rehearsal, and repeated combat reads as repetition | HBO’s The Last of Us cut action that did not develop character: “If it doesn’t move character, and if it was only there for spectacle, then it was an easy cut for us” (Druckmann, in Yee, “‘The Last of Us’ Creators Address Pleas for More Infected”, TheWrap, 13 March 2023) |
| Procedural generation and replay variation | Each run differs, so the player’s run is theirs | One fixed version of events; variation can only be imitated by anthology or flashback structures | — |
| Player-set pacing and exploration | The player decides when to push on, linger or detour | Editing sets the pace; the audience cannot go off the path | — |
| Silent or player-defined protagonist | The player projects themselves onto, or builds, the hero | A cast actor with an authored personality and voice, or an entirely new protagonist | Fallout (Prime Video) tells an original story set in 2296 with new characters rather than adapting a game’s player character (Wikipedia, Fallout (American TV series)); in Half-Life, Gordon Freeman “never speaks and is never actually seen” (Wikipedia, Half-Life (video game)), a design that a film could not keep |
| Mastery and skill expression | Getting better is itself a source of satisfaction | Skill becomes a character trait we watch, not a capacity the viewer builds | Poole’s pod-race example above |
| Emergent player stories | Stories arise from the player’s actions within the systems (see narrative-architecture) | Only authored stories survive; the emergent ones belonged to individual players | — |
Which is hardest to adapt: system logic, agency or the resource loop? Following Poole, agency is the deepest loss, and the other two are agency in another form. A game’s system logic and its resource loop matter because the player operates them: the rules are something you test, and the loop is something you balance. Film can depict both, as a world with consistent rules and characters under resource pressure, but it cannot hand them to the viewer. This is an interpretation of Poole’s argument rather than his own comparison of the three.
Recent adaptations that worked
Since 2021 several screen adaptations have been widely praised. All three below adapt a game’s world and characters rather than its mechanics, which is arguably consistent with Poole’s point: they keep what film can carry and leave the interactive core behind.
- Arcane (Netflix, first season November 2021; second and final season November 2024). Produced by the French studio Fortiche under Riot Games’ supervision, it tells an original story set in the League of Legends world, following how the sisters Vi and Jinx came to be. It won the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program in 2022 (Wikipedia, Arcane (TV series)).
- The Last of Us (HBO, premiered 15 January 2023; created by Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann). It follows the game’s story closely but cuts much of its combat. Mazin said “there may be less action than some people wanted” and explained the change by medium: “After all, you’re not playing it; you’re watching it” (Yee, TheWrap, 13 March 2023). The series has won nine Primetime Emmy Awards (Wikipedia, The Last of Us (TV series)).
- Fallout (Amazon Prime Video, premiered 10 April 2024; created by Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet, executive produced by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy). Bethesda allowed an original story within the franchise’s canon, set in 2296. Amazon reported 65 million viewers in its first 16 days (Wikipedia, Fallout (American TV series)).
The pattern suggests that the “video game curse” was less about games being unadaptable than about adaptations trying to film the gameplay. Mazin’s comment that action on screen “needs to be … a little bit more focused and purposeful” than gameplay (Yee, TheWrap) is close to Poole’s argument from the production side.
Film adapted to games
The reverse problem: film content adapted into games often fails because games require systems, not scenes. A faithful recreation of a film’s story in game form requires the player to execute what the film showed happening — turning authored events into tasks. This collapses the film’s narrative authority while also lacking the organic emergence of designed gameplay.
FMV in games
Full Motion Video sequences embedded within games attempt to borrow cinematic language inside the game container. Poole observes these typically fail on both fronts: they return the player to a passive role (undermining player-agency) while lacking the craft of actual cinema. The player’s attention shifts from doing to watching, and then back — an awkward oscillation.
FMV as a narrative delivery mechanism survives in modern games (cutscenes, dialogue sequences), but is most effective when kept brief and purposeful, and when it transitions seamlessly back to playable states.
From watching to doing
If film’s mode is watching and the game’s is doing, game narrative techniques can be placed on a spectrum between the two. The ordering below is a teaching device built on Poole’s distinction and Jenkins’ four kinds of spatial narrative (see narrative-architecture); it is not a scale either author proposes.
| Technique | Player’s role | Notes and examples |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-rendered cutscene / FMV | Watches | Poole’s “awkward oscillation” between doing and watching (see above) |
| In-engine cutscene | Watches, but the world and characters look the same as in play | Smaller visual break; control is still removed |
| Scripted sequence with control kept | Moves and looks while the scene plays out | Half-Life’s story “is told mostly using scripted sequences (bar one short cutscene), keeping the player in control of the first-person viewpoint”; Valve had planned traditional cutscenes but switched to a continuous first-person view (Wikipedia, Half-Life (video game)) |
| Walk-and-talk | Travels while characters talk | Exposition is delivered during movement, so the player keeps steering (design pattern; no source on this page) |
| Playable set piece / quick-time event | Acts within an authored spectacle | Control is narrowed rather than removed |
| Environmental storytelling | Investigates | Story is placed in the space for the player to find and interpret, at their own pace (see environmental-storytelling) |
| Systemic / emergent narrative | Causes | Stories arise from the player’s actions within the rules (see narrative-architecture, emergent-design) |
Moving down the table trades authorial control for player ownership, the same trade-off as the film/game comparison table above. Most games mix several rows: narrative-design describes The Last of Us (the game) combining tightly scripted beats with emergent beats from combat and exploration.
Open-world techniques
Open worlds push story towards the “doing” end because the player controls route and order. Techniques that suit this, with the evidence available for each:
- Player-paced main quest. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild “can be completed in a nonlinear fashion”; producer Eiji Aonuma said in 2014 that the team planned to “allow players to reach the end without progressing through the story” (Wikipedia, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild).
- Optional, discoverable story. In the same game, Link travels across Hyrule “returning to locations from his past and regaining his memories” (Wikipedia, as above), so backstory is found through exploration rather than delivered in order.
- Stories tied to places, not to times. Jenkins’ enacted narrative attaches beats to arrival at locations; in Unity this means trigger colliders or Timeline sequences fired on arrival rather than after a set time (see narrative-architecture).
- Reveals that work in any order. When content can be met in any sequence, reveals should check what the player knows rather than where they are in a script (see environmental-storytelling on condition-based reveals).
- Ambient life and dynamic events. Authored scenes that play out when their conditions hold, such as smart-zones, and a drama manager that adjusts content to the player’s choices (see ai-experience-management).
See also open-world and player-agency.
Poole’s displacement argument
“Film did not replace theatre. The Internet did not replace the book. Videogames have been around for thirty years, and they’re not going away.” — Poole, Ch. 1 (source-trigger-happy)
New entertainment media do not eliminate existing ones — they coexist and differentiate. Each medium carves out the territory where it is irreplaceable:
- Theatre — live, communal, ephemeral presence
- Film — authored, reproducible cinematic experience
- Television — serial, domestic, habitual consumption
- Games — interactive, player-driven, systems-based experience
This historical pattern suggests that debates about games “replacing” film or books misunderstand how media ecosystems evolve. Games will occupy the niche where interactivity is the core value; film will remain dominant where authored experience is the goal.
What games can do that film cannot
- Create genuine stakes through consequence — the player’s actions have outcomes that matter to them because they chose them
- Produce unique personal stories — two players’ playthroughs of the same game generate different experiences
- Enable mastery and skill expression — the satisfaction of executing a difficult move or strategy belongs only to the player
- Model systems, not just scenes — games can represent complex dynamic systems (economies, ecologies, social networks) that film can only depict statically
- Generate emergence — unexpected outcomes from rule interactions that no author scripted
What film can do that games cannot
- Exercise total authorial control — every frame, beat, and edit is intentional
- Create precise emotional pacing through editing, music, and camera
- Tell stories about passive experience — observation, suffering, watching — without the awkward imperative to do something
- Achieve performance — actors’ performances are captured and reproduced exactly, without variation
When to choose games / When to choose film
Choose games when the goal is player ownership of experience, decision-making, mastery, or systems modelling.
Choose film when the goal is precisely crafted emotional narrative, performance capture, or experiences that require controlled pacing.
Related
- player-agency — The interactivity argument in depth
- game-definition — Schell’s and Poole’s competing definitions
- game-studies-foundations — Broader context for medium-specific game theory
- games-as-systems-vs-games-as-stories — Extends the systems/story tension beyond the film comparison
- genre-taxonomy — Genre examples across the games spectrum
- foundational-vocabulary — FMV, interactivity, feedback
- overview-game-studies-foundations — Synthesis route through the theory-history backbone
- narrative-architecture — Jenkins’ evoked, enacted, embedded and emergent narrative
- environmental-storytelling — story through space, NPC behaviour and condition-based reveals
- narrative-design — delivery channels and scripted vs emergent beats
- open-world — structuring large, player-paced spaces
- source-trigger-happy
External references
- Lawrence Yee, “‘The Last of Us’ Creators Address Pleas for More Infected in Future Seasons: ‘You’re Not Playing It, You’re Watching It’”, TheWrap, 13 March 2023: https://thewrap.com/the-last-of-us-criticisms-infected-season-2-more
- Wikipedia, Arcane (TV series), The Last of Us (TV series), Fallout (American TV series), Half-Life (video game) and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (consulted 2026-10-25)