Before I explain why the innards of gaming are as gross as imagining how slowly Boba Fett is being digested in that Sarlacc, just a little chart of where I have been since my entry over a month ago. I started training my mind for a new morning routine, going to bed a little earlier and getting up before work a little earlier to spend time learning. I got the getting up early part down, 7am never looked so beautiful and my cats are just post zoom, so it works out. Yet, I still haven’t gotten the learning part quite down yet, and I think it’s because I was a little overwhelmed. On the other hand, I have been dreaming up some really great game ideas, inspirations to move me further. If you have read anything on my blog, you know that I spend a lot of time thinking about film, both narratively and constructively, and I found myself doing the same thing for video games. The weird thing is I realized I had never really spent time doing this before. When I thought about why, generally it’s because as I have gotten older, games have gotten longer, deeper, and more sophisticated. Film on the other hand, while more sophisticated in graphics and techniques, they have stayed bite size. Their arcs are completed in 2-3 hours, put into bit size chunks, and you won’t see that in Metal Gear Solid 2 or Persona 5. There is something easily consumable about film creation. Point a camera at something, record it, play it back. Game design is so much more complex and peeling back the veil on their creation is like learning how steak goes from cow to plate. And I kind of… hate it.

Fear not, this doesn’t mean I have quit, it’s just a little alarming. I would go into detail, but I am afraid the other problem is the same as all programming: It is very boring to read about if you don’t care. Programming is so multifaceted and so wide, that if you were a layman, it’s hard to understand much less know where to begin. Just take my word for it, it’s like manually peeling the skin of a living animal. Film is constructed in a much more natural way, point and shoot. All of the objects either already exist to form some other purpose, from the mighty office park to the lowly toaster. But in gaming, they are tortured into existence from cubes and spheres. Their lighting is “baked” (industry term) into them. In games and animation, everything has to be constructed from scratch and formed into a living thing. You are a god. Are all game and animation developers beset with a god complex? I am not religious at all, but it strikes me that filmmakers simply use or augment god’s designs for the sake of their art. Alternatively, games give us a chance to take our collective understanding of the universe and create something for ourselves. It’s actually kind of scary, all that power. I am learning to embrace it.

During all of this, the Mortal Kombat movie came out. Here is my one sentence review: It fails to do as well as the original, but it was entertaining nonetheless. Normally, with a movie of this caliber, I would have gathered a group to watch it in person, but as the pandemic is ever reaching and never ending, the collective decided to watch-party the movie over discord (which was still a great time!). From the discussion over the film, an idea was born. A friend of mine mentioned that not a single video game film has ever broke the 7/10 mark, essentially saying if these films went to highschool, they would all be dropouts. When I looked into the issue, this turned out to be true both critically and fanatically (I have no other words to describe Fan-based scoring). So I decided to do two things: First, that I would only make games that either could never be made into a film or could be translated perfectly into film. Second, that I would watch all of the live-action, Hollywood financed films in order of their release and judge personally if they make the grade and get that diploma. I think that film can and has taught games many things, and I think that I can learn from what film has translated about games. I love film. I love games. Maybe I can bridge the gap.