Why Is Adapting A Game So Hard?

Hi Casen and Mike! First of all, I really enjoyed Mike’s Witcher: Last wish review and Casen’s DQ your story video. Both videos hit on the point of film adaptations, which leads me to my question and (long) comment. My question is: Do you think we should include a film adaptation’s faithfulness to the original work when judging the overall quality of that film? (I would say no. But it took me a while to come to this conclusion.) This is a bit of a long-winded story, but there is a point to it at the end I promise! Listening to Casen recall his initial reactions to the 4th Harry Potter movie and the Two towers reminded me of my own experience walking out of the theater for Fellowship of the Ring the first time. My friends and I loved the movie. We left the theater thinking we had seen something amazing, one of the best movies we had ever seen. We had a (mostly) great time discussing it over dinner afterwards. However, there was one problem, one person in our group, John, HATED the movie. And the reason for that was… Lord of the Rings was his passion. John is a lifelong LoTR/Tolkien expert and Lord of the Rings is his favorite work of fiction ever. He’s read through the books many times, he has a collection of LoTR artwork, a collection of old Tolkien interviews and writings, and so on. He’s a mega Tolkien enthusiast. (He ended up getting a Masters in English and chose LoTR as the subject for several of his assignments/essays.) Before Fellowship was even released, he had read through the books (Hobbit + LoTR + Silmarillion) about 8 times each. Now it’s even more. So when we walked out of the theater, all John could talk about afterwards was how many things the film got “wrong” from the book. Not just in terms of plot points skipped or changed, but how the characters behaved or were depicted, and several other issues I can’t remember at this point. We tried to explain to him how even despite those changes, it still turned out to be a great film. But he wasn’t convinced. He told us “The movie can’t be considered great if it isn’t faithful to the book, in fact you shouldn’t even consider it good.” For several weeks we tried to explain that by having this sort of mindset, he was robbing himself of a good experience, but his response was always along the lines of “If you knew as much about Tolkien as I do you would understand.” And there wasn’t really much we could say to that. He was the expert after all. We invited him to go see the movie again to see if we could somehow change his mind, but he declined and said he’d rather “pretend it didn’t exist at all.” That’s how disappointed he was with the movie at the time of its release. Fast forward to about a year later. We all go as a group to see Spider-man (Toby McGuire version). We all enjoyed the movie… except for Ted this time. Ted is a big comic book guy, with Spider-man being one of his favorite characters. He walked out of the movie disappointed, though not quite as much as John was with Fellowship. Ted was obsessing over details that they got “wrong” about spider-man, to the point where it got annoying for the rest of the group and sparked an argument. At one point John told Ted “Maybe they cared more about trying to make a fun movie than trying to put a comic book on the screen”. To which Ted replied “Well maybe Peter Jackson cared more about making a good movie than putting an entire novel on the screen.” This led to quite a bit more arguing…. Fast forward to today, several of these arguments and another decade of Hollywood remakes/adaptations behind us made us all eventually realize that these film adaptations are all typically made for the general audience 1st, and the original audience 2nd. That’s just how it is. If it’s an expensive project, it needs to win over the people who've never heard of the story before just as much or even more so than the fanbase of the original story. And if the movie is appealing to the general audience, it will often lead to a lot of them seeking out the original anyway. (Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter are good examples of this.) Not only that, but by changing certain aspects of the original work in the adaptation, the director and movie studio are often able to give their own “take” or “spin” on the story, rather than have their film be a direct copy/paste of someone else’s story. Which allows the film to exist as its own thing in the mind of the viewer. (For example: Blade Runner and Jurassic Park) But if it’s a copy/paste adaptation, it will quickly be forgotten or feel hollow (For example: Most Disney live-action remakes.) Years later, this realization has allowed John to go back to the LoTR films and actually enjoy them for what they are. Well made, enjoyable movies, based on his favorite books, that are altered and re-imagined to fit neatly into 3-act structures in a way to appeal to a general audience. Now he regrets that he didn’t come to this conclusion sooner, as he never got to see Two Towers or Return of the King in the theater with the rest of us. The point of all this backstory is that I think there is a big difference between a good adaptation and an overall good book/film/movie/etc. It’s possible to do both of course, but that is so rare at this point I don’t know why anyone would expect them to be faithful or even mostly faithful when they are announced. It seems like it’s often the case that faithfulness to the original is not even the Writers/Directors primary goal with a film/TV show adaptation. From my experience, we are usually better off expecting adaptations to be different when we walk into them. Judging it as it’s own story first and then critiquing it’s faithfulness as an adaptation of the original work afterwards. Not only will you generally end up enjoying more film adaptations this way, but the discussion that follows afterwards will be things like: “What did they change about X? Is that better or worse for the story? Did that change make it better as a film? How could they have not changed X and kept the story flowing well? Was the change to X done to appeal more to the general audience? Did that work? How much does the change to X alter how other aspects of the story are told? Are any of those other aspects improved as a result?” But if you consider an adaptation’s faithfulness to the original as one of the most important criteria of its overall quality, you’ll often end up with discussion along the lines of: “They changed X, and X was really good in the original so changing it is terrible.” or “They changed this character, they weren’t like that before. Now they are different and that’s bad. There was no reason to change them because they were a great character as they were before.” It just doesn’t lead to much interesting discussion in my opinion and also alienates the folks who have only seen the adaptation. Many of them will think “Huh, I really enjoyed the movie, but it sounds like the book is way different. And these people who liked the book didn’t like the movie. I guess I probably wouldn’t like the book then.” As Casen mentioned in his video, there is a reason that the “The book was better” people often come off as annoying and sometimes elitist, even if they are right 90+% of the time. And in my experience, it’s because they often look at any deviation from the source material as an inherent negative, regardless of whether or not the changes helped the story/character fit better on the big screen. Either that or they just list the changes without really detailing how this affected the story for the worse. (Mike avoided this issue in his Witcher video by carefully explaining which changes to the Netflix show he thought were reasonable/understandable and which were not. But this is pretty rare with adaptation critiques and discussion in my experience. Especially online.) This is why I think judging adaptations with overall quality and overall faithfulness as separate criteria is the way to go. If we all had my friend’s John or Ted’s old mindset, and considered accuracy to the original as one of the primary criteria, many film adaptations of written works (Blade Runner, Willy Wonka, Jurassic Park, LoTR, nearly every comic book film, etc.) would have to be considered “bad” before we even have a chance to look at how they succeed or fail on their own as a film story. And I think that leads to a lot of “missing the forest for the trees” conversations when discussing these film adaptations. So yeah… I’m wondering how you feel about this issue and how much it has been on your mind given the topics of the recent videos.

I liked it a little better than Casen did, I think (Mike here). We'll definitely be discussing it in greater depth on the next podcast!

Resonant Arc

Good video from Casen!

Elias Luukkanen

Just got done watching, great vid! I actually just checked it out last night. I think it definitely helps to have some sort of expectation going in to adaptations, (or better yet as you put it, interpretations). I adored the middle trilogy when I played them on DS in High School, so going into this, I was just expecting sort of a highlight reel with pretty visuals to go along with it. I was very surprised and happy in regards to what they did with the ending, and it really lets me gloss over a lot of the problems that I was having with it initially going in and in some way even made the experience as a whole better for me all in all. You guys are cranking out great stuff! DQ Retrospective when, Casen? 😏lol jk