this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2026
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Games

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One of my main heuristics for if a videogame is worth playing is if it only works as a game. As in if you transported it out of the medium, it loses a lot. The adaption can still be good, hell, the game can still be good but I don't think they're interesting in the art form that is videogames.

My main example here'd be TLOU. The netflix adaption was pretty much a hit because of course it is. The story is entirely linear, it's very clearly subdivided into combat -> exploration -> story, allthough sometimes the order changes. It's all polished to a mirror sheen, the gameplay is fun, hell, the brutality ties in thematically instead of being a back-of-the-box selling point to edgelords (allthough it is also that) but functionally it could be a movie or a series and it is and it works.

So whats your videogame that only works as a videogame, and most importantly, why? I think Disco Elysium is the free bingo square for this community on this one and the reasons are endless, but I'll start with something that surprised me recently: the new Hitman games.

They have movies but they're shit, all the comics and tie in novels I assume are for people into hitman lore because the story isn't really anything to write home about - mostly existing to get you to next location - but the the experience of playing hitman can't be recreated in another format because the interactivity is such a big part of it. I mean sure, "shoot someone in the head" basically always works. It's one of my main criticisms about a lot of games I have that give you a whole host of options to tackle a mission which all pale in effectiveness to "have a bit of aim and do headshot with the starter pistol" but somehow it's way more fun to hoist rich dipshits by their own petard.

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[–] AssortedBiscuits@hexbear.net 6 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

I think the vast majority of games don't work outside of being games. It's why movie adaptation of games notoriously suck.

There are entire genres:

  • RTS

  • Fighting games

  • Racing games

  • 4X games

  • Genres where grinding is like 90% of the game like ARPGs, MMORPGs, or some shitty gacha game

  • Pretty much any genre that's top-down or isometric like MOBAs or isometric RPGs wouldn't work as a conventional movie because the top-down view is absolutely essential to the core game experience. Imagine playing Dota or Disco Elysium with 1st person POV. It would be a cool novelty and perhaps even a good game in its own right, but it wouldn't be Dota or Disco Elysium anymore.

  • Games where resource management is crucial don't really work outside of games either. So something like old-school roguelikes like Nethack, on top of being top-down POV, have intense amounts of resource management that can't translate to other media.

  • PVP games are also not good for adaptation. Most media don't have the equivalent of opposing players. You have musical duets, but that's more like gaming co-op. I guess you have rap battles, but I don't think you can adapt BW TvZ into some rap battle between the "Terran rapper" and the "Zerg rapper."

The closest medium to videogames are boardgames. You could have a Nethack the boardgame although I can't see why anyone would want to play this outside of novelty, which goes back to this boardgame being as poor of an adaptation as Nethack the marble sculpture or Nethack the watercolor painting or Nethack the epic poem. Boardgames, relative to videogames, have simpler rulesets and can't be burdened by too complicated calculations.

Honestly, it's a better question to ask what genres can be adapted in other media (walking simulators, VNs especially kinetic novels, rhythms game, 3rd-person shooters, stealth games, 1st-person dungeon crawlers, 1st-person platformers/parkour).