Games

The Sims and pretty much any strategy or god-view game.

There's never going to be a Crusader Kings or Vicky 3 movie.

Dmc as a show sucks. Half the power fantasy is actually doing the ass kicking. It's hard to overstate how much of every fight is because dante wants to showboat longer. The way the rank system encourages it and ties into the music makes go even crazier.

Basically the entire category of games where gameplay takes priority over narrative or even excludes it entirely. Shooters, rhythm games, fighting games, tetris. Honestly the ~~best~~ easiest adaptations are going to be rpgs because they lean so much harder on said narrative.

The league of legends show has to both retcon (idr if its a retcon or if its just separate) a bunch of shit and also ignore the base premise of the game to function as a show. But then again the lore and the game already ignore each other.

Lots of anti-games work for this. DayZ, at least, the hook of it's original experiment, cannot work without the interactive layer and other players.

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).

Almost all of them.

I suppose you could rip the story out of them and do something with that, but why would you do that?

Also the "Minecraft Movie" was ass.

I would argue that the entire grand strategy genre doesn’t really work outside of video games. You could argue that you could make them work as board games, but they would simply be way too unwieldy basically 1,000-hour games if you tried to play them IRL.

And yes, I am aware that The Campaign for North Africa exists, and it has an estimated 1,500 hours to complete a single playthrough. But that kind of proves my point. Super-deep, complex games are better played as video games, since playing them IRL is incredibly time-consuming and cumbersome.

Outer Wilds. It's a game with almost no dialogue and barely any characters where for 99% of the game, nothing actually happens. The experience is entirely based on the player's exploration and curiosity.

RuneScape. But to some extent it’s not its fault.

RuneScape has a few novels and even a comic book, which is great for worldbuilding and having the story evolve beyond its clunky mmo point and click game.

But the problem is part of its charm is the fact its the funny medieval cookie clicker, and many pieces of its humor revolve around it. You can tell great RuneScape stories outside the game, but you lose some of the scapeyness in the process.

Any game where player decisions and the weight thereof are tightly incorporated into the narrative:

• Spec Ops: The Line
• Undertale/Deltarune
• Papers, Please
• Pathologic
• Suzerain
• This War of Mine

Games like Shadow of the Colossus wherein the player's participation is required for the full emotional impact. You don't feel guilty watching someone else slaughter an ancient magical giant to unseal a dark god, but you sure do if you're responsible for it

Octo Dad is always my go-to when I was thinking about this same thing a few years back. Games that take full advantage of the interactivity. You could put other similar games in there, but the fact is they can only exist in the context of video games. The point of the game is controlling Octo Dad and navigating tasks with imperfect equipment and ability to do so.

Unless someone is gonna build an octopus mobile suit that is purposefully hard to control, you won't get that anywhere else

The balatro movie is gonna suck

Fighting games? Sure you could make an action movie, but watching somebody chain a 15 hit combo is way more impressive

Missile command, unending waves of nuclear bombs raining down on no-name cities in a no-name country. The only narrative is your own reactions to watching yourself fail to protect the cities, as there is no win condition.

Mario. Illumination never explained the beauty of learning the power of jump like in the infamous level 1-1 as explained in the 7 hour video essay on how Mario teaches players to jump. This made the movie just not work for me.

Pretty much any golden age arcade game, how are you going to make a movie about Asteroids? All you do is shoot rocks until you get a game over, there's no story or even an ending.

It depends on whether you include a different medium just ripping the lore out of the game and telling the story devoid of gameplay mechanics.

Starcraft broodwar, for example, could easily be adapted into a sci-fi war against the aliens type movie but wouldn't be able to capture anything about how an RTS is played or feels.

A movie about managing resources in a context that doesn't really apply to anything in the real world (spend all your money all the time any resources left over are wasted) sounds pretty tough to do.

Disco elysium could be adapted into a movie, similarly, if it plucked the story and setting out of the gameplay. All the internal dialogue might have to be cut or turned into a cheap allegory for mental illness like so many movies do these days. Starts off following this eccentric vagabond collecting cans in a shopping bag talking to himself through a drunken stupor until you meet kim and realize harry's a detective.

What I'm saying is that I don't think a movie can accurately represent videogame mechanics but probably can represent the storyline from basically any game.

My real answer is VVVVVV

Qix would be pretty hard to adapt to anything else. Games like this, Tetris etc are about as "pure" as video games get as a medium, although they also expose the limits of the "game" part of the video game label - a theory I've been thinking about for a while now is that what we call "video games" are more accurately described as multimedia experiences where the game is just layer of the overall experience which can also include some combination of a narrative, visuals, music, etc. That's why Steam can sell visual novels and walking simulators and still feel coherent - the "video game" label is outdated, but held on to by convention because it was just the first thing that was invented in this digital mixed media medium that we all engage with.