Just got off the phone with Jose Antonio Vargas, a reporter with the Washington Post. He s working on a story about the video game movie stigma to run in paper s Style section. The story is spurred by Doom, which he saw and apparently did suck. Dammit!

Vargas sounds like just the kind of mainstream gaming writer the industry needs. He was telling me about a story he wrote on GTA where he went to South Central to see how some of the people there played the game and then compared it to the playing style of suburban white kids. Excellent.

Anyway, we had an interesting conversation about why video game movies suck and if that will ever change. Part of the problem, I think, is that Hollywood tends to pick the blockbuster, plotless games to turn into movies instead of focusing on games that have some depth to them.

Another issue is that you just can t replicate the immersive experience of gaming in a linear format. Movies tend to lean to heavily on the success of their video game counter-parts instead of trying to reshape the experience for the medium they are using.

My two cents.

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