Much like Mother Theresa or Martin Luther King, Jr., I have a dream. Here the comparison to these small fry ends, however. While they may be remembered for their priceless contributions to the betterment of the human condition, I will go down in the books of history as the writer of the greatest Internet rant ever.

My vision is one that can only be done justice with celluloid. It begins with a simple black screen. Orchestral music that was so quiet you didn't realize it was playing begins to crescendo. The string section sings out a joyous melody, while the brass warns us "don't trust those happy-go-lucky strings. What the hell do they know? Life is pain, man. Trust us, we've seen some shit." A classically trained voice-actor (someone who sounds like Patrick Stewart or Ian McKellan) begins a voice-over full of phrases like "in a land in need of a hero," "the evil lord of super evil" and "women in chain-mail bikinis." The screen then fades in to a closeup of Brad Pitt wearing full plate. Slowly the shot zooms out until we see him taking careful aim with a longbow. The music climaxes as the releases his shaft (did I just write that?). With appropriate CG effects, we see the arrow hurtling through the air, travelling what seems like miles, until finally it embeds its bodkin point with a thwack in the back of a small child's noggin. The camera cuts back to Pitt, who pumps his fist and says,

"Boom! Headshot! Now I can join the Assassin's guild!"

Elder Scrolls: The Movie is then written on the screen in letters of fire by an invisible hand. The ensuing film is over sixty hours long.

Cinema and games don't mix. There, I said it. Despite what millions if not billions of dollars would have you believe, cinema and videogames are two different art forms. Think about that - you ever see anyone try to make a painting of Oedipus Rex? Of course not. Paintings of specific scenes from the play may be done, but, with good reason, no one tries to capture the very essence of what Sophocles is trying to say in a different medium. It's recognized that certain aspects of the play would be lost in translation. The resulting canvas could be, independantly of how effectively it represents Oedipus Rex, a fine work of art, but it would still be a failure in its efforts to convert the play to another art form.

Examples supporting this abound. Take Doom: what makes the games so great isn't the plot or the character development or its pacing. Doom is fun because it's an intense, old school run-and-gun shoot 'em up. It's you and your shotty against an unholy legion, with no strings attached. The operative word here is you. Who wants to see, I dunno, the Rock or maybe Karl Urban run around and kill demons? It'd be like watching someone else play the game. Maybe entertaining for a bit, but it ultimately pales in comparison to actually doing it yourself.

Even plot-driven games don't translate well to the big screen. Unless they were heavily modified (perhaps to the point of being totally different from their source material), movies based on games like Baldurs Gate or Vampires the Masquerade: Bloodlines would be terrible. Their stories are way outside the scope of even the most epic of films. What makes them good games would not translate well to film. The movies would either change or cut reams of material from the games to make it fit on the screen and fail to capture the essence of the games, or they would try to incorporate everything and last for eighty hours each and go a trillion dollars over budget.

Obviously, the transition doesn't work the other way either. Every once and a while a game based on a movie comes along that shocks the world by not totally blowing chunks, but for every Spiderman 2 there's a dozen games like Enter the Matrix or The Hulk.

For the most part, attempts to convert works of art between media fail miserably. Either they attempt to faithfully recreate their origional work and fail, or change many aspects of the source and loose the evocative or notable elements. There are some notable exceptions - everyone should go watch Wait Until Dark with Audrey Hepburn- but for the most part, the world would be a better place if media cross-overs stopped happening.