Fat Ninja

I’ll be the first to tell you that I’m not shy about my being a “Gamer”. Fortunately, the explosion of the gaming industry and community as afforded me, and people like me, a great deal more social recognition than we once enjoyed. In fact, it’s almost at the point now that you’re weird if you aren’t a gamer, be it casual or hardcore. 

I think this embracing of the geek by popular culture is thanks to a number of things. I mean, aside from the fact that geeks are largely to thank for the fact that our world continues to operate smoothly in this age of information technology. In particular, I think that successful film adaptations of popular comic book series have certainly helped shed some light on what it is comic book fans find so damned appealling about the sources of their obsession. However, similar attempts by Hollywood to capitalize on the growing gaming community have, in most cases, been ill-received; both by the general and gaming community. Fortunately, there are some bright spots on the horizon. For example, Silent Hill looks like it could actually pay worthy tribute to its source material. Other recent efforts, while not necessarily Oscar worthy, have nonetheless done well enough not to heap too much scorn from the general public upon the collective head of the gaming community.

And then there’s this; a surefire way to drive us back five years in our struggle for social recognition. As though some weren’t dismissive enough of our culture, we now have to combat the stereotypes that a movie of this sort will only reinforce. Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for the continued adaptation of great games into movies, provided that the transition is facilitated by someone who is intimately tied to the source material. But remember, I said “great games”. That is to say, games with deep and intricate plots, set in universes worthy of further exploration and investigation. Dead or Alive is no such game.

As a game franchise, the Dead or Alive series never needed to be scrutinized for its lack of a cohesive narrative. As a 3D-fighter, it simply needed a loose backstory to provide flimsy justification for the fisticuffs that comprised its gameplay. Fans of fighters don’t need the gameplay to be validated by complex plotlines. Not only that, we’re often more than willing to make allowances for even the most ludicrous of attempts at such a validation.

Once you undertake the foolish task of transmuting such a game into a movie you then become responsible for infusing it with all of the justifications that the gaming community is willing to do without. Suddenly, you need to have a fairly legitimate excuse to explain why all of these attractive, scantily-clad women are grappling with one another in all of these exotic locations. The fact is, you can’t; at least not in a way that’s going to palatable to the general public. In the end, people will leave the theater confused and, most likely, agitated that they paid to see such a travesty unfold on the silver screen. In the end, impressions like these will further fuel existing misconceptions about the gaming community. Personally, I could do without the negative publicity.

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