The Screen Dichotomy

I am a gamer and a watcher of many things, and it occurs to me that we are getting into an interesting phase. Movies are starting to be remade; Judge Dredd, Robocop and Total Recall to name a few. Movies are getting less and less original and stretching bad franchises more and more. With Fast and Furious SEVEN coming up and a promise for three more thereafter, one must ask, has the movie industry become so dumbed down that we will never again see the likes of The Shawshank Redemption or Schindlers List? Will we ever again see the likes of good comedies like unto Robin Hood – Men in Tights, or the epics like Dances With Wolves, or must we be beaten over the head with Saw 15 and yet another Scary Movie or Final Destination.

But at the same time we are experiencing a massive leap in the level of television production. From seemingly nowhere we have fantastic series like Sherlock, The Newsroom and The Blacklist. We have Game changing series like Hannibal – made in the USA but with enough world-wide funding to keep being made without the support of any major American network, or Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, which has movie like effects on a TV budget and in a TV timescale.

Movies that take longer to produce and are shorter to watch are becoming worse and worse while TV that takes less time to produce and lasts longer is getting better and better. And then there is the inverse we are currently witnessing in the field of computer games (I speak mostly of PC’s here being a PC gamer only but I’m sure this applies across the board.)

More and more computer games are going to something like the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game or MMORPG, a format that doesn’t take a comparatively long time to program. A format that while playable, continues and continues with no end in sight. The shorter single story game, that takes much more time to program having to build everything from scratch, is becoming less popular, yet this is where the advancements are being made; and cost less for a better experience. These games have long been around and have continued to improve while the MMORPGs stagnate and become dull. With all the missions done, one can only interact with the other, often lesser intelligent, players, showing them what no one would show you and holding their hands through the same missions you have already completed for no apparent reason them save to now and then compare your equipment with your neighbour’s., all the while putting more and more money into in-game purchases and into the latest update of a game that costs you as much as a stand-alone game cost you and is far less satisfying. Meanwhile the standalone game gives downloadable content often at no cost or much cheaper for much more game play.

So here we arrive at an interesting position. Movies that take longer to produce are getting worse while TV that takes less time to produce is getting better; while MMORPGs that take less time to produce are becoming more prevalent and worse while standalone games that take much more to produce are continuing on an upward curve but are becoming less and less popular.

So here I sit dear reader, confused by this screen dichotomy, and I am reminded of the poem by AA Milne called Twice Times and as one got better as the other got wuss I ask myself and you – 

What can we expect from these two giants of screens going forward?

Where to from here?

And what new idea will change the game in such a way as to get everything on the up and up again?