10 Artistic Things Video Games Can Do That Movies Can't
3. Exploration
World building is impressive in films, don't get me wrong - the planet of Pandora in Avatar or Middle Earth in The Lord of the Rings offer some of the most gorgeously imaginative worlds ever created for stories. However, they are also quite limited to the confines of their own story. No film solely exists to explore a location to pick out the tiniest details. At least, not in the same way video games can be. Just think of something like World of Warcraft - the animators and design team at Blizzard Entertainment created (and have since continued to reshape) entire continents, climates, cultures, and biospheres to suit the game they wanted to make. While that are hardly the only example (even much more linear games allow fairly immersive exploration) the detail and polish that goes into making video game worlds feel three dimensional puts a movie's digital backdrop to shame - if only because you can obsessively explore it in more ways than one.
Self-evidently a man who writes for the Internet, Robert also writes films, plays, teleplays, and short stories when he's not working on a movie set somewhere. He lives somewhere behind the Hollywood sign.
