Doom, Super Mario Bros., Street Fighter, Wing Commander: There have been so many awful video game movies that studios lack confidence in funding more ambitious adaptations, such as the Peter Jackson-produced Halo movie that fell through. This is no more obvious than in movies that have tried to adapt video games, which has mostly proven to be disastrous. Regrettably, the film industry has yet to embrace video games as a mainstream aspect of popular culture. Nowadays, a 70-year-old grandmother is just as likely to be playing a quick round of Angry Birds as a 7-year-old boy. This shift in demographics is partly because of the rise of casual gaming and the all-age success of mobile gaming, which has brought in demographics that had simply never played video games before or hadn’t since the days of the Atari. According to the Entertainment Software Association, 37 percent of players are actually 36 or older with an average age of 30 meanwhile women make up 47 percent of gamers. This stereotype remains to this day in television shows such as The Big Bang Theory, the people who play video games are still shown as predominately male, socially awkward and out-of-touch with reality. In most dramas or comedies, if someone played video games they were either kids or stereotypical dorks. Movies and television shows didn’t do anything to discourage the supposedly fringe culture of video gaming in fact, this portrayal contributed greatly to that misconception. Before the days of Call of Duty, Madden or Halo, people who played video games were perceived not just as nerds, but as introverted individuals who spent all day hiding in their parents’ basements playing games. The approach is notable since, up until recently, video games were still treated as a niche form of entertainment, the equivalent of Dungeons & Dragons or chess club. – | Photo courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures The Disney film parodies today’s popular video games. Jane Lynch voices the Hero’s Duty character Calhoun in Wreck-it Ralph.
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