This Is Hardcore

Is the whole world turning into a video game? For instance, I'm thinking I should carry bandaids and a random amount of ammuntion with me at all times. That's in case I die: I'm just assuming that whoever finds me will naturally expect that when searching a body.

Games are infecting sports too. It used to be that sports video games played quite unrealistically, because you could find an abnormally successful strategy. For instance, football teams would score 200 points a game, just by running the same play over and over. But now, that's been flipped backwards: A great performance in real-life sports is often described as "like a video game." So rather than games wishing they could be more like reality, we have real people wishing they were more like games.

And now movies are going gamey. There's this new movie Hardcore Henry, which is an action movie filmed entirely from the point of view of the protagonist. So it's essentially a First Person Shooter movie.

It appears it's not just the perspective that is borrowed from games. I'm only going by the ads and a few early reviews, but it appears to have the same outlandish backstory that's just to set up a simple action story. It also seems to have the same awkwardly one-way conversations, and arms and legs that only occassionally show up and don't really look like they're attached to you. And that title: although modern games have movie-sized budgets that ensure names are cleared by a hundred focus groups, "Hardcore Henry" is the sort of let's-leave-it-up-to-the-programmers title we had to get used to twenty years ago. Even "Hardcore Hank" would have worked better.

The irony is that this movie is out at the same time that the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset is coming out. Movies are reducing you to one perspective, like older games. Meanwhile, the games are going to try to give us the chance to see more perspectives, like movies.