I would love to see Lord of the Rings done in an imaginative style, in which over the top mythology can seem more real than an elaborately realistic presentation.

It was always odd to me how games, an ostensibly more complicated medium with infinitely more moving parts and where a four-hour runtime is considered “very short”, are ultimately more conducive to smaller, lower budget projects than film solely because the audience is more willing to suspend their disbelief than in the latter. The concept of “it doesn’t have to look nice as long it’s engaging enough” is a mantra that gets bandied about even in the most mainstream of gaming circles, but it’s a sentiment that practically does not exist in film. This is couldn’t be a matter of games being easier to make - high-budget videogames are often five times as expensive to produce as movies with the same clout, yet many of the most critically acclaimed games in the field are tiny, one-man projects produced by amateurs with virtually no industry experience.

You end up in a situation where you have games like That Dragon, Cancer or Virginia where the interactive elements in them are so light as to almost be perfunctory - yet if you were to remove them, the ensuing reclassification from “video game” to “movie” would destroy any chance of them being taken seriously both critically and commercially. “Low-budget” and “cheap” carry the connotations of an insult when you’re talking about movies. Cutting corners for the sake of your art might earn you respect of certain circles but it’ll kill your prospects of greater acclaim, meanwhile in videogames you can use nothing but flat textures and blank out everyone’s faces because you can’t afford to hire an artist and still end up with a 90% positive rating on Steam.

Lego Movie, but seriously

It’s funny you bring up The Lego Movie, @argumate​, because when reading @lumsel​‘s comment the thing that came to mind was ‘ok, but you could just as easily be talking about animation’. 

Because, like… yeah, people talk about ‘cheap animation’, but what they usually mean is ‘low-effort animation’. Most people can tell Disney apart from… well, whatever the hell This is. 

But it’s difficult for someone who doesn’t know anything about animation to tell the difference between mediocre animation, good animation, and bad-but-not-terrible animation. And a lot of the time people wind up blaming the tools or the technique rather than the final result- like, stop-motion has a bad rap for being ‘uncanny’ and Flash animation has a bad rap for ‘looking cheap’- but it’s because they don’t have the language to talk about why it’s bad, and there’s plenty of good work done in both stop-motion and Flash. 

The difference between animation and ‘traditional’ film is that most of what a layman notices about animation is character design. Unless something is moving like this - generally looking terrifying and uncanny- you generally notice what the characters look like and how they emote more than you notice the specifics of how they move.

It’s why most people like this show:  

But hate this one: 

okay there are lots and lots of good reasons to like Gumball and from what I understand lots and lots of good reasons to hate Angela Anaconda, but you get my point. 

Because of this, in animation, you’re suspending your disbelief from the get-go. Animation is all about stylizing elements of the world to not be realistic, because the less realistic it is, the easier it is to get Right.    

Like, look at this goofus. 

Even the hammiest of ham actors doesn’t move like that (and it’s easier to see that in an endlessly-looping .gif). But because of the way it’s drawn, and because of how exaggerated it is, it still looks right. You can still tell what this is (a person) and what he’s doing (being ridiculously overdramatic for comedic effect). 

I think this is why video games have that ability- in a way, video games are more like animated film than they’re like ‘traditional’ cinema. Both mediums started out with severe limitations that meant they HAD to embrace stylization from day 1 just to get across simple concepts:

… grew more representational as time passed, while still keeping unique features from their origins…

and eventually became able to represent a ‘realistic’ world…

(obviously I couldn’t find a good 2-D animated film for this, but that Hepburn is computer-generated)

…but are often better stylistically when they use the language of their medium than when they try to copy film. 

And there are plenty of indie animators who do critically-acclaimed minimalist stuff,  solo or with a small team- this guy is a pretty good example. His stuff looks like ass on a technical level, but it’s interesting ass. 

TLDR: If you want to understand why games get a pass for being stylized and film doesn’t, you might want to take a look at animation history; the two get treated the same way. 

I cannot let Don Hertzfeldt be mentioned without linking this.

[highlighter-flowcharts]:

(Warning for information hazard that could probably make you very uncomfortable with the world and is difficult to forget) (#pollution cw)

I agree. Although it is worth noting that “anyone you could possibly interact with [is potentially] contaminated” is already true. Most places have laws about reds needing clearly visible red hair because they don’t always because some people make bad choices and have sex with reds (or do not adequately avoid them or report afterward?) and aren’t careful enough to even avoid having children who are going to be red and live predictably miserable and unclean lives. I do not trust people who are that careless or apathetic to decontaminate themselves properly afterward. Probably there exist members of clean castes who are similarly careless and get pregnant and wind up with an invisibly red kid, and nobody but the parents would even know. It’s very unlikely, I hope, but anyone you meet could be actually red and not even know, unless being red feels like something unmistakable? (If any reds read this and want to answer, does it?) There have been ethically bankrupt studies where scientists found that people can’t actually tell what’s polluted if they don’t know about it.

People sometimes are contaminated when a loved one dies or gets sick enough to lose control of their body, and become distressed and don’t remember everywhere they went and everything they touched clearly. There are laws against pollution violation, but they don’t catch everyone. Even a tiny number of contaminated people who are insufficiently careful could spread huge amounts of pollution everywhere they go without anyone knowing. Most public places aren’t cleaned thoroughly anywhere near often enough. We have existed for a long time, and the entire world is statistically unclean.

Reds are unclean but at least they all have training about pollution and there are laws that mean that it is enforced that they have to be very very careful. And they do make it possible to avoid having to actually deal with a lot more directly contaminated things. People should at bare minimum avoid antagonizing them or making their work more difficult. And they are unclean because for ages we have needed someone to be. So we should avoid being cruel to them for doing exactly what they are supposed to.

Maybe if there were robots and reds were in charge of cleaning and maintaining the robots, and everyone’s direct contact with contamination, including theirs, were reduced, and decontamination procedures improved over time, they could at least be less unclean?

(I sometimes have utopian fantasies about a world where greens eventually figure out how to clean genetic pollution, and they do that to everyone in the world just to be sure, and cleaning and decontamination get more effective and easier and eventually automated, and the entire world is clean. Including the reds. And then we get thousands of colony planets and nobody has to worry that their ships or colonies or somehow-seasoned arcologies might be unclean.)