I found this Gamasutra editorial by Chris Remo interesting (and not just because he mentions POP).  He dares to ask: Why do today’s video games (and the movies based on them) tend so relentlessly toward the epic, at the expense of other kinds of stories?

Is it because games are often played as power fantasies? Is it because, when the default progression mechanic in most games is combat, grand conflict and badassery just make the most sense?

It’s a good question.  I saw Star Trek last week at the Arclight Hollywood with friends whose movie tastes run more towards art-house fare.  (I loved it, they didn’t.) After the first three trailers (Transformers, Terminator, and GI Joe), my friend leaned over to me in some perplexity and said: “I feel like I’ve just seen the same trailer three times in a row.”

Coincidentally, Terry Gilliam made much the same remark in today’s LA Times:

Terry Gilliam went to the movies the other night, and this is what he saw. “Trailers from ‘Transformers,’ ‘ G.I. Joe,’ ‘ Harry Potter’; they all had the same explosions, the same sound mix, the same rhythms, it was all the same film,” the director says, still not quite believing it. ” Hollywood’s been doing this for 20 years. When’s it going to end?”

[Small world: Gilliam's new film, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, was edited by Mick Audsley, who is also one of the editors of the POP movie.]

Kurosawa once said that he made movies for people in their twenties. For me, that’s the key.  Epics are the kind of movies I loved most when I was in my teens and early twenties.  I liked other kinds of movies too, but I lived for epics.  Movies (and video games) mattered more to me at that time in my life than they ever have since. This being a business, it’s fair to note that I spent a far greater proportion of my time and disposable income consuming them than I do now. So in a way, I’m still making movies and games for my 20-year-old self.

These days, when I go to the movies (or the Xbox), be it Star Trek, Bioshock or whatever, what holds my interest most are the small, quirky, human moments that somehow transcend the familiar epic framework, make it come alive one more time. They’re getting harder to find.