"The occasional awful movie can be chalked up to bad directing/acting/writing/etc., but why have traditional screen adaptations of video games been consistently terrible? I suspect a huge part is simply due to the difficulties of translating across mediums; video games are very different from a show or a movie, and turning a good game into a good show is way more difficult than it seems. Shows and movies do not require any input from the watcher outside of pressing the “Play” button, whereas games are very interactive (and a lot of times the story is also integrated into gameplay). So to turn a video game into a movie or a show requires removing essentially its core element, the “game” part, so everything else needs to be really good to make up for it, especially the writing, as there is no longer gameplay to carry the experience."