From final boss battles to open-world dangers, TV and movies can learn a lot from video games | games

IIt was starting to feel like a test of endurance at the end, but still, like the fool I am, I watched the Stranger Things finale last week. and Spoiler warning: I will talk about it generally in this post. Since roughly 80% of the final season was twenty-something “teens” explaining things to each other while using random 80s stuff to explain convoluted plans and plot points, my expectations weren’t high. After an endless hour, finally, something fun happens, as the kids arm themselves with machine guns and Molotov cocktails and take on a giant demon crab. Aha, I thought – the final boss battle!

Combat was like something out of Monster Hunter, in all its scale and spectacle with a touch of desperation. For too long, video games have sought to imitate cinema. Now cinema (and television) looks like a video game. The structure of Stranger Things’ final season reminded me a lot of Resident Evil: long stretches of slow walking through corridors, with characters loudly exchanging plot information on their way into the action, and occasional explosions of gunfire, screaming monsters, or car chases. Those long periods of relative inaction are more bearable when you have a controller in your hands. I’m all for TV and cinema embracing the action, spectacle and dynamism of video games, but do they have to embrace the unnecessary side quests and open-world bloating as well?

The mutually influential relationship between gaming, television, and cinema has evolved a lot in the past few years. A Generation X and millennial gamers have recently evolved into a creative and commissioning force in these industries. That’s why we’ve come to have people like Jonathan Nolan head up the excellent Fallout TV show, and it’s why all screen video game adaptations have become significantly less terrible in the past five years or so. This also inevitably means that the boundaries between interactive and non-interactive entertainment are becoming more porous: previously game makers were (primarily but not) heavily influenced by film. Exclusively Alien/s and Star Wars), and now that relationship works both ways. Most Marvel movies feel like a video game to me, and not just because they’re full of computer-generated graphics. It’s their temperament and their speed.

Edge of Tomorrow remains the most video game-like movie I’ve ever seen: the premise of dying and coming back to life, and experiencing different things on each run. It’s a sci-fi movie roguelike. I wanted to play Mad Max: Fury Road the entire time I was watching it, and John Wick 4 was literally a fighting game boss rush. When film critics say a film feels like a video game, they often mean it disparagingly; Many cinephiles still see gaming as the inferior form. When I say a movie feels like a video game, that’s a compliment – unless it feels like a video game boring Video game.

That was the problem for me with Stranger Things: every episode felt like loading up an open-world game I hadn’t played in a few months. More and more characters kept appearing, and I didn’t remember or care who most of them were. Between the Upside Down, Vecna’s mindscape, Hawkins’ real world, and a whole new dimension introduced in the last two episodes, there were a lot of locations to track down. Each episode brought the mild despair I feel when I think I’m nearing the end of a very long game, only to discover a whole new area to explore. Meanwhile, the long, agonizing conclusion is only rivaled by the endless post-game hours of Red Dead Redemption 2. Please, let it end already!

Of course, in modern popular culture, nothing is allowed to end right, even if it still makes money. I’m surprised there’s no word on an official Stranger Things video game tie-in (except on old-fashioned smartphones from 2019). Come to think of it, we don’t see a lot of these types of licensed games anymore: in the 2000s and 2000s, most major movies and TV shows were released with interactive accompaniment. Presumably this is due to the increasing cost of game development – ​​you can no longer knock out a humble PlayStation 2 game in nine months – but also, when TV shows feel so much like games, do we really need to adapt anyway?

What are you playing?

The first game I finished in 2026 is Indicaa surreal and somewhat apocalyptic game about a young nun who questions her faith and has conversations with the devil as she embarks on a very strange journey through bleak, snow-covered villages and abandoned factories with an escaped convict. There are flashes of much-needed humor here, but also things about religion, control, and sex that I’ve never seen in a video game before. It’s also part of a small wave of games (see Baby Steps) that mock the gamer’s mentality: there are points, but they don’t make sense; Explore the beaten path and you will find something useless, unimportant, not a secret or something fun. That is if I find anything at all.

Available on: PC, PS5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch
Estimated playing time: Five hours

What are you reading?

• David Rosenco-founder of Sega and an influential figure in the history of arcade video games, died on Christmas Day at the age of 95. Keith Stewart writes about his very interesting life.

• Hollow Knight: Silk Song It was named Game of the Year at the Steam Awards, which were publicly voted on on the PC gaming storefront. It won the Sit Back and Relax award with something I had never heard of: an RV up there yet. I bought it out of curiosity.

• My book about Nintendo will be released next month! It’s called Super Nintendo It’s a lively cultural history of gaming’s most beloved company, based on 20 years of interviews (and 30 years as a gamer). You can support The Guardian by ordering it through Guardian Bookshop, and I’ll also be organizing launch events across the UK throughout February.

What to click on

Question block

In the recent Pushing Buttons, Keza mentioned that the games have been combined into five huge franchises and I was trying to figure out what are these franchises? I guessed GTA, Fortnite, Call of Duty, Minecraft and EA FC, but I don’t have much confidence in this one!

You are not far away. According to data from Circana, the five most played games on PlayStation 5 this year were exactly the same as last year: fortnite, Call of duty, Grand theft auto 5 (including online), Roblox and Minecraft. All of these toys range in age from five to ten years. This stagnation at the top is why every major publisher has spent millions in the past decade trying to create live-service games, and why most of them fail. Meanwhile, last year on Steam, only 14% of total play time was spent on new games released in 2025. Any developer releasing something new, whether blockbuster or indie, is competing for a small slice of players’ time and money. These statistics explain a lot about why the gaming industry is where it is now, and why there is such a gloomy mood among many developers.