The Game's The Thing...

I can't remember exactly what caused me to recently search for the letter a on the Zavvi.com website.  I think I had been puzzled by it's interpretation of a search term I'd put in so I tried just searching "a" to see if the result would be any item with the letter a in at all - in other words, most items.

As it turned out, it was not.  The results given were all items featuring the word "a" (the indefinite article if you've been to university).  Curious, though what about I don't know, I searched for the definite article instead ("the") and noticed straight away that there were huge numbers of Blu-Rays and DVDs in the search results but not that many games.  I thought that there would probably be more films for sale on the site and when I checked there were, but not by enough to account for the disparity of "the" results.

What I'm getting round to saying is that 1331 out of 4557 Blu-rays had the word the in the title but only 51 out of 402 PS3 game titles did.  That is 29.21% of Blu-rays and only 12.69% of PS3 games.  To draw a slightly questionable conclusion from this, films are more than twice as likely to have a "the" in the title than games.

Looking down the list of games featuring "the", there were a reasonable number of "The Ultimate Edition", "The complete Edition", "Game of the Year Edition" etc.  In other words, "the" had not featured in the original title for those games.

In the list of Blu-Rays, it was immediately striking that many of them started with "The", a feature which not many of the games shared and I think here I can draw my only substantial conclusion (assuming any of this is worth writing), film titles are chosen to inject one important quality which games are less likely to require...

(pause)

...drama.

I can imagine films called The Borderlands, The Dishonoured (I will spell it correctly), The Assassin's Creed or even The Little Big Planet but game titles work differently.  I could just as easily imagine chopping the "Thes" off film names and giving them to games: Godfather, Usual Suspects, Bourne Identity and (and I think this is the best illustration), Deer Hunter.

The film The Deer Hunter is about a guy who happens to hunt deer but also falls in love with his mate's girlfriend then goes off to Vietnam to fight in the war but when he comes home his mate stays in Saigon with post traumatic stress but our bloke soon realises he can't stay at home and enjoy a life there (including a relationship with his friends girl, who is now interested) until he's done everything in his power to bring his friend home.

A game called Deer Hunter would involve hunting deer and slowly improving your skills at hunting.  It might involve playing a guy who starts out hunting deer but goes on to shooting people for some reason but it would not be the personal story about an individual and the unique events that happen to him that the film is, it would be an ongoing process which most players would not get to the end of.

That lack of specificity is the reason a game has no "The" and a film does.