For senior Paul Jiang, most movie or show adaptations of games have been synonymous with terms like underwhelming, erroneous, and numerous other negative connotations. However, with an IMDb score of 9.2/10 and Rotten Tomatoes rating of 100%, Jiang said the Netflix show Arcane, which is based on the game League of Legends, has done what very few adaptations have done before. 

“I thought Arcane was fantastic,” Jiang said. “It revolutionized a genre that had remarkably few good entries prior. It builds the world from the ground up and makes it easy for any audience to understand what’s going on.”

However, despite Arcane’s unprecedented success, Jiang said many other game companies should determine whether their product is a good fit for an adaptation before following Arcane’s footsteps.

“Some games just aren’t fit to be adapted to a different medium, and sometimes no adaptation is better than a bad one,” Jiang said. “That being said, if the company has the means to create what they believe could be a competent adaptation, I think it’s no different than adapting a show or movie from any other medium, book or otherwise.”

Similarly, Esports club sponsor Dylan Gentilcore said he agreed with Jiang and outlined numerous risks involved with creating an underwhelming adaptation.

“(Game companies) risk significantly hurting their own brand and audience (with a bad adaptation). Customers will think they can’t even manage their own product, their own property, (and may wonder) why they should continue to have good faith.”

However, despite the risks, Gentilcore said he supported the idea of adaptations in order for companies to expand their player base and business.

“(Adaptations are) another way to activate (different) audiences. You might have people who have never had a gaming PC or console, who have never been interested in a game as complicated as League of Legends, but now we have people who see Arcane and they want to buy merchandise focused around the characters; now, they want to go and play the game or try out some version of the game that’s accessible to them,” Gentilcore said.

Similarly, junior Alex Park said he agreed with Gentilcore, indicating how an adaptation may add to the emotional depth of a game.

“I think adapting games into movies and tv shows seems like a good concept on paper since it allows companies to expand on the overall lore and story behind many popular titles, which would otherwise not be possible in the game itself,” he said.

However, Park said most adaptations face an issue that must be cleared in order to benefit a game’s player base and business.

“One big issue of (video game adaptations) is that they cater towards already existing fans of these games rather than trying to bring in new audiences. In my experience, if I am not familiar with the source material of the adaptation, the movie is very hard to follow and stay engaged in or I don’t even bother watching it,” Park said. “Companies should do a better job with their world-building and characterization in these types of shows so that everyone can enjoy them.”