Hollywood is attacking the video game business, and we need it to stop.

There's no way around this, frankly; it's an inescapable conclusion. While game developers have successfully adapted a number of movies in recent years and created some truly excellent titles, it appears that the road between Hollywood and your PC/Xbox/PlayStation/GameCube is a one-way street. Virtually every attempt to turn a video game into a movie has failed at the box office, in the eyes of fans and critics, or both. It's time to take up arms and demand that Hollywood put an end to this shameful practice, before it's too late.

You may be wondering why this is even a problem. Why should the movie adaptation of Resident Evil, for example, ruin the experience of playing the game? Well, it doesn't - at least, not yet. But there are other things to consider.

First, bad movies give video games a bad reputation. Every pile of crap that producers fling up on the silver screen only reinforces the view held by many people that the video game is not a serious art form. It may be an unfair case of guilt by association, but a lot more people than you think out there are making the "bad movies = bad games" connection.

Second, gamers will continue to play their favourite games even after those titles are perverted into disappointing movies, but what about non-gamers? It's foolish to think that this business doesn't require continued growth to succeed, especially when blockbuster titles have production budgets as big as some of today's films. Game developers and publishers want to bring more non-gamers to their work, and I'd argue that it's increasingly harder to do these days. For example, how in the world could I convince a non-gaming horror movie fan to play BloodRayne, when the movie version is so widely panned as being disgraceful?

Third, and perhaps most importantly, bad video game movies are a threat to our way of life, because films and games are getting closer to co-production every day. We now have screenwriters authoring video games - as is the case with the forthcoming X-Men: The Official Game - and titles being developing simultaneously with their related films. This growing synergy is a threat, because the poor quality that afflicts these awful movies could potentially infect the games themselves. There's nothing to stop the poisonous backwash of hack directors like Uwe Boll and Paul W. S. Anderson from flowing downstream and washing over the games themselves, coating them with a layer of filth and mediocrity. Hollywood may be able to churn out crappy, big budgets products by the dozen and brush off their miserable failings, but the game industry, in its current state, simply cannot afford that luxury.