Enraged ‘Until Dawn’ reactions keep pouring in, but they’re all missing the bigger picture

The latest trailer for Sony’s Until Dawn film adaptation has brought with it a slight shift in reception. Where its debut trailer was met with vitriol for only marginally resembling the Supermassive Games hit, this one is being received slightly more positively.

And yet, the vitriol is still bubbling underneath. Among the chill wait-and-seers and those who have wised up to the fact that this film is a standalone story set in the Until Dawn universe rather than a straight adaptation of the video game, some are transfixed on how this adaptation appears to be spitting upon the game’s narrative achievements.

But upon examining how games and stories actually work, it’s obvious that a direct adaptation of the Until Dawn video game would not only fall at the first hurdle, but illuminate a core issue with video game narratives that the medium at large refuses to address.

Until Dawn is defined by its butterfly effect system, in which players influence the beats and outcome of the story by making choices (for instance, in a life-or-death situation, you can choose to keep your current player character safe at the risk of letting another character die, or vice versa). This is bolstered by an autosave system that prevents players from returning to an earlier save and making a different decision for a more preferable outcome.

Therein lies the problem: Until Dawn does not have an ideal outcome, because every individual variation of the story is theoretically correct, and therefore arbitrary. This is partially why a straight film adaptation of Until Dawn would never work. The value of stories lies in emotional human elements that reckon with ideas, dilemmas, and morals, primarily through character. If a character dies in a good film, the death is likely significant to the wider idea(s) that the film is trying to capture. Another character might speak a line that evokes the attitude of the story, and another still might have a negative arc that might not be what you want for them but is exactly what the story needs to make its point.

The value of games, meanwhile, lies in choices, which are made with a self-sufficient goal in mind. In chess, the goal is to capture the king, but the choices you make to reach that goal — no matter your skill level — are not so straightforward, and are further influenced by your opponent’s own literacy of the game. Navigating those choices in pursuit of the goal is what we know as gameplay.

The problem with games that manifest as choice-sensitive stories (like Until Dawn) is that the goal becomes decentralized — the goal is now whatever the players want it to be, and the story exists to satisfy player preference instead of presenting its ideas for the audience to then bring themselves to. Story endings become trophies to collect and rank instead of the period at the end of the storyteller’s sentence.

And this culture of preferential catering is precisely what’s enabling the increasingly dire straits of the film zeitgeist. Proponents of A.I. will try to sell consumers on it by emphasizing how it can make anything you want. A sci-fi horror film starring Anya Taylor-Joy and the long-deceased Christopher Reeve? You can have it! It might have no personality, but if it exists for no other reason than your consumption, it doesn’t need one. That sci-fi horror film wouldn’t be a story — it would be a product. You’re never going to see a top filmmaker ask their audiences what they want to see, while major game studios incorporate consumer quite frequently.

Will the Until Dawn film be any good? Who knows? Is the game’s appeal fundamentally incompatible with what a good story can and should be giving us? Yes, and for the sake of both gaming and stories, we should stop pretending otherwise.