Getting tired of all my recent posts on gaming issues? Too bad, this stuff is cool.

The new Beowulf movie is getting folks talking (again) about the anticipated convergence of movies and computer games (great Wired article on this). This has been a hot topic for some time, at least since Pixar started making theatricals. When Final Fantasy came out in 2001, it seemed like a trend was born. FF was a game that became a full-length CGI theatrical. "CGI" is a computer generated image.

But we've seen a lot of games-from-movies and movies-from-games over the last few years – what's the next step? Currently you have completely different production platforms. Although virtually all movies these days employ CGI techniques, you still mostly have actors and live action shot on film, while game production is all CGI.

Beowulf, like FF and the kinds of animated films pioneered by Pixar, is a full-length CGI movie. Production of the film included actors wearing motion-capture rigs, which allowed for digital rendering of the actor's movements. The images are CGI produced, but a lot of the motion is derived from live-action. Critics are saying that the result is not as good as either live action or traditional CGI films, comparing the quality to computer game cut-scenes.

Quality issues aside, now that all of this is being captured digitally, we have a lot of new possibilities for bridging the two platforms:

This will mean that tie-in video games will become even more important, because soon enough there will be no technological difference between what you're playing and what you're watching. It'll all look the same. They'll share assets. They'll build movies and games together from the ground up.

Oh yeah. And what are "assets"? Could be a character/actor's likeness, artwork, just about anything. Once those digital assets are released to the public (in games, movie DVDs), you can bet that the media will be cracked right away, and the data extracted and manipulated. You think we'll see characters from Beowulf appear on Youtube in compromising positions? Absolutely – you ever read any fan fiction? How long will it take before some 14-year-old kid from Shenzhen finds a fun way to use the digital version of Angelina Jolie from Beowulf? Somehow I don't think that kid is going to be worried about copyright infringement.

What about censorship and other restrictions? China censors games and movies, but there is also a very restrictive quota on imports of foreign movies. If movies and games converge, what will this mean to the film quota? Maybe some day a CGI-produced Spiderman movie won't be released in China, but the game version, which could include actual scenes from the theatrical, wouldn't be subject to the quota?