That’s a good answer. In that respect, a film is a lesser medium for the complexity of top tier video games.
But that doesn’t excuse arcade games and most platformers. For example, Disney made a fantastic film about multiple fake video games that included a few real ones.
Oh, I mean, I don't really know why you'd ever make a movie off of an arcade game or platformer... That's never made sense to me. It reminds me of a few years back when board game companies were selling the movie rights to things like Chutes and Ladders. Like... okay, but why?
I do think it's interesting that there are a number of decent movies
about videogames. Wargames, The Wizard, Wreck-It Ralph, Scott Pilgrim... I think that's probably a lot easier to do.
Thinking about this a little more, a game that came to mind was 2016's Hitman. There was already a Hitman movie (there might've been two? I can't remember), but I think it misses the point of the game. It's a game where at the start of each mission, you're given a target (maybe more than 1), and possibly a secondary objective. And then... the game is your sandbox. The reason I'm bringing this up, is that over the course of 2016 Hitman's first "season" (the game was released episodically), it attempted to shoehorn in a story arc throughout, but that arc was hamfisted an
super thin, even by game standards. It was just sort of
there, but none of it mattered. What the game forgot, and what I think the movie(s) forgot, is that Hitman The Game is about
how you carry out your mission, and the reason the game is so special in that respect is that on its best levels it allows for insane amounts of freedom.
Put another way: I can tell some great stories about individual missions in Hitman, but so much of that is personal to
me and the situations that a specific sequence of choices I made got me in. I don't think it translates well to a movie for that reason, and I think the game suffered when it tried to encroach on my own storytelling by shoehorning in an unnecessary plot of its own.