Rockstar isn’t giving videogames a bad name. Neither are Jack Thompson, Leland Yee, Hilary Clinton or Joe Lieberman.

It is Joss Whedon.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer signed off the air on May 20, 2003, after seven successful seasons. It garnered respectful ratings for airing on the WB and UPN, but its legacy has lived on, becoming a pop culture phenomenon and a major creative influence in television today. But, aside from the various trade paperbacks and side projects within the Buffyverse, it wasn’t enough – the people wanted to spend another season with the Scoobies.

Last month, Mr. Whedon granted them their wish. BtVS Season Eight premiered in comic book form, selling through its initial printing of over 100,000 copies and warranting a second printing to satisfy demand. Given the relative niche market for comic books, this is a hands-down, bonafide cross-over smash.

Comics and movies have been cross-pollinating for years with relative success. Major comic IPs have made for some big Hollywood blockbusters over the years, but it hasn’t been until recently when Hollywood has been churning out lesser-known franchises into box office gold. Sin City, Road to Perdition, V for Vendetta and recently 300 are all examples of more artistic works translated to the silver screen with success. And Frank Miller, Neil Gaiman, and Alan Moore are now practically household names, at least with the Tinseltown crowd.

But as with every healthy relationship, it goes both ways. The comic industry has also had its fair share of borrowed talent. J. Michael Straczynski, Kevin Smith and the aforementioned Joss Whedon have all put their name to shake up some storied comic franchises like Spiderman, Daredevil and X-Men.

Surely, we all have our favorite canceled TV shows we’d like to see continue on in some form or another; I know I have mine. And then I started thinking, wouldn’t it be great if we could have a Millennium Season 4 comic? Or an X-Files season with Fox Mulder back with Scully, and Chris Carter penning the script? I could go on and on.

Then it hit me – why not use videogames as a way to continue favorite-but-canceled franchises?

Videogames have long suffered because of poor storytelling, and as the videogame industry approaches Hollywood-like status this point is becoming increasingly more difficult to hide. Hideo Kojima is viewed as a pioneer of videogame storytelling, but taken on their own the stories are laughable at best. Epic’s Gears of War seems to hit random bullet points of a greater story outline, leaving the rest for the inevitable sequel. With any given game, tech comes first and foremost; narrative, on the other hand, is almost always neglected. Even with established, and undoubtedly expensive, licenses; the story is tasked to some staff writer who writes the equivalent of children’s movie storybook, and its delivery inevitably lags behind the technology used to tell it.

Blue sky time: wouldn’t it be great the day a game production has A-list Hollywood actors, lead by real Hollywood directors, reading scripts written by Hollywood screenplay writers, with music composed by Hollywood composers, from a story by and overseen from a high-profile Hollywood producer? Not that Hollywood is the answer, but for anyone who has played Gears of War, it could have used a little help from a professional.

It’s a give-and-take relationship – franchises could expand their visibility and extend their universe via a new medium, while videogames would benefit from having someone at the helm experienced with creating the franchise and skilled at crafting narratives. Stories would no longer be born of technology, but rather games would be born out of stories. That’s how it should be. And in borrowing a page from comics, having “names” behind these titles would not only add much-needed maturity to the gaming industry, but bringing it closer to the film industry of which it closely follows.

So why not have Joss Whedon write dialog and story for a Buffy Season, told episodically, by a videogame? Chris Carter last wrote the story for the X-Files game Resist or Serve in 2004, but why not have him oversee production on a faithful continuation of the X-Files series? If Buffy Season Eight can have such cross-over success with a comic book, just think of the success it might have with a larger, more mainstream market, given the same attention? The last time a big Hollywood celeb put his muscle in a game production, that person was Vin Diesel with his Tigon Studios, and the end result was the Game of the Year nominee The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. As we all know, that didn’t turn out so bad. John Singleton’s Fear & Respect was canceled early in the project; and the next big Hollywood collaboration comes by way of China, in John Woo’s Stranglehold, a sequel to the 1992 foreign film Hard Boiled, both staring Chow Yun-Fat.

The videogame industry continues to give high profile work to lightweights like Susan O’Connor, while Whedon effortlessly writes circles around anything its best has ever churned out – and I’m only talking about his work in comics, for cryin’ out loud. Until he’s given the chance to show everyone how a game should be, let’s all load up Gears to remind us how bad we really have it.