Dreamworks Picks Up Feature from 'Heroes' Hiro

It truly has become a geek's world. Heroes star, former Industrial Light & Magic effects artist, gamer, and all-around cool nerd Masi Oka has signed a deal with Dreamworks to develop his feature film The Defenders, about a group of MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role-playing game) players who get together for a real-life adventure.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Oka and writer Gary Whitta bonded over their love of "World of Warcraft" and pondered the idea that in online games, according to Oka, "[y]ou can be whoever you want to be. The question came to me: What if you had to live up to the person you created in the virtual world?"

Dreamworks producers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci are on board after getting an improvised pitch from Oka, who'd come in to their offices to talk about an acting job. After hearing from Orci that the producers wanted to make "the kinds of movies that Amblin used to do, that combined an innocence with the adventure," Oka -- a big fan of The Goonies -- took the opportunity to sell them on his project. It worked, and D.J. Caruso (Eagle Eye) is now set to direct.

With gaming as huge as it is, it's not surprising that it's finally making its way into the plots of Hollywood movies. The real puzzler is why it's taken so long. The super-low-budget, straight-to-video 2002 indie comedy The Gamers was one of the first to focus on game nerds, but little else has followed, save the brilliant webisodic comedy The Guild (and if you haven't seen The Guild, you need to head over to the website and check it out right this minute. Seriously. We'll wait.)

Even if you're not one of the thousands (millions? Billions?) of online gamers who would happily buy a ticket to see a movie about your obsessive pastime (if only so you could hit the message boards afterward and complain about everything the filmmakers got wrong), game culture is a natural platform for storytelling. Orci told the Hollywood Reporter, "People are expecting you to be there and to contribute; it's a team, sort of, even though it's virtual," noting that Oka and Whitta, being gamers themselves, are in a great position to tell such a story. "Masi and Gary have put in countless hours in this world and have found a way to make it work for those that don't play the game, but also for the millions that do."