Gaming Cinema

The confession of most tertiary educated people (be it university or film school) is that most of what they learned was acquired in the pub with their peers over beer after class rather than the classroom itself. Whilst I’d like to think, as a teacher, that this is not entirely true there have certainly been a number of rather enlightening pub-based conversations ive observed and particpated in with students.

One that I found highly intriguing was the suggestion from a student, fresh from completing their first semester, that the future of cinema was a conjoined, unified, hybrid mode of interactive movie-gaming. The idea that supposedly ‘passive’ cinema would be supplanted and reform into this singular new and hybrid form.

It’s a simplistic but intriguing idea and one that has floated around before. But, as the old adage goes, to understand the future you need to look to the past. Are there any historical precedents to support this idea? Is there an historical example of where a old-media form has engulfed and replaced a new-media form?

The obvious touchstone is the printed word. Guttenberg’s printing press unleashed the written word upon the world. From painstakingly hand-written bibles to mass production. From there we get the newspaper, the magazine, mass publishing, the novel, the comic-book and every other perceivable printed literary mode. We can look to the rise of Desktop Publishing as a major ‘revolution’ in how mass media is made and consumed and the culture by which it is engaged but fundamentally the Written Word, as a form didn’t change. The birth of the magazine didn’t obliterate or supplant the novel. Instead it expanded the contexts of reading; created more options and variability in reading experience, distribution and engagement.



We might also look to music, pre-dating the written word and see similar patterns that show a media-form expanding and becoming multiplicitous rather than expunging what went before. The invention of the stringed instrument didn’t mean the death of percussion and human voice from which all music began.

So if we look at computer gaming and interactive forms and ask will they replace cinema as we know it, the answer is to say that there isnt any historical indicator to suggest that this will be the case; no precedent. The Magazine didn’t replace the Book, it expanded the options for experience the written word. The Guitar didnt replace the Drum, it expanded the means by which music could be generated. Thus we might conclude that the Computer Game wont replace or dissolve ‘Cinema’, it simply expands the platforms for the experience of the moving image.

From this I would take another step, dissolving an often cited line of seperation…. Gaming IS Cinema.

Cinema, by definition, is the ‘art of the moving image’ and so the fundamental problem is actually to view gaming as somehow separate and apart from cinema. Gaming IS cinema because it is an artform of the moving image. The fact that it is interactive is neither unique nor special. A DVD with multiple angles and a selectable directors commentary is Interactive. It may be a less sophisticated form of intercativity than a game but a magazine might be seen as less sophisticated than a novel but that doesn’t make any less a work of Writing and an art of the written word.

One might argue that in games the player and their choices effect the outcome which is not the same as in cinema where the outcome is pre-ordained. Yet this idea of varible player directed outcomes in games is somewhat of a misnomer. The number of games where the outcome is actually varible is very small outside of ‘complete’ and ‘incomplete’. Almost every first-person shooter game ever made steers irrevocably towards a singular ending. There have been recent exceptions such as Bioshock where the ‘moral’ choices of the player can change the nature and narrative of the epilogue but even here the reuslt is nothing more than the gaming equivalent of ‘DVD Alternate Endings’. Even open-world ‘sandbox’ games such as Oblivion or Grand Theft Auto imply a varible multi-path story but those paths are none the less pre-defined, the player may chose the order and manner in which they play through those story archs but the end results are still pre-defined and largely unavoidable (so long as you ont stop playign altogether).

There is obviosuly more to exmine here than a journal-post can accomodate but the key point is that making a seperation between gaming and cinema on the basis of ‘interactivity’ is to argue difference based only on degrees of interactivity, which is tenuous at best. Likewise to mark distinction by whether the viewer/player effects the outcome is very far from consistent or even common in games. What is more important by being more useful is to comprehend the realtionship betwene gaming and cinema not by what seperates them but rather by what unifies them; what is consistent rather than what is divergent.

What is fundamental to understanding the evolution of media-forms; how they expand, multiply, exchange and evolve is a set of ideas from media theorists Bolter and Grusin who penned the framework of Re-Mediation. In simple terms their idea is that NEW media begins by replicating the forms, tenets, language and modes of OLD media before it finds its own language elements. For example the birth of Photography re-mediated paitning. Early cinema re-mediated Theatre and Photography before finding more unique sensibilities. This same pattern can be seen in much computer gaming; games re-mediating other forms. An example would be games (particularly FPS) which have long re-mediated traditional cinema - the cut scene, the ‘passive’ non-interactve’ cinematic sequence that plays out as a movie between playable sections of the game. It’s interesting that the first major FPS game that did away with the movie-like cut scene to fully immerse the player from beginning to end in the singular person first-person perspective was Half Life. The FPS genre remediated movies before finding a more unique visual language - the unbroken single ‘take’ perspective.

(Episode 2 of the GameProbe series looks specifically at Half Life2 and the Unbroken Perspective)



It therefore becomes highly problematic to view new forms of cinematic experience such as computer gaming as some how consuming ‘cinema’; they are of themselves cinema and so their arrival is simply the evolutionary expansion of cinema. The diversification of cinematic experience into multi-platform and scalable delivery through a process of re-mediation rather than the more traditional singular and unified mode that dominated cinema for most of the first 100 years of its life.

So to really understand what ‘Digital Cinema’ - as a cultural entity and arts sphere more so than a technology- we need to take a more broad perspective of where the overlaps and influences between cinematic forms are because it’s the joins between that encompass the dynamic possibilities and long-term influences of what the many faces of cinema will become. Old-media isn’t replaced or consumed, it’s simply re-mediated and expanded.

A fascinating essay by Manovich entitled plainly What Is Digital Cinema? is available online here and it provides this insight….

“We no longer think of the history of cinema as a linear march towards only one possible language, or as a progression towards more and more accurate verisimilitude. Rather, we have come to see its history as a succession of distinct and equally expressive languages, each with its own aesthetic variables”

Lev Manovich