I Screen Studies

On his excellent blog Personalizemedia, Gary Hayes has pronged the cinema again. In a post entitled ‘Video: Cinematic Game Renaissance – Game Now Leading Film’, Gary asks

Have we reached a tipping point – with many more user hours spent with games than films are they now more culturally relevant (as in our cultures are saturated with them)? With most films having ‘game-like’ story arcs and, at the last count, nearly 80 films with stories based on game titles in production I am starting to think so.

Game culture and their inherent stories are now absolutely mass media. In a low risk, and dwindling film business, creating stories around experiences that people have already spent 20-40 hours immersed in the story world, is a no brainer, so what we are seeing is a threshold now of game-like films but more importantly films based on games.

It’s time to call it quits in the measurement of the experiential media in relation to cinema. It’s not a war of cultural relevance that one or other can win. Culture doesn’t have to be a contest which begets winners and losers. I think we need to think about negotiating copresence and dance together, like Windradyne at Parramatta, with a slip of paper in our hats with ‘Peace’ written on it.

It is a nobrainer that cinema and games are coming together. It is also a nobrainer that they will stay separate. And there are very many brainers who enjoy both. There are many, particularly, older brainers that enjoy only films and cannot see the attraction of what they perceive to be games … though they probably do crosswords or sudoku or jigsaws. They will be around for a while yet, the older ones, though they will probably die off. These things are probably easily verifiable for someone more concerned with the particulars of statistical nicety.  As they die off, it is natural too that there is a cultural death of sorts for some of their pursuits though they may survive as a rump (or niche) for their successors to fossick through.

It has been ever thus; think music hall, big balls in big country houses, shooting live animals, the Roman vomitorium, all cultural pursuits once enormously popular now less so, but all live on, sort of. I don’t think cinema is going to die off. And I chafe at efforts to smooth its pillow.

There are many, particularly, younger people who enjoy games more than films, though I would hesitate to even unscientifically assert that there is a rump or niche who absolutely never spend any time at all with film.

And there are many in the middle who grew up with film and especially with television who are now stoking the games locomotive and enjoying experiencing enhanced content while navigating avatars and probably working for a living at the same time.

The opposition between cinema and games is a false opposition. Judging one against the other is a bit like comparing apples and chairs.
The assertion of heightened cultural relevance for one media over another, experiential over cinema, reminds me of the vehement demarcation campaign around football in Victoria which has for so long seen soccer represented as the enemy. Territory is to be defended, and the enemy kicked at every opportunity. Hence Das Libero formed to police the boundary and point out the excesses of the AFL mafia.  The thing is, I reckon that there are heaps of people like me who like both football and football (and football, for that matter) – the round ball and the pill and the other one – and to suggest I should be convinced that I have to like one more than the other is a bit futile, really.

So it is with cinema and the world it has created, and experiential media and the worlds they promise.

The worlds of cinema and experiential are not in conflict. Warlike or evangelical crusades to convince (who?) of the virtues, permanence, artistry of games and experiential media and their superiority in some form to cinema are no longer necessary. There is no tipping point. We are not on a see saw with cinema (or ‘heritage media’) sat on one end, and the new funky, heavier stuff on the other.
I think it may be time to move on from the cinema-games dialectic. They will coexist, just like George Lucas says. There will be negotiation, exchange, confrontation, collaboration, such is the nature of relationships.

And of course cinema and games are related.  More professionals are now equipped to work in the production of both, and have for some time. Many Hollywood leaders from the 1970s and 80s on have led – not resisted – this today, as Gary’s excellent (though slow loading out here on the old juice) film from his post shows so well. George Lucas, James Cameron, John Landau.

The fact is, and I don’t think this really is news to anyone least of all cinephiles and their marginalia (like me), cinema is a minor cultural pursuit. It is still enormous, but it is not the thing that most people do or spend their time with or spend money on. But lots of people still have time for it. It is not the primary income stream even for the Hollywood majors – none of whom I would guess are anything like the size of EA (which Gary notes has, staggeringly, 8000 employees), though they might have been before the Second World War.

I think there is still a great future for people committed to being filmmakers. I don’t think they will all spend all their professional life working in film, because that group probably will diminish for all sorts of reasons. But some will continue to make films. They will almost certainly be part of a suite of content rather than a stand-alone project. They may be seen in the cinema, though cinema exhibition will change, is changing.

There will be films of games, and games of films, and gamefilms and filmgames.

Let’s stop seeing them as in opposition (or even in comparison in lots of ways), and enjoy them together. Let’s end with evangelism and its desire for final conquest. Let’s not hold up the knife or the mirror to each other. Let’s stop playing this like the other needs to be taken on, overcome, and ultimately either destroyed or made like its conqueror.