Cinematronics

De-framing Video Games from the Light of Cinema

Perron and Arsenault's 2015 essay, "De-framing Video Games from the Light of Cinema," argues that video game scholarship has been shaped too heavily by a cinema-centric framing that treats film as the default lens for understanding games.

• The essay argues that video game scholarship has been overly shaped by a cinema-centric framing that treats film as the default lens, and that this alignment is a cultural and historical construction rather than a natural fit.
• Its central thesis is methodological: games should be analyzed through their own traditions, including real-time animation, parallel projection, cartography, and text-based interactive fiction, along with ludic and computational dimensions that cinema-focused analysis underweights.
• Drawing on Gaudreault and Marion's theory, the authors call on scholars to use film theory with awareness of its limits rather than importing film assumptions wholesale.