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. Drawing on Gaudreault and Marion's theory, the authors contend that this alignment is a cultural and historical construction rather than a natural fit, and they call on scholars to use film theory with awareness of its limits. Their central thesis is methodological: games should be understood through their own traditions, including real-time animation, parallel projection, cartography, and text-based interactive fiction, as well as through the ludic and computational dimensions that cinema-focused analysis tends to underweight.

The authors support this argument with several kinds of evidence. A search-based comparison in August 2014 found 384,000 Google Scholar results for "video games," against 241,000 for "computer games" and 19,600 for "digital games," illustrating how dominant the video-based terminology has become. They also point to historical episodes such as Cinematronics, Cinemaware, and the 1990s full-motion video "interactive movie" craze as cases where the cinematic model was actively pursued, and they trace the 1970s shift in which home consoles such as Atari's Home PONG and the VCS turned television into an interactive, leisure-oriented device that positioned games as video rather than cinema.

The essay's scope centers on the history of home video and console technology from the 1970s onward, with its theoretical concerns spanning game studies, media theory, and film studies. Its conclusions are largely methodological rather than empirical: the authors argue that montage and camera-based looking can obscure the authorial choices embedded in game imagery, and that scholars must decide when a camera, pen, or keyboard is the appropriate analytical tool. Understanding the relationship between film and video games, they conclude, requires situating one's work within a broader scholarly lineage rather than importing film assumptions wholesale.