Re-framing Video Games in the Light of Cinema

This editorial introduction to the fourth issue of the peer-reviewed journal G|A|M|E, published in 2015, examines the complex relationship between video games and cinema. Its central argument is that the two media are linked not only through shared textual forms, aesthetics, and iconography, but also through production models, professional roles, consumption habits, and the theories that surround them. The authors contend that film theory can contribute meaningfully to game studies, and that the cinematic character of games extends well beyond narrative and genre into interface design, framing, editing, and spectatorial practices such as YouTube walkthroughs and live streams.

The piece traces the historical tension between game studies, which fought to establish independence from film-based frameworks, and film scholars, who were slow to engage with interactive media. It surveys how cinema has portrayed games across three typologies: films using games as a trope, films structurally influenced by games, and adaptations of game material. It also documents how transmedia franchises and paratexts have expanded game universes, and how games now inform cinematic understandings of time, space, and point-of-view.

The introduction previews the contributions of the issue, which include a reconsideration of André Bazin's writings on cinematic realism, a critique of the cinema-centric "cultural series" applied to games, a proposed methodology for analyzing crossmedial adaptations, studies of narrative time and the loop, a hypertext history of video game representation in film, and an analysis of British game industry myth-making in documentaries and films. The editors frame the volume as an exploration of what is cinematic in games and what is ludic in cinema, acknowledging a relationship that is both prolific in practice and problematic in theory.