War of the Worlds: the Convergence of Films and Games

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"In recent years the two forms have adapted to each other's styles, with film narratives such as Inception conceptually structured around levels of a mission, while the newest games increasingly offer the experience of interactive movies."

When talking about Fahrenheit - "this innovative gameplay style required players to assess their environment and make split-second decisions to pivot the story in entirely different directions."

"The game marked a conscious shift toward narrative-driven drama within the industry, and as the next generation of consoles established themselves on the market it became clear that video games were beginning to take a more cinematic approach to storytelling."

"...Heavy Rain for the PS3, employing Wii-influenced Move technology to allow the player unprecedented access into the game world - literally allowing for their physical movements and intellectual calculation to impact the direction of the plot." - Mentions to be coming movie adaption.

Inception

"...allows for different layers of reality to be engaged with at the same time, each containing a specific set of goals to be completed. Nolan's screenplay is entirely expository, functioning as a kind of in-film instruction manual which checklists the various achievements available in each level. Scenes of the team formulating the heist essentially perform as cut-scenes, and Ariadne (Ellen Page) acts as the training icon, ensuring that we're keeping up with how to proceed through each mission ('wait, whose subconscious are we going into?'). The action itself - Fischer's kidnapping, the hotel chase and snowy HQ siege - forms the basic mission structure."

Sucker Punch

"Much like American McGee's Alice video game series which warps Lewis Carroll's popular fairy-tale, the plot here finds a female protagonist institutionalised and imagining an outlandish underworld to cope with emotional torment."

"McGee's macabre masterpiece succeeded in genuinely empowering the Gothic, dollied-up Alice by allowing the character strengths key to her personality, but Snyder's ingénues are mere cardboard cutouts, arranged in schoolgirl and burlesque costumes."

"His unchecked imagination finds them battling WWII zombies and fire-breathing dragons, with each 'interlude' posing a different task to be completed. The training icon here is Scott Glenn's Wise Man, who instructs the girls that they

"will need to find five items... a map... then fire... then a knife... and a key. The fifth thing is a mystery."

"The cut-scenes here illustrate the girl's trials in Lennox House, and the gameplay has them squaring off against myriad mythic foes (recalling Resident Evil, Ninja Gaiden and Dragon Age)."

Changing Narratives

"cinema has made an unusual effort to distance itself from narrative, instead building stories around set-pieces (or as we would call them levels)."

"I don't see them attempting to become movies - I think they're trying to fill in the narrative gaps that movies just don't have time to consider."

"In cinema the protagonist would be tasked with bringing down the oppressive regime, and within a 120-minute timeframe they would do so - and the focus must always be on action, as within this constrained timeframe there is little room for politics or character development."

"In so many action movies we see the character outnumbered and outgunned, forced to improvise in impossible scenarios. We know they'll always make it. But in Far Cry 2 tension is established for the fact that you are tasked with improvising, scouting out each location, finding the best place to strike and ensuring that you have enough ammo to down every thug in the guerrilla camp."

"This is the sort of experience that only video games can provide, and in this sense it's arguable that they have overtaken movies not only in the storytelling stakes, but also in atmosphere and immersion..."

"The cinematic reference point would be Michael Mann, whose grain-filled digital aesthetic is beautifully recreated to paint the neon-lit dystopia of Shanghai."

"Throughout the game (and not only in cut-scenes) shaky-cam, lens flare, soft focus and piercing sound design are employed to amplify the experience, pinning the player into the middle of each firefight."

"So many contemporary action movies employ the same effects, but rapid-fire editing disorients the viewer and displaces them from the geography of the firefight. Dog Days succeeds because there's a constant third-person focus and we control its line of sight - we are the film crew, essentially, pulling the director's vision into a coherent whole."

And Now ... the Moral Panic

"video games have irrevocably succeeded movies as the media's pitchfork topic, constantly decried as the source of society's moral decay."

"...the politics of gaming and cinema have become almost interchangeable. Rockstar's Manhunt was banned in Australia, New Zealand and Germany for the charge of sensationalising violence and indulging torture - but what authorities missed was the game's Orwellian temper, with an omnipresent dictator (an ex-film director) forcing the player through a series of 'scenes' for his snuff film."

"The repugnant acts of violence, rated on a 1-5 scale for audience satisfaction, is clearly mocking of a Big Brother culture, and the game's bleak social commentary means that the violence is supposed to be barbaric - our emotional investment depends on it."

"It seems that nowadays the film-going public are much more accepting of violence in cinema, with most 12A titles containing quite harsh and impactful action (The Dark Knight's pencil-in-eye-gouging springs to mind). But games come under scrutiny for their interactivity with violence, and therefore the idea that they implicate us - the player - in crime and decadence."

"The defenders of Modern Warfare face the same opposition as supporters of The Evil Dead (Raimi, 1981) did back in the early 80s, when a series of gory slashers found themselves on trial for obscenity and - laughably - the potential to corrupt a majority of their audience. This led to the creation of the Video Recordings Act 1984, which decreed that all films distributed for home entertainment must be classified appropriately, and stickered with a corresponding rating by the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification)."

"...in recent years, as games have made a conscious move toward narrative, cinematic storytelling, so has the number of officially classified titles increased. We no longer live in an 8-bit world. Video games can now depict sex, drug use and torture - they can pin us into the middle of war-zones, alien worlds and zombie outbreaks."

"Each art form has a considerable impact on the other - Sucker Punch and Heavy Rain are practically interchangeable in their medium. Of course, films still hold the monopoly and many video games take their inspiration from Hollywood"