Impact of Videogame Culture on Contemporary Filmmaking

As digital technology continues to advance, the influence of video games on contemporary filmmaking has become increasingly common, blurring the line between these two artistic forms of entertainment. Storytelling and visual aesthetics of video games are inspiring many filmmakers who want to express new levels of immersive potential of films, by mimicking the interactive nature of game narratives. The goal of this paper is to explore ways in which computer game culture have influenced contemporary cinema, leading to the popularization of complex narratives. Through examining the complex narration in, mostly, non-linear narratives of puzzle films, and even more complex narration in, mostly, linear narratives whose structure is based on the videogame rules and mechanics, we will be able to compare different categories of movies remediating video games, as well as the affects it has on the viewer. In order to understand contemporary media-multiplied environment and the hybrid nature of cinema, the theoretical part of the paper will start with intermediality studies, and its crucial role in studying digital cinema. This first chapter will focus on the relationship between the two mediums in a broader sense, through examining the concepts of remediation and media convergence, where this more holistic approach will touch upon economic, social and cultural aspects of intersection of these two media. The aim of the chapter two will be to show how the era of internet and computer games had affected the classical Hollywood narration, and immediacy as its dominant strategy for immersing the viewer, creating movies that show potential for interactive cinema, with Christopher Nolan’s ‘Memento’, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘Magnolia’ that will be used as case studies. By analyzing elements from movies: Zack Snyder’s ‘Sucker Punch’, Doug Liman’s ‘The edge of tomorrow’, Steven Lisberger’s ‘Tron’, Duncan Jones’s ‘Source Code’, Steven Spielberg’s ‘Ready Player One’, and Nolan’s ‘Tenet’ and ‘Inception’, the chapter three will, from a ludological point of view, examine how these movies use hypermediacy as dominant remediation strategy for mimicking videogame rules and videogame’s visual representational strategies, which creates complex, gameful narratives that strongly enact the experience of playing a video game.