VIDEO games

Video games. Not computer games, or consoles or anything else, but video games. Video, meaning film and cinema, meaning a visual medium where we are taken up in to a story and then delivered to a satisfying conclusion. Yet the term “video game” itself is slowly decaying to a retro way of thinking, those hulking 80’s units are to be found on sticky-floored amusement arcades, or found lurking in bowling alleys.

However, the “video game”, a synthesis and middle ground between content and viewer has, in the last five years, become a multi-billion dollar industry and continues to happily outgrow the film industry. We are finally living in a golden age of gaming, where graphics and processors have caught up to the imaginations of the developers and the game purchasing public. We can theoretically render anything we want, from atoms, to apples, to galaxies; and then throw a flashbang at it. But the storytelling has fallen behind. We have been treading the same old ground.

Now, the film purists among you, the vast majority of whom will have clicked back on their browser as soon as the words Video Game came up (shame on you), are shouting and stamping about the validity of films and games being mentioned in the same breath. But then again, I bet they haven’t climbed a Colossus.

There have been a handful of games that have boldly attempted to be the first to bridge the gap between these steadily closing media continents. I’m sure you’re naming some of them in your head right now. The cleverly realised Heavy Rain is perhaps the most fully-fledged, the enigmatic old school Myst was an early adopter, the various GTA’s and the eagerly awaited Mass Effect 3, to name a few. But where are the borders? Some films, or particularly the DVD releases, are built to house multiple endings, so we are sculpting the experience right there. Is that not a video game, in its purest sense?

After all those years of wishing for a weird cinema where you can choose what the hero does (but you’d have to move seats, or even screens, right? I’ve thought this through a few time and it just doesn’t work, let the dream go), video games have marched up and grabbed the idea by the throat. I think we’re still waiting on the true breakthrough video game, but it’s on the way, and then perhaps the dwindling film industry will wake up and wonder where the revenue went.

Ah well, maybe caution is the best approach.

Tom, of The Cautious Train.