Video Games and Narrative Cinema

Course Overview

In this hands-on gaming course, students will decipher the narrative design of video games while exploring the legacy of cinema to gameplay. They will also apply critical gaming concepts (agency, flow, point of view, authorship, representation, narrative choice, loops) to evaluate cinema as a ludic and participatory artform beyond conventional narrative elements.

We will approach our study of video games and cinema through three interconnected frameworks: as media technologies, visual cultures, and narrative forms. First, we’ll examine games and films as the historical products of discrete media industries. We’ll investigate the history of cinema and digital gaming alongside readings in media theory that will help us analyze films and video games as forms of visual culture that often disclose divergent narratives of technology. Next, we’ll turn to readings in critical theory, computer science, and eco-criticism to consider the theory and design of interactive environments (in games, and in films) as indicative of operational logics for rendering playable models of environmental flows, social ontologies, and speculative temporalities. We’ll conclude the course by interrogating the ways that video games and cinema present narrative experiences that negotiate, subvert, or reproduce, historical patterns of violence and power. To ground our discussions historically, we’ll examine a sequence of games and films that re-mediate the complex relationships between race, history, and national identity.

We will watch influential films from a variety of genres and historical periods including horror, science-fiction, and thrillers from across the silent era, classic Hollywood, global cinema, and contemporary blockbusters. During each week, we will also engage in critical play sessions to explore a few select games in-depth, and view and discuss gameplay footage from a host of others. Games played in the course will include INSIDE (2016), Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (2017), Resident Evil 4 (2005), and Death Stranding (2019). Other games to be viewed and discussed may include: Rom Check Fail! (2013), Lemmings (1991), Pony Island (2016), Pokémon: SNAP! (1999), Cyberpunk 2077 (2020), Dune II (1992), Perfect Vermin (2020), Super Mario Bros. (1985).

Course Outline