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appear as a mix of early talk shows and current entertainment news programming.While the content of these programs appears ideologically and aesthetically tradi-tional, rooted strongly in preceding mainstream norms, the very fact that Second Lifeoffers the tools for one to make these programs potentially gives limited agency, atleast, to the Second Life players as they turn television producers. GGSL has recentlyannounced a contest for Upper East Side participants specifically to create their owntelevision programs. What will fan-authored, industry-proscribed, and videogame-enabled television programs look like, who will watch them, and how will they influ-ence the original televisual program that inspired them? Stay tuned to your nearestvirtual world to find out. *

Louisa Stein is assistant professor of Television, FOm, and New Media at SanDiego State University. She has authored several essays on TV audience engagementonline and is co-editor of the collection Teen Television: Essays on Programming and Fandom.Her new book project is entitled Millennial Noir.

Camera-Eye, CG-Eye:Videogannes and the "Cinematic"

by Will Brooker

Iused to be good at games. I was good at the only Space Invaders ma-chine in South London, in 1979. I was the first kid to have a ZXSpectrum in my school, in 1982.1 published in the national gamesmagazine Crash when I was seventeen. But since the age of eighteen

and my first degree, I've concentrated on cinema. So this article comesfrom a film studies perspective; I've relied on game experts for many ofmy examples. Because I'm no longer good enough at games, I haven'tbeen able to play through to witness most of these scenes first-hand.I've had to watch them at a secondary remove, as records of otherpeople's achievement. That is, I've had to watch game scenes a& films.

Of course, one of the reasons I focused on cinema is that youcouldn't study games academically in 1988. You couldn't even takea degree solely in cinema: my degree was unusually progressive, of-fering fifty percent film and a token module in television. Since then,film studies has become higher status, moderately established, andrespectable-on the middle-rung of the ladder between the academicstudy of television, games, and comics at one end, and literature at theother. By extension, complaints about the careless adaptation oí Doom

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(Andrej Bartkowiak, 2005) and Daredevil (Mark Steven Johnson, 2003) may rage acrossdiscussion boards but rarely make it beyond fan communities, whereas issues about theadaptation of Austen or Atonement Qoe Wright, 2007) from their original literary textsare debated in broadsheet newspapers.

The "Videogame" Film. Because fidelity to the original is of low priority whenporting from games to cinema, direct adaptations of videogames—with rare excep-tions—have litde in common with the aesthetics and conventions of the source mate-rial, and resemble the game primarily only in mise-en-scène and costume design. LaraCrofl: Tomb Raider (Simon West, 2001), for instance, ignores the opportunity to re-createthe player's experience by having Lara "seen to die, even if only on one occasion, andthen to be able to restart a sequence, game-style, for another attempt." Its occasionalreferences to the game-world constitute "insubstantial nods . . . rather than anythingcentral to the structure or form of the film."'

However, a more general conception of the "videogame-style film" can be estab-lished from references to diverse movies that incorporate game conventions while notadapting a specific game. On a broad aesthetic level, the term "video game" is used toconnote spectacular, showy displays of effects at the expense of subtext and character,as in: Tony Scott's bravura digital camerawork in Dga Vu (2006);^ the spectacle thatoverwhelms ideas in /, Robot (Alex Proyas, 2004);^ The Matrix's emotionless, uninvolvingstunts (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999);* the exhibition bouts between CGI mon-sters in King Kong (Peter Jackson, 2005);^ and the dense, detailed, but artificial actionsequences of George Lucas's Star Wars prequels (1999, 2002, 2005).^ More directly,critics and fans have identified specific videogame mêmes in filrns, such as the progres-sion through levels, power-ups, and signature moves in Ong-Bak (Prachya Pinkaew,2003),' the "get all weapons" cheat code in The Matrix,^ and the platform-jumping in

- Attack of the Clones (George Lucas, 2002) droid factory These are regarded as playful,knowirig quotations and in-jokes along the lines of the Lara Croft "nods" or, in thelatter case, as cynical cross-marketing through the placement of a scene that was im-mediately adapted to PlayStation and Xbox.

1 Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska, "introduction," in ScreenPtay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces, ed. Geoff King andTanya Krzywinska (London: Waiifiower, 2002), 19.

2 Camnniia Altjertson, All Movie Guide, http://www.amazon.ca/Deja-Vu-Tony-Scott/dp/B00005JPOO (accessed iVIarch17, 2008).

3 John Dale, Autology, August 9, 2004, http://biogs.warwick.ac.uk/johndaie/tag/cuiture/?num=20&start=20 (accessedMarch 17, 2008).

4 David Edelstein, cited in Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: When Old and New Media Coiiide {New "fork: NewYorkUniversity Press, 2006), 121.

5 C. Woodward, "King Kong Two Disc Special Edition," DVD Active (2002), http://www.dvdactive.com/reviews/dvd/

king-kong-two-disc-special-edition2.html?post_id=64476&action=quote (accessed March 17, 2008).

6 Claudia Puig, "10 Movies That Sat Us Straight Up," USA Today, Decemtœr 24, 2002, http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2002-12-23-top-ten-side_x.htm (accessed March 17, 2008).

7 Nathan Lee, "Traditional Storytelling, Video-Game Style," New York Sun, February 11, 2005, http://www.nysun.com/artlcle/9068 (accessed March 17, 2008).

8 King and Krzywinska, "Introduction," 19.

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Finally, "videogame" style in films suggests a certain form of narrative, based onthe cycles of character-death and reset. Charles Ramirez Berg traces the "Tarantinoeffect" in recent cinema to the influence of postmodern resistance to master narra-tives, of hypertext links, and of videogames, which "repeatedly take players back tothe same situations."' Similarly, Jeff Gordinier identifies the "PlayStation Generation"of twenty-first-century-filmmakers, who "mess with narrative in new ways [. . .] messwith time, with space, with the laws of physics and the structure of story" and "bringto their movies the cut-and-paste sensibility of video games and the internet."'" This isthe reading of videogame conventions that leads Warren Buckland to identify "video-game logic" in Luc Besson's (1995) The Fifth Element's "serialised repetition," includinga "feedback loop" and "space warp,"" and prompts Margit Grieb and Kate Stablesto discuss Run Lxila Run (Tom Twyker, 1999) and Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993)respectively as game-style cinema because of their looping mini-narratives and re-telling of the same story with variations, like repeated attempts at the same level.^^like Berg and Gordinier, Grieb's discussion of Run Lola Run links the repetition andnon-linearity that structure the film's narrative not just to games but to other forms ofdigital media—"websites, hypertext stories, interactive GD-ROMs."'^

The implieations of this overlap between cinema and games are mixed: on onehand, importing videogame conventions suggests a fast-and-loose, "cut-and-paste"resistance to traditional narrative rules, with overtones of rebellious youth (Berg de-scribes "playing with narration" as "cool and fun," and refers to Tarantino's "wild"techniques). On the other hand, videogame aesthetics are associated with empty spec-tacle and cynical attempts at cross-platform marketing, both of which are presumedto take precedence over character and traditional storytelling. Gommon to both read-ings is a sense of digital novelty and technological innovation, whether in thé boldslicing and reworking of story like a word-processed document, the web-style clickingthrough branching narratives, or the fiashy showcasing of state-of-the-art effects.

The deliberate association with a lower-status form like videogames brings a moviedown to a trashier, edgier, funkier level; it sacrifices any claims to serious art (unlessit also carries the exotic kudos of "foreign" cinema, such as anime) but it gains a hipattitude. Crank (Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, 2006), reviewed in Film Journal Ln-ternational as "among the most mindless action films ever made, b u t . . . a helluva videogame," is a prime example of this trade-off.''' The movie refers explicitly to gaming

9 Charles Ramirez Berg, "A Taxonomy of Alternative Plots in Recent Films: Classifying ttie 'Tarantino Effect,'" Film

Criticism 3\ (2006): 6.

10 Jeff Gordinier, cited in Kimberly A. Owczarski, "The Internet and Contemporary Entertainment: Rethinking the

Role of the Film Text," Journal of Film and Video 59, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 3; see also Jenkins, Convergence Culture,

119.

11 Warren Buckland, "Video Pleasure and Narrative Cinema: Luc Besson's The Fifth Element ana Video Game Logic,"

in Moving Images: From Edison to the Webcam, ed. John Fullerton and Astrid Soderberg Widding (London: John

Libbey, 2000), 162.

12 Margit Grieb, "Run Lara Run," in King and Krzywinska, ScreenPlay, 161; Kate Stables, "Run Lara Run," Sightand

Sound i \ , no. 8 (August 2001): 19.

13 Grieb, "Run Lara Run," 165.

14 Bruce Feld "Crank," Film Journal International (2008), http://viiww.filmjournal.com/filmjournal/reviews/article

_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003087415 (accessed March 17, 2008).

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conventions and history, both superficially (screens from the 1980 arcade game Ber-zerk! and a pastiche of the PC game-emulator MAME) and on the level of storytell-ing. Its plot is made up of fast-paced missions with a single goal; its visual perspectiveswitches from ground-level chase to Google Earth map views. Its aesthetic is GrandTheflAuto, and it makes the debt clear with visual nods to GTA's producers, RockstarGames. The film was written off by one reviewer as "the latest stab by Hollywood tocash in on the violent video game craze," and, tellingly, slated for its similarity to "anyrecent output by Tony Scott."'^ The movie's teen-punk response to criticism, in turn,is built into its opening credits, in the form of a high-score table: "FUG," "YOU,""ASS," "HOL."

The "Cinematic" Game. The connotations of the "cinematic" in videogaming arevery different. King and Krzywinska identify an assumption within the industry that"more cinematic equals 'better' . . . a judgement accepted by many reviewers."^^ Gin-ema, as they recognize, has greater cultural prestige and a "standing higher in ourdominant cultural hierarchies... a factor that adds to its potential appeal to the gamesindustry.'.'" MarkJ. E Wolf's taxonomy of on- and off-screen space in games is basedon the same implicit approach of elevating the study of gaming through a comparisonwith film theory and cinematic form—just as theories of authorship, borrowed fromliterature, dignified popular cinema in the 1950s and 60s. Wolf finds a parallel be-tween the scrolling of Defender (Williams Electronics, 1982) and the panning in EdwinS. Porter's Life of an American Fireman ( 1903) and Gecil Hepworth's A Day with the Gypsies(1906), while D. W Griffith's cuts between adjacent spaces match the cuts betweenneighboring rooms in Atari's Adventure (1978).'®

If these overlaps between the evolution of spatial storytelling in early (1900s) cin-ema and early (1970s) gaming were the result of technological limitations—in bothcases, a static "camera"—by the mid-90s the process had become one of deliberateemulation. As Jo Bryce and Jason Rutter note, since the advent of the PG GD-Romand the GD-driven PlayStation, both offering increased storage capacity, game design-ers of the late 1990s worked towards the holy grail of "interactive movies"—"movies,"in this case, implying mainstream Hollywood.'^ Games from the mid-90s onwards at-tempted to incorporate this "cinematic" sense in a range of ways. Full-motion video,with real actors and sets (such as the casting of Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowellin Wing Commander III [Origin, 1994]) proved to be a fad, phased out and replaced bypre-rendered, GGI sequences created on a more powerful computer than the gamesconsole itself. Ironically, this incorporation of high-quality, "filmic" visuals tended todisrupt the player's immersion in the diegesis, breaking the flow between cut-scene and

15 Brian Orndorf "Crank," FilmJerk, September 2, 2008, http://www.filmjerk.com/reviews/article.php?id_rev=916(accessed March 17, 2008).

16 King and Krzywinska, "Introduction," 6.

17 Ibid., 7.

18 Mark J. P. Wolf, "Inventing Space: Toward a Taxonomy of On- and Off-Screen Space in Video Games," Film Quarterly

5 1 , no. KAutunin 1997): 15-16.

19 Jo Bryce and Jason Rutter, "Spectacle of the Deathmatch: Character and Narrative in First-Person Shooters," inKing and Krzywinska, ScreenPlay, 161; Stables, "Run Lara Run," 66.

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gameplay.^° Cut-scenes therefore improved, paradoxically, by becoming less smoothand polished; bridging scenes were increasingly generated "in-engine," created on thefly by the console, with no discrepancy in visual quality; and Half-Life (Valve, 2000)introduced a radical shift by keeping all exposition within the game-space, avoidingthe shift between "playing" and "viewing."^.^

Capcom's Resident Fvil gamts of 1997-1999 fit Wolf's theory of a parallel evolutionbetween cinematic and game grammar by forcing the player to work within fixed cam-era angles, linked through the conventions of classical continuity editing. However, asKing and Krzywinska note, "predetermined framing of this kind acts like that of afilm . . . at the expense of player freedom," and this fixed camera positioning is, likefull-motion video, rare in contemporary gaming.^^

Twenty-first-century games continue to incorporate cinematic (and televisual)motifs—most obviously in their title sequences and credits and the use of "letterbox-ing" (appropriating TV's mediation of cinema) to signify a cut-scene^^ but also throughin-game pastiche: the "bullet time" of Max Payne, inspired by John Woo through TheMatrix, the Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998) simulation m Medal of Honor: Al-lied Assault (EA, 2002), and the slow-motion stunt replays in GTA: San Andreas (Rockstar,2004), which recall a range of sources from Bullitt (Peter Yates, 1968) to Terminator 2(James Cameron, 1991). The "realism" these games aspire to is a mediated truth—theexperience not of being at war, but being in a war film. Similarly, King and Krzywin-ska recognize that within sports simulations, the "primary point of reference is televi-sion coverage of the sport, rather than the experience of the sport itself "̂ ^ That gamescontinue to simulate mediated experience is underscored by the way they digitally re-create the view through a camera lens, rather than the human eye: the golf game Links2004 (Microsoft, 2003), like the strategy war game Ground Control (Sierra, 2000) and theSF combat of Hah: Combat Evolved (Microsoft, 2001), incorporates the analogue oddityof lens flare; Max Payne experiences drug hallucination through a fish-eye lens, whileGT4: Vice City (Rockstar, 2002) signifies rain through droplets on a glass surface, evenwhen the player is outside a car.̂ ^ Similarly, American McGee's Alice (EA, 2000) and SilentHill 4: The Room (Konami, 2004) employ simulations of flickering, scratched celluloidas part of their horror repertoire.^®

The Videogame Camera-Eye and the Cinematic Avant-Garde. Overall, how-ever, the trajectory within games of the current decade has been away from a slavishemulation of the cinematic and towards the evolution of visual storytelling techniques

20 Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska, Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders: Videogame Forms & Contexts (London: I.B.

Tauris 2006), 135; Sacha A. Howells, "Watching a Game, Playing a Movie: When Media Collide," in ScreenPlay,

114-115.

21 Howells, "Watching a Game,".120.

22 King and Krzywinska, "Introduction," 13.

23 Howells, "Watching a Game," 118.

24 King and Krzywinska, Tomb Raiders, 136.

25 Ibid., 102-103.

26 See Ewan Kirkland, "The Self-Reflexive Funhouse of Silent Hill," Convergence: Ttie International Journal ot

Research into New Media Technoiogies 13, no. 4 (2007): 410-411 .

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that establish a unique mode, distinct from cinema—or more precisely, distinct frommainstream Hollywood. The experiments in "interactive movies" have demonstratedan unworkable tension between the cinematic (in terms of continuity editing andconventional film grammar) and the playable. FuU-moticm video cut-scenes break theplayer out of immersion in the diegesis, arguably like inter-tides in early films. Fixedcamera angles restrict player movement and freedom, leading to an "on-rails" experi-ence like a theme-park ride, rather than a convincing simulation. As Wee Liang Tongand Marcus Cheng Chye Tan conclude in their chapter on narrative space across thetwo forms, while many games "have intentionally mimicked and even attempted toout-do movies," what has emerged is "a distinctive mode of visualisation . . . [gamesare] unlike movies because they lack defining cinematic cues." Above all, it is "theemployment of a free-ranging camera that breaks the rules of conventional cinema."^'Again, the key term is conventional cinema.

Videogaming is currendy dominated by two key camera positions, those of theThird-Person Shooter (TPS) and the First-Person Shooter (FPS). While, as noted,games are still dedicated to reproducing the visual effects of an analogue lens, thesetwo key camera modes are very different from the camera-eye, and the associated edit-ing, of mainstream cinema. The FPS point of view is generally assumed to have origi-nated with Wolfenstein 3D (id, 1992), though it has precursors in the arcade game Battle-zone (Atari, 1980) and the ZX81 3D Monster Maze (New Generation, 1982). Wolfensteinled to Doom (id, 1993), which led to Quake (id, 1996); these and further variants refinedthe details, texture, and lighting of the game environment, but retained the fundamen-tal premise that the game "camera" represents the player's point of view. The TPSpoint of view can be traced to Super Mario 64 (Nintendo, 1996), where it appears as aliteral flying-eye camera, independent of the Mario avatar; the mode evolved throughTomb Raider (Eidos, 1996) and became the dominant POV in Rockstar's Crand TheßAuto when the series went 3D in 2001. In contrast to the FPS, this virtual camera "cor-responds to no actual pair of eyes in the gameworld. The point of view from whichwe see Lara Croft is constantly moving, swooping, creeping up behind her and giddilysoaring above, even diving below the putative floor level."^^

Neither of these modes is conventionally "cinematic." We see a POV similar tothe FPS in horror and science fiction, putting us in the position of the "Other"—theTerminator's digital scans of a barroom, or the Predator's infra-red vision. We wit-ness Murphy's transformation to RoboCop through his helpless eyes (Paul Verhoeven,1987) as we share Jean-Dominique Bauby's locked-down vision in The Diving Bell andthe Butterfly Qulian Schnabel, 2007). Similarly, cinema invites us to share a character'senhanced vision through binoculars (see Star Wars: A New Hope [Lucas, 1977]) or azoom lens [Rear Window [Alfred Hitchcock, 1954]). Of course, the first-person POVshot is part of conventional film grammar—but it is a small part, a shot sparingly used.A sequence in an FPS game, from start until death, is a continuous point-of-view shot,and a technique so rare in cinema that its uses can be quickly listed: most obviously,

27 Wee Liang Tong and Marcus Cheng Chye Tan, "Vision and Virtuality: The Construction of Narrative Space in Film

and Computer Games," in King and Krzywinska, ScreenPlay, 109.

28 Steven Poole, Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames (London: Fourth Estate, 1999), 145-146.

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the unsuccessful experiment of. the first-person film noir, The Lady in the Lake (RobertMontgomery, 1947), and the scenes where we jack into a character's cerebral cortexin Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995).' The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick andEduardo Sanchez, 1999) and Cbverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008), which may seem to comeclosest to feature-length FPS, differ in that their point of view is explicitly a camera,which shakes, blurs, can be set down and passed from one character to another—quitedistinct frorn the smooth, steady view of gaming, where the virtual "camera" is notheld separate from the body, but embedded behind the eyes. (TelMngly, the televisioncomedy Peep Show (Jesse Armstrong et al., 2003 onward) is shot from precisely thispoint of view, for its unnerving, uncanny effect.) The movie adaptation of Doom incor-porated a first-person sequence as a novelty, another token nod to the source material,but switched back to conventional continuity editing for the majority of the film.

Where do we see the fluid, soaring, unbroken TPS camera in cinema? Again, theoccasions stand out as remarkable. Orson Welles choreographed a swooping craneshot for the opening of Touch of Evil (1958); more recently. Children of Men (AlfonsoCuarón, 2006) and Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007) faked lengthy, mobile shots with acombination of camera rigs and CGI. As with the FPS, the most notable aspect ofthe third-person POV in games is (after its mobility) its lack of cuts: a technique thataligns it not with conventional Hollywood, but with Hitchcock's playful experimentin Rope (1948), with Greenaway's long tracking shots, with Tarkovsky's lengthy takes,with the unblinking stare at violence in Irreversible (Gaspar Noé, 2002) and Hidden(Michael Haneke, 2005); with rarities like Tlmecode (Mike Figgis, 2000) and Russian Ark(Alexander Sokurov, 2002).

The dominant camera of videogames, then, is far closer to that of art dnema thanto mainstream Hollywood. The videogame's vision of "reality" is Bazinian, not Eisen-steinian. Its virtual camera starts, records what happens without turning away, andcuts only at the end. While "videogame cinema," as discussed above, seems to implyan aesthetic of cut-and-paste and flashy, funky superficiality, the FPS and TPS modesactually look nothing like a Tony Scott movie. As cinema, the videogame would be notyouthful reibellion, but the mature challenge of the avant-garde. *

Will Brooker is principal lecturer and Director of Studies, Film and Television atKingston University, London. He has published widely on various aspects of popularculture, with a particular focus on the history of cultural icons [Batman Unmasked, Alice'sAdventures)., fan communities, and broader issues of audience [Using the Force, The Audi-ence Studies Reader). His more recent work has explored fan pilgrimage and trans-media,cross-platform narratives. His book for the BFI Film Glassies series on Star Wars isforthcoming in 2009.

Thanks to the gaming forum of Barbelith.com, and Hit-Reset.co.uk.

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