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The evolution of traditions of the screen in terms of computer games and films

INTRODUCTION

Computer games are often judged on their sense of realism, particularly their ability to evoke film-style narratives via photo-realistic graphics and naturalistic avatar movement. Over the past two decades, the vast majority of developments in terms of the technology behind computer game software and hardware has been in the direction of cinema, with the ultimate ambition of the majority of game developers being to create a more immersive, more reactive film-style experience. To an extent, this is understandable: both cinema and computer games rely on the screen, as well as music and dialogue, in order to tell a story; the major differences is that computer games allow the viewer to take control of the events unfolding on the screen. Nevertheless, it's clear that, as Henry Jenkins points out, "the ambitions of computer game developers have tended, up until now, to be restricted to attempting to bring games closer to films" (Jenkins, 2008, p. 17). To an extent, this can be viewed as a missed opportunity, since games are not simply a genre of film, but an entirely different form of media altogether; one in which the viewer is transformed into a participant and the narrative, far from being expressly determined by a single director or writer, is in fact open to input from the player, who is able to explore a number of avenues of activity. In fact, as Jon Dovey and Helen W. Williams point out, "games are advancing to the point where the narrative can be assembled by the player from a variety of plot points, incidents and characters devised by the developer" (Dovey & Williams, 2006, p. 185), to the point where, according to Alan Bradshaw, "many of the more self-consciously modern film-makers in western culture are now trying to make their films seems more like computer games" (Bradshaw, 2009). In other words, whereas games once tried to be films, films now try to be games, representing something of a full circle journey in terms of the relationship between these two distinct media forms.

Fundamentally, however, games and cinema share a number of attributes that make them far closer, stylistically, that most other media forms. Key to this is the function of the screen: whatever innovations are made within the realm of the film or the computer game, it eventually has to be transmitted to the viewer or player via a screen. As is noted in the literature review, the screen has come to be a powerful and dominating part of modern culture, and to an extent it unites cinema and gaming, making it impossible for them not to be aware of each other, and to feed off each other's innovations. As Dovey and Williams note, "when gaming becomes more popular, films become jealous and try to steal the audience back, and vice versa" (Dovey & Williams, 2006, p. 206); in other words, for a variety of social and cultural reasons - not all of them based on genre and media considerations - cinema and games are inextricably linked, not only in the minds of the audience but in the minds of the developers and producers. As this dissertation will show, cinema and gaming feed off each other, and most of the major advances in both media in the past decade have been in some way linked to this bi-polar struggle for the audience's attention. While computer games may have only really begun to develop in the early 1980's, when cinema was already a well-developed and sophisticated art form, games have rapidly risen to prominence: in 2008, total revenue from the computer game industry reached a record high of $22bn (NPD, 2008), and a number of commentators have suggested that this is money that the game industry is taking away from cinema. As Alan Bradshaw suggests, "there's significant anecdotal evidence to suggest that cinema and video games are competing for more or less the same audience, particularly in the younger demographic" (Bradshaw, 2009), and while cinema still (just) remains ahead, the gap is narrowing. As this dissertation will show, cinema and gaming, far from representing two sides of the same media genre, are distinct, though partly related, industries that are constantly learning from one another but that are usually most successful when stickign to their own particular strengths rather than attempting to copy each other.

LITERATURE REVIEW

The screen is one of the most pervasive modern inventions, and is encountered by users of a number of media forms, from cinema and television to gaming and the internet. At its most basic level, the screen is “an interface portal that turns the individual into a viewer” (Kellner, 1994, p. 95), making the screen a transformative artifact with significant social and cultural power. As Henry Jenkins goes on to point out, “the screen has turned almost the entire world into viewers, with almost everyone interacting in some way with a screen” (Jenkins, 2008, p. 17). Furthermore, the screen has in recent years become portable: there are screens on phones, laptops and watches, as well as screens as part of street furniture. These screens serve a variety of purposes, from entertainment to information, and have pervaded almost every part of modern life, from education and healthcare to work and family life. As Jenkins goes on to say, “the vast majority of people on this planet consult screens hundreds of times a day, sometimes for fun and sometimes for vital information” (Jenkins, 2008, p. 38). Screens have even been placed on satellites and sent into space, becoming the only way that humanity can explore the outer regions of the solar system. Screens even out-number humans several times over, and broken screens are estimated to contribute around 17% to the white goods landfill pollution problems around the world (WHO, 2008). Jenkins makes the convincing point that there are almost no individuals on the planet who have not at some point accessed a screen for some reason (Jenkins, 2008), and it’s clear that the screen is a central figure in all the major cultural and social debates of the modern age.

Games take the screen and use it as the focal point of a particular form of interaction that revolves around the ability of the viewer to directly and instantly affect what is seen on the screen. While the screen was traditionally considered to be an invention that invited passivity and disconnectedness on the part of the viewer, the gaming screen represents an invitation for the viewer to instead become a player. In doing so, the gaming screen can be seen to be part of a revolution in terms of the way in which the screen interacts with the viewer / spectator in modern society. The creation of the first computer game, ‘Spacewar!’, in 1961, was the moment that the screen ceased to be merely the canvas upon which images could be arranged and became, in Frans Mayra’s words, “a two-way environment in which the viewer becomes the gamer and the screen allows the fantasy of interactivity to be realized” (Mayra, 2008, p. 106). As technology has continued to develop, the screen has allowed for interaction not between the gamer and a computer but between two individual, geographically distant gamers. In this way, the screen has arguably become one of the primary means by which people communicate in the twenty-first century. J. Patrick Williams and Jonas Heide Smith suggest that while evolution is traditionally a long process, the screen has “ensured that a major evolutionary step – the incorporation of the screen and the game into modern life – has occurred almost overnight” (Williams & Smith, 2007, p. 58). This is reflective of a general cultural trend that, according to Janet Harbord, has seen "evolution, in media and culture terms, accelerating at an unprecedented rate" (Harbord, 2002, p. 7); in other words, technological and cultural changes are happening faster and faster.

Media products exist today in a multi-platform environment, where the highest profits usually come to those products that successfully 'port' their appeal to a wide range of media forms. Jon Dovey and Helen W. Williams suggest that "a film that is just a film can make a significant profit, but a film that can also be a computer game, or a stage show, or a music franchise, can make the kind of profits that studio executives dream of" (Dovey & Williams, 2006, p. 116). The major film productions therefore all have tie-in computer games, and while these are sometimes little more than after-thoughts using pre-generated gaming engines onto which film-related iconography is attached, the games are sometimes far more imaginative efforts that take the icons of the film and re-imagine them for the gaming world. Sometimes the game version is explicitly acknowledged by the film as being a valid part of the 'canon'; for example, the recent 'Star Wars' prequel films included a number of references to events that were never shown on the movie screen but were depicted in computer games. Dovey and Williams argue that this is the way forward for both industries, since viewers are able to enjoy the very different forms of immersion offered by each media form; for some viewers, one form will take dominance over the other, but Dovey and Williams believe there is evidence to suggest that the majority will accept both, and that therefore "the most important element of any film or computer game is not perhaps the specific narrative that is being presented to the audience, but... the possibility for numerous multi-narrative adventures, at different levels of interactivity" (Dovey & Williams, 2006, p. 137). It's clear, therefore, that games and films can feed off one another and, when well-managed, can generate narrative and characters for each other. This is, as Dovey and Williams point out, "far more sophisticated than the old model of simply producing a quick platform game based on a film, hoping to hoover up a little profit in the wake of interest in the film" (Dovey & Williams, 2006, p. 147); this is, rather, a sophisticated multi-platform media entity.

THE END OF SIMPLICITY

The modern screen is a far more complex environment than it was even ten years ago. As graphical interface technologies have grown, so too have the opportunities to display a variety of information on the screen in such a way as to break the screen into a number of distinct informational units that nevertheless have an overall cohesive identity. This is to an extent an evolution of the idea of split screen, which as Joel Black notes "once represented the ambition of cinema to revolutionise the screen, but which has now become a rather tired device" (Black, 2001, p. 58). The modern information screen arguably came into being with the advent of rolling TV news feeds in the late 1980's, which saw a central image overlaid with a number of additional pieces of information, some of them static and some of them moving, and which over the time have grown and become increasingly sophisticated, as can be seen in this screen-grab from CNN:

Clearly, this is a far more sophisticated medium that the simple graphical representation of a few key elements of data. Black suggests that "the modern screen requires a more sophisticated user that used to be the case" (Black, 2001, p. 85), one who can pick through the data, determining what is important to them and ignoring the rest. Taking a look at a single minute from a 2009 CNN report, it's possible to determine at least seven data sources running simultaneously: three tracker bars running at different speeds along the bottom, a weather tracker on the top right, a Breaking News banner in the lower third, an information bar on the top left and the main image of the newsreader. No viewer can be expected to pay equal attention to all of these, but the sophisticated viewer can negotiate this barrage of information and determine what they find relevant.

The end of the simplicity of the image is therefore one of the key developments of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As Henry Jenkins notes, "traditional cinema was based, at least partly, on the idea of mise-en-scene and shot construction, with the aim being, in many cases, to produce a well-balanced and aesthetically pleasing image" (Jenkins, 2008, p. 58). Computer games, however, had a different impulse right from the start, mainly because of the need to keep the player informed about such information as their score and the amount of health and ammunition remaining, as well as information about time and levels. Computer games have therefore had to balance the need to be aesthetically pleasing with the need to provide information for the user, who in the guise of the player has to be able to access such information quickly and, often, in a high-pressure environment. This screen-grab from the early 'Spacewar!' game shows how, from the beginning, computer games had to present different layers of graphical information:

The graphical limitations of computer games, in terms of producing photo-realistic images, largely helped the industry avoid questions of traditional aesthetics, allowing it to focus on the successful combination of the various necessary graphical layers. As can be seen in the 'Spacewar!' screen-grab, the game environment requires far more information than the cinema environment, and therefore represents a far more crowded and difficult screen. However, as Diane Carr has noted, "users have developed much greater abilities in terms of being able to navigate the modern screen, which to older people, who were brought up in the days of the traditional cinema screen, often appear impossibly complex" (Carr et al., 2006, p. 207). The less simple screen of the modern game is therefore not a burden on the modern user, who is able to negotiate such a screen environment.

Film-makers, having noticed this, have begun to experiment with limited degrees of screen-based manipulation, although their efforts have tended to be in the margins so far rather than in the big screen blockbusters. The earliest form of complication of the screen in cinema was arguably the subtitle, which grew out of the need for audiences to be able to understand films in languages they didn't understand. Interestingly, the subtitle remains a sign of awkwardness even in 2009, and Richard Johnson has pointed out that "the same audience that plays games and negotiates those complex graphical and informational arenas... will then complain that they can't watch subtitled films because they don't want to have to read while watching them" (Johnson, 2009); clearly, therefore, while subtitles are a strong indicator of 'otherness', the graphical information presented in games is not received in the same way. Joel Black argues that "film-makers face a problem if they put too much graphical information on the screen... since this reminds the audience that they lack the control that they would have in a computer game, and therefore potentially increases their frustration" (Black, 2001, p. 17); in other words, graphical information has become culturally synonymous with computer games, and any such information carries strong connotations of the lack of the computer game and its various methods of engagement and immersion.

As Graeme Turner points out, immersion is not a single process but rather an umbrella term for a variety of methods by which viewers enter the screen world, and "the immersion of a film viewer is very different to the immersion of a computer game user" (Turner, 1993, p. 85). This question of immersion will be considered in more detail in the next chapter, which covers the changing role of the spectator, but for now it should be noted that levels of graphical and screen simplicity have a decisive role to play in terms of determining the level and type of engagement that is required from the viewer or gamer. Although there are clearly exceptions, it's possible to argue that the more complicated a screen appears to be, the more involvement it demands of the viewer. This involvement can range from passive acceptance of the screen to a more complex interest in the various forms of information being presented, through to an active involvement. The extent to which this immersion is controlled by the simplicity or otherwise of the screen is a complex argument based on spectator reactions to various forms of stimulus, and it would be wrong to suggest that the screen presents anything other than an array of sophisticated stimuli that, taken separately or together, have a strong impact on the spectator and are among the key determining factors when it comes to the transformation of that spectator from viewer to player.

FROM VIEWER TO PLAYER

One of the major cultural changes introduced by cinema was the transformation of virtually every individual into a spectator. Joel Black argues that this was a profound change in terms of society and human evolution, since it "fundamentally undermined previous considerations of reality and involvement and culturally validated the act of watching" (Black, 2001, p. 185); in other words, the inauguration of the age of the spectator represented an entirely new phenomenon rather than a change to an existing phenomenon, and this resulted in widespread cultural and societal upheaval. There has been extensive research carried out on the role and identity of the spectator, and the extent to which the role subsumes certain elements of the personality, making them instead subservient to the formalities of that role. As James Whitty argues, "there are certain expectations of the spectator, in terms of morality and viewpoint, and there is a cultural understanding that there can be no neutral ground in terms of these expectations" (Whitty, 2005, p. 96). Whitty's argument is that the screen requires the spectator to assume a pre-defined position in terms of, for example, adherence to certain moral values; this is why, for example, there is such an outcry whenever a film or computer game appears to go against the collective moral consensus, since there is a cultural expectation that film, and other screens, will reflect the mainstream view. Whitty goes on to suggest that the role of the screen in terms of morality is actually extremely complex, since when the spectator is passive he or she can appear to be joining in with the moral consensus while secretly experiencing thoughts and reactions that would cause outrage if expressed (Whitty, 2005). In other words, the passive nature of watching a film allows the spectator to hide his or her reactions to the film, and to experience quite strong emotional reactions and yet keep them internalised. This is one notable area in which cinema is very different from the computer game, since a game requires that the spectator's reactions are externalised and realised on the screen; in this way, therefore, it's far less possible for the gamer to hide his or her true feelings or reactions, with the result that the computer game environment is one that inculcates far less guilt than the cinema environment. This is a very clear difference in terms of the different reactions to the screen, and is clearly key to the way in which the different functions of films and computer games impact upon the reaction of the spectator.

The role of the spectator is undeniably linked to the question of voyeurism, which has been central to cinematic discourse for over a century. Put simply, voyeurism involves the various emotional and identity-based mechanisms that come into play when one individual watches another, often without the awareness of the one who is being watched. The film 'Rear Window' (1955) is a clear enactment of the questions and doubts concerning voyeurism, as James Stewart's character witnesses a murder in the flat opposite his, which he sees entirely via a cinema screen-shaped window in the side of that flat. Criticising the role and passivity of the viewer, 'Rear Window' is a perfect example of the potential for the viewer-voyeur to become unconventionally emotionally involved in what he or she is watching; furthermore, the film criticises the passivity of the audience and the way in which this arguably affects people in real life. In fact, as James Castle has suggested, "the voyeurism of the cinematic spectator has become so culturally engrained that it's almost become simply another part of modern life" (Castle, 2008, p. 37). The voyeur, therefore, has come to be the dominant paradigm in terms of the ways in which individuals interact with the screen, and with cinema (and to a lesser extent television) coming to represent the dominant use of the screen in the twentieth century, the voyeur came to be folded into the overall experience of spectatorship, with a resulting impact on society and culture.

The rise of the computer game, however, fundamentally changed the nature of the spectator. Fundamentally, it's not possible to be a spectator when playing a computer game, and nor is it possible to be a viewer, since by their very nature computer games demand more involvement from the user. The spectator therefore becomes the gamer, i.e. someone who interacts with the screen in a non-passive way, with a greater degree of control over what happens. According to David Buckingham, this represents "a massive shift in terms of the way in which the audience interacts with the screen... with the result that even when they're not playing a game, but watching a film, their experience of spectatorship remains ineffably altered" (Carr et al., 2006, p. 185); in other words, Buckingham is arguing that each spectator can accommodate only one definition of spectatorship at a time, and that this is fundamentally altered by the experience of having played computer games. However, Janet Harbord argues that spectators are far more sophisticated than this model would suggest, and that they are in fact capable of balancing a number of different spectator-styles at once. Therefore the spectator approaches a computer screen with a fundamentally different set of expectations and principles than when approaching a cinema screen, for example, and subconsciously has very different expectations.

These factors all have an impact on the ways in which the spectator is able to immerse him or herself in the world that is unfolding on the screen. Gareth Schott suggests that the idea of immersion is based on the ability of the viewer to "become completely involved in the fictional world, even if only for a moment, in such a way as to have a heightened sense of reality in terms of that world's existence. Cinema was traditionally thought to be a medium that offered a reasonable level of immersion, with Richard Johnson noting that "to varying degrees, the audience invests its time and interest in a narrative unfolding on a screen... that offers more and more emotional power the more the spectator invests" (Johnson, 2009). In other words, cinema can be seen as a medium in which emotional reward is granted to those who are able to immerse themselves in the world that is shown on screen. However, Joel Black points out that "this immersion is a fiction... (and) is based on the individual's degree of awareness of everything around him - the crowd, the dark theatre and the projector" (Black, 2001, p. 95). Cinema is as much a social activity as anything else, albeit one that priorities the private and personal reaction; this private reaction is generated in the context of a public setting, at least when a film is watched in the cinema, with the result that voyeurism becomes the accepted method of communication. In fact, the question of immersion can be seen to come down, ultimately, to the question of reality.

THE QUESTION OF REALITY

The screen has, arguably, become the ultimate arbiter of what is 'real' and what is not. However, modern audiences are far more sceptical of the truthfulness of the image than the audiences in 1893 who ran away from a screen that showed an oncoming train. In 2009, audiences believe that they understand most, if not all, of the trickery that can be put on the screen, and fundamentally this awareness comes down to a single belief: there is nothing that technology can't show, to a photorealistic degree, on a screen. Anything that can be imagined can be realised via special effects, and real video can be subtly manipulated in order to show anything that the manipulator desires. The modern audience is therefore as wary of the screen image as that audience back in 1893, but for different reasons: in 1893, audiences feared that the train was about hit them, whereas in 2009 audiences would question the message and image of the train, and would try to determine what trickery was being used, and for what purpose. The modern audience, therefore, has lost its trust in the screen's willingness to tell the truth.

A key element of immersion and reality is editing, and this is one area where cinema and video games differ greatly. In cinema, editing is a process of "cinematic punctuation" (Black, 2001, p.6), used to convey pace, action, drama, emotion or any one of a number of other elements. In computer games, however, the image tends to be presented free of edits, since these would distract from the game-play. When players do decide to switch the camera view, it's sometimes because they want a more interesting view, but most often because they want to have a better image so as to improve their ability to react within the game. This makes the computer game closer to the modern news channel than to cinema, since modern news pictures, especially of breaking news stories, rarely have time to use sophisticated editing techniques. This is not the only way in which immersion is affected by the news-like imagery of computer games. The following two images illustrate the way in which modern weaponry used in war-zone activities has come to resemble computer game footage:

Audiences are aware of these similarities, even if it's on a subconscious level, and the result is that computer games receive what Andrew Jahn-Sudmann and Ralf Stockman call "the validating honour of being compared to the level of reality that is achieved on, for example, television news shows" (Jahn-Sudmann & Stockman, 2008, p. 96). In the aftermath of the 911 terrorist attacks on New York, for example, it was notable how many people made comparisons of the attack to cinema and computer games. It was as if this was the only way to deal with the images of the World Trade Centre being destroyed - to put them in terms of a computer game. The question of immersion then comes down to a consideration of the opposite of immersion - avoidance. When people avoid media images, they do so because those images are to upsetting or too frightening to comprehend. The images of New York on 911 were like this, but spectators were able to comprehend them once they had been brought into the context of cinema and video games. And as Jahn-Sudmann and Stockman note, "it was ultimately cinema that was evoked the most... as if to say that audiences still look to cinema for the truly emotional material that really impacts on their lives" (Jahn-Sudmann & Stockman, 2008, p. 107). As Joel Black goes on to note, "true immersion involves not just the suspension of disbelief, but also the willingness to invest emotional energy in the screen product" (Black, 2001, p. 17). This investment is far more effective when it's directed at a cinema screen, since this screen allows the viewer to abdicate control and put the fate of the characters in the hands of the writer and director. The resulting tension helps to foster the kind of emotional reaction that, ultimately, leads to full immersion.

CONCLUSION

Ultimately, it can be seen that screen traditions have been hugely affected by the emergence of video games and the subsequent conflict between games and cinema. This conflict has resulted not in a bi-polar relationship between the two media forms but, instead, in the creation of an entirely new type of spectator, able to juggle the conflicting requirements and assumptions that are inherent in the two forms. The biggest change of the twenty-first century is the way in which the internet has developed to the point that both films and games can be played via a computer; in other words, cinema and games can now be accessed through the same screen. This has a huge and fundamental impact on the ways in which the spectator is able to access the image and, in some cases, interact with them. The traditional response to the cinema screen has been complicated by the advent of computer games, which in theory should encourage the spectator to demand the right to wrestle control of the image and manipulate it; in practice, however, computer games seem to have largely served to emphasise the authoritarian control of the writer and director over the cinema screen, and to help cinema to redefine its role in the modern media environment.

Games have long fought to be given the same respect as other media and art forms, but have struggled because their core demographic - young, often totally immersed males - has tended to lack the perceived sophistication necessary to support the claim that games have the emotional and dramatic complexity that would be required in order to compete with cinema. However, the modern game is capable of sustaining a substantial narrative element, and modern technology ensures that the graphical capabilities of modern games are more than good enough to allow them to compete with cinema. Games and cinema are traditionally viewed as opposites, competing against one another for the same audience. However, it might be more accurate to see them as entirely distinct media forms that are capable of co-existing and learning from one another. It was once popular to suggest that they would ultimately merge to form the ultimate screen experience; however, it would appear that audiences are sufficiently sophisticated to be able to maintain multiple spectator modes when enjoying each media form. Nevertheless, cinema and computer games have dramatically affected the traditions of each other's screen, and will likely continue to do so.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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