Content area
Full text
I used to be good at games. I was good at the only Space Invaders machine in South London, in 1 979. I was the first kid to have a ZX Spectrum in my school, in 1982. 1 published in the national games magazine Crash when I was seventeen. But since the age of eighteen and my first degree, I've concentrated on cinema. So this article comes from a film studies perspective; I've relied on game experts for many of my examples. Because I'm no longer good enough at games, I haven't been 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 other people's achievement. That is, I've had to watch game scenes as films.
Of course, one of the reasons I focused on cinema is that you couldn't study games academically in 1988. You couldn't even take a degree solely in cinema: my degree was unusually progressive, offering fifty percent film and a token module in television. Since then, film studies has become higher status, moderately established, and respectable-on the middle-rung of the ladder between the academic study of television, games, and comics at one end. and literature at the other. By extension, complaints about the careless adaptation of Doom (Andrej Bartkowiak, 2005) and Daredevil (Mark Steven Johnson, 2003) may rage across discussion boards but rarely make it beyond fan communities, whereas issues about the adaptation of Austen or Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007) from their original literary texts are debated in broadsheet newspapers.
The "Videogame" Film. Because fidelity to the original is of low priority when porting from games to cinema, direct adaptations of videogames - with rare exceptions - have little in common with the aesthetics and conventions of the source material, and resemble the game primarily only in mise-en-scène and costume design. Lara Groß: Tomb Raider (Simon West, 2001), for instance, ignores the opportunity to re-create the player's experience by having Lara "seen to die, even if only on one occasion, and then to be able to restart a sequence, game-style, for another attempt." Its occasional references to the game-world constitute "insubstantial nods . , . rather than anything central to the structure or form of the film."1