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Movie-games and Game-movies: Towards an aesthetics of transmediality

This chapter revises the author's earlier work on the relationship between videogames and cinema, bringing the debate around convergence up-to-date by focusing on tie-in games and (exhibiting the shift in relations) tie-in movies. Earlier academic accounts tended to claim little substantial relationship between cinema and videogames; similarities occurring more as the result of interpretation than at any deep structural level, a position that the author argued in an introduction to an edited collection in 2002. The chapter maps out the scope and depth of the new and dynamically altered relationship between games and film, arguing that there is a now considerable convergence of aesthetics and that this closer relationship is symptomatic of contemporary large-scale media's strategy towards increasing transmediality. The chapter cautions against regarding games and film as absolutely synonymous however; differences are still to be found in the ways that stories are told, players and viewers engaged : ‘players’ and ‘viewers’ therefore remain legitimate terms. This chapter was commissioned by the editor on the basis of the Krzywinska’s previous published work on the relationship between games to cinema. It was co-written with Douglas Brown, a PhD student under Krzywinska’s supervision and a new member of staff. Krzywinska devised the argument and wrote over two-thirds of the chapter, Brown contributed some examples and proof-reading. This chapter is included as it is indicative of the development of the Krzywinska’s thought on the changing relationship of games and cinema and shows the relevance of that work across disciplinary divides. Given the amplification of transmediality in contemporary popular culture, the chapter also shows the importance of devising comparative methods to better understand formal specificities and to uncover the potentialities for multimedial storytelling (a theme that ties into a core strand of Falmouth’s Arts-based research).