Introduction

Abstract

Throughout history, stories have been told to describe and explain the world around us. Discussing the rise of complex storytelling in contemporary cinema, Warren Buckland finds that ‘in today’s culture dominated by new media, experiences are becoming increasingly ambiguous and fragmented; correspondingly, the stories that attempt to represent those experiences have become opaque and complex’ (2009: 1). With the advent of interactivity, especially in relation to computer games, digital culture is reshaping film at narrative, structural, visual and philosophical levels. The aim of this book is to analyse contemporary cinema through the prism of computer games (and, in turn, digital media), which is still an under-explored subject matter. While Game Studies and Digital Media Studies (and especially the early publications in these disciplines) have frequently drawn from Film Studies in attempting to establish the parameters of these relatively new academic fields and in order to trace the various areas of influence, the ‘reverse’ study of these points of intersection has not been undertaken. Yet now that both gaming and digital media occupy such a cultural stronghold, it is not merely timely but imperative to examine the impact of gaming — or of the ludic — on cinema.