Narrative Architecture: Databases, Labyrinths and Stories that Won’t End

We have yet to witness the full impact of gaming on cinema, especially as future developments in film are expected to lie within the sphere of interactivity, the interactive film being a form that is still very much at an experimental level and lacks a viable commercial or distributional model. But before interactive cinema becomes the norm (if, indeed, that proves to be the direction of development), there are several categories of film within which the influence of gaming is evident, even if the subject matter has no explicit links to games, and perhaps these will prove to be the transitional films that will usher in a new cinematic era. It would certainly be misguided to think that with the advent of interactivity enabled by digital technology, completely new forms will replace old forms. It is more often the case that new cultural forms rearrange existing elements, as Fredric Jameson holds, so that for example, what was subordinate becomes dominant and vice versa (Manovich 2001a: 131, 229). In the process of this so-called rearranging, in McLuhan’s view there is a transitional step before the new form emerges, and that is the ‘hybrid of the meeting of two media’ (1994: 55) which heralds the essence of the new form to come. It is this hybrid spot that the films discussed in this book occupy.