Playing with Cinema: An Intermedia Archaeology of Cinematic Games

The purpose of the project is two-fold: to study the historical relation between cinema and video games, and thereby develop a new, widely applicable method for the historical study of intermedial relations.

Video games have grown into one of the world´s largest media industries - a dominant cultural practice that conditions human lives, behaviour and perception.

Although typically categorised among "new media", the key point of reference through which video games are framed remains the older medium of cinema.

To understand the cultural significance of video games as a dominant medium of our age, it is thus crucial to understand its complex relation to cinema.

Combining media archaeology and intermedial tools, I will proceed by working through six four-month work packages regarding concrete and conceptual problems that arise at the intersection between cinema and video games, framed as ludic immersion, kinetic transmediation, liminal interaction, virtual cinematography, vicarious warfare and gamified cinephilia.

Through technical, aesthetic and discursive analyses of games, films, and related materials, I examine the intermedial entanglements between two dominant media of the 20th-21st century.

While each problem spotlights a specific tension related to the convergence of cinema and video games, it also becomes an entry point for wider theoretical discussions regarding how we understand media, their relation to each other, to us as humans, and to the world(s) that we inhabit.