La remédiation des images de cinéma dans le jeu vidéo

Collection : Encyclopédie raisonnée des techniques du cinémaBien avant l’apparition des simulations photoréalistes en 3D, les développeurs de jeux vidéo ont été obnubilés par un désir de mimétisme. Le jeu vidéo est prisonnier d’un paradoxe qui explique en partie cette obsession : foncièrement interactif, il procure un effet d’immédiateté bien supérieur à celui des médias produits à partir de prises de vues réelles. Cependant, en matière de réalisme visuel, il parvient difficilement à les égaler. Ce livre numérique raconte l’histoire de cette obsession, mettant en relief les efforts que les concepteurs de jeux ont déployés ainsi que les multiples défis technologiques rencontrés. Il souligne également en quoi la remédiation de séquences vidéo filmées a donné lieu à un phénomène intermédial inédit : la vague du « cinéma interactif » des années 1990, dont la contribution à l’histoire du jeu vidéo demeure sujette à débat.Videogame creators have been obsessed with the simulation of visual perception long before the contemporary development of photorealistic 3D simulations. The videogame medium has been caught in a paradoxical remediation scenario, which can help understand this obsession better: while it proposes, thanks to interactivity, a more immediate experience than captured media such as photography and cinema, it could not measure up to their perceptual realism. This digital book explores the obsession of videogame designers to integrate cinema-like images, and the numerous technological challenges faced. It also highlights how a direct remediation of captured film sequences led to a peculiar intermedial manifestation, the movie game craze of the 1990s, whose contribution to videogame history is still an object of debate to this day.Introduction = Introduction ; Les fondements de la mémoire informatique = Memory basics ; L’envie cinématographique = Cinema envy ; La compression des images = Compressed media ; Les paradoxes de la remédiation = Paradoxes in remediation ; Le FMV dans l’histoire = FMV through history ; L’avenir du FMV : la vidéo volumétrique = The future of FMV : volumetric vide

Cinematic games : the aesthetic influence of cinema on video games

During its first decade, Game Studies debate mainly revolved around the juxtaposition between two perspectives: the one of ludology and the one of narratology, each positing a primary quality of video games against the other. The study of the relationship between cinema and video games got somehow caught in the crossfire between these two fields. In this work, I investigate the extent to which representation in video games is connected to cinema and its representational codes. A number of authors before challenged this assumption, theorising models that only partially connect the cinematic form to video games. Such investigations have always started from the ludologically educated assumption that video games are different from cinema and, therefore, for the premises of this comparison to be considered “vitiated”, only tangentially useful due to the irreconcilably different nature of the two media. The adjective “cinematic” is a concept constantly evoked in cultural discourses concerning video games. Magazines, reviewers, critics, but also designers, artists, users and commentators (even scholars) often summon the idea of cinematic games in the attempt of describing some peculiar features that share affinities with films and suggesting that video games possess the aura of the big screen. Cinematic games are born at the crossroads between interactive movies and video games, for which the cinematic expression is retained by means of audiovisual representation while keeping the action in the hands of the player. Due to the vast scale of the subject, my work focuses on relatively recent developments in game design which have yet to be fully investigated, and seeks to extend existing attempts to apply the tools of film theory to Game Studies. A secondary value of this work is an annotation on the disengagement of moving image scholars with video games, and it partly serves as an invocation for this to change

Distributed Cinema: Interactive, Networked Spectatorship In The Age Of Digital Media

Digital media has changed much of how people watch, consume and interact with digital media. The loss of indexicality, or the potential infidelity between an image and its source, contributes to a distrust of images. The ubiquity of interactive media changes aesthetics of images, as viewers begin to expect interactivity. Networked media changes not only the ways in which viewers access media, but also how they communicate with each other about this media. The Tulse Luper Suitcases encapsulates all of these phenomena

Distributed Cinema: Interactive, Networked Spectatorship In The Age Of Digital Media

Digital media has changed much of how people watch, consume and interact with digital media. The loss of indexicality, or the potential infidelity between an image and its source, contributes to a distrust of images. The ubiquity of interactive media changes aesthetics of images, as viewers begin to expect interactivity. Networked media changes not only the ways in which viewers access media, but also how they communicate with each other about this media. The Tulse Luper Suitcases encapsulates all of these phenomena

Material windows and working stations. The discourse networks behind skeuomorphic interface in Pathfinder: Kingmaker

The article probes the intermedial structure of the skeuomorphic interface in Pathfinder: Kingmaker. The author indicates that intermedia research in game studies is often diachronically limited, focusing on material and semiotic interactions between “old” and “new” media. He proposes to open the field onto historically aware discoursive analysis and bases his method on Friedrich Kittler’s notion of “discourse networks”. This allows him to inspect the game in relation to technologically-founded networks that embody or bring into life specific modes of though and experience. During his analysis, he discovers that the interface design is involved with navigation devices in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance periods, Alberti’s windows as objects through with narrative spaces become visible, isometric modes of objective thinking, industrial and cybernetic notions of control, and the Xerox invention of the computer as a working environment.The article probes the intermedial structure of the skeuomorphic interface in Pathfinder: Kingmaker. The author indicates that intermedia research in game studies is often diachronically limited, focusing on material and semiotic interactions between “old” and “new” media. He proposes to open the field onto historically aware discoursive analysis and bases his method on Friedrich Kittler’s notion of “discourse networks”. This allows him to inspect the game in relation to technologically-founded networks that embody or bring into life specific modes of though and experience. During his analysis, he discovers that the interface design is involved with navigation devices in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance periods, Alberti’s windows as objects through with narrative spaces become visible, isometric modes of objective thinking, industrial and cybernetic notions of control, and the Xerox invention of the computer as a working environment

The Comic Book Film as Palimpsest

In this dissertation, I argue that the comic book film can be productively conceptualized along the same theoretical lines used by Gérard Genette in his literary study Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree: that is, as a genre whose individual works are constructed of multiple textual layers. In this case, these layers consist of different media—film and comics—both of which remain uniquely visible in the final product, and whose combination results in unique articulations of cinematic style. I argue that the full import of these stylistic interventions is lost or overlooked when using an adaptation studies approach to the genre; therefore I employ a version of Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s theory of remediation filtered through Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of literary dialogism and heteroglossia. Chapter One articulates the limitations of adaptation theory and presents remediation as a productive alternative. Chapter Two develops a Genette-inspired six-tiered schema that details the categories into which the various strategies of remediation fit. The following two chapters draw upon this framework to explore particular formal differences between comics and film and the stylistic means through which various film texts have addressed them: namely, the difference between the film frame and the comic book panel (Chapter Three) and cinematic movement versus comic book stasis (Chapter Four). In Chapter Five, I explode the established paradigm by considering two case studies that remediate comic books amongst a broader variety of media, which present comics as one medium in the vast contemporary digital media ecology. In the final chapter, I address the superhero film in particular, exploring the question of celluloid versus digital cinema at length and how Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” trilogy (Batman Begins; The Dark Knight; The Dark Knight Rises) uses its narrative to allegorically advocate for cinematic specificity, thus articulating a counter-example to the framework established in the previous chapters

Gamic Cinema and Narrative Space in Run Lola Run and Gamer

In his formative book Gaming: Essays of an Algorithmic Culture, Alexander Galloway suggests that technological innovation and a dynamic shift in cultural appeal has ensured that the relationship between cinema and video games has become increasingly more complex in nature. Once regarded as an inferior form of media in the past, video games have quickly grown to become one of the most influential forms of media of the 21st century, challenging the ways in which we view, analyse and engage with contemporary visual media. In studying the impact of video games on film, Galloway notes that a new wave of filmmakers has begun to explore the multifaceted ways in which video games can influence film by incorporate specific innovations from video games in to the filmmaking process. He identifies this wave as a form of gamic cinema. It is my contention that the rapid evolution of video games continues to have a profound influence on the filmmaking process today. Therefore, the aim of this thesis seeks to examine the concept of gamic cinema by conducting a comparative textual analysis of two primary texts; Tom Tykwer’s hyperkinetic Run Lola Run (1998) and Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor’s visually frenetic action film Gamer (2009). In doing so, it poses two primary research questions; what specific innovations from video games are incorporated in to these films, and what filmmaking techniques are used to do so? To further explore these questions, this thesis suggests that the study of narrative space, a concept that exists within both film and video game studies, may be an effective means through which we can examine gamic cinema. In light of this, this research also draws on theories and discourse from the fields of film, video game and new media studies in order to offer a thorough exploration of the relationship between the two media forms. Ultimately, this research sets out to explore video games have influenced the filmmaking process and what this could mean for the future of cinema

Towards a Common Language: A Theorization of Text, Audio, and Image in Videogame Narrative

The mention of the videogame medium in academic disciplines outside the realm of game studies tends (for this writer, anyway) to inspire excitement and dread in equal measure. The former would seem to derive from an appropriately childish desire to sit at the adult’s table of academia, as it were: long has there been discussion of what games have borrowed from the media that have come before, and little of the reverse. The latter feeling is based in the fear that the term “videogame” would appear, as it did for years, in a negative connotation. Not in the archaic media/sociological studies sense (i.e. the tired question of videogame violence and its correlation to aggression in players), but merely in the sense that the videogame medium is perceived either as a lesser art form, or perhaps as not an art form at all. It’s with these preconceived aspirations and worries I approached Thomas Eslaesser’s Chapter on the “Mind-Game Film” in his book Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, a text that was published in March of 2009. In this Chapter, Elsaesser cites a school of thought in modern film narrative analysis which posits that “mind-game films [are] leftovers of classical narrative, during a period of transition, when the default value of cinematic storytelling is rapidly becoming that of the interactive video-game and the computer simulation game”. Elsaesser continues by claiming that this assertion “should certainly leave the theoretician dissatisfied,” explaining that “the literature on whether games are narratives at all, or need to be seen as an entirely different species, is vast and vastly divided…”. Here, Eslaesser has provided game academics with a much-needed outsider’s perspective: Twelve years after Janet Murray wrote a book on the topic of interactive narratives, eight years after the supposed “Year One” of Game Studies (Aarseth), six years after Gonzalo Frasca claimed both that games are resolutely not narrative and that the debate between narratology and ludology didn’t actually occur (Simulation versus Narrative; Ludologists Love Stories), and 5 years after Espen Aarseth’s “Genre Trouble,” game studies still had not offered a definitive answer as to whether or not games can be understood via narrative theory. This lack of resolution creates the image of a house divided: a medium that persons from outside disciplines can only approach with a measured uncertainty at best. This inconsistency obviously manifests itself in the myriad definitions of videogame: compare, for example, Jesper Juul’s six formal features of the videogame – Rules; Variable, Quantifiable Outcome; Values assigned to possible outcomes; Player Effort; Player attached to outcome; and Negotiable Consequences – to Geoff Howland’s five elements: Graphics, Sound, Interface, Gameplay, Story (Game Player World; 1998). Even the exact spelling of “videogame” is left undecided: is it “video game,” as Mark JP Wolf refers to it in his book The Medium of the Video Game? Or is it the “videogame” that James Newman and Grant Tavinor refer to in their work? Or is it the medium of the “video-game” that Elsaesser speaks of? These kinds of inconsistencies are not the growing-pains of a new academic discipline: commercial videogames have existed for over forty years, and scholarship on videogames has been written since before the supposed “Year One” of academic game studies thirteen years ago. This is a problem.Bachelor of Art