I began to write this a couple of months ago but I never bothered to finish it: I wasn’t sure whether I was actually talking about the game in question…
Honoring cinema
This post and the last one were written for the Blogs of the Round Table at Critical Distance, a monthly invitation for video game bloggers to discuss about a proposed…
For Impure Video Games: In Defense of Cinematic Storytelling
With the critical and detached perspective we can now afford on the video game production of the last ten or fifteen years, one of the dominant phenomena of its evolution…
Imitation of Life (4): Film is Dead, Long Live Video Games!
I opened this series of articles about CGI on the idea that “Video games are not cinematic and they will never be”, a radical statement that I would not repeat…
Imitation of Life (3): A World Past
In my last apocalyptic article, I presented computer-generated imagery as a threat to the photographic image, but what can be so dangerous with CGI? As previously discussed, Terminator 2: Judgment…
Imitation of Life (2): The Fall of Man
Let’s begin with the obvious: Hollywood doesn’t like changes. So, all novelties Hollywood movies may bring have to be firmly counterbalanced by the most rigorously classical visual style possible. This…
Imitation of Life (1)
What is cinema? Does this question still make sense today, in this age of CGI, digital cameras, heavy post-production effects, with movies distributed in a variety of formats, from the…
Things to Come
Videogames are not cinematic and they will never be. I’m not saying this because I hate these so-called “cinematic” videogames, or because I’m a ludologist who cares only about mechanics…
Tomb Raider (2013): Surviving a Tutorial
I started to play the new Tomb Raider recently and as I already knew the first hour or so is a series of non-ending QTEs. And as I already knew…
Lincoln (2012), Steven Spielberg
I didn’t have a proper conclusion for my two articles on Spielberg’s cinema, but now I found it with Lincoln, his last film, which happens to be also a good…
To Kill Or Not To Kill
In the past week, I’ve been having a little back and forth with Joel Goodwin on his blog Electron Dance about ethical choices as they are currently depicted by videogames….
Videogames as Possibilities
Let’s resume what I said in my last two articles: on one hand, the representational aspect of videogames is always shifting, in the sense that the moving image in front…
The Illusion of Choice
“A game is a series of interesting decisions.” We all know this famous assertion made by Sid Meier (does anyone know when and in which context he said it, or…
The Protean Form of Videogames
Maybe this can explain why I find videogame criticism so difficult or at least so alien for me, with my background in cinema: it is the only form of criticism…
The Experience of Art
I should have learned by now: never announce an article that is not yet written. I will not answer (for now) the questions raised at the end of my last…
Author as Style
What is an author? Or rather: how does the idea of “author” fit into an interpretation of a work of art? Let’s begin by the obvious: The Death of the…
The Cinema of Steven Spielberg (2): Behind the Images
If the first part of Steven Spielberg’s career can be summarize by a general movement toward the lights in the sky, like Roy Neary in Close Encounters of the Third…
The Cinema of Steven Spielberg (1): Toward the Lights
A quick note about my last post: it wasn’t made clear that the author theory is an interpretative angle amongst others, one I particularly like, but it’s certainly not exclusive….
A Thoughtful Love
The author theory seems to be greatly misunderstood nowadays. Or maybe it’s not new, I don’t know, but for sure, now, the idea of defending all movies made by a…
Citizen Kane and Me (2): Citizen Kane
I haven’t really answered these questions yet: what is Citizen Kane, and what does it represent? The first time I saw Citizen Kane I remained blind to its munificence, I…
Citizen Kane and Me (1): Me
What is Citizen Kane? Obviously it’s a movie, but what does Citizen Kane represent, or what do we mean when we say “this is the Citizen Kane of videogames”, or…