 The Uncharted series has become synonymous with the term cinematic game, being designed as an interactive version of Indiana Jones with us playing the role of protagonist. However, it draws from a lot more than just Spielberg's classic franchise. Take Uncharted 3, this opening bar brawl that breaks into a bathroom seems reminiscent of a similar scene in Casino Royale. This chase sequence through the city streets of Yemen shares the intense pacing and cinematography of the rooftop chase in the Bourne Ultimatum, and the level inside a cab-sized ship comes straight out of the movie Poseidon. This goes without mentioning that the general thematic overlay of the story was influenced heavily by Lawrence of Arabia. Naughty Dog, to their credit, do an incredible job of lifting many of these cinematic inspirations and melding it with interesting gameplay, creating a pulsating sense of adventure that they describe as an active cinematic experience. However, Uncharted borrows more than just specific scenes, themes and scenarios from cinema, but many of its more general properties. Cut scenes are filmed with the same cinematic flair, set pieces drive much of the pacing of the whole game, and it also uses a fractured version of the three-act structure that has become standard in modern cinema. Chase sequences, dynamic camera composition, cuts, and in-media-sres openings like in Uncharted 2 all play a role to make it feel cinematic. So we see not just thematic inspiration, but mechanical adaptation when it comes to defining what a cinematic game is. Uncharted was far from the first game to be overtly inspired by cinema though, with the moniker for most cinematically inclined designer going to Hideo Kojima. Much like Uncharted, Metal Gear Solid's cinematic inspirations are obvious from the outset. In interviews regarding the many influences of the Metal Gear series, Hideo Kojima cited the guns of Navarone, The Great Escape, and the protagonist of Escape from New York, Snake Pliskin. Each of his games draw from different source material, with Metal Gear Solid 1 being the most infiltration heavy. Metal Gear Solid 2 took on a much more meta dimension, invoking classics like 2001 and Space Odyssey to tell a subversive tale of postmodern inversions. Metal Gear Solid 3 is a love letter to James Bond, Mission Impossible, and Rambo, and everything from the lovably cheesy opening title song Snake Eater, to the snappy dialogue between Big Boss and Paramedic as they muse about classical cinema show Kojima and his team's love and appreciation for film. Again though, let's look past the surface level inspirations. The Metal Gear series is notorious for having extended cutscenes, once more directly lifting the cinematic language to do its storytelling. The opening of Metal Gear Solid 1 has the credits rolling on screen as you play it, replicating a convention of cinema, and the shifting camera angles off the game, whether it be when you turn around a corner or literally adopting the first person view, show some of the mechanics of the cinematic craft. Once more, we see both thematic and mechanical inspiration being drawn from the cinematic art form, and the Metal Gear series is one of the most beloved franchises because of this. The strength of cinema is that it can generate tightly defined emotional experiences, inventing a framed reality as it were, and leverage tools like camera angles, cuts, and cinematic composition techniques to convey themes and ideas. The saying is show, don't tell, and much of the greatest cinema can communicate its ideas without even saying a single word. The strength of games though comes from the fact that it is an interactive medium, with the expression of preference being do, don't show. You see the central conflict here, cinema leverages precise authorship, whereas games are ostensibly interactive, and so in many senses, simply replicating cinematic techniques can be counterproductive. Metal Gear Solid 4 was a fantastic game, but one of the most enduring criticisms offered were the absurdly bloated cutscenes, taking agency out of the player's hands for sometimes hours at a time. QuickTime events became very popular for a while, thanks to games like Shenmue, which are instances where the player effectively taps a button to do something interesting. Again though, these are widely condemned in gaming for removing player agency. Finally, camera techniques and cuts are somewhat constrained in their use in gaming, because ultimately, games need to be playable and functional. However, cinematic techniques can be used to enhance gameplay and storytelling, and so drawing inspiration from cinema can actually be transformative. In Joseph Maselli's book, The Five Seas of Cinematography, he cites camera angles, cuts, continuity, close-ups, and composition as the central tools of the cinematic language. And we can see how games leverage different forms of this vernacular. Fixed camera angles and cuts in Silent Hill actually heighten the sense of tension in the game. The original God of War had fixed camera angles that frame the action perfectly to make you feel a part of an epic cinematic adventure. Devil May Cry, on the other hand, has a controllable camera, making you the cameraman of sorts in a quasi-Kurosawa samurai film. Shadow of the Colossus uses wide shots to create a sense of awe and disempowerment in the face of a vast, unknowable world, and close shots are pervasive in games like The Last of Us to create a sense of intimate character. Cuts are used not just in horror games, but also games like Thirty Flights of Loving, which uses this filmic technique to destabilize their sense of space and time. Playing with time is something that was explored with movies like Memento and Pulp Fiction, and games have also tried their hand with these techniques. Whether it be the stylized detective game Return of the Oberdin or the disjointed narrative in a game like Her Story, single shots are seen as some of the most technically difficult to accomplish in cinema. But games are actually leveraging this technique now. Hellblade uses a single shot to reinforce its theme about how people suffering from psychosis view themselves from the outside, creating a kind of disassociation. And the latest God of War uses a single shot through the entire game, seamlessly transitioning from cutscenes to gameplay to create a powerful, immersive trance. Much like gaming, cinema sought after legitimacy for the longest time, and it took a fair while for that to happen. Starting out as a derivative form of photography and theater, cinema commenced as kinetoscopes with no story, then moved into action scenes, silent films, and then feature land formats with birth of a nation. It wasn't until the golden years of cinema, dating around the 1930s, where we had seminal films like Citizen Kane, Gone with the Wind, and Casablanca that the potential of the medium finally shone through. People realized you could convey powerful biographical surveys, emotional themes, and pulsating action all at once, finally establishing it as a viable art form. In the post-war era, cheaper production, portable cameras, and a growing diversity of filmmakers led to even deeper thematic content. Through directors like Desika, Kurosawa, Godard, and Bergman, cinema evolved from being about no story and superficial emotions to broader thematic emotions that encompass the wide range of human experience. If this sounds familiar, this seems to mirror how most art forms evolve. Video games are often dismissed as children's playthings, and have yet to establish themselves in the eyes of many of the public, much like what cinema and then later television and comic books would struggle with. In his famous dragon speech, Chris Crawford implored developers to create wider thematic content than just fun engagement and challenge. And now, with the proliferation of indie games, a lower barrier to entry in game design, and more diverse crowds enjoying gaming, we are getting more rich thematic experiences in conjunction with more conventionally gamey games. Some argue we are still waiting for our citizen cane to truly establish what the medium is capable of, whereas others claim we have already had our equivalent. It just exists in the guise of great gameplay, like in Tetris or chess. In his GDC talk, cinematic games are dead, long-lived cinematic games. Matthew Weiss presents what he sees as the history of cinematic influence in games and where it needs to go in the future. The well runs much deeper than Naughty Dog and Hideo Kojima, with old licensed properties like E.T. and Tron having gaming equivalents in the early days. However, much like how games based on movies tend to be horrible to this day, lots of these games were just cash grabs, which has replicated the themes of the movies without considering unique interactive adaptation. We then are games like Dragon Slayer and Dragon Slayer, which looked literally like animated movies, but the interactivity was so minimal, so it has to be irrelevant. They functioned more like choose-your-own-adventure books, with very little in the way of traditional mechanics. Finally, we got fully realized worlds and myths and the cinematic aspirations of games like Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil. Ultimately though, he argues that we need to adapt the world, themes and ideas of cinema to the gaming interface, preserving its best elements, but transferring its meaning into interactivity when possible. Further on this topic, in his talk, Narrative Mechanics, Daniel Bowen articulates how the relationship between passive observing and interactivity has evolved over time, with movies being fully passive, games like Tetris being fully interactive, but games like Dragon Slayer and Otherworld and Pac-Man having more hybrid structures. Games ever since the introduction of cutscenes have relied on the crotch of non-interactivity to convey their stories, instead of using interactivity itself to convey meaning. He then articulates how a game like Virtua Fighter functions like interactive cinematography, as the story comes from the mechanics of the fight the player is participating in, blending storytelling and gameplay. How do we use interactivity to create cinematic gameplay, though? If we take the example of a fighting game, we can see the mechanical contrivances modern fighters use to create more cinematic play. As we mentioned, the rounds, mechanics and context all create a kind of dramatic play space for a cinematic fight to take place. Tekken 7 has a slow motion mechanic that slows down the end of fights, highlighting a John Woo-esque kind of moment right at the climactic sequence. Additionally, it has a mechanic called Rage that gives the person losing additional damage, keeping the fight tense until the end. This is no different to rubber banding mechanics used in racing games to increase the dramatic tension of a race. Now we begin to see how game designers can use systems and design to reconcile the divide between authorship and agency that we identified as fundamentally conflicting between cinema and games. If we take an uncharted set piece, we see how the dynamics of player constrained by the pacing, the world design, enemy placements and tension. And if the player wavers too far from the script, it's a proverbial yell of cut every time you die. You can think of the act of play as a kind of performance for someone else who is watching the game. The famous train sequence in Uncharted 2 is perhaps one of the greatest set pieces in gaming and what it does is have the player go on a looping track until certain actions or reaching a certain location triggers a new sequence of the level. Each play through is slightly different but the possibility space is still tightly defined so the overall impression of the level comes across as similarly pre-authored. What does this all have to do with cinema, you ask? Well, the point of cinematic gaming as far as I see it is to leverage the tools of game design to create the illusion of agency and authorship all at once and having that fit into a thematic structural or mechanical analogy to the cinematic medium. Set pieces work brilliantly because they constrain the play space tightly. Boss battles feel naturally cinematic because they usually have escalating stages and a precise set of actions you need to do to succeed. Escape sequences, chase sequences and time constrained platforming all feel cinematic because everything feels tightly coordinated with the whims of the designers. Take the style system of Devil May Cry 3. It rewards you with points for playing like a creative trickster, switching up weapons and combos and what this does is effectively make you a stunt actor and cinematographer. If you take the framing of the first boss fight with your brother Virgil, the slow movement at the start gives way to a frenetic pace by the end and the cutscenes that play afterwards highlight the continuity more publicly. Virgil seems straight out of a samurai movie whereas Dante seems more at home in a John Woo film with his absurd improvisational antics and dishonorable gunplay. Other games adapt different conventions of cinematic genres. The slow motion gunplay of Hong Kong cinema can be seen in Max Payne's bullet time mechanic and the improvisational fight scenes of a Jackie Chan film can be seen in the fights of the Yakuza series. Again, the systems and framing of all these games incentivize players to play a particular way, getting the fights to feel pre-authored even though they preserve a sense of agency. However, we can also try managing things in the back end of games to further reconcile this divide. Alien Isolation is a lovingly crafted homage to Ridley Scott's seminal films which pits you against a singular xenomorph as it stalks you around a station. To adapt the movie to a game, the designers used an AI director in the background that observed the tension of the player based on proximity variables to manage when the alien would appear. The future of cinematic games will most likely involve AI directors and procedural AI tools to create more dynamic cinematic experiences. Reimagining the cinematic art form in an interactive medium might seem daunting but it's clear there is still much we can learn from cinema. Take The Last of Us. Its cinematic influences are equally as obvious as uncharted. The father and child relationship in the road and the nature reclamation post-apocalyptic trope popularized by I Am Legend. However, the designers of The Last of Us also cited eco as an inspiration and this shows fairly clearly in the bond they try to establish between Joel and Ellie. One chapter in particular, the Winter Chapter, highlights how games can draw from both the cinematic and gaming languages to create an emergent experience that is more than the sum of its parts. This chapter has you switch between Joel and Ellie as they try to find one another whilst being hunted by cannibals. The violence you invoke as Joel is a metaphor for the love he now bears for Ellie and the stealth sections as Ellie highlights the disempowerment she feels in this harsh world. However, the cinematic interludes that punctuate this section only enhance the meanings conveyed by interactivity by framing the stakes, resolving the dissonance, switching between their perspectives and ultimately showing how they come together. The chapter feels like a virtuoso performance that blends games, cinema and television to create something that is both derivative but utterly unique. Ultimately, my argument is that we should view interactivity and the cinematic language as tools we can use to craft unique experiences, all while recognizing the inherent strengths of both mediums. When we say a game is cinematic, I don't think it just means theme mechanics or remediation, but also the implicit recognition that the arts are blended in some sense. We also don't have to be constrained by the limits of cinema either, and we can devise new templates and frameworks that work with the unique language of interactivity. Regardless, in the same way that cinema evolved from a pure mechanics base to an emotional medium, then to one that generated an incredible array of complex themes, games shared this progression as an art form. Every art form borrows from the past when it tries to explore what its unique language is, but what establishes an art form as unique is what it can do using its own internal vernacular. However, blending the arts and borrowing from the past also gives us hybrid experiences and puts an emphasis less so on the medium and more on what artists can communicate.