Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 128)

Trigger Happy
130
videogames present information to our eyes in the same
way as films?
CinÉ qua non?
Since the upstart videogame form shattered film’s
monopoly on the moving image, the two media have
been engaged in a wary standoff. As their powers of
graphic realization have increased, videogames have
begun superficially to look a bit more like films, while
films have become more interested in videogames as
visual furnishing and conceptual subject matter.
Videogames have lovingly appropriated set-piece forms
from the cinematic milieux of horror, action and
science fiction (the enormous monster, the car chase,
the space dogfight), while films have stolen ever more
brazenly from videogames’ hyperkinetic grammar (the
exaggerated sound effects, the disregard for classical
gravitational laws) in executing those same forms on
the silver screen.
It is, of course, understandable that the mass media,
in having to deal with the vast but to them
incomprehensible culture of videogames, naturally
reach for the vocabulary of film—apparently the
nearest medium in visual terms—in order to describe
such games as Silent Hill. But before we start positing