Movies crossing into games

The movie adaptation of 300, Frank Miller's gore-splattered graphic novel, hits UK cinemas tomorrow after crushing box office records in the US. Roger Ebert wrote that it looks like the most expensive videogame ever made, and other US reviewers have fashioned similar, usually disparaging, connections between the two entertainment forms. They're not just talking about the obvious visual similarities (300 makes extensive use of CGI environments and special effects); many have woefully put Zack Snyder's flick at the vanguard of a new cinema, aimed at a generation of attention-deficit gamers, where narrative drive is sacrificed at the altar of fetishised hyperviolence. They have a point. Abandoning the traditional three-act structure, 300 is built much more like a game, with its escalating series of setpiece battles interspersed with plot-driving sections and even several boss battles. It is linear and relentless; several times I expected to be handed control of the action. But where the critics are wrong is in believing this is an entirely new phenomenon. Videogame design has been influencing US TV and movies for several years. Lost is a key example - a popular interpretation of the series is that it's all actually a videogame, the characters merely pawns in some photo-realistic interactive entertainment. But even if that's inaccurate, the writers use dozens of devices taken from videogames: the locked hatch found in season one resembles a key game design technique in which the player finds a locked door but has no means to open it until later in the adventure. The employment of unexpected, out-of-place animals - ie, the polar bear - is basic videogame stuff, recalling the dinosaurs in Tomb Raider among many others. And now that DVD releases are more profitable than box-office takings, directors and studios have to think about providing 20 hours of entertainment rather than 90 minutes; this is much more in line with the videogame experience. It is fortunate that game designers are starting to meet narrative cinema halfway. I've just visited Ubisoft's Montreal studio where, according to Patrice Desilets, the creative director on hugely promising adventure Assassin's Creed, no game goes into production until the team has agreed on an underlying theme. There has to be a point to it all. In many ways, videogames are bigger than cinema now, and most young movie scriptwriters grew up playing games - the crossover of ideas is inevitable. It is to be hoped that something new and positive comes out of this, something beyond the invectives of old-skool film critics who recoil in shock at digital effects.