Where Good Old Cinema Narratives and New Media Collide

Abstract

Based on the study of contemporary action/fantasy/horror blockbusters adapted from video games, with a special focus on Assassin’s Creed (Kurzel, 2016), the paper examines the influence of new media, and especially video games on contemporary cinema storytelling, with a special focus on how they reshape narrative structures and logic through adding a novel spatial dimension and incorporating a new form of reality based on the rules of video games. This reality of imagined spaces creates a narrative that from many aspects breaks away from the rules and the logic of a more ‘tightly-woven’ storytelling, and – among many other things – introduces the presence of the non-present, unfolding their plots through discovering the unknown spaces of imaginary universes. While this ‘new real’ is emerging in contemporary cinema, as the present paper will argue, in years to come it might easily become a set of ‘new rules of the game’ for a lm industry targeting a new generation of movie-goers who grew up with touchscreens and apps, and are just entering their teenage years.

Keywords

• games history
• videogames
• new media
• cinemanarrative
• storytelling
• imagined spaces