Welcome to the age of convergence entertainment.
But what do we mean by "convergence entertainment"? It's about bringing two or more media forms, styles, systems, and platforms together to produce entertainment we can all enjoy - and that makes good business sense.We see this convergence in most of our valued forms of media: television now surpasses cinema in its own game and offers the intellectual, emotional and even visceral experiences normally reserved for big-screen cinema. Can there be anything more "cinematic" than the last season of AMC's Breaking Bad?
Convergence is nothing new as a media logic. However, gambling opens up a courageous and potentially disturbing new world of aesthetic and economic convergences.
It's not hard to see the impact of games on the cinema. The entire production of such a popular filmmaker as Michael Bay lends itself generously to a game sensitivity with its heightened spectacles, formulaic stories and reassuringly familiar character sheets.
And is it so radical to assume that a film like Inception (2010) has a big part in its dramatic impact on the modest platform game? After all, we enter with Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) the virtual dream space, do a predetermined set of tasks (goals) and ascend to the next level.
As the publication of Beyond: Two Souls shows, the future of convergence entertainment promises even more complex integration of media genres and platforms.
Companies such as Sony and Disney are increasingly investing in the full range of entertainment media and investing resources in cinema, television, music, merchandising and the gaming industry.
These multi-faceted entertainment industries are no longer separated by streams of production. Rather, they need a bit here or there to successfully merge the revenue streams.
In the same year, Sony will be the owner of both Elysium (2013), Neill Blomkamp's successor to District 9 (2009), and PS4, which will hit the market next month. a sci-fi movie and a game console.
Rockstar's recently released Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V) grossed more than $ 1 billion in the first three days, a timeframe roughly equivalent to the opening weekend of the Studio Tent Pole movie.
Tent Pole releases refer to films that protect a studio from the financial losses of smaller releases that are often available on niche markets. But not even the 20th Century Fox avatar (2009) or Disney's The Avengers (2012) approached GTA V's monetary performance last month.
With such strong economic performance in an increasingly globalized entertainment market, the film industry faces a hard truth: gambling has outpaced the revenue stream movie itself in its myriad of sales streams - movie theater, Blu-ray, DVD, and home entertainment - vendors.
The once modest console game has become a potentially more lucrative art form and commodity than any other in the history of entertainment media. And instead of being a pastime for teens and the inappropriate (a common perception of the ordinary player out there), gaming has the potential to reach the demographically largest audience and speak to a variety of personal and collective fantasies.
Of course, game developers have strategically used a convergence media ethos to diversify their target markets. It only makes sense that an entertainment product converges with other entertainment products and addresses a range of interests. It helps a complex diversified company like Sony to get their movie buyers excited about the game interface, doubling sales of a Sony product.
Recently, I was on a panel with the visionary leader of Quantic Dream, David Cage, the man and the company behind Beyond: Two Souls. It's an exceptionally ambitious game that offers a dense narrative experience. The powerful stars Elaine Page and Willem Dafoe dominate the billboards. The promotional material looks like any other set of movie posters released by Hollywood studios.
When I talked extensively with Cage, I found that the uniqueness of his vision was essentially based on his search for and commitment to a complex, ingenious convergence of play and cinematic aesthetics. Cage welcomed the description of Beyond: Two Souls as "cinematic gaming".
In his description of the cinema and its long century of development, something was almost awesome; By comparison, gaming is an infant at an early stage of development. Cage is openly committed to games as a new media form without borders.
But as a film scholar, I have strong reservations about how far this convergence can go. I welcome media experiments, and the mass media have gone through exactly this transformation process.
My concern is that the potential of aesthetic convergence be limited by the economic realities of the global entertainment industry. GTA V is a billionaire affirmation of some sort of gaming experience. and an economic return of one billion dollars can rule out other types of experiences.
How many games are there that match the aesthetic and economic standard of GTA V (or any other mass product)?
I asked Cage: Do you think that Gaming Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) or Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) could produce a mass cultural experience? Cage's answer? Not for some time.
How can we imagine what will become of games or what will be a gaming experience over the next few decades? All contemporary mass media forms - even and especially games - are shaped by the markets in which they are produced.
This is not to favor one game over another, but to glorify Cage's "Complex Emotional Experience" from Beyond: Two Souls on the visceral gameplay of GTA V. However, it is about projecting the concept of the game experience as open, as it has the ability to reflect the full range of intellectual, emotional, and visceral experiences.
In a sense, cinema has been trying for different results for more than a century.
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