Film Journal 2/11

There was a ridiculously (and hilariously) long titled game advertised on TV today ("Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Ghost Recon Advanced War Fighter 2" or something of that nature... I'm not making this up!), and watching the commercial I realized video games need to stop pretending to be movies. The commercials show cinematic sequences from video games, but the special thing about them is that they're interactive.

Films are stories with set endings being told to you as you watch (and of course there's lots of gray area here), but video games are something you participate in. Video games won't come into their own until they stop trying to be films, just as the film medium came into it's own after it stopped trying to be live theatre (the previously established and respected art of the day).