Video Games and Films: Forward into the Past

The essay compares the media of video games and films. It asks why the art procedures that work in films usually cannot work in video games and finds the main reason for this in the form. With its montage procedures and the viewer’s physical alienation from the happening, film is a distinctly modern medium, suited to modern types of narratives. The latter can no longer invoke traditional tropes, which in the framework of the medium can come across as naïve or kitschy. Contrary to film, video games connect the player, the protagonist and the world into a meaningful whole that is structurally reminiscent of a pre-modern cosmos, in which all things are connected with a common purpose. That is why games offer the possibility of including the old tropes about heroism, the functioning of magical elements and epic approaches. In this sense, they are essentially a more traditional form than film and offer greater possibilities of mobilisation to reactionary movements.