interactivecinema.org

Interactive entertainment is bristling with unrealized potential. Although the incredible advancements at the technical level have indeed been beneficial, they have been used to improve the surfaces of the experiences only -- that is, while graphics are continually reinvented, the underlying structure of the experiences they present has remained virtually unchanged because it has not been recognized as Interactive Cinema.

During the early days of cinema, the emphasis of the medium was spectacle. Instead of thinking about what the images represented, the early cinematic audiences only cared to see pictures move. While this desire for spectacle was, and to some degree still is, a major force in cinema, filmmakers realized that the tools they had at their disposal could be used for something much greater than capturing simple actions such as a sneeze. This realization initially manifested itself by recreating existing modes of performance such as theater, but once the versatility of the camera was made clear when, for instance, a close-up was juxtaposed with a tracking shot, a cinematic language was developed through montage. With the recognition and analysis of cinematic montage, film was able to truly expand beyond its spectacular beginnings.

Though interactive entertainment designers have naturally used a montage structure in their creations, they have not understood the full implications of the montage structure as it exists in their creations. This has resulted in very few good Interactive Cinematic experiences in an industry cluttered with failures. Furthermore, the power of the montage structure has not been recognized as being important in the few successes.

In order to investigate Interactive Cinema as the driving power behind the industry, I first had to dissect it. This revealed that Interactive Cinema is a montage structure of the interactive and the cinematic, but further analysis was required to properly describe these components. To do so, I first surveyed the prevailing "new media" theories regarding interactivity, but I found no description of interactivity that adequately explained my observations of the interactive process. Thus, I turned to Chris Crawford's versatile definition that perfectly described my observations of the interactive process. Crawford defines interactivity as a cyclic process in which two actors alternately listen, think, and speak (Crawford 2000, 6).

I then revisited Film Theory's concept of montage introduced by Sergei Eisenstein as a collision of two cinematic elements in a synergistic fashion. Since a theory must encapsulate the general principles of an idea and not simply describe particular instances of application, I next examined the patterns that preceded and eventually led to the "Interactive Cinematic montage."

I began at the start of mechanical interactivity to examine the driving forces behind the development of interactive devices. While initially an examination of utility, it became apparent that the history of interactivity is better illuminated by an understanding of play. To that end, I surveyed theories of play, paying particular attention to the various theorized motivations of play. One aspect of Johan Huizinga's characterization of the play instinct, the differentiation between play for victory and play for the sake of play led me to see the history of interactivity differently than I had before. From this new vantage, I reevaluated the history of interactive entertainment spanning from the early 1960s to the mid-1980s. By paying attention to the play elements of the games developed during this period, I was able to discern trends in the development of the interactive playground that would not otherwise have been apparent, namely the evolution of montage by way of the goals of the playgrounds.

I came to recognize the structure of montage and its development, especially when I traced the changes of the genre classifications of the industry over time by examining how the critics classified the game industry and how those classifications changed. This left me with a very good idea of where the industry was headed with the Interactive Cinematic montage, but to properly define Interactive Cinema as an independent media, I took steps to distinguish it from traditional media.

The main obstacle to analyzing Interactive Cinema as its own medium is that it borrows heavily from cinema. Not only does Interactive Cinema incorporate sequences composed of cinematic montage, it also contains virtual counterparts of the cinematic apparatus. To demonstrate that the tools used to analyze cinematic montage are inadequate when dealing with Interactive Cinema, I closely analyzed how the Interactive Cinematic montage is constructed as well as how the audience perceives it.

Scott Bukatman's concept of "Terminal Identity" allowed me to theorize both the relationship between the work and the audience and that between the audience and the apparatus. I then went on to characterize the changes in these relationships from the early 1960s to the mid 1980s. Finally, I cast a speculative gaze at the future of Interactive Cinema by considering whether and how the worlds of Interactive Cinema represent real worlds.

The primary goal of my work has been to recognize Interactive Cinema as it now exists, to examine its anatomy and trace its genesis to through the history of human-machine interaction. In that process, I found good reason to suggest that the label "videogame" is inadequate because it fails to accurately represent the complexity of the montage structure that is better described by the name "Interactive Cinema."

A necessary attribute of a definition is that the definition describes the general concept and not a few isolated instances. My definition of Interactive Cinema -- "an experience involving one or more alternations between juxtaposed non-trivial interactive sequences and cinematic sequences" -- accurately describes nearly every interactive entertainment product released today. The few exceptions are primarily straightforward simulations (such as playing a sport or piloting a vehicle) that do not aspire to anything beyond the accurate reproduction of a real (usually agonistic) playground in a virtual arena.

Interactivity must be understood as a structure composed of multiple elements that alternate between the interactive and the cinematic, agonistic play elements and free-form play elements, and even the organic and the cybernetic. These alternations function as synthesizers as it is the tensions that emerge out of these alternations which define the Interactive Cinematic experience.

While others have noticed that there are interactive and non-interactive elements in "videogames," they fail to place the proper emphasis on the crucial relationships between them (Manovich; Newman). By scrutinizing these relationships, I have been able to offer new ways to analyze the medium, which I call Interactive Cinema.

Interactive Cinema does share traits with traditional media such as cinema, but traditional media theories cannot be used to describe an interactive cinematic experience. For instance, there is a (virtual) camera present, but because the interactive process has replaced suture with hyper-suture (the immersion of the audience by both visual and interactive means-- see page 74), the (virtual) camera no longer produces the relationships between the viewer and the viewed theorized by suture and similar theories. This departure is made even more apparent in the light of Scott Bukatman's concept of "Terminal Identity," or an increased sense of fusion between the audience and the work as well as between the audience and the apparatus. In this thesis, I have initiated an examination of how the organic and the cybernetic components are being brought together by a montage structure of the cinematic and the interactive. My examination is informed by Film Theory and New Media Theory, but it necessarily exceeds both in order to re-cognized interactivity as the alternation of freeform immersion (in the cinematic) and agonistic play (in the contest).

Eventually, when worlds are created that exist only as virtual playgrounds, and user and machinery approach Terminal Identity, "interactivity" will cease because all boundaries of "immersion" will have disappeared. This is the ultimate destiny-- and irony-- of "Interactive Cinema."