Transmedial Aesthetics: Where form and content meet - Film and Videogames

Krzywinska, Tanya ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0744-4144 (2013) Transmedial Aesthetics: Where form and content meet - Film and Videogames. In: Content and Representation. International Companions to Media Studies . Blackwell-Wiley, Oxford, UK. ISBN 978-1405193566

Abstract / Summary

This chapter uses the lens of transmediality (co-ordinated storytelling or world-building across different media platforms) to investigate the specific relationship of form to content in videogames. Through close textual analysis of two transmedial franchises, it is argued games and other media have grown closer in terms of content and representation. This paper was written before ‘movie-games and game-movies’, although published later, and there is a strong relationship between the two. The paper develops on Krzywinska’s work other work on game form and transmediality, but distinctively here a case is made against formal determinism. This is regarded as an inadvertent consequence of the advocation of games as a unique media – a rhetoric necessary in the early days of Game Studies to demonstrate their importance. While there are formal distinctions between games and other media, games nonetheless still draw heavily on cinematic vocabularies, not just through tie-ins but also more generally, in the deployment of familiar narrative formations, tropes and genres. The overarching aim of this chapter is to bring greater nuance to the present, hyperbolically polarised argument and show that games should not be regarded as hermetically sealed from broader media and cultural trends. This brings games under the umbrella of ‘the humanities’; a topic that Krzywinska is currently developing and invited to speak on at the Institute of Education in Winter 2013. It is also consideration of affect conjured up between player and text that is informs her current book project on the gamification of the Gothic. In addressing the solicitation of affect, the chapter makes sustained use of theoretical models derived from French philosophy, designed to move Game Studies away from formalism. The chapter was commissioned by the editor on the basis of Krzywinska’s previous work on videogame form; unusually each paper was anonymously reviewed by three other contributors.

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