The Film Game Dis/Continuum: Making Sense Of Entertainment Across Media

A recurrent, messianic dream of film makers and game developers has been that one day, their Shakespeare or Dickens will arrive, with a game that bridges the two art forms perfectly and ushers in a new age of interactive entertainment. This vision has existed for at least four decades, and endorsed by entertainment industry veterans from Brenda Laurel via Clive Barker to Steven Spielberg, so how close are we to this ideal? And are there other ways to imagine the futures of film and games, for instance as cross-media combos? The talk will apply a historical perspective on the development of story-telling games, and also present a design theory for how to construct these game-story hybrids, based on examples from the already rich and varied genre of epic games.