Watch a Film, Play a Game – Play a Film, Watch a Game: Notes on the ‘Intermedia-Presence’ of Digital Games in Cinema

ABSTRACT: The present study does not approach digital games per se and in accordance with the, so to speak, matter-of-course habitus, i. e. within the frame of game studies discourse (regardless of the ludology-narratology debate and probably even continuing tension), but rather in a wider cultural context and that by following essentially their relations to other cultural contents and phenomena, cinema in particular. Hence the intermediality discourse is within the pursued reflection applied as, from the point of view of the author, a fruitful framework. Intermediality can be legitimately approached as such a relation between media which, as Petr Szczepanik puts it, ‘creates indivisible fusions’. If we accept this thesis and utilize it as a starting point, film – connecting image, word and sound – appears to be intermedial apriori. On the basis of this and in connection with digital games (which, by the way, can be in terms of the aforementioned understood as intermedial a priori, too), such cinematic works of art – naturally, pars pro toto – are in the centre of interest here in which the a priori intermedial character of film is in a sense amplified or rather brought to a square (film as ‘intermedium²‘) – in this case and context by evincing ties, implicit and/or explicit, to digital games.

KEY WORDS: digital games, experience, film, intermedia, intermediality.