This document discusses how video games have impacted traditional film and television narrative over the past 40 years. It explores how games have adopted storytelling techniques from other mediums like episodic and sequel/spin-off structures from TV, as well as the importance of story and familiar yet unique worlds from movies. The document also examines how games are influencing other mediums by emphasizing player exploration of physical and narrative spaces, world-building, and coherent action sequences that respect the player's spatial awareness. Overall, it analyzes the evolving relationships and influences between games, film, and TV as narrative forms blend together.

1. Mario vs. Aristotle:
The Impact of Video Games on
Traditional Film & Television Narrative

2. Who is Keith?

3. Who is Bob?

4. Your Quest Givers
Keith Giglio
Newhouse School at Syracuse
University
@KeithGiglio
Robert Bryant
Writers Program at UCLA
@thumbcandy

5. Part 00: Overview
WRITERS AND NEW TECHNOLOGY

6. The Printing Press

7. Radio

8. Silent Movies

9. “The Talkies”

10. Animation

11. Television

12. Movies over 100 years old
TV almost 70 years old
Video Games almost 40 years old
WE ARE IN A GOLDEN AGE

13. Talkies changed the movies…
These platforms changed games

14. IT WASN’T ALWAYS THE GOLDEN AGE OF TV

15. Video Games Evolved...

16. CLICK HERE

17. The Lines are Blurring...

18. Variety:
Variety recently wrote “television and gaming
have supplanted movies as platforms for
iconoclastic works of art ranging from Mass
Effect to Breaking Bad.“

19. What Have Movies/TV Taught
Games?

20. The Importance of Story

21. The Importance of Uniquely Familiar

22. Neil Druckmann inspirations

23. STRUCTURE
He recalls the studio’s creative director Sam
Lake banging his head over trying to perfect
game narrative beyond Max Payne’s movie
format, before taking inspiration from TV shows
like Lost.
“It was during that time that the big series started
to come out with HBO and whatnot, Lost for
instance was one where people were buying the
boxsets, and then watching the episodes at their
own pace. Some are binging through it, some are
watching one a day, some are watching one
every other day or once a week, but all at their
own pace,” he explains.

24. Episodic Storytelling

25. Sequels and Spin-offs

26. Rise of the Indies

27. Make Us Care

28. Ingmar Bergman
●His work took us beyond film’s native
emotions and brought his lens to bear on
more complete range of human
experience

29. Despair

30. Torment

31. Shame

32. Alienation

33. Bergman’s Generation
Fellini
Truffaut
DeSica
Rossellini
Kurosawa

34. Paul Schrader
Bergman “probably did more than anyone
to make cinema a medium of personal and
introspective value.”

35. “personal and introspective
value”

36. How Have Games Changed
Movies and Television?

37. Video Games are 43 years old
Pong (1972)
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015)

38. Three Generations of Creators
There are creators working today whose
parents play(ed) video games

40. Pixels (2015)
No respect for the game medium
No respect for game culture
No respect for the audience

41. How It’s NOT done
Super Mario Bros. (1993)
Street Fighter (1994)
Mortal Kombat (1994)
Doom (2005)

42. Doom (2005)
https://youtu.be/-dMA8NmdyW4
First-person scene

43. Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (2015)
Turandot sequence demonstrates real
puzzle for the audience from Ethan’s POV

44. What’s a “Game?”
A game is “an [interactive] experience
defined by rules.”
- Anna Anthropy

45. “Show, Don’t Tell.”

46. “Don’t show me. Let me do it.”

47. “Game Mechanics”
• Moving
• Jumping
• Exploring
• Solving
• Herding
• Shooting
• Bartering
• Planning
• Nurturing
• Dancing
• Playing plastic
guitars

48. Key Game Mechanic
Exploring

49. Game Writing = World Building

50. Exploration
Of physical space
Of narrative spaces

51. Physical spaces
Snowpiercer
Inception
Interstellar

52. 1980s = The New Hotness
Michael Bay, et al., are a generation of
filmmakers raised loving and making music
videos.
“The tyrrany of the cut.”

53. “Screen Geography”
Younger “gamer” directors are respecting
space again.
More coherent action sequences.
Players HAVE to know where they are.

54. Narrative spaces

55. Video games
Long tradition of extratextuality

56. TV & Movies
Easter eggs
Recaps

57. Recaps
“What did I miss?”

58. (or questions)
Exercise

62. Character Choice??

63. Level Design

64. Breadcrumb - Myst is lost
Levels - Snowpiercer, Edge of Tomorrow
DLC
Up the action -
Storytelling devices

65. Action!

66. Worlds are blurring
Wrap up