Introduction - Text 1
After more than fifty years of commercial videogames, developers are now able to produce near photorealistic illusions generated by computers in real time. The development of this mathematical simulation of visual perception is a rich and complicated history in itself. However, these illusions still rely on captured media to a great extent, for instance through photographic textures applied on 3D models and performance capture with actors. Videogame creators have been obsessed with the ability to reproduce photographic and filmic illusions long before the contemporary development of photorealistic 3D simulations. The videogame medium has been caught in a paradoxical remediation scenario, which can help understand this obsession better. Remediation has been defined by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin as “the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media form”[1]. The authors note that the quest for a more lifelike or immediate media experience plays a major role in this process; new media often appear to remedy shortcomings or improve on their predecessors. For any videogame historian, the paradox is clear: while videogames propose a more immediate experience than previous audiovisual media thanks to interactivity, and thus propose an evolution in its remediation of animated images, until the first decade of the twenty-first century the quality of these audiovisual assets could not measure up to the perceptual realism associated with captured media such as photography and cinema.
This entry explores the obsession of videogame designers to integrate cinema-like images throughout the medium’s history, and the numerous technological challenges faced along the way. It also highlights how a direct remediation of captured film sequences led to a peculiar intermedial manifestation, the movie game craze of the 1990s, whose contribution to videogame history is still an object of debate to this day. The first section exposes the fundamental technological aspect allowing computers to store and manipulate information. The second section unearths early examples of “cinema envy” in arcade game marketing and computer games. The third section highlights more extensive remediation attempts thanks to the advent of various CD-ROM formats, along with the necessity to develop compression techniques. The fourth section delves into the remediation paradox presented above, focusing on aesthetic challenges and set-backs in terms of ludic design. The fifth section explores the reception of movie games throughout the medium’s history. The sixth and final section highlights a continuity between these remediation attempts and a new type of captured media used in video games and virtual environments: volumetric video.
