Game Studies

volume 23 issue 1 March 2023 ISSN:1604-7982

the international journal of
computer game research

Videogame Adaptations as Opportunities for Remembering Gameplay

by Bjarke Liboriussen

Abstract

There are forty-seven English-language films based on videogames with an estimated production budget of at least ten million US$ and primarily intended for theatrical release. The article understands the viewing of these films as opportunities for remembering gameplay. A grounded cognition approach to remembering, which includes game studies inspired by phenomenology and ecological psychology, focuses the article on the body as well as on genres (for example, first-person shooter and survival horror). Examples illustrate how filmic adaptations of videogames can trigger memories of both deliberate and habitualised gameplay, of having one’s body schema extended with and through an avatar, of re-enacting micronarratives and perceptual cuing -- some of which are perceived as sensorimotor affordances. Videogame adaptations can also make intermedial reference to specific games, game genres and to the medium of videogames, which include distinct types of players as well as the relationship between players and avatars. Gameplay is maintained throughout as the article’s key concept, firstly, to have the article resonate with the pleasures and frustrations experienced by gamers who watch filmic videogame adaptations and, secondly, to mitigate the risk of overreliance on narrative tropes such as story and character in both scholarly and popular criticism.

Keywords: Adaptation, grounded cognition, film, gameplay, genre, intermedial reference, memory, phenomenology, remembering

 

Introduction

Gameplay is a unique aspect of games, defined by Jesper Juul (2014) as “the experience of interacting with the game... not how a game looks, but how it plays” (p. 216. Emphasis in the original). This article frames the reception of videogame adaptations as opportunities for remembering gameplay. An analytical approach focused on gameplay diminishes the danger of reducing a game to how it looks, a danger faced by media scholars and film critics alike. For example, in his review of the videogame adaptation Monster Hunter (Anderson, 2020), Bilge Ebiri writes:

The movie is called Monster Hunter after all, and dammit, he’s [the director’s] gonna give us monsters. Not to mention some gnarly weapons, from giant scimitars to flaming swords to retractable, wrist-mounted crossbow thingamabobs. (I assume some of this stuff comes from the game, which I haven’t played.) (2020)

In order to better understand the film under review, Ebiri senses a need to better understand the adapted videogame. However, attention to “giant scimitars,” “flaming swords” and “retractable, wrist-mounted crossbow thingamabobs” -- all “this stuff” on the screen -- can help understand how a game looks but not how it is experienced. My apologies to Ebiri if he is in fact an avid gamer (incidentally, the review is thoughtful and ends on a positive note), but the quote illustrates how easy it is to overlook the fundamental difference between playing and watching. As a consequence, critics and media scholars alike might be tempted to fall back on narrative tropes such as story and character when comparing an adaption to its game (Meikle, 2019, chapter 4, offers an overview of critical and popular reception of videogame adaptations).

As a starting point for adaptation, the gameplay aspect of the videogame experience offers special opportunities that cannot be found in texts that require trivial effort for their traversal. The necessary efforts of traversal are not to be confused with the interpretative efforts required to experience any text: interpretation takes place in the mind, “while the user of cybertext also performs in an extranoematic sense” (Aarseth, 1997, p. 1). Espen Aarseth refers to cybertexts that require extranoematic and nontrivial effort as ergodic literature in contrast to nonergodic literature that only require trivial effort for traversal. When a text is adapted, it would typically be uninteresting to include nontrivial efforts of traversal in the adaptation, for example, by evoking the turning of pages of a novel or the sitting down to watch a play. In contrast, the nontrivial effort necessary to traverse a cybertext can be included in an adaptation in interesting ways, for example, by offering the film viewer opportunities for remembering gameplay.

As academic attention to videogames grew in the early twenty-first century, Aarseth (2001) remarked that “[g]ames are not a kind of cinema, or literature, but colonising attempts from both these fields have already happened, and no doubt will happen again” (see also Eskelinen, 2001). Warnings against colonisation from film studies and literature studies should be read through Mieke Bal (2002) as a warning against transdisciplinary academic work where concepts (for example, story and character) “travel” into the field of game studies “without changing” in contrast to interdisciplinary work characterized by “a negotiation, a transformation, a reassessment at each stage” of travel (p. 39). It is in this interdisciplinary spirit that this article lets gameplay travel from game studies into adaptation studies to understand the reception of videogame adaptations in a way that is focused on the viewer’s previous experience as a player, that is, their memories of gameplay. Players are motivated to interact with videogames for any number of reasons, but the concept of gameplay offers a motivational baseline, namely, the fundamental motivation to interact with videogames in first place.

Even if 2001 warnings of disciplinary colonisation are read generously as warnings against transdisciplinarity rather than interdisciplinarity, some of today’s responses are sceptical since “[n]owadays, the study of games stands firmly on interdisciplinary ground” (Fizek, 2022, p. 87). Brendan Keogh (2018) acknowledges that early game studies had a strategic need to emphasise unique experiential features of videogames, but “[n]ow, what is important is that we understand the context of videogames in the broader media ecology -- how they are similar to other media forms, how they deviate” (p. 196. Emphasis in the original). Filmic videogame adaptations can be a productive site for exploring those medial similarities and deviations, as already demonstrated by the essays collected in ScreenPlay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces (King & Krzywinska, 2002) and Game On, Hollywood! (Papazian & Sommers, 2013), as well as research into the connections between film production and videogame production (Brookey, 2010; Donovan, 2010, chapter 14; Elkington, 2009) and related work focused on narrative (Ryan, 2004; Thon, 2016) and transmedia (Kennedy, 2019; Thon, 2019). Some of the most recent work on the connections between videogames and films emphasises how gameplay tropes can be found in contemporary cinema (Boszorád, 2020; Sell, 2021). This article shares the intermedial aim explicit in Boszorád (2020) and implied in Sell (2021), that is, to highlight and discuss how a viewer of a film might occasionally have experiences between (inter-) film and videogames. However, whereas some of the examples used by Boszorád and Sell are only tangentially related to videogames at first glance (Sell [2021] convincingly and thought-provokingly reads 1917 [Mendes, 2019] as a “videogame film”), this article looks at films that count as videogame adaptations in a straightforward sense. Table 1 (in the Appendix section) provides an overview of all videogame-based, English-language films with an estimated production budget of at least 10 million US$ (adjusted for inflation) primarily intended for theatrical release. The article will illustrate how videogame adaptations can function as opportunities for remembering gameplay with examples from Table 1.

As explained in more detail immediately below, remembering of gameplay will be understood through the lens of grounded cognition, an approach that emphasizes how remembering is grounded in several domains outside of the mind itself. These domains include the physical environment, the social environment and, very importantly for gameplay, the body. The grounded cognition approach to remembering gameplay is then put to analytical work in the sections “Remembering Deliberate Gameplay,” “Remembering Repetitive Rehearsal” and “Evoking Players and Avatars through Intermedial Reference.”

A Grounded Cognition Approach to Remembering Gameplay

Remembering is a cognitive process that occurs in the mind along with other cognitive processes such as attention and thought (Barsalou, 2020). From the mid-twentieth century, the multidisciplinary field of cognitive science was broadly characterized by “computationalism,” that is, using the digital computer as an analogy for how the mind works (Shapiro & Spalding, 2021). Since the 1980s, however, cognitive science has increasingly acknowledged that cognition is not realized by the individual mind in isolation but in conjunction with the entire body and with external entities such as people and places (Barsalou, 2010). Because empirical evidence for making claims about the body’s role in cognition is relatively strong (Wilson referenced in Pecher & Swan, 2005, p. 2), “embodied cognition” (Shapiro & Spalding, 2021) has emerged as one of the most popular ways of labelling anti-computationalist approaches to cognition. However, usage of this label runs the risk of signalling that cognition is exclusively supported by the body. Lawrence Barsalou (2008) therefore prefers “grounded cognition” (p. 618) to signal that several domains ground cognition, namely, the body, the modalities, the physical environment and the social environment (Barsalou, 2020). In game studies, Andreas Gregersen (2014) has advocated a turn towards “situated cognition” rather than a narrower focus on embodied cognition, whereas Bernard Perron and Felix Schröter (2016) suggest “cognitivist game studies” (p. 7) to label game studies informed by cognitive science.

I will be following Barsalou’s suggestion and use the self-consciously broad term grounded cognition to describe how remembering of gameplay occurs when watching a videogame adaptation. This will allow me to bring together game studies that is explicitly cognitivist (Grodal, 2003; Schröter, 2016) with work indebted to two of the historical precursors for the grounded cognition approach (Shapiro & Spalding, 2021), namely, phenomenology (Chin, 2017; Gregersen & Grodal, 2009; Keogh, 2018) and ecological psychology (Linderoth, 2012). The body is the most important domain for the experiential grounding of the viewing experience of filmic videogame adaptations, but the grounding also occurs through the film and videogame genres that exist in the viewer’s social environment.

When experiencing a videogame adaptation, audiences might remember having played the adapted game, a game of the same genre or perhaps a game of a different genre -- in other words, remembering having had a gameplay experience. Following Laura Ermi and Franz Mäyrä (2005), a gameplay experience is defined as “an ensemble made up by the player’s sensations, thoughts, feelings, actions and meaning-making in a gameplay setting” (p. 2). Gameplay experiences are typically repeated many times. Keogh (2018) describes the repetitive nature of gameplay experience in a manner that fits a grounded cognition approach to remembering gameplay: “through repetition and failure multiple pasts and lost futures converge on the present play experience to intermediate each other through muscle memory, genre conventions, retries, ‘Game Overs’, seriality, and wasted time” (p. 140).

Through repetition, gameplay experiences in working memory (explicit memory) are stored in long-term memory (implicit memory) (Barsalou, 2020, p. 4) to support future gameplay. When an experiential ensemble is remembered, there is “a sense that what is being remembered hangs or holds together as an experience or a group of experiences,” a phenomenon that Edmund Husserl describes as “the unity of the remembered” (Casey, 2000, p. 41). However, the unity of empirically occurring sensations, thoughts, feelings, actions and meaning-making as they happen when a game is played should not be confused with the unity of the gameplay experience as remembered. Portions of the past might be filtered out, forgotten or repressed in remembering, and remembering might be fused with elements of imagining. For example, a fight sequence in the film Mortal Kombat (McQuoid, 2021) might function as a prop that reactivates remembered gameplay experiences, either because the viewer makes a conscious effort to retrieve long-term memory or because the memory is triggered automatically during viewing. I might, for example, have had extensive gameplay experiences of fighting in videogames. Watching Mortal Kombat, I might think back on hundreds of hours of fighting and regret having spent my time this way -- or, on the contrary, hold fond memories of play, including a confident sense of mastery of the game, which may or may not be empirically well founded. Negative or positive as the content of the memory may be, the activity of remembering can itself be pleasurable, as Edward Casey (2000) notes with support from Sigmund Freud (p. 47).

Remembering Deliberate Gameplay

Although much gameplay is repeated, some gameplay is relatively more deliberate. The “leap of faith” in the Assassin’s Creed series is an instructive example and has undergone adaptation in the Assassin’s Creed film (Kurzel, 2016). The leap of faith is also an example of what Henry Jenkins (2004) would call a “micronarrative” or what Sergei Eisenstein would call an “attraction”: an “element within a work that produces a profound emotional impact” (p. 125). For example, the player’s avatar, that is, the player-controlled protagonist seen on screen, reaches the spire of a church tower, which has been marked on the screen as a “viewing point.” Onscreen instructions appear, telling the player that they can perform a leap of faith by simultaneously pressing a combination of buttons. Upon pressing the buttons, the avatar dives towards the ground. The player’s engagement with the game is briefly turned “Off-Line,” that is, the player remains bodily engaged -- they stand ready to act -- even though the option to provide input to the videogame through the controller is momentarily taken away (Newman, 2002). When the Assassin’s Creed avatar touches the ground, the player’s engagement becomes On-Line again. In phenomenological parlance, both Off-Line and On-Line engagement stem from having a “’lived body’ (after Leib in Husserl)” (Casey, 2000, p. 178). Casey (2000) uses the term body memory to “[allude] to memory that is intrinsic to the body, to its own way of remembering” (p. 147) and explains how “many body memories (above all, habitual ones) need not be accompanied by consciousness in any explicit form” (p. 178). These formulations usefully highlight how both gameplay experiences and the remembering of gameplay experience are sometimes, but not always, accompanied by deliberate consciousness yet always grounded.

In the filmic adaptation, the cinematic protagonist’s capacity to perform a leap of faith is emphasised as part of the story, not least in the film’s’ concluding sequence. The protagonist stands on top of a tall building in the centre of London. The camera swirls around him, giving the viewer a sense of the urban landscape similar to what a player of an Assassins’ Creed game can achieve when controlling the virtual camera. An Assassin’s Creed player is familiar with this view of a city because much of the action of the games involves scaling buildings, running along rooftops and jumping across alleys. In other words, this mode of viewing the city can in itself function as a prop for remembering gameplay. The film’s protagonist holds his pose on the rooftop, almost as an immobile avatar standing ready for player input, and as the camera moves closer to the protagonist he looks directly at the viewer -- or perhaps we are meant to be thinking of ourselves as players at this point? -- then jumps out of the frame, presumably to perform a leap of faith. In short, the film ends with a double invitation by fictionally inviting the viewer to join the Brotherhood of Assassins in the fictional world of the film while also inviting the viewer to play an Assassin’s Creed game.

The leap of faith in the videogame is “cinematic” in the double sense of being both Off-Line and spectacular. Its inclusion in the filmic adaptation gives viewers an opportunity for remembering their gameplay. To compare the film viewer experience with the gameplay experience, Gabriel Patrick Wei-Hao Chin (2017) offers the concept of tool-based empathy: “though a player/reader may experience a kinaesthetic empathy that resembles the filmic mode of observer/performer kinaesthetic empathy, the videogame form engenders a deeper tool-based empathy” (p. 206); on a similar note, Schröter (2016) suggests a model of the relationship between player and avatar, which includes a description of the avatar as both game piece and fictional being. In short, when watching filmic videogame adaptations, the viewer’s relationship with characters can follow standard cognitive patters of recognition and empathy trained through general film viewing, but the experience can be coloured by reminiscences of tool-based empathy through avatar-based gameplay.

Performing a leap of faith in Assassin’s Creed requires minimal bodily input from the player, yet players experience that “they” are hurling themselves towards the ground. The same phenomenon occurs when a player exclaim that “they” hit their opponent in a Street Fighter game or that “they” hit obnoxious green pigs when a bird meets its target in an Angry Birds game. In other words, player agency encompasses the lived body’s capacity to act both in a literal sense (for example, by touching a screen or pressing a button) and in an extended sense that includes changes that occur inside a gamespace. To describe this phenomenon, Andreas Gregersen and Torben Grodal (2009) rely on Shaun Gallagher’s (2005) distinction between body image and body schema, where body image refers to “a system of perceptions, attitudes and belief pertaining to one’s own body” and body schema refers to a broader “system of sensory-motor capacities” centred on, but not reducible to, the physical body (Gallagher as cited in Gregersen and Grodal, 2009, p. 67). This allows Gregersen and Grodal (2009) to claim that “interacting with video games may lead to a sense of extended embodiment and sense of agency that lies somewhere between the two poles of schema and image” (p. 67). In most videogames that have been adapted into films, extension of embodiment and sense of agency takes place with and through an avatar. When watching a filmic videogame adaptation, the viewer’s embodiment and sense of agency cannot be extended because viewers are by definition incapable of influencing what happens in the film, but a viewer might remember gameplay as a lingering sense of an extended body schema; a sense of Off-Line engagement that is never turned On-Line.

Remembering Repetitive Rehearsal

Staying with Assassin’s Creed, the games also offer examples of gameplay experience that is relatively less deliberate and, in other words, not necessarily accompanied by any explicit form of consciousness. The player performs an assassination by pressing a single button with appropriate timing, and the player’s engagement with the game is then very briefly turned Off-Line as they watch their avatar perform the assassination. The Off-Line engagement lasts from half a second to several seconds. In the filmic adaptation of Assassin’s Creed, the protagonist’s first assassination involves jumping from a cliff. The jump is slightly extended through rapid editing of shots from several different camera angles. The sound of the protagonist landing with a thump and immediately killing his opponent with a hidden blade -- a weapon that has mystical meaning to the group known as the Assassins -- has visceral impact. The impact is heightening if the viewer recalls such moments from having performed hundreds if not thousands of in-game assassinations. Assassination quickly becomes habitual to the player of an Assassin’s Creed game. The novice player needs to learn how to operate the game controller, how to avoid detection by opponents, how to place themselves in a good location, and so forth, but after the initial, deliberate learning of how to assassinate, the player’s capacity for carrying out successful assassinations might in fact be hampered by conscious attention to the mechanics of the game. As Keogh (2018) points out, successful playing of non-casual games typically “demand intricate and habitualized comprehension of complex input devices” (p. 63), which means that those who have not played an Assassin’s Creed game or have tried but failed to use the gamepad in the habitual manner prescribed by the game, fail to appreciate the full and intended gameplay experience. To emphasise how successful gameplay requires repeated training, Keogh (2018) uses a concept from Henri Lefebvre to describe the videogame’s demand on the player “as a form of dressage, of being ‘broken in’ [Lefebvre, 2004, p. 39], not unlike a dog or a horse” (pp. 77-78. Emphasis in the original). When it comes to the filmic adaptation of the assassination, the concept of dressage can be used to describe how failure to undergo dressage excludes some viewers from appreciating the full range of experiential parallels between videogame and film.

Gameplay often relies on habitual memory for successful play, especially when it comes to games focused on repetitive acts such as driving (Need for Speed), fighting (Double Dragon, Dead or Alive, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Tekken), and shooting (Doom, Far Cry, House of the Dead, Max Payne -- and, to a lesser extent, Resident Evil; all the videogame series mentioned here have been adapted into film, see Table 1 in the Appendix). As Grodal (2003) puts it: “The video game experience is very much similar to... an everyday experience of learning and controlling by repetitive rehearsal” in contrast to experiencing a film, which is “mostly experienced as a unique sequence of events” (p. 148). Filmic videogame adaptations are characterised by inclusion of unique events in ways that give the viewer opportunities to remember the bodily grounded repetitive rehearsals that made them learn and master the game. The adaptations can almost, but not quite, be said to reverse the relationship between unique events and repetitive rehearsal. For example, through repetitive rehearsal a player learns to shoot in Doom (id Software, 1993). The player then watches unique shootings in the filmic adaptation and experiences body memories of gameplay. The reversal of repetitive rehearsal and unique events is not straightforward, however, because the remembered past might be edited through additions (by imagination) and filtering (by forgetting or repression). More importantly, a viewer’s gameplay memories of shooting probably stem from semantic rather than episodic memory. Episodic memory is associated with working memory and direct experience, whereas semantic memory holds universal structures useful for building mental simulations of hypothetical futures and for fillings out gaps in experiences built on limited perceptual information (Tulvig [1972] cited in Kumar, 2021, p. 21). The exact relationship between episodic and semantic relationship is still under debate, but “more recent theoretical accounts… typically [view episodic memory] as a gateway to semantic memory accessed through the process of abstraction” (Jones & Avery, 2019). If a videogame adaption of Doom triggers memories of shooting, those memories of shooting could be memories of playing Doom, but they could also be memories of playing other shooting games stored in sematic memory as universal memories of shooting standing ready to support future gameplay.

Filmic adaptations also evoke repetitive rehearsal of movement through gamespaces. Two of the adaptations humorously draw explicit attention to movement: in Super Mario Bros. (Jankel & Morton, 1993), Mario and Luigi’s ability to perform high jumps is explained by special boots, and in The Angry Birds Movie 2 (Van Orman, 2009), the use of gigantic slingshots to send birds flying through the air is explained as a unique mode of public transportation. Two other adaptations present movement through urban areas in a way that will resonate with players of the underlying games. Both Prince of Persia and Assassin’s Creed allow avatars to traverse urban spaces by performing parkour-inspired movements. Here, the concept of affordance from ecological psychology is useful for describing how players perceive space in the games (Linderoth, 2012). When an avatar is afforded the ability to jump across an alley, land on a ledge and then jump from ledge to ledge as they move through the city, the player who perceives those avatar affordances can act on them. The player’s perception of the urban environment is coloured by how the perceived avatar affordances allow the player movement through gamespace, and the player’s successful movement through gamespace is ultimately contingent on this parkour-style mode of movement becoming habitual.

The Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (Newell, 2010) and Assassin’s Creed (Kurzel, 2016) films include several chase sequences where the cityscapes of the films seem to afford the same type of movement as the cityscapes of their games. In these instances, the film viewer receives visual and auditory cues that are fairly close to what they received when they played the underlying games or games offering similar opportunities for movement with and through avatars. Something comparable occurs in the filmic adaptations of fighting games such as Dead or Alive, Mortal Kombat and Tekken where fights are staged in arenas or in other enclosed areas. As Jenkins (2004) notes when comparing gameplay to visiting an amusement park, “[t]he most compelling amusement park attractions build upon stories or genre traditions already well-known to visitors, allowing them to enter physically into spaces they have visited many times before in their fantasies” (p. 123). Arenas resonate through history as spaces dedicated to playing, fighting and sport (Huizinga, 1949). However, the filmic adaptations not only place fighters in arenas or arena-like settings but also reuse music and spoken phrases from the games (most notably in the 1995 and 1997 Mortal Kombat films), which function as intertextual reminders of specific games.

Evoking Players and Avatars through Intermedial Reference

So far, my examples of grounded remembering of gameplay have centred on the body, but remembering might also be grounded in differences and connections between films and videogames that are socially constituted as shared understandings of the media themselves or as genres. This section gives three examples such social grounding, namely, of how filmic adaptations can offer opportunities for remembering gameplay through intermedial reference. Following Irina Rajewsky (2005), an intermedial reference is defined as an instance where a “media-product [in our case, a filmic adaptation] thematizes, evokes, or imitates elements or structures of another, conventionally distinct medium [in our case, videogames] through the use of its own media-specific means” (p. 53). Intermedial reference can be made to a text of the other medium, to the other medium as a “system,” or “to a specific medial subsystem (such as a certain film genre)” (Rajewsky, 2005, p. 53) that sits between text and medium. I will be counting conventional types of players as well as the relationship between player and avatar as parts of the medium of videogames. These parts of the medium are not specified by code and rules -- or by any other part of the videogames as media texts -- but by “conventions [that] exist because of a traditional understanding on the part of the audience about the form each medium should take” (Mack, 2016, p. 101).

The first example of intermedial reference is from around the 1 hour 30-minute mark of Doom (Bartkowiak, 2005) and lasts for about five minutes. The protagonist space marine takes perception- and combat-enhancing drugs that turn him into an even more efficient killer. From the moment the drugs take effect, the viewer experiences the marine’s optical point of view with their handheld weapon visible in the frame, a viewpoint emblematic of the first-person shooter (FPS) videogame genre. No editing occurs during the intermedial reference (except for a brief moment when the space marine loses consciousness) and for five minutes of genre-aware monster-killing, the film viewer experiences a videogame -- except it is in fact a film. “This ‘as if’ and illusion-forming quality” (Rajewsky, 2005, p. 55) is typical of intermedial reference. Based on memories of gameplay, the film viewer can briefly enjoy the illusion of being a player, as if they could take part in the action.

As the film leaves the protagonist’s optical point of view, the intermedial reference ends with five seconds of seeing the protagonist moving with precise and dispassionate movements, rapidly aiming his weapon at a number of different points in space where enemies might be placed. Seeing the protagonist of a film behaving as if they were an FPS avatar calls attention to the conventional player of this videogame genre. A player who masters the FPS typically demonstrates “the ability to generate, process, and execute separate task goals and responses in an expedient temporal order” (Steenbergen et al., 2015, p. 3). Laura Steenbergen et al.’s 2015 study confirms intuitions about the potential cognitive effects of mastering the genre that already in 1994 led the US Marine Corps to use an experimental adaptation of Doom II (id Software, 1994) for training purposes (Crogan, 2011, p. 16). In short, the adaptation of Doom makes intermedial reference not only to the specific, underlying game, but also to the genre of the FPS and to its conventional player -- a player whose attitude is one of calculation and expediency.

The second example of intermedial reference is from House of the Dead (Boll, 2003), a film adaptation of a series of survival horror games called The House of the Dead. A player of a survival horror game might very well demonstrate an attitude of calculation and expediency, but the core emotion of survival horror is fear (Perron, 2018, p. 58). The player routinely experiences how calculation, expediency or any other goal-oriented attitude break down to be replaced with fear. Those breakdowns are at the experiential core of the genre. On a historical note, the first The House of the Dead games were released as collaborative arcade games, and the controller was a plastic gun. Compared with a mouse-and-keyboard desktop setup, this context of reception was not conducive to a detached attitude of expediency. In the filmic adaptation, an intermedial reference begins around the 49 minute-mark and lasts for about seven minutes. The film’s protagonists shoot their way through hordes of zombies. At first, the protagonists form a disciplined line, but the line gradually breaks down and individual fights between protagonists and zombies become increasingly desperate. The sequence includes brief, intertextual insertions of gameplay footage. The non-diegetic heavy rock music is intrusive and unrelenting, and the editing becomes almost psychedelically rapid as the protagonists continually face imminent death yet survive by killing. This “kill-or-be-killed” attitude is at the heart of survival horror, thus the sequence makes intermedial reference not only to The House of the Dead videogames themselves but also to the genre of survival horror and to its conventional player, one whose attitude oscillates between control and a pleasurable, fearful loss of control. Here the notion of body memory becomes particularly apt, as it alludes to a type of memory that is mostly habitual (Casey, 2000, p. 178) and associated with fear as a basic emotion (Grodal, 1999, p. 43), something that feels primordial and difficult to put into words.

The third and final example of intermedial reference is to the relationship between player and avatar. It occurs towards the end of Resident Evil (Anderson, 2002), just after the 1 hour 30 minute-mark, and lasts for about 1 and a half minutes. The first six Resident Evil films have Alice as their protagonist, a character who was invented for the films. Alice is introduced in the first film through reversion of the shower scene in Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960). Viewers first see an extreme close-up of one of Alice’s eyes, the camera then moves out to reveal that Alice is lying in a shower stall. She is naked but loosely wrapped in a shower curtain. A flashback reveals how Alice lost consciousness while showering and involuntarily grabbed and tore down the shower curtain as she fell to the floor. Alice seems exhausted and attempts to recall her identity by studying her face in a bathroom mirror. The restoration of memory and the quest for identity are major themes of the first six Resident Evil films. The series offers answers, but in the first film, Alice’s mental state is a tabula rasa: a blank slate that needs to be filled with new experiences or restored memories, for example, body memories. When suddenly facing the deadly threat of a pack of vicious dogs, Alice reacts, much to her own surprise, by swiftly and expertly killing the dogs with handguns. Throughout the film, Alice attempts to process the little she remembers of her training -- her dressage, as it were -- and the mysterious external force that must have put her through that training. Viewers can identify Alice if they have undergone the dressage often required to fully appreciate non-casual videogames.

The moment of awakening is repeated with an extreme close-up of one of Alice’s eyes, which marks the beginning of an intermedial reference that presents the possibility of imagining Alice as an avatar and the viewer as a player. Alice finds herself half naked on a laboratory table. Long, transparent cables hang from the ceiling, dispensing unknown fluids into her limbs and head. Filled with rage, Alice disconnects her body from the cables, as if she was a marionette doll or a videogame avatar demanding her freedom. Alice’s attention is drawn to a mirror, which she correctly assumes to function as a window that would allow someone to observe her without being seen. The camera shows Alice from the other side of the mirror-window as she repeatedly shouts, “Who’s in there!?,” while hitting the glass. Accompanied by ominous music, the camera moves back to reveal a desktop setup, as if a scientist, or a guard, or perhaps a player could look at Alice through the window with the aim of observing and controlling her. Here a sense of tool-based empathy is mixed with a more ambiguous and potentially darker relationship between viewer and character, as the viewer might identify with Alice struggling to regain agency while taking voyeuristic pleasure from a gamer-like vantage point behind the mirror-window. This intermedial reference to the relationship between viewer and character cannot, however, be read as a clear-cut admonishing of players fantasizing about avatar control. It might as well be read as an invitation to join Alice by becoming her player; to fantasize about a symbiotic relationship. Seen as an opportunity for remembering gameplay, this intermedial reference should not be analytically reduced to an opportunity for remembering action (see also Allison, 2020, p. 295; Keogh, 2018, p. 195). Apart from direct, sensorimotor action, the assemblage of the videogame experience also includes hesitation, frustration, lurking, waiting, wanting, impatience, identification and many other sensations, thoughts, feelings and diverse types of meaning-making. The cinematic medium is well suited to trigger memories of gameplay through intermedial reference both to action and to non-action aspects of the gameplay experience.

Conclusion

Filmic videogame adaptation is a rich site for exploring the complex relationship between videogames and film, but both scholars and critics run the risk of reducing adapted videogames to narrative tropes such as story and character. In this study, a focus on the concept of gameplay helped mitigating this risk by understanding videogame adaptations as opportunities for remembering gameplay, including both deliberate and habitual gameplay. A grounded cognition approach -- which incorporated the existing and growing strand of phenomenologically inspired game studies -- helped clarify that the body is crucial for the gameplay experience, that genres also help ground the gameplay experience and that remembered gameplay exists as both semantic and episodic memory. Future work at the crossroads of adaptation studies and game studies can follow (or modify) a grounded cognition approach to remembering gameplay or other aspects of the videogame experience. This article has focused entirely on films intended for theatrical release, but the recent rise in serialised videogame adaptations for domestic streaming provides new opportunities for future work that explores the relationship between videogame and film. The two media have unique features that can hopefully be highlighted without reducing them to those features, but the true richness of the intermedial relationship stems from having experiences with one medium that occasionally puts you in-between two.

 

Appendix

Year	Film title [game title (if different from film title, might refer to series)]	First game	Developer of first game, directed (or designed) by, platform, publisher	Film director [production company]
1993	Super Mario Bros.	1985	Nintendo, directed by S. Miyamoto, Famicom/NES, Nintendo	Annabel Jankel, Rocky Morton [Hollywood Pictures]
1994	Double Dragon	1987	Technōs Japan, designed by Takashi Nishiyama and Hiroshi Matsumoton, arcade, Technōs Japan	James Yukich [Imperial Entertainment Group]
1994	Street Fighter [Street Fighter II]	1991	Capcom, directed by Takashi Nishiyama, arcade, Capcom	Steven E. de Souza [Edward R. Pressman Productions]
1995	Mortal Kombat	1992	Midway, designed by Ed Boon and John Tobias, arcade, Midway	Paul W. S. Anderson [Threshold Entertainment]
1997	Mortal Kombat: Annihilation [Mortal Kombat]	1992	Midway, designed by Ed Boon and John Tobias, arcade, Midway	John R. Leonetti [New Line Cinema]
1999	Wing Commander	1990	Origin Systems, directed by Chris Roberts, MS-DOS, Origin Systems	Chris Roberts [20th Century Fox]
2001	Lara Croft: Tomb Raider [Tomb Raider]	1996	Core Design, n/a, Sega Saturn, Eidos Interactive	Simon West [Paramount Pictures]
2001	Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within [Final Fantasy]	1987	Square, directed by Hironobu Sakaguchi, Famicom/NES, Square	Hironobu Sakaguchi [Columbia Pictures]
2002	Resident Evil	1996	Capcom, directed by Shinji Mikami, PlayStation, Capcom	Paul W. S. Anderson [Constantin Film]
2003	House of the Dead [The House of the Dead]	1996	Sega, directed by Takashi Oda, arcade, Sega	Uwe Boll [Boll KG Entertainment]
2003	Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life [Tomb Raider]	1996	Core Design, n/a, Sega Saturn, Eidos Interactive	Jan de Bont [Mutual Film Company]
2004	Resident Evil: Apocalypse [Resident Evil]	1996	Capcom, directed by Shinji Mikami, PlayStation, Capcom	Alexander Witt [Constantin Film]
2005	Alone in the Dark	1992	Infogrames, directed by Frédérick Raynal, MS-DOS, Infogrames	Uwe Boll [Boll KG Entertainment]
2005	BloodRayne	2002	Terminal Reality, designed by Joe Wampole, PlayStation 2, Vivendi Universal Games	Uwe Boll [Boll KG Productions]
2005	Doom	1993	id Software, designed by John Romero, Tom Hall and Sandy Petersen, MS-DOS, id Software	Andrzej Bartkowiak [John Wells Productions]
2006	DOA: Dead or Alive [Dead or Alive]	1996	Team Ninja, directed by Tomonobu Itagaki, Katsunori Ehara and Takeshi Kawaguchi, arcade, Tecmo	Corey Yuen [Impact Pictures]
2006	Silent Hill	1999	Team Silent, directed by Keiichiro Toyama, PlayStation, Konami	Christophe Gans [Silent Hill DCP Inc.]
2007	Hitman [Hitman: Codename 47]	2000	IO Interactive, n/a, Microsoft Windows, Eidos Interactive	Xavier Gens [EuropaCorp]
2007	Resident Evil: Extinction [Resident Evil]	1996	Capcom, directed by Shinji Mikami, PlayStation, Capcom	Russell Mulcahy [Screen Gems]
2007	Postal	1997	Running with Scissors, directed by Mike Riedel, Mike Riedel, Mac OS and Microsoft Windows, Ripcord Games	Uwe Boll [Boll KG]
2007	In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale [Dungeon Siege]	2002	Gas Powered Games, designed by Chris Taylor, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft	Uwe Boll [Boll KG Productions]
2008	Far Cry	2004	Crytek, directed by Cevat Yerli, Microsoft Windows, Ubisoft	Uwe Boll [Boll KG Productions]
2008	Max Payne	2001	Remedy Entertainment, directed by Petri Järvilehto, Microsoft Windows, Gathering of Developers	John Moore [Dune Entertainment]
2009	Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li [Street Fighter]	1991	Capcom, directed by Takashi Nishiyama, arcade, Capcom	Andrzej Bartkowiak [Capcom and Hyde Park Entertainment]
2010	Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time	2003	Ubisoft Montreal, designed by Jordan Mechner, Game Boy Advance, Ubisoft	Mike Newell [Walt Disney Pictures]
2010	Tekken	1994	Namco, directed by Seiichi Ishii, arcade. Namco	Dwight Little [Crystal Sky Pictures]
2010	Resident Evil: Afterlife [Resident Evil]	1996	Capcom, directed by Shinji Mikami, PlayStation, Capcom	Paul W. S. Anderson [Constantin Film]
2012	Silent Hill: Revelation [Silent Hill 3]	2003	Team Silent, directed by Kazuhide Nakazawa, PlayStation 2, Konami	M. J. Bassett [Silent Hill 2 DCP Inc.]
2012	Resident Evil: Retribution [Resident Evil]	1996	Capcom, directed by Shinji Mikami, PlayStation, Capcom	Paul W. S. Anderson [Constantin Film]
2014	Need for Speed [The Need for Speed]	1994	EA Canada, n/a, 3DO, Electronic Arts	Scott Waugh [DreamWorks Pictures]
2015	Hitman: Agent 47 [Hitman: Codename 47]	2000	IO Interactive, n/a, Microsoft Windows, Eidos Interactive	Aleksander Bach [Daybreak Films]
2016	Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV [Final Fantasy XV]	2016	Square Enix, directed by Hajime Tabata, PlayStation4 and Xbox One, Square Enix	Takeshi Nozue [Visual Works]
2016	Ratchet & Clank	2002	Insomniac Games, directed by Brian Allgeier, PlayStation 2, Sony Computer Entertainment	Kevin Munroe, Jericca Cleland
2016	Resident Evil: The Final Chapter [Resident Evil]	1996	Capcom, directed by Shinji Mikami, PlayStation, Capcom	Paul W. S. Anderson [Screen Gems]
2016	Assassin's Creed	2007	Ubisoft Montreal, directed by Patrice Désilets, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, Ubisoft	Justin Kurzel [New Regency Productions]
2016	The Angry Birds Movie [Angry Birds]	2009	Rovio Entertainment, designed by Jaakko Iisalo, iOS, Chillingo	Clay Kaytis, Fergal Reilly [Columbia Pictures]
2016	Warcraft: The Beginning [Warcraft: Orcs and Humans]	1994	Blizzard Entertainment, directed by Patrick Wyatt, MS-DOS, Blizzard Entertainment	Duncan Jones [Legendary Pictures]
2018	Tomb Raider	2013	Crystal Dynamics, directed by Noah Hughes, Microsoft Windows and consoles, Square Enix Europe	Roar Uthaug [Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer]
2018	Rampage	1986	Bally Midway, designed by Brian Colin and Jeff Nauman, arcade, Bally Midway	Brad Peyton [New Line Cinema]
2019	The Angry Birds Movie 2 [Angry Birds]	2009	Rovio Entertainment, designed by Jaakko Iisalo, iOS, Chillingo	Thurop Van Orman [Columbia Pictures]
2019	Pokémon: Detective Pikachu [Detective Pikachu]	2016	Creatures, directed by Naoki Miyashita, Nintendo 3DS, Nintendo	Rob Letterman [Legendary Pictures]
2020	Sonic the Hedgehog	1991	Sonic Team, designed by Hirokazu Yasuhara, Sega Genesis, Sega	Jeff Fowler [Sega Sammy Group]
2020	Monster Hunter	2004	Capcom, directed by Kaname Fujioka, PlayStation 2, Capcom	Paul W. S. Anderson [Constantin Film]
2021	Mortal Kombat	1992	Midway, designed by Ed Boon and John Tobias, arcade, Midway	Simon McQuoid [New Line Cinema]
2021	Resident Evil: Welcome to Racoon City [Resident Evil]	1996	Capcom, directed by Shinji Mikami, PlayStation, Capcom	Johannes Roberts [Screen Gems]
2022	Uncharted	2007	Naughty Dog, directed by Amy Hennig, PlayStation 3, Sony Computer Entertainment	Ruben Fleischer [Columbia Pictures]
2022	Sonic the Hedgehog 2	1991	Sonic Team, designed by Hirokazu Yasuhara, Sega Genesis, Sega	Jeff Fowler [Sega Sammy Group]

 

Table 1. Videogame adaptations defined as videogame-based, English-language films with an estimated production budget of at least 10 million US$ (adjusted for inflation) and primarily intended for theatrical release.

 

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