Losing Control: Until Dawn as Interactive Movie
This essay contextualizes the horror video game Until Dawn (Supermassive Games, 2015) within the broader history of the ‘interactive movie,’ a genre of storytelling video games with prerecorded video sequences that reached its cultural peak in the mid- to late 1990s. Critics have questioned whether these products truly count as games because of the relative […]
The World War II Video Game, Adaptation, and Postmodern History
From Air Force (Howard Hawks, 1943) to Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009), the cinema has taken on the cultural task of visualizing World War II. Increasingly, however, this task has also been taken up by new media—video games, in particular—resulting in new perspectives on the social and political meanings of the war in contemporary America. […]