Trigger Happy
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ELECTRIC SHEEP
A specter is haunting Tinseltown. We have seen how successful videogames already compete in financial terms with the figures grossed by Hollywood blockbusters. And one increasingly popular term of praise for a certain sort of exploration videogame is to say that it is like an “interactive film.” On the summer 1999 release of Silent Hill, a horror videogame in which you play the character of a man searching a deserted American town for his missing daughter, one journalist claimed that this game “fully exploited” the developments toward “fully interactive cinema.” The media buzz is that cinema and videogames are on convergent paths. If this is true, Hollywood ought to be worried that videogames are going to swallow it whole.
Some of the world’s best videogame developers happily admit that they lean heavily on styles of action
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