Video game publishers really have a thing for the word “cinematic,” don’t they?
A camera sweeps across a digital ruined city, and suddenly, we’re in cinema territory. Nathan Drake clings to the side of something that really ought to have collapsed several minutes ago—cinematic. Joel looks emotionally devastated in expensive facial animation—you already know what’s coming next.
The term’s been bandied around so much that it’s now one of those bits of gaming lingo that everybody understands right up until we’re asked to explain what it actually means.
Games like Uncharted and Alien: Isolation are all routinely described as “cinematic,” even though none of them are actually doing the same thing. The Last of Us, for instance, borrows from the hallmarks of prestige TV (ironic, we know), while Isolation shoves us into dread-inducing territory with its tight corridors and chilling sound design.
Scale isn’t the thing here; feeling is. But could that be what cinematic has meant all along?
Strip Away the Story; What Survives?
Maybe “cinematic” gaming isn’t really about how much movie can be squeezed into a game. Here’s a way we can test that.
Strip away the 30-hour campaign, lose the dialogue trees, the motion capture, the explorable sets, and all those lovingly acted scenes. What’s left?
Quite a lot, as it happens! Especially in a corner of gaming that you wouldn’t necessarily think of when talking about cinematic experiences on the small screen: iGaming. Specifically, the slots genre.
You see, these days, slots are firmly embedded in the wider digital gaming ecosystem, even if they’ve evolved along a very different branch of it. And their relationship with cinema isn’t exactly new, either. Long before browser casinos and mobile-first spinners, physical machines were already packed with movie tie-ins and cross-over content.
Here in the digital age, you only have to browse the various movie slots that are playable at an online casino to see just how little visual overload a game needs to evoke an entire genre of cinema. These aren’t sprawling adaptations, and most aren’t trying to reproduce a particular film beat for beat. They’ve got reels, symbols, sound, animation, and the occasional bonus sequence to work with, so everything has to earn its place.
A samurai-themed spinner leans on sword flashes and carefully staged character poses. A racing title will feature noise, neon, speed effects, and enough visual movement to make the reels feel like they should come with a seatbelt.
None of this is conveying “story” in the traditional sense. But, as you play, you know exactly what sort of movie language is underpinning the design. This is a really useful way to understand how cinematic works at its core, what the fundamental function is. Slots utilize it constantly, and because all the other noise has been removed, it’s far easier to understand it in this context.
Remember When Cinematic Meant “Here’s a Cutscene”?
We can remember a period when the route to cinematic credibility revolved around not actually gaming. The CD-ROM era gave developers all that lovely storage space, so naturally, we ended up with pre-rendered sequences that stacked up enough earnest acting to keep an entire generation of B-movie performers employed.
Bigger budgets brought things like motion capture, increasingly elaborate facial animation, and cutscenes. Oh, the cutscenes!
Look, we really did get some brilliant games in that era. But there’s always been something slightly odd about claiming a game’s most “cinematic” moments to be the bits where it stops being interactive altogether.
The Camera’s Only Half of it
So, if cutscenes aren’t the secret sauce, what is? Well, this is where cinematic games get much harder to pin down, because sometimes their most movie-like moments barely look like “moments” at all.
Take The Last of Us. Some of Naughty Dog’s best work happens when the main character isn’t dangling from a train or springing away from an explosion. Someone looks away instead of saying what they really mean. The camera hangs around for just long enough to make things awkward.
The game borrows timing and pacing from film, not all those flash, bang special FX. But it’s still enormously effective.
Slowly edging our way down those creepy corridors in Alien: Isolation also feels like an event. And Creative Assembly didn’t get there by firing up a cutscene every five minutes.
Something isn’t suddenly cinematic because the camera swoops dramatically around it. Sometimes, cinema is in the silence, or that bone-chilling “clang” somewhere behind you that makes you stop moving altogether.
Turns Out, We’re Really Easy to Direct
That’s what’s so funny about all of this. We like to think that the interactive nature of gaming puts us firmly in charge. But developers like Naughty Dog and Creative Assembly are constantly nudging our attention around without us really noticing.
It’s staging. And, as we’ve discovered here, that’s a core part of what cinematic gaming really stands for.
It can mean the unbearable quiet of Sevastopol Station. It can mean a fighting-game super exploding out of the normal camera perspective. And, yes, it can even mean a reel-based game using a few bits of sound, movement, and iconography to convince you that you’ve wandered into a mob movie.