Where good old cinema narratives and new media collide

Abstract

Based on the study of contemporary action/fan- tasy/horror blockbusters adopted from video games, with a special focus on Assassin’s Creed (Kurzel, 2016), the paper examines the influence of new media, and especially video games on contemporary cinema storytelling, with a spe- cial focus on how they reshape narrative struc- tures and logic through adding a novel spatial dimension and incorporating a new form of re- ality based on the rules of video games. This re- ality of imagined spaces create a narrative that from many aspects break away from the rules and the logic of a more ‘tightly-woven’ storytell- ing, and – among many other things – introduce the presence of the non-present, unfold their plots through discovering the unknown spaces of imaginary universes. While this ‘new real’ is emerging in contemporary cinema, as the pres- ent paper will argue, in years to come it might easily become a set of ‘new rules of the game’ for a lm industry targeting a new generation of movie-goers who grew up with touchscreens and apps, and are just entering their teenage years.