“Questa non è altro che una guerra per il controllo del futuro”. Scontri e incontri tra cinema e videogiochi, due casi studio

As various studies have already demonstrated (e.g., Fassone 2017a; Bilchi 2019), the visceral relationship between videogames and cinema has given rise to multiple intermedial tendencies that, ranging from adaptation (Hutcheon 2011) to the imitation of expressive potential, have profoundly reshaped the contemporary mediasphere (Eugeni 2015; Arcagni 2016). Since the rapid rise of the videogame medium, the two expressive systems—by adopting a policy of profound remediation (Bolter & Grusin 1999) structured around logics of legitimation and competition (Gaudreault & Marion 2015)—have sought to occupy each other’s social and cultural space. While cinema attempts to remodel itself through videogame aesthetics to increase its appeal, videogames, in turn, have sought to dethrone the film medium from its role as the dominant popular art form and generator of contemporary myths. Building upon these considerations, the present article aims to analyze the constellation of aesthetic remediations that, together with a massive sharing of technologies, have brought the two forms of entertainment (in their most mainstream expressions) into such proximity that they appear on the verge of collision. Accordingly, the analysis will draw not only from game studies and film and media studies, but also from social media studies and production studies, which will provide the theoretical framework for mapping the main remediative trends already canonized (Evan-Zohar 1990) within the target semantic system. The emerging tendencies will be further supported by a detailed examination of two emblematic case studies within the sci-fi genre: Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One (2018) and Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding (2019). A dialectical comparison between the two texts will demonstrate how, through processes of confrontation, hybridization, and mutual contamination, the two media come close to substituting for one another, ultimately converging toward a problematic shared aesthetic despite their irreducible interactive differences. The article therefore seeks to capture the complex and multifaceted condition of the two media which, by cannibalizing one another, have nearly come to occupy the same space within contemporary popular culture—an intermedial short circuit that also reverberates through the domain of adaptations, productions that, from this perspective, open the way for further research.