Video games have influenced contemporary cinema in more ways than supplying stories for adaptations. Their quest structures, explorable worlds, interfaces, visual styles and play-driven tension have shaped how films can be organized and experienced. The relationship also works in reverse: cinema has long influenced the look and storytelling of games. The most useful way to understand the connection is as a two-way exchange, with adaptation only one part of it.
What does video-game influence look like beyond adaptations?
Film scholar Lasse Juel Larsen uses the term “cinemafication” to describe game elements appearing in noninteractive cinema. His framework offers five ways to recognize that influence: play worlds, ludified quests, controllers and interfaces, play experience, and game structure. These are analytical categories, not proof that a particular film borrowed from a specific game.
- Play worlds: environments are presented as spaces to explore, with their own rules, routes and hidden information.
- Ludified quests: a character’s journey is organized around objectives, obstacles and stages, rather than only a conventional dramatic arc.
- Controllers and interfaces: screens, maps, targeting displays or other interface-like visuals shape what the audience sees and knows.
- Play experience: a film tries to convey sensations associated with play, such as suspenseful trial and error, pressure, repetition or discovery.
- Game structure: the film’s composition echoes patterns such as levels, branching choices or repeated attempts.
These traits can describe a film’s form even when no direct influence from an identifiable game has been established. Jasmina Kallay’s Gaming Film: How Games are Reshaping Contemporary Cinema maps the wider subject across visual aesthetics, narrative architecture, spatial design, changing audience reception, transmedia and audience involvement. Together, these approaches help explain why the influence extends from plot design into the way films frame space and invite viewers to interpret what they see.
Why is adapting a game a translation, not a simple transfer?
A player acts within a game; a film viewer follows a fixed sequence. An adaptation must therefore decide which elements to preserve, compress, omit or invent. A game’s plot and characters may be important, but so can its rules, pacing, tone and the pressure of making choices.
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The British Film Institute’s 2026 discussion of adaptations highlights different ways filmmakers have handled that problem. The Last of Us retains the game’s emotional arc and core survival-horror experience. Fallout tells a fresh story in a recreation of its established world. Exit 8 translates looping gameplay and its rules into a claustrophobic cinematic experience. Grand Theft Hamlet takes another route: it is a documentary performed within Grand Theft Auto Online, not a conventional retelling of a game’s plot. The BFI argues that recent adaptations have worked better when they embrace a source’s distinctive feel rather than simply borrow its label or characters; that is the BFI writer’s assessment, not a universal rule.
How do adaptation strategies differ?
There is no single recipe. The source material determines what filmmakers have to work with, and the adaptation may prioritize a story, a game world, gameplay sensations or a connection to real events.
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| Approach | What the film draws on | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Adapt an established story | Existing plot, characters and emotional arc; adaptation can still involve omission and expansion. | The Last of Us, described by the BFI as retaining the game’s emotional arc and core survival-horror experience. |
| Tell a new story in a game world | A recognizable setting and its rules, without retelling a specific game plot. | Fallout, which the BFI describes as a fresh story in an authentic recreation of its world. |
| Translate gameplay into film form | Rules, repetition, pace or the sensations created through play. | Exit 8, which turns looping gameplay into a claustrophobic cinematic experience, according to the BFI. |
| Build a film around a real-world connection | A game concept or its connection to a person or event, rather than an established game narrative. | Gran Turismo, centered on real racing driver Jann Mardenborough, who played the game before becoming a professional driver. |
| Make a documentary inside a game | The game as a performance space and production environment. | Grand Theft Hamlet, a documentary performed within Grand Theft Auto Online, as described by the BFI. |
PlayStation Productions head Asad Qizilbash says that adapting The Last of Us involved deciding what to leave out and what to add, including giving side characters more depth. He describes the game as inspiration rather than a rule book. By contrast, Gran Turismo had no established story to adapt, so the film took a different route through Mardenborough’s real-life story. Qizilbash summarizes the distinction: “There’s not one size that fits all in terms of a method of adapting video games to film or TV.”
How have games changed film production and studio strategy?
Influence also appears behind the camera and in companies’ plans for intellectual property. Sony Interactive Entertainment created PlayStation Productions in 2019 to adapt its game properties for film and television. Qizilbash describes its goals as finding new audiences for game IP and enabling closer collaboration within Sony; those are the company’s own account of its strategy.
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One specific production example shows how a game’s technology can support filmmaking. Qizilbash says the Gran Turismo game engine was used to create tracks, the environment and cars for stunt previsualization: “For our Gran Turismo film, we actually used the Gran Turismo game engine to create tracks, environment, and cars to do all the previs for the stunts.” This documents one workflow, not an industry-wide standard.
Deloitte’s 29 November 2023 analysis placed the global games industry at nearly US$200 billion and framed adaptations as part of a wider effort by film and game companies to extend IP across media and reach new audiences. It also forecast that video-game IP’s share of theatrical box-office revenue would double by 2025. That was a prediction made in 2023, not a verified current measurement.
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Why is the relationship between games and cinema reciprocal?
Games have drawn on cinema’s visual language and storytelling, while films have increasingly borrowed game-like structures, aesthetics and ways of organizing space. The exchange is not a one-way journey from games into movies, nor is every resemblance evidence of direct borrowing. It is a continuing film-game symbiosis: each medium can influence the other while transforming what it takes into forms suited to its own audience and rules.
Further reading
For a scholarly overview of the subject, see Jasmina Kallay’s Gaming Film: How Games are Reshaping Contemporary Cinema, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2013 (ISBN 978-1-137-26293-6).
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