Games as Movies

Some of the most successful games to date share a unique quality – they play more as a movie than a game in the traditional sense. For example, the Uncharted series and the new Until Dawn, which are both extremely popular games, both share this quality. While you can walk around and explore as these characters, and each have their moments of combat or quick-time events, both are very realistic-looking games that have a heavy cinematic feel to them, mainly with their large amounts of cutscenes, and are fairly linear. If you were to take out the gameplay and watch the cutscenes alone, you could almost get a perfect sense of the entire game. Instead, the gameplay serves to connect these cutscenes together, giving more of a sense of playing through a movie than a game.

What makes these games so popular? And should it be done more often?