I have always been fascinated with the effect that images in film can have – from the towering, shadowed cityscapes in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) to the bleak, apocalyptic streets of 2027 London in Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men (2006), film has the ability to portray atmosphere in a manner that is all at once static, engaging, and ultimately illuminating. Growing up in a small town in Mississippi might seem to have hindered my access to films, or dampened my curiosity in visual mediums – but in reality, my early surroundings only helped to engage me.

Film has served as an aesthetic benchmark since its inception in the first part of the 20^th century. The tableaus created by early auteurs, and later, by directors in Hollywood, remain in our consciousness as indelible indicators of time, space, and current visual sensibilities. Iconic scenes in film play a large role in driving the Western pop culture lexicon, and visual interpretations that we see as standard are often born from a cinematic source. Production designers have been largely responsible for the larger aesthetic derived from films, and as C.S. Tashiro stated in his book Pretty Pictures: Production Design and the History of Film, the production designer’s “thorough knowledge of a film’s setting, from the basics of architectural style to the shape of a cufflink,” is a prerequisite to impactful mise-en-scene. I have been interested in production design since I began watching films through a critical lense, largely because the environment in a film can be as important as other elements that are more readily recognized, like acting or cinematography.

The convergence of film and interactive games is one that is not unforeseen, nor is it in the least bit surprising. Grand Theft Auto IV, the sprawling, open-world recreation of New York City developed by Rockstar Games in 2008, took three years and 100 million dollars to produce. The massively multiplayer World of Warcraft has over ten million subscribers every month. Though the gaming industry isn’t immune to expensive flops, in recent years it seems that games, as a form of popular media are eclipsing more traditional mediums as they influence the aesthetics of entertainment. As budgets for games begin to parallel and surpass those of major Hollywood films, and in return, video games begin to reap profits in the hundreds of millions, it seems that the interactive medium should not be taken lightly as a force for shaping aesthetic sensibilites, particularly in regards to environmental design. Film allows a viewer to witness an orchestrated (or not) vision of space and atmosphere, but games take that notion and expand it. The production design role in video games can mirror the same role in film, though the two fields are not entirely similar.

The intention of my research is not to prove that one medium is “better,” or even more influential than the other. Rather, I am interested in the interplay between video games and film, and how the interactivity of the former responds to the way we experience aesthetic sensibilities. Film and video games are two forms of popular media that I have grown up with since a small child, and both have affected my own appreciation of art in overlapping and also polar opposite ways. Now, with the introduction of multi-core processors and the decreasing price of hardware, the line between the visuals in films and video games is becoming more ambiguous. As video games attempt to become more photorealistic, it seems that the gap between the two mediums is blurred. However, from a cursory, highly opinionated standpoint, it seems that this yearning for realism in games has done little to advance the medium as an art form. These two facets of entertainment occupy similar spaces in our culture, though their functions are quite different. I have never experienced the level of immersion in a fictional world as I have when I played Final Fantasy VII for the first time on PlayStation One, nor have I been as affected by setting as I was after the introduction of the stark, imposing beauty of a futuristic Los Angeles in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). The environments created by level designers and production designers are the meat of both of these visual mediums, largely because plot and characterization has already been explored to a great degree in purely literary forms. Though my intentions with this thesis remain vague, I am inspired by the in-depth collaborative process of production design, which can be the realization of one person, as in the case of Jack Fisk (Eraserhead, There Will Be Blood) or an intricate team of codesigners, which is the case with the video game development company Valve, spearheaded by Gabe Newell. I want to examine the impact of video game production design and also explore the field’s relevance to film.