Asynchronous gameplay. The features of the videogame in experimental cinema and video creation

There are numerous audiovisual works created by filmmakers and video artists that anticipate visual resources and conceptual proposals later applied to the field of video games. Experimental cinema and artists video not only influence the implementation of aesthetic and narrative strategies introduced in video game culture but are also permeable to it. Thus, various computer games, arcade machines, and video consoles serve as inspiration to create videographic pieces that problematize the uses and abuses of an industry undergoing constant growth. Reflecting on the idiosyncrasy of this bidirectional connection is the purpose of a text that puts into play the value of a series of perceptible exchanges in both disciplines. In this way, the beginnings of computer-generated images (CGI) are studied in dialogue with abstract animation; the interactive nature of videogames in line with contemporary video installations; simulation games and first-person shooter (FPS) together with the subjective point of view in avant-garde film practices; the recycling of digital images extracted from action videogames in the genre of machinima and the radicality of the political discourse present in the artists’ game mods. These are the sections explored in a text that proposes a transversal approach to the world of videogames, leaving fiction cinema aside to focus on experimental cinema and video creation. Addressing the formal and the ideological similarities that the latter share with the virtual universe of the videogame are important objectives of an article that confirms the asynchronous nature of these influences. Observing how this exchange increases exponentially once the digital age has been reached is a sign of the fruitful evolution that this meeting supposes.