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From Post Futurist Science Fiction to Technoludic Cinema

This thesis argues that the technoludic film could be interpreted as a progression of what Sobchack (1987) defined the “post futurist science fiction movie,” (p. 220) that is, the last step in the evolution of the science fiction cinema. Like most, if not all science fiction movies, the technoludic film subsumes and grapples with the fascination and fears brought on by rapid technological changes. And like the “post futurist science fiction movie,” it exemplifies many of the postmodernist preoccupations. But it differs from its predecessor in its concerns for specific technology, i.e., video games. Technoludic is used as an umbrella term for a variety of films that incorporate video games into their narratives. This neologism combines two different words: technology and ludus, a Latin word for play. Technoludism refers to the technology of play (Bittanti, 1999).

The technoludic movie is cinema’s interface to video games, as the two are becoming more and more interconnected. As Bell and Kennedy (2000) suggested, “from the virtual reality experiences of The Lawnmower Man to the technobody horror of Videodrome, from Hackers playing war games, to the biotechno matrix of the Borg in Star Trek: The First Contact, the images pouring out from our (filmic) screen are fed back through our (computer) screens in a loop which ultimately blends ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’, ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’ to create our sense of cyberculture” (p. 3).

The emergence of electronic entertainment has been accompanied with a multi-layered film commentary that consists of more than 50 movies from 1973 to 2001 (see