Gaming’s next level? Tales of the unexpected

The future looks dim for film-style storytelling as more games enable you to plot your own adventures

For a while, the trajectory of video games curved toward cinema. Technology's advance allowed characters and scenes that were previously composed from rudimentary sprites (Super Mario's porno moustache, for example, was grown because people found it difficult to make out an unadorned mouth on a 16-pixel-high character at the time) to be newly rendered in full detail. Hollywood actors and artists began to lend their talent to games. The Oscar-winning film composer Hans Zimmer provided the score to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Beyond: Two Souls, a cinematic game that stars Ellen Page as both the face and voice of its protagonist. In this way video games began to look like and sound like films and, in turn, through the use of point-of-view camera angles and stentorian set pieces, films began to look like video games.

The enduring appeal of video games has always been in their ability to cast us into the role of an active participant