“Consequently, films like Transformers offer a poor analogy to game spaces. One has to look elsewhere, perhaps to Hitchcock’s Rope, which disguises its cuts to create the illusion of a single back-and-forth movement, motivated by the restless crossings of the film’s characters. Or Sokurov’s Russian Ark, which threads its way through St. Petersburg’s Hermitage in a 90-some-minute take representing the point of view of one figure adrift in time. But the canniest approximation of video game geography belongs, in my opinion, to Gus Van Sant’s Elephant. That film does something remarkable, establishing a sense of intimacy with the kids wandering the school’s hallways not through dialogue or exposition but simply because they stand as our avatars in this threatened and threatening space. It’s a bond forged in large part through the soundtrack, which slides almost imperceptibly between a rich representation of the school’s actual acoustics and something more muted and interior: a hum of preoccupation, some memory of piano. It’s forged too in a play with visual focus and depth of field in which characters are located in grounded spaces that dissolve over the course of the film into rectangles, spheres, and diamonds of light and color, with only the figure we’re following in sharp relief. The film includes video games in its uninflected checklist of explanations offered for the Columbine massacre, but the film itself is a kind of video game, an anti-shooter that keeps restarting itself, as if to delay the arrival of guns and slaughter.”
– B. Kite on Elephant from his (excellent) essay on videogames.
