Convergence: Always Already, Already

In some ways, the timing for this colloquy on film, television, and computer game convergence is perfect.¹ There are now Internet television talk shows recorded live from the dangerous and mercurial front lines of online game worlds;² computer games in which the objective is not only to build and run a movie studio but actually to shoot films which can then be distributed and screened online;³ live machinima performances (films shot using computer games and game engines) recorded at film festivals and subsequently aired as infotainment on national cable networks;⁴ and even virtual “homes” in which consumers can set up and watch appointment television, show movies to friends, and play collaborative and competitive computer games.⁵ There are also mergers, acquisitions, and consolidations of the highest order,⁶ multimedia franchises with tentacular narratives (and the sales plans to go with them) that wind through all manner of moving- and static-image media,⁷ multi-platform marketing and promotional campaigns driven by alternative reality games and their own distinctive forms of convergence,⁸ and the headlong rush of colleges and universities to get in on the action. Indeed, it almost takes a contrarian’s audacity these days to speak about convergence with anything less than exuberance. The flowing together of film, television, and computer games seems to have entranced even the most reluctant digital media consumers with the promise of new ways of seeing, studying, and interacting.

The confluence of film, television, and computer games is nothing new, of course. These media have been converging in one way or another since the early part of the twentieth century. Think of the intricate and intimate relationship between the U.S. film and television industries (a relationship that began before network radio),⁹ the fact that the first concrete imagining of the computer game medium was as a substratum of television,¹⁰ or that game developers have long licensed both film and television programs as source material,¹¹ for example. The truth is, convergence—“convergences” is probably more accurate because of the manifold syntheses and hybridizations in play—is one of (if not) the defining qualities of the U.S. mass media over the past century. Such a history makes this colloquy actually somewhat late in coming.

In the interest of trying to reconcile the paradox of perfect timing and awkward tardiness this In Focus feature embodies, I want to annotate a few key nodes in the history of film, television, and computer game convergence. The idea is to help contextualize the proliferating phenomena the other contributors take up, as well as to evoke a sense of what convergence may really mean. I also want to suggest that while the process of convergence often appears smooth, even inexorable, it tends to be “glacial” instead—irregular, with (often simultaneous) surges and retreats.

Film and Television

Convergence of the film and television industries began in the early 1920s before television was even invented, let alone industrialized. As Michele Hilmes notes in her thoroughgoing account, by the time commercial television appeared in the 1940s as an outgrowth of radio, Hollywood and broadcasters had been sharing talent, technology, aesthetics, and business practices for decades. This mutually constitutive and synergistic relationship was simply extended to television, and intensified in the process. Not only did network television effectively become the “vault of Hollywood” in short order, but it also became a proving ground for the sorts of large-scale convergences and conglomeration that today seem commonplace (e.g., the 1953 United Paramount Theaters/ABC merger, the transmedia branding of Disney in the mid-1950s, and so on).¹² Today’s story of film and television convergence is thus almost ahistorical; convergence existed in both principle and practice before its possibility, before television itself. The conflux of film and television has been a relationship of fits and starts, of strife as well as synthesis. In other words, these media have long been both mutually constitutive and competitive: “Hollywood has functioned since the early 1920s as broadcasting’s alter ego, its main rival and contributor, the only other force unified and powerful enough...