ABSTRACT This essay contextualizes the horror video game Until Dawn (Supermassive Games, 2015) within the broader history of the ‘interactive movie,’ a genre of storytelling video games with prerecorded video sequences that reached its cultural peak in the mid- to late 1990s. Critics have questioned whether these products truly count as games because of the relative passivity of non-interactive watching and other limits to player control. Previous theorizations of the interactive movie have understood it as a limit case that nevertheless supports the generally accepted definition of the video game medium as something that requires significant player activity and offers players agency and freedom of choice. In contrast, I argue that Until Dawn provides an excellent case study of a video game in which the player’s lack of consequential options, diminished agency, and limited control are crucial to the meaning of the text. I also suggest that interactivity and player action have been overemphasized in the conceptualization of the video game as a medium and that the non-interactive elements of video games should be acknowledged and studied further.

中文翻译：

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失去控制：直到黎明作为互动电影

摘要本文将恐怖视频游戏《直到黎明》（Supermassive Games，2015年）与“互动电影”的更广泛历史联系起来，这是一种叙事视频游戏，其预录视频序列在1990年代中后期达到了文化顶峰。批评者质疑这些产品是否真正算作游戏，因为非互动观看的相对被动性以及对玩家控制的其他限制。交互式电影的先前理论已经将其理解为极限情况，但是该极限情况仍然支持视频游戏介质的普遍接受的定义，因为视频游戏介质需要大量的玩家活动并为玩家提供代理和选择自由。相比之下，我认为《直到黎明》提供了一个出色的视频游戏案例研究，其中玩家缺乏相应的选择，代理权的降低和有限的控制对于文本的含义至关重要。我还建议在将视频游戏作为一种媒介的概念化中过分强调交互性和玩家行为，应该承认并进一步研究视频游戏的非交互性元素。