The video game industry, as a burgeoning artistic and technologically pioneering medium, has modelled itself closely on cinema. Despite being an active, interactive medium that sees the audience have their own agency, many of the highest grossing video games have pursed what journalists like to call "cinematic storytelling". Wherein acting, lighting, scenery, framing, dialogue and action lend themselves a level of immersion and realism seen in mainstream narrative cinema.

With it's desire to be adopted into popular culture and compared to cinema, a common question has naturally occurred, asking what is the video game answer to Citizen Kane. Well, before we delve into such a matter we must first ask what importance does Citizen Kane hold for cinema. How and why did Citizen Kane get put on a pedestal? And, most importantly, does the video game industry even need it's own Citizen Kane?

Maybe we, as video game users, should not be asking where our Citizen Kane is, but instead feel proud that we are a part of a diverging, multifaceted medium that could never birth a Citizen Kane. We are moving and expanding at such an unprecedented rate that no one game could ever attempt to typify what makes our medium so special. We have our answers to Orson Welles and we have the community cinephiles and film academics were striving for in the 50s and 60s. We have legitimised our medium ourselves without the need for a Citizen Kane. Maybe, then, it is about time we stopped comparing video games to cinema and, instead, time we started embracing what makes video games special.

Music was sourced by:

"Blip Stream" and 'Odyssey" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) 

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/