Films, Obviously

Jeremy had one last point in his email (this is the fourth installment of four drawn from an email conversation -- don't miss the earlier ones on FF, gender/violence, and cyberpunk/Ender's Game):

> In
> film, obviously, the choices are rich, from TRON and The Last
> Starfighter to eXistenZ, etc. - but I'm not sure if the list you are
> looking for involves film.

For the purposes of my class, I'm already pushing my department's envelope a bit to include games as required reading; they give me a minimum of course materials that must be read -- one of the reasons The Matrix got pulled at the last minute and replaced with Fight Club.

But perhaps the crux of the conversation I'm trying to get started on this journal lies in the fact that academic considerations of gaming are almost uniformly contained in film departments, or rhetoric/anthro/sociology. New Media programs, few and far between already, seem to focus primarily on museum pieces -- and as the canon of new media hardens, it seems to leave out the lion's share of popular material (as canons so often do)...

With that said, what makes it a given that [video] games are better approached through filmic, as opposed to literary, methodologies? Why are there so many more game narratives told through film/TV/anime/etc ... or at least more successful ones?

Mainly: much of the revolutionary capacity of game narratives lies in their replacement of a reader (passive, receptive) by a user or player (active, aggressive). But the viewer of a film is surely as passive and receptive as a reader... right?