Browser Games Taught Me More About Modern Movies Than School Ever Did

Summary

• Film studies at school broadened my understanding of movies, directors, and genres beyond my original expectations.
• Playing movie games like Cinematrix challenges me to expand my knowledge of cinema beyond iconic and critically acclaimed films.
• School focuses on iconic and genre-shaking films, while movie games push me to explore lesser-known works and actor filmographies.

Figuring out what I wanted to study at university was a convoluted journey for me. I jumped from a written journalism track to a combination of broadcast journalism and film studies after my first year, which eventually led to me making my own short film. I’m not very comfortable saying that I actually did film studies proper, since I was also taking journalism, marketing, and research classes to meet the requirements for my degree, but school is where I took my only film studies classes and expanded my understanding of media criticism.

I got a grasp of the basics: I watched Bicycle Thieves, Rashomon, and Rear Window. We discussed the idea of the auteur and explored contemporary examples, watching Children of Men and Spirited Away. I saw my first Coen film in True Grit, and reshaped my understanding of the documentary form with This Is Not A Film and The Act of Killing. I discovered directors like Lars von Trier, David Cronenberg, and Michael Haneke.

And then I left school and realised that being a pretentious film bro means only being slightly familiar with a small slice of every movie ever made in the world. Can I discuss the violent, religious themes of Breaking The Waves with passable depth? Sure. Can I name a single movie that Denzel Washington has been in? Absolutely not. Film classes taught me a lot about theory, criticism, and how a single innovative film can reverberate through decades of films that come after it. But they did not teach me a thing about popular culture.

Do other people have Meryl Streep's filmography memorised? Asking for a friend.

This is never clearer to me than when I play games about movies. I used to play Framed every day, a Wordle-style game where you’re given a single frame of a movie, asked if you can guess the title, and then given one more increasingly obvious frame for every wrong answer you give. Encountering that small daily challenge again and again over time made me realise that I haven’t even heard of a lot of movies that are part of the wider cultural imagination, let alone seen most of them. Every time I encounter a movie I don’t know on Framed, I google it.

There’s No Way The Borderlands Movie Is Good, Right?

Even setting aside the long post-production, the things that make Borderlands distinct as a game are liabilities as a movie.

And now I’ve gotten hooked on Vulture’s Cinematrix, a new game that tests your cinema trivia knowledge. Created by the people behind Movie Grid, Cinematrix has a three-by-three grid with three categories on each axis. For example, one column might be Michael Cera, and a row might be Emma Stone, so the answer for the one overlapping square would be Superbad. There might be multiple answers for a square as well, and you get more points if your guess is rarer – a box with the clues ‘Director: Christopher Nolan’ and ‘Nominated for Best Picture’ has three possible answers.

Cinematrix and Movie Grid require much more than just a passing level of knowledge about films, but simultaneously reward you for your knowledge of the esoteric. Most people can name three Sandra Bullock movies, but it’s a little harder to remember exactly which were released from 2005 to 2015. Or which have only a single word as their title. Or which have a specific co-star, who might have featured in a minor capacity.

You only get nine guesses for nine boxes, so make them count.

These games force you to think beyond the critically adored. Very often, I find myself googling actors and directors out of frustration and learning much more about their filmographies than I otherwise would ever have cared to know. Realising that I wasn’t familiar with anything Nicolas Cage made before 2000 apart from Face/Off led me to discover the box office and critical flop Vampire’s Kiss. Not having a clue what movie Justin Timberlake starred in with Amanda Seyfried meant finding out the entirely mediocre In Time exists.

School will teach you about the iconic films and the ones that shake up the genre, but none of my professors ever bothered showing me a mediocre commercial film in class. Never have I had to think quite so hard about Jessica Alba’s body of work. To understand the medium, you have to watch the wheat as well as the chaff, and I’m learning about both and everything in between. But most of all, I’m learning that I don’t know that much about movies at all.

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