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Go to enough video game presentations and you'll soon start to hear the same hollow mantras dizzily ringing round again and again. Promises of more authenticity clang dully alongside promises of more immersion, more scale and more scope - and there's been a new addition to the thin lexicon of video game marketing in recent years. Games are getting more Nolan, and it's a trend I'm not entirely comfortable with. I can't put my finger on exactly when the phenomenon started, but I've lost count of the number of times Christopher Nolan's been name-checked as a developer outlines their vision for a new game. At first, it was hard to bat an eyelid: games have always, for better and for worse, leant on Hollywood's most cherished, whether it's Call of Duty's keen attendance of the Bruckheimer and Bay school of shallow action or the pervasive influence of Scott and Cameron.
So there's nothing particularly wrong, or unprecedented, about Nolan being a certain strand of gaming's new cinematic love, and its new favoured crutch. If anything, he's the right man for games to turn to, his films literate in games to the point where it's hard not to see the influence of malleable digital worlds in cinematic labyrinths so dependent on systems and rules.
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