I don’t know if anyone else is watching SCIFI.COM | The Lost Room, but it’s occurring to me how much like a game experience this show is. I’ve played Silent Hill a good bit (with the help of online walkthroughs, since I have no patience for wandering these games endlessly) and there are similarities there. But in general, it has a sort of game logic — there’s someone to rescue, and in order to do so, you have to go through difficult tasks to accumulate special objects. There’s an internal logic to it all, rules to the game, that are discovered as you go. And there’s a narrative arc keeping it all tied together.

I know it’s not the first movie or tv experience to do those things to some degree, but this is the purest example I can recall that seems to have been almost completely inspired by adventure-game mechanics. It makes me wonder how much digital games are going to continue to inspire and shape traditional media and storytelling.