I agree, from reading and watching the clips linked to the article, that there does indeed appear to be a shared visual vocabulary between early film and the birth of contemporary video games. As a writer and a storyteller, I’m curious how this vocabulary affected early filmgoers and affects modern-day gamers’ understanding of narrative. Along these lines, the visual vocabulary common in early film is an assortment of images of escape. Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd run over and around a variety of obstacles to avoid capture. In said medium, the viewer associates with and roots for the protagonist. The audience, like the protagonist, is undergoing the challenge of escaping an antagonizing force, but it is doing so passively, from a physical standpoint, in that the spectator is seated and his or her own movements do not affect the film’s plot. With video games, on the other hand, the viewer interacts with narrative conversely, physically manipulating the character with simple hand movements, but never truly creating a paralleled relationship with the character and his goals. I say this not because the gamer does not feel like he is associating with the character or carrying out the character’s actions, but because the goals never belong to the character. They are merely a facet of the game and its gameplay.  In simpler terms, I want to say early videogames dictated their own objectives: to get from screen left to screen right or whatever they may have been— and the characters had no real influence over said objectives.