This dissertation is about how video games incorporate cinematic style and use cinema’s aesthetic toolkit. The ways that games affectively impact players are often determined by cinematic techniques; games thus demonstrate the influence and nesting of one medium within another. This dissertation occupies a theoretical space between that of “ludology” and “narratology,” in that games’ medium-specificity (interactivity) is what communicates with other media. This dissertation contends that games should be described as modeling cinematic, or “cine-real,” mediations of reality via interactivity. That games are a creative use of (or play with) codified forms of cine-reality is this dissertation's instantiating claim. Games are unique forms of “predestination machines,” systems for processing external input into predetermined outcomes. They bear authorial signatures in ways similar to cinema. This dissertation offers the interpretation that what is unique about games is ontologically specific to their nature as interactive, cinematic machines. Games play themselves, progressing in predetermined fashions, ultimately demonstrating that what is authored in games parallels their cinematic attributes. The idea of “playing with cinema” qualitatively elevates neither player agency nor authorial intention, even as it illuminates the latter as a corrective to decades of game scholarship dismissive of cinematic influence. The evolution of games across the last 30-plus years demonstrates that the influence of cinematic style has exploded rather than waned. How this has happened—through what formal means and cinematic-gamic correspondences—is this dissertaiton’s primary concern. It is inarguable that games today resemble cinema more than ever, but what often goes uninvestigated is that games were conceived as quasi-cinematic works from the medium’s earliest days. Early fundamentals of the medium complexly utilized cinematic style, as shown in this dissertation’s analysis of Secret of Mana, which wrestles with pervasive evidence of cinematic audio-visual techniques seamlessly integrated within interactive game segments. Interactivity is a polar node of the feedback loop with cinematic style in games, and this interplay is evident even in the 16-bit era, during which designers used music and text-based dialogue to condition emotional responses and evoke cine-realistic worlds. This audio-visual domain rarely functions without choreographed cinematic elements. The development of cinematic style in games over time can be broadly characterized as the evolution of relationships between “cinematic flow” and “cinematic rupture.” The oscillation between and intermingling of flow and rupture is where we locate games’ simulations of cine-reality. This dissertation examines the evolution of cinematic storytelling in games from the mid-90s to the late-00s in particular, showing that the influence of cinematic style on games was no more prevalent today than in the 90s, but is simply more clearly visible today. It is also argued that the aforementioned period is historically crucial to the development of cinematic game style, and solidified many conventions of current video game design. We have always been playing with cinema, and as technology evolved the latitude of this play only increased in complexity, as demonstrated herein through analyses of games including Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, and Uncharted 2.