If you don’t know the name Hideo Kojima, you may know it soon enough. Gamers are certainly familiar with him, as Kojima is the auteur behind “Metal Gear Solid,” “Zone of the Enders,” “Castlevania,” and countless other hit video games.

Now he’s looking to the future, as the world of entertainment begins to cross-pollinate with different media. In a recent interview with the BBC, Kojima said, “In life, people are very busy doing lots of things. The time you have to choose what media or entertainment you experience is dwindling. More people are looking at types of media that combine elements together.”

“More people are looking at types of media that combine elements together.”

It’s a bold concept, one that is now possible thanks to technological advances. Kojima’s idea is to converge film and gaming, so that rather than watching a movie or playing a game, people can effectively do both. He envisions movies that can offer choices to viewers along the way — with various narrative pathways — and he seems keen on exploiting the assets of the medium to also generate emotionally compelling content.

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He noted in the same interview that virtual reality isn’t being used to its full potential, and that “it has the potential to bring [out] emotions that people have experienced before when playing a game or watching a movie.”

The ability to create highly emotional experiences within an interactive environment is something that’s being delivered by a new wave of theaters: the immersive theater. This trend kicked off a few years ago, with the New York sensation “Sleep No More,” in which visitors wandered through remarkably crafted scenes: a 1920s sanatorium, ancient graveyard, chapel, parlors, ballrooms, a cobblestone street with multiple shops, speakeasies, candy shops, taxidermist’s store, tailor’s shop, detective’s office, and a bedroom. Within these mysterious confines, a drama played out across three main narratives — a mashup of “Macbeth” and Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rebecca,” yet with actors who do not speak — and scenes were often dramatized via interpretative dance.

In recent years, the proverbial haunted house at Halloween has also morphed into interactive theatrical experiences, with some having storylines in which visitors engage with the actors to move the story forward. “Delusion” is a popular show that has run for several years in Los Angeles; a virtual reality firm recently purchased the company behind it. The goal seems obvious and right along the lines of what Kojima envisions: creating interactive horror-themed VR experiences that meld old entertainment platforms with new ones.

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The ultimate emotional potential of merging media is limited only by the imagination, but what has already been experienced at one immersive show in Los Angeles offers a glimpse at the kind of rewards that may be available.

“The Tension Experience,” which was reviewed here in October, is an experience that literally takes participants into a whole other world for some 2.5 hours. Bearing similarities to the 1997 David Fincher film “The Game,” where separating reality from fiction becomes increasingly difficult, participants enter a warehouse that is fully “dressed” to appear as a dilapidated cult headquarters. Then customers appear to be indoctrinated into the mysterious organization.

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The entire world, with some 30 characters, comes to life as participants move through a completely realized story. So detailed is the world that some visitors have returned two, three, and even four times, each time experiencing something new. The result for many visitors were moments in the infamous “Red Room,” where visitors reported deeply rewarding emotional moments.

Kojima is talking about taking all of this interactive entertainment to a new level. He says the goal will be to have novels, video games, and film all “merge into one type of entertainment.”

The focus of his company, Kojima Productions, is to take advantage of more interactive storytelling and to eventually evolve entertainment as we know it today. “If we just make a game, people are less likely to choose that as something to do,” Kojima told the BBC.

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He added, “They would rather engage in something that combines different forms of entertainment together. That’s where we need to focus our efforts, on this convergence.” Though Kojima has not created interactive entertainment like “The Tension Experiment,” his company already produced one project, “Quantum Break,” which experimented with melding film content with a video game.

An upcoming project, “Death Stranding,” is being kept under wraps by the company, but Kojima coyly teased that it could be the first project to exemplify his “one type of entertainment” future promises. “We want this game to be something that people can get into easily, but after an hour or two they’ll start to notice something a little different,” said Kojima.

The potential to elevate and advance experiential entertainment is enormous. One suspects Kojima understands that while people are searching for pure entertainment, they also harbor a desire for true emotional connections and experiences. In the very near future, then, perhaps therapists will be put out of work by artists pushing the creative media into their next incarnation.