Trigger Happy
is activated, providing an opportunity to relax and rest those tired wrists. FMV sequences can be graceful and beautiful in their own right (especially in the Final Fantasy games, where they alone can eat up $4 million of the budget), but they are something of a red herring. These sequences are simply there to be watched; they cannot be played with. They are merely tinsel around the real gameplay.
The question remains: what kind of cinematic action happens, not as self-contained intervallic episodes, but in the thick of videogame play itself?
Camera obscura
When videogames were flat, two-dimensional affairs, the player was furnished with a God-like objective viewpoint. The gameworld of Pong or Space Invaders is laid out flat before the eye; everything takes place in the same horizontal plane. You can see everything at once, because you can see the entire universe. The problem once three-dimensional games became the norm was that in a solid world every viewpoint is subjective, and no viewpoint enables you to see everything. So videogames began to offer the player a choice of windows on their worlds that could be switched at will, depending on the task in hand. In a
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