Trigger Happy
seemingly robust analogy with film, they are known as
If it can be argued that the film camera in some sense creates the onscreen world rather than passively recording it,20 such a theory can be taken rather more literally with videogames. For, of course, there is nothing really there for the videogame “camera” to shoot in the first place. Instead, there is a complex mathematical model held in computer memory that only ever erupts into visual “solidity” for an instant, before fading away and being replaced with the next frame. The world is drawn perspectivally from one moment to the next, depending on the camera settings the player has chosen.
Videogame cameras (“cams” for short) have fairly recently settled into a group of standardized viewpoints. “Follow cam” is usually offered in driving or flying games, and sets the viewpoint to a position behind and slightly above the vehicle under the player’s control. Sometimes this is differentiated from a “chase cam,” the latter taking a tighter and lower
_________________
20 While AndrÉ Bazin famously likened the film image to a “window on the world” on the analogy with Renaissance theories of geometrical perspective, other film critics, such as Pascal Bonitzer, insisted that the film world could never extend outside the frame and so constituted a microuniverse in its own right.
