Trigger Happy
view to enhance the feeling of speed. The same genres also offer a “cockpit cam,” which puts the player in the hotseat, right at the virtual controls. G-Police (1997), a helicopter gunship sci-fi shoot-’em-up, makes available an “aerial cam” that looks perpendicularly down on proceedings from a great height. Threedimensional exploration games, meanwhile, generally offer elevated cams at each point of the compass that may be switched at will. They will also offer the player either a temporary first-person viewpoint—as in Mario 64, where you can look through Mario’s eyes to line up a tricky narrow path—or a “shoulder cam,” as in Tomb Raider. The latter is a curious invention that provides a viewpoint that is very near to the character’s own, yet is still an external one, peeping impishly through the eyes of a virtual stalker over Lara’s shapely trapezium.
Why is it important for modern 3D videogames to provide this multiplicity of viewing angles? There are two answers: one functional and one aesthetic. Consider a real-life experience—say, watching a tennis match. If you watch it from the side and near the ground, you will see different aspects of the game from someone watching higher up at one end of the court. The spectator watching from the latter viewpoint, the
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