Trigger Happy
catches this point when he dismisses one early example, Video Hustler, as “like playing marbles.” A similar sort of disjunction might be argued to operate in G-Police, where the multiplicity of viewpoints on offer creates different game styles within the same environment; the aerial cam, especially, which is more useful than the standard perspectival cockpit cam for lining up bombing raids on ground targets, harks back to classic two-dimensional top-down shoot-’em-ups such as Xevious.
Normally, of course, we don’t encounter these sorts of problems in real life, because our eyes are (sensible, prescient Nature) hard-wired into our bodies. It is only the creative alienation of videogames, which translates physical action here (on this piece of plastic, in my living room) into visual effect there (in this otherworldly arena, at once viewed through my eyes and mediated through the prosthetic, virtual eyes of the videogame camera), that throws up such novel perceptual conundrums.
But ignoring for the moment the difference between watching the action of a film and implementing the action of a videogame, presumably this “camera” analogy between the media still holds to some extent? No, it does not. Videogame camerawork
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