Trigger Happy
method of inducing tension: the player can get killed by zombies not because the environment is cleverly designed but because he was deliberately hindered from seeing them coming until it was too late. And, crucially, Resident Evil 2 doesn’t let you choose the shots in the way Mario 64 does. As with film, shots are done to you. Silent Hill, meanwhile, sometimes lets the player control the camera when walking around the streets, but dive into a dim alley and the tilted overhead shot is the only perspective you’ll get. And this shows how a purely filmic notion of camerawork cannot work in a videogame context. Film manipulates the viewer, but a game depends on being manipulable.
There is an even more fundamental formal distinction to be made between the structures of visual imagery in films and videogames. Modern film relies for its storytelling and conceptual effect on a highly sophisticated grammar of montage, a technique invented in cinema’s youth, and perfected by Sergei Eisenstein. In simple terms, it describes the process of “cutting together” discontinuous
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