Trigger Happy
Isometric perspective was not a brand-new discovery. It is very similar, for instance, to the form of “parallelism” (representation in which parallel lines do not converge) found in ancient Chinese art, whose high viewpoint and oddly elongated (to the modern eye) diagonals are reproduced by Zaxxon and its siblings. In this case it is irrelevant that isometricity doesn’t resemble the way we see things in real life.29 In videogames, isometric perspective enjoyed a phase as the most technologically sophisticated means of building a 3D world, for example on games such as Ant Attack, Highway Encounter and Knight Lore for the ZX Spectrum.
Foreshortening implies a subjective, individual viewpoint, so its absence in isometric graphics, along with the elevated position of survey, conspired to give the user a sense of playing God in these tiny universes. God could not yet move around—he was still glued to his chair—but he could see everything, he was in control, and he saw that it was good.
_________________
29 At any distance, that is. In fact, according to modern psychologists, when scrutinizing objects that are very close in our visual field, convergence doesn’t operate, and what we “see” actually resembles parallelism more closely.
216
