Trigger Happy
range of vision (and thus what the computer has to draw) is markedly limited. Objects or monsters can loom out of the mist with stylish effect, passing smoothly from blued-out fuzz to sharp delineation. Often, fog and general darkness make an effective means to heighten tension in horror-related gameplay, for instance in Silent Hill (see fig. 12), a good example of how technical limitations can be turned to positive aesthetic effect.
Some technical limitations, however, run deeper. The mode of scientific perspective, whether in videogames or traditional art, inevitably involves some choices and compromises about how to display visual information. One of the well-attested problems of representation in scientific perspective is that of marginal distortion. Projective geometry speaks of a “picture plane” in front of the viewer. Imagine it as a window looking onto a garden.34 Light rays from objects are said to subtend angles at the eye: this simply denotes how many degrees of our visual field they take up. But objects also have “plane projections,” which is their apparent size on the picture plane—the
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34 The term “perspective” itself actually comes from the Latin for “to look through”—to look through something like a transparent picture plane, or window.
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