Trigger Happy
player’s ability to switch control between several soldiers with different mission duties enhances the demands of strategic timing and also, since the environment may be seen from several different viewpoints in rapid succession, increases the sense of that environment’s solid existence. Games such as Omikron: The Nomad Soul or Eden, meanwhile, create ever more stunning Blade Runner and Judge Dredd– style cityscapes whose furniture and surfaces are increasingly interactive in new symbolic ways.
Currently, the third-person game—for instance Tomb Raider, Metal Gear Solid or Zelda 64—has the edge over the first-person game such as Quake III, which shows a perspectival viewpoint as if you were actually in the digital environment. Although it might initially look as if the latter genre should be the more involving, since the illusion is that you are really there, it is almost always less symbolically rich. This limitation derives directly, in fact, from the artificially narrow view angle in such games, and also from the observation that without stereoscopic vision (our two eyes receiving slightly different images in real life) it is much harder to judge depth. Therefore, symbolic interoperation through space is severely limited.
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