Cinematic Camera as Videogame Cliché: Analysis and Software Demonstration

"Only with effort can the camera be forced to lie: basically it is an honest medium: so the photographer is much more likely to approach nature in a spirit of inquiry, of communion, instead of with the saucy swagger of self-dubbed ‘artists’" -Edward Weston, "On Photography" by Susan Sontag Of all the fictions presented in the videogame medium, perhaps none is more prevalent and less recognized that the notion of the camera. The central lie told to the videogame player by the camera is that it exists at all. Although referred to widely in the critical and game development literature, the peculiar nature of the videogame camera is that it is not there, at least not as an optical camera. If a camera is best described as "an optical system for recording light," a videogame camera is properly described as "a computational system for producing light." While this difference is apparent and self-evident, the ongoing collusion of the optical and videogame cameras has resulted in a number of unique, and perhaps avoidable, conceptual and methodological moves. Confusions arise as the conceptualization of the videogame camera merges with the optical camera, forcing a reading of videogames as form of photography or, more often, as cinema. The consequences of these conceptual and methodological missteps include the following key issues: First, the videogame medium is rich in examples of non-optical, non-cinematic camera perspectives. Games such as Pac-Man and Asteroids provide clearly non-Euclidian spaces rendered in the service of the symbolic needs of the game rather than any effort to mimic cinema. Even a contemporary game such as SimCity 4 forgoes possible optical (and therefore cinematic) perspectives to present the word in an impossible isometric perspective. The contemporary development of 3-D technologies and hardware has meshed with and fueled the aesthetic recapitulation of Renaissance impulse toward realism in art, leading game development efforts away from classic, non-optical perspectives and toward the scientific perspective of the cinematic, optical camera. This move has unnecessarily disadvantaged "classic" game designs and winnowed the design vocabulary for contemporary game developers. In short, we have more Doom and less Spacewar. This consequence can be described as "the cinematic camera as videogame cliché’" A second issue mirrors the first as theorists attempt to merge cinematic theory with videogame theory based on assumptions about apparent structural similarities in the media. However, this theoretical position does not account for the conventional merging of the videogame and optical camera concepts. Even if, as Lev Manovich argues, "Rather than being merely one cultural language among others, cinema is now becoming the cultural interface, this is a transient phenomenon. Even though games may have absorbed cinema has their primary interface, this is a not a necessary arrangement. Instead, it becomes clear that the cinematic interface only remains necessary until indigenous videogame interfaces develop further and reach full cultural adoption. The colloquial evolution and encoding of the cinematic, optical camera perspective as the primary player perspective in games is not a necessary configuration of the interface. Games do not require a cinematic interface and therefore are not bound to a cinematic theoretical model. Moving beyond a strict reading of the videogame camera as an optical camera returns valuable design options to the game development library, provides a platform for recontextualizing film theory vis-à-vis games and establishes a theoretical platform for considering games as sui generis and not simply an extension of other modern media. To reach this perspective, this paper describes the evolution of the optical, cinematic camera perspective in games, describes how the cinematic camera became the preferred videogame interface, develops a theory of consequences described as the "cinematic camera as videogame cliché", outlines competing perspectival urges in the videogame medium and, finally, proposes solutions. To illustrate and illuminate how the optical cinematic camera perspective limits expression and creation in the form, this paper is paired with a software project that provides several non-optical, non-cinematic camera perspectives. This real-time, 3-D software allows the player to experience radical, non-optical camera perspectives as described in the paper.