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Camera Eye, CG-Eye

  
  

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miss wonderstarr
13:28 / 26.01.08
I've been asked to contribute an article for The Cinema Journal, for a special issue about the relationship between cinema and gaming.

I've provisionally agreed to do it as I had some ideas along those lines (below), but my position is that I know a fair bit about cinema and only really a bit about gaming.

My notes so far were more about cinema's use of CGI and how our notions of "authenticity" are still so tied to what the analogue lens shows us, and to the physical limits of the film camera. I've also got some observations in there inspired by a thread on this board, about lens flare and the way your "eyes" in a game are represented as if they were a camera lens ~ again, the (hand-held in particular) camera as guarantor of "truth" and "realism".

I'll share the paragraphs I wrote earlier, here, and then move on from there.

NB: there are some really basic notes in there, within square brackets and italics, as add-ons to the more finished prose (which I was writing as a draft book proposal). Some of them are, again, inspired directly by a Barbelith thread ~ the one on Cloverfield.




The three films discussed directly above – as with The Matrix and also Crank, which pastiches the look of the Grand Theft Auto series – borrow in many ways from the visual style and storytelling conventions of contemporary video-games. This is an increasing trend in action-oriented SF cinema but for the most part – with further exceptions such as the steadicam in Strange Days imitating a “first person shooter” viewpoint – the borrowing works in reverse, with video games appropriating the techniques of cinema to connote spectacle and authenticity. The swooping CGI camera-eye that establishes and introduces new locations, familiar in many video games, is borrowed by Ultraviolet but this move originates, as noted above, in 1920s city cinema. The Matrix’s “bullet time”, a forensic camera view that focuses on and fetishises the detail of weapons trajectory, was explicitly copied in the Max Payne games, which were promoted as film noir; Max Payne’s bullet time sequences are even shot in sepia, imitating old photography. Like the vast majority of contemporary games, the recent GTA series uses conventions of establishing shot and shot/reverse shot for its dialogue and cut-scenes; it also employs slow motion for replayed sequences or moments of particular spectacle, raindrops on the “lens” during wet weather, and lens flare when the player looks towards the sun.

These last two techniques are particularly telling, as they are not designed to imitate the authentic experience of walking or driving in the city – only a camera lens, not a windshield or human eye, produces flare, and outside a car, there is no physical explanation for raindrops obscuring vision. These visual devices imitate the experience of cinema: it is analogue photography, with all its quirks – lens flare is technically a limitation of the equipment – that guarantees “authenticity” in video games.

This drive to imitate photography is even more extreme in cinematic CGI. Again, ironically this involves breaking down the smooth, shiny visuals of CGI in order to disguise it as the more primitive analogue technology; developers strive towards reproducing cinema’s technical flaws. Battlestar Galactica prides itself on the jerky, handheld quality of its outer-space CGI, complete with rapid zooms and momentary loss of focus. Zodiac includes a sequence of entirely artificial time-lapse city photography, the jerkiness of the earlier method reproduced in CGI.

[see also Cloverfield with CGI-augmented DV footage as “authentic”, though it is carefully, painstakingly constructed to look rough and amateur, and LOTR hand-held/jumpy battle footage]

[NB despite the “authenticity” of this CGI we are of course buying an illusion, knowingly – and repressing our knowledge that we’re looking at a simulation. Like Cypher, who opts for the Matrix illusion knowing it’s a fake, or Deckard/Rachael, trying to repress their own suspicions of their replicant status, we accept a convincing simulation as “real”. We are like citizens of a simulated city ourselves
Dover in Minden, 2000: 281-283 Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (Camden House) – the viewer is consumed by the images on screen as the workers are consumed by the machine – the citizens devoured by the city reflect the viewer being devoured by the screen’s seductive surfaces
Inability of humans (diegetic citizens, and viewers) to maintain the integrity of self in a machine/image environment – we are subsumed
Cf. Matrix viewers (and Dark City viewers, etc… BR viewers) accepting simulating and repressing the uncomfortable real, just as the protagonists do.]


The conventions of photography, and the cinematic techniques established over a century ago, are still the guarantor of authenticity in contemporary cinema. This privileging of the photographic image as connoting the real, personal history, memories and identity is also central to many recent SF films. Blade Runner’s Rachael desperately clings to a picture of her mother as proof of her past, Leon treasures snapshots of his replicant “family”, while Deckard keeps images of people he can never have met. Jack Logan, Lenny Nero and John Anderton in Timecop, Strange Days and Minority Report respectively immerse themselves in video memories (whether conventional, 3D or cerebral cortex “SQUID” clips) of lost loved ones.


[also Wong kar-wai. Mazierska and Rascarioli 2001]

This chapter will consider the implications of what SF writer Bruce Sterling calls “technological lock-in” – the way the potential of the “CG-Eye” is deliberately hobbled to bring it in line with photography. As previous chapters have demonstrated, to an extent the CGI camera does offer us spectacle, both in terms of what we see and how we see it, beyond the scope of the analogue camera; but the earlier discussion has also shown that these techniques evolve directly from analogue photography. The CG-Eye is currently tied to the conventions not just of cinema, but of specific, limited approaches from cinema – for the most part it reproduces but expands upon the mobile, free-moving crane or helicopter shot to introduce city vistas, and as noted above, occasionally imitates hand-held shake or stop motion. So far, CGI has only occasionally attempted to engage with the vast possibilities of other cinematic “looks” beyond this range: Max Payne’s dream sequences, fittingly for a self-styled noir, resemble Expressionism, and the first trailer for Grand Theft Auto IV was a witty pastiche of Koyannisqatsi. So far, though, the potential of the CG-Eye to show us new views of the city has been held back by a perceived need to guarantee the “real” through the approximation of relatively mainstream cinematic forms.


So that's where I am so far.

I'm posting this on here in the hope that some of you might help me bounce off these ideas, discuss them in ways I hadn't thought of, fill in the gaps in my knowledge with some relevant examples from games (or from cinema I haven't thought of) and maybe point me towards some of those examples ~ bearing in mind that I can't really buy a ton of games and play them through to the appropriate moment, because I am having to research and write this article very much in the margins of my full time job. (It's still an inconvenient fact about games as art, to the scholar, that to see a specific moment, you have to play them through to that point ~ in contrast to the instant accessibility of a scene on a DVD).

The key questions I'm interested in are:

Do contemporary games invariably follow the conventions of mainstream cinema ~ eg. cut-scenes in establishing shot and shot/reverse shot ~ or are there examples of game "cameras" establishing their own grammar of visual storytelling distinct from cinema?

I'm particularly interested in the fact that the mobile camera in games seems to simulate the crane shot and/or the steadicam ~ the sort of thing we've seen in cinema since, say, Touch of Evil and The Shining.

And that the FPS seems to emulate either the steadicam or the hand-held camera, for "authenticity". That is, it's not emulating what a human sees, but what a camera sees ~ especially true when drops fall on the "lens" or the sun flares.

Does this vary by genre? eg. do war games particularly play up "hand-held" shake and disruption ~ as a parallel to the way Cloverfield, LOTR and BSG employ camera-shake and, in BSG, dramatic whip-zooms (or is it crash-zooms? someone will know the difference) to suggest the frantic intensity of a combat emergency?

Do sports games, and racing games, specifically emulate the camerawork we're used to from watching those sports on TV?

Are other devices borrowed from TV? The slomo replay of stunts in GTA, for instance, seems inspired by the spectacular car-jumps in Dukes of Hazzard (and other action-genre TV of the 80s? A-Team, Knight Rider?).

Are there other examples of games simulating specific historical and cultural styles from cinema, like Max Payne's use of sepia for "bullet time" (which is confused in itself, because sepia surely connotes early cinema, which appears to run faster, not slower, and the game is billed as film noir, which actually doesn't look much like either Max Payne's contemporary crime drama, or the sepia mode).

Is bullet time in The Matrix an example of cinema appropriating gaming camerawork, or did it originate in The Matrix (or in Hong Kong action cimema?) and then inspire games like Max Payne? Are there visual techniques in cinema that have been borrowed from gaming? (What about films based on games, like Silent Hill? Were the games cinematic, or are the films game-like?)



The film Crank seems to deliberately style some of its scenes as an homage to recent GTA games; this comes across as fast-moving, tongue-in-cheek, slightly cartoonish. Why is this apparently so different from games that style themselves as "cinematic"? Is it because of the different cultural capital of the two forms? that is, a game acquires gravity and artistic pretensions by trying to look like a film; a film is playful and funky if it lifts its approach from games?

The GTA IV trailer is the first example I've seen of games pastiching art cinema, rather than mainstream Hollywood. This experiment was then apparently abandoned after the first teaser. Are there any other examples of games modelling their visual style on a cinema outside Hollywood? on early film, avant-garde film? The key national styles like German Expressionism (perhaps in a nightmare or dream sequence)? Does East Asian cinema shape game aesthetic and visual storytelling?

~~~

You may well ask what you get out of discussing this, apart from the fact that this forum apparently needs more traffic and activity! You might point out that I seem to have lifted stuff from Barbelith discussion without any acknowledgement, above. Well, that's true, but it was only for my own notes.

If I do write something on this topic, I will properly credit everyone I use in the published piece, using your screen name or real name, whichever you prefer.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
12:42 / 27.01.08
This is going to be a bullet-point response, W, because it's a pretty enormous subject that you've got here and I don't know how to string it all together into a proper post. You know more aout cinematic techniques and the terminology than I do, and there's a good chance that a lot of this may ultimately be of no relevance to your piece. It's basically a bunch of random thoughts on the subject, but I hope some of it is useful.

- Lens flare has dropped out of fashion in first-person games over the last couple of years, replaced by some more realistic effects. I can't for the life of me remember which games these appear in, but I've recently seen effects that range from a halo of light around particularly strong light scources (which makes me think of what I used to be able to see when I was a contact lens wearer), through a white-out effect when you turn the viewpoint so that you're looking directly at the sun, to a particularly smart effect that's currently in vogue and tries to replicate the sensation of your eyes readjusting to strong variations in exposure to light - a temporary bright blindness when emerging from a dark area into a light one, and the opposite when moving into dark areas from light ones, the screen becoming too dark to see until it gradually brightens to allow you to make out detail.

Trying to remember which game first used lens flare - think it was Turok on the Nintendo 64. Sections of the gaming press started to ridicule the effect after three or so years of constant exposure to it, and that must have combined with the appearance of new technology to make developers move away from it.

- The first-person camera is more than just steadicam and I'd be wary of suggesting that older films were influenced by first-person videogames in the use of that viewpoint without having some evidence to back it up - your comment about Strange Days. Mention probably needs to be made of the Doom film (which I've not seen apart from a few clips), for its direct homage to the game during the first-person sequence.

The thing to remember about first-person games is that the player is in control of the camera at all times - in most of them - and this is where it's fundamentally different than a similar point of view in film. A game's director can't rely on the audience being focused on a certain point at a certain time, not unless control it's during a cut-scene where control is removed. Or a lightgun game, where movement is cosntantly on-rails. That has massive implications for storytelling - Half-Life 2 does a good job of *suggesting* that the player looks in a certain direction through its use of sound and its effective creation of a personal relationship between the player/player-character and hir companion.

There's also the issue of switches in point of view - in Halo, for example, the camera jumps from out of the player-character's head whenever the player takes control of a vehicle - it looks cool, but it's primarily an issue of functionality. How do you allow a player to control the direction of the vehicle and their point of view independently of each other, without them ending up steering the vehicle into the walls all the time? Temporarily shifting the point of view is the answer here, whereas in other games (Half-Life 2 being one, I think), the solution is to have the camera forcibly re-centre itself.

- The increasing number of games that try to give the player-character a phsyical presence - that the player can see their limbs when they look for them. I don't know if that's got a huge amount of relevance here, though.

- I'm wondering if you're not maybe a bit too focused on camera movement at the expense of discussion of camera placement. The limitations of technology, when developers first started to really make use of polygonised character models, meant that they had to use pre-rendered backgrounds and place the character models on top of them to create the illusion of three dimensions. One of the most noticable games to do this, imo, was Infogrammes' Alone in the Dark - a Cthulu-mythos game that was the inspiration (although it's never been vocally acknowledged as such, to the best of my knowledge) for Capcom's Biohazard/Resident Evil series. If you're not familiar with AitD, then RE is effectively the same thing, making use of similar tech ideas.

Because the backgrounds are flat pre-rendered images, there can be no camera movement. Instead, changes in viewpoint are handled by an immediate switch to a *different* camera. In this it resembles, I suppose, cinema pre-Welles.

Sorry, I can't concentrate on this on this computer. Have to post this as-is and come back after I've moved.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
13:15 / 27.01.08
Great stuff, thanks E. Randy. There's a lot there for me to think about already, and I'll try to engage with some of the points that really stood out for me.

Overall, my feeling on reading your post was just how much you could write about one aspect of this subject... like the development of the FPS. I only just scoped it out on Wikipedia and of course, it dates back to Battlezone or even earlier. It could be that the use of steadicam to evoke a first person perspective in Strange Days is just coincidental, a fairly rare intersection between cinema and games' visual style ~ anyway, I can't think of a lot of films that use the first person perspective. Lady in the Lake, a film noir experiment, is one that's cited so often I assume it's an exception. If Doom the film adaptation does it as homage to the game, that's interesting ~ and it's also interesting if it's only for a brief section of the movie. I suspect very few films keep that perspective up all the way through (Blair Witch, Cloverfield?)

- Lens flare has dropped out of fashion in first-person games over the last couple of years, replaced by some more realistic effects. I can't for the life of me remember which games these appear in, but I've recently seen effects that range from a halo of light around particularely strong light scources (which makes me think of what I used to be able to see when I was a contact lens wearer)...

A previous post I saved from Barbelith called the newer convention "bloom":

Developers seem to be leaving it behind now, anyway. Now it's all bloom and specular lighting effects. More realistic, but still overdone.

It's interesting if designers are guided by novelty and fashion in the way they depict the way the player "sees"; rather than by some kind of progression towards "realism". Though perhaps the evolution you're describing actually works as a move from representing how a camera sees to how the human eye sees.

I suspect there is a strong association of camera-eye effects (such as lens flare, whip-pan) with "realism", simply because most battles we've seen (like most sport events?) are going to be mediated for us through film and video, rather than something we've witnessed directly with the naked eye. And I wonder if games haven't been trying, for most of their history, to approximate films as closely as possible, rather than life. Why do we need cut-scenes to be shown using conventional film grammar, after all? It seems that the main idea is to make the player feel like part of a film or TV show. I'm most familiar with the recent GTA series and I'd say they're enjoyable partly in the way they emulate what we've seen in film and TV representations of 1990s LA (Boyz N The Hood, Terminator 2). Vice City, even more so (with regard to Miami Vice).


Or a lightgun game, where movement is constantly on-rails.

What's on-rails? You're right I'm sure that storytelling is radically different just because of the player's agency in terms of where s/he looks, in a game.

Still, even though the player can control the camera, a FPS point of view still resembles a steadicam shot, doesn't it? But then perhaps there's not much other practical alternative. You couldn't play a game that looked like an avant-garde film and kept cutting you from your perspective to something you couldn't control and had little relevance to the scene you last saw, in a different location. You could do it in cut-scenes, but I don't know if you could play a game that looked like Un Chien Andalou.


- The increasing number of games that try to give the player-character a phsyical presence - that the player can see their limbs when they look for them. I don't know if that's got a huge amount of relevance here, though.

I'm pretty sure the SQUID first-person sequences in Strange Days include this too, and I do feel there's something about these sequences' "coolness" (they're presented as a brief buzz of immersive experience) that's associated with their resemblance to games.



- I'm wondering if you're not maybe a bit too focused on camera movement at the expense of discussion of camera placement. ...

Because the backgrounds are flat pre-rendered images, there can be no camera movement.

Not sure I understand this yet, so I may need more examples and explanation, or to follow up your examples.


Instead, changes in viewpoint are handled by an immediate switch to a *different* camera In this, it resembles, I suppose, cinema pre-Welles.

My understanding is that D W Griffiths was the first to start moving the camera more fluidly, and I'd guess Hitchcock was probably trying free mobile camera movement before Welles' Citizen Kane in 1941, but... I think it's probably true that apart from a couple of pioneers, before Welles there was not much spectacular crane-shot work. I might be wrong there.

So I think you're saying that prior to the developments in gaming that enabled players to progress through their environment, with it moving around them rather than remaining static, games told their stories through "cuts".

I'm still trying to think of examples of this from my own experience, because as far as I can remember the arcade games around the time of Battlezone had a fixed background and perhaps panned up around it, but only cut when you went to a new level; not to give you a new angle on the same scene.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
13:48 / 27.01.08
Okay, that's better - sorry, was on a laptop, people talking at me, impossible to think.

AitD and RE are both hugely influenced by horror cinema. RE is splatter material, but like AitD, the static camera - and the oblique angles that it's almost always watching the action from - is more directly linked to films with a supernatural bent. Ghost stuff, haunted houses. Off the top of my head, I'm thinking Robert Wise's The Haunting - things like the moment when the camera looks down on the players from the top of the spiral stairs in the library. I know that film has some really huge moments of movement in it, but on the whole it's the sections where the camera is motionless (or as good as) that the terror strikes home. It's obviously partly about the strange angles doing weird things to your brain through simply being out of the norm, but it also creates the impression that you're looking at things from the point of view of... something that shouldn't be there, something that's not quite on the same wavelength of reality.

RE uses that brilliantly - there's a corridor that has a number of crows perched on a rail near the ceiling, and the camera is positioned just slightly above them, looking down on the player-character as ze runs through the passage. You expect the crows to start buzzing hir at any moment, but it never happens - it's astonishingly tense.

- The Silent Hill games do something similar, although they feature limited, on-rails movement of the camera from those odd positions. There are also other camera effects that come into play here and which, as far as I'm aware, still haven't been used by film-makers - there's a constant film of fuzzy white noise over the image at all times, which *is* partly to mask technical limitations (you don't noticed low resolution textures so much if they're purposefully obscured), but significantly ups the nastiness - the interference increases as the monsters get closer to the player-character and whenever the player-character encounters a particularly horrific vision (there's a lot to say about the SH games in relation to the way that they play with the accepted conventions of storytelling, too, but that's another discussion).

- Driving games are a difficult one, and I don't know that there's a lot of mileage to be had from them here. Camera is entirely about functionality for the most part, being placed behind, inside or on top of the vehicle. At least, in modern games (much older stuff - Spy Hunter - would often have a camera that viewed the action from directly overhead, which, now I think about it, might have been an attempt to recreate the sensation of watching helicopter-shot police chases. Strange, but I never noticed the resemblance before).

The problem for driving games in positioning the camera anywhere else is that doing so interferes with the player's ability to accurately control the vehicle. The exceptions are in moments where control is removed - as you mention, the stunts in GTA. Which, I think, must have first been seen in Reflections' Driver on the original Playstation - a game that was directly influenced by chase sequences in films like Bullet. The intention with Driver was actually stated as being to put the player into a 1970s' chase sequence, and the game even included a replay editor to effectively allow the player to direct their own little scene - you'd play the level (which typically involved chasing another car and banging into it until it was wrecked, only with lots of alleyways with destructible boxes to crash into) and then you could watch a replay of the level and select the camera angles that it'd be viewed from, before saving the whole onto a memory card for future screenings. Iirc, it even had a level where you were chasing after a passenger train above you, French Connection-style, which should indicate what it was going for.

- Sports games *do* try and go for a direct recreation of the television experience, because that's what sells, and also because for a lot of us the television experience is as close to those sports as we get, making it a very strange sort of 'reality'. Licenced sports - and racing - games nearly always do this. If a publisher has the official Formula 1 licence, the game will have have all of the official logos and fonts, and be as close to watching the race on television as it can be. Same applies to modern football games, cricket, rugby, ice hockey, etc. The game camera is placed where the television camera is placed - or it's at least an option.

- Sepia tones are used in a lot of story-led games to denote past events. Sometimes, the developer will go as far as including aging effects - hairs, muck, dirt - on the 'film'. Um, I need to think of some examples now.

A lot of these effects are often used by games in their unique fourth-wall breaking way. Sega released a realistic racing game on the Xbox called Sega GT, which featured a set of 'classic' races - all they really were were regular races, just with the car types limited to those produced in certain years. The funny touch - funny as in a nod and a wink to the player, an acknowledgement of the fact that it's a game - comes with the beginning of those races taking place in sepia tone, then gradually moving to full-colour.

I need to have a bit more of a think about this, because I'm sure that there are other games that play with use of colour in this way - not just sepia tones, but also over-saturation and stuff, to create a sense of time and place that's linked directly to our experience of watching films shot in the past, and the way that the colours in those films appear to us now and date them.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
14:14 / 27.01.08
One example I can bring out of my limited experience is American McGee's Alice, which used sepia, "damaged", flickery clips for the thumbnails of saved games. Which fitted (vaguely) with the 19th century milieu of the game's setting and Lewis Carroll's association with early photography.

You could have a game look like, and work like, The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (as a key example of German Expressionist cinema), with warped perspective and weird angles. In fact, maybe horror games do work that way. I felt the nightmare levels in Max Payne were reminiscent of Expressionism in some respects (though perhaps most attempts to recreate dreams in films and games are going to be similar ~ it was also a bit like Hitchcock's Dali-influenced film Spellbound).

Another limit to my experience is that I don't watch sport or horror. I'm starting to think maybe I should admit these limits and my personal position, in the article ~ maybe it's interesting in itself to have someone coming from film, trying to map that onto games, and seeing whether an understanding of film actually helps you to understand games, or whether games exceed and challenge your framework.

Which, I think, must have first been seen in Reflections' Driver on the original Playstation - a game that was directly influenced by chase sequences in films like Bullet. ... Iirc, it even had a level where you were chasing after a passenger train above you, French Connection-style, which should indicate what it was going for.


I think the San Francisco/San Fierro jumps in San Andreas in particular must have Bullet ~ actually just checked, it's Bullitt unless you mean something different ~ in mind. And the Los Santos district has a big set piece with a tanker chasing you on a bike (iirc) that you're meant to recognise as part of T2. The pleasure there is that you feel like you're part of T2. Not that you're replicating some experience of Los Angeles (although having been to LA, San Francisco and Vegas in the year I bought the game, I really did enjoy the recognition of actual places) but that you're participating in the film/TV version of those cities.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
14:49 / 27.01.08
Er, that comment about The Haunting, I meant 'players' as in 'actors'. Just in case it caused any confusion.

If Doom the film adaptation does it as homage to the game, that's interesting ~ and it's also interesting if it's only for a brief section of the movie.

Here's the sequence in question. It's a direct homage to the games - to first-person shooters in general, actually, more than to the Doom series in particular. There are a lot of things in there that you might not notice if your not too familair with videogames, but that are clear nods to the medium and the FPS genre - the position of the gun, the reload and idle gun 'animations', the mirror trick, the smooth sway of the camera, the zombie about to throw an axe at the character and the character shooting it away (that's a direct lift from Sgea's House of the Dead lightgun games [I'll explain "lightun" below]). It moves away from games as soon as the character gets knocked to the floor, though, and becomes more like the kind of thing that film-makers *think* games are like than what they actually are.

Why do we need cut-scenes to be shown using conventional film grammar, after all?

You're right in suggesting that games have, until fairly recently, looked towards recreating the movie experience instead of creating their own language of storytelling, but that's changing fairly rapidly. An awful lot of modern first-person games have events happen in front of the player's eyes while the player is still behind the player-character's eyes. The original Half-Life is one of the most celbrated examples of this - its intro credits sequence places the player riding a monorail system on hir way into work, free to observe whatever's going on outside of the windows, but limited in how and where they can move by the physical limitations of the carriage that they're in. And then the game itself takes places entirely from that same point of view - every single event takes place from the pov of the player-character.

What's on-rails?

When the player has no - or limited - control of their own movement. Lightgun games are the most obvious example - in Sega's Virtua Cop, for example, the player is pointing a gun at the screen, with the player-character's point of view entirely pre-defined. I suppose another good example would be all those terrible full-motion video games that were popular amongst publishers when the CD format first became financially viable - where they recorded footage of actors on sets and simply played that footage back, pretending that there was an element of interaction there. Road Avenger is a notorious example - all you do is press the correct button when it flashes up on the screen in order to keep the video playing.

I'm pretty sure the SQUID first-person sequences in Strange Days include this too,

Yeah, because they're coming from roughly the same place - the camera is actually somebody's eyes.

On pre-rendered bakgrounds:

Not sure I understand this yet, so I may need more examples and explanation, or to follow up your examples.

Here's a bit of Resident Evil 2 that I'll use to explain. All of those really detailed areas, they're not actually 'there' - they have no presence within the game world, they're not being created by the hardware. They're just flat pictures, created on a vastly more powerful bit of kit and then stored as a bitmap image on the CD. The only things that are being generated by the games machine that the game is running on are the characters and some incidental bits and bobs that they can interact with - the ruby and the statue right at the beginning of the clip, say.

It's a clever optical illusion.

Scruffy visual aids coming up.

Here's what you see on the screen when you're playing:



but the Playstation is really doing something like this:



where it's only generating the visuals for the characters, telling them that they can't move into the red area, can move into the green area, shrinking them as they move to point X and enlarging them as they move to point Y. And doing that mathematically, of course, not actually using red and green blobs. All the stuff that you see in place of the red and green blobs, that's the pre-rendered background, a flat image that's laid underneath the charater models.

There's more stuff to mention here, I think - things about how older RPGs used to consist of static camera-viewed areas entirely - but I'll come back to it later, if nobody else does.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
14:51 / 27.01.08
actually just checked, it's Bullitt unless you mean something different

Yeah, the Steve McQueen flick. Brain got onfused for a second there.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
15:10 / 27.01.08
This is wonderful stuff ~ though it's making me think the only way for me to write such an article would be to fully admit where I'm coming from and how much I don't know, and take it from there.

I am also interested in the ideas in my notes above about how CGI in cinema seems pretty much devoted to reproducing what a camera sees, complete with all the "flaws" that we accept as "realistic" because we're so used to them and because we accept the camera's way of rendering things as real, rather than what the eye sees (ie. the eye can't whip-pan the way the CGI camera does in BSG, and the CGI camera doesn't have to, any more than the CGI camera flying down into Coruscant has to include a lens flare, but it does because we accept it as realistic).

Maybe that's stuff for the Film forum? These ideas do seem to overlap, in terms of the computer-game eye, or the CGI eye in movies, not really branching out into its own language away from cinema (or so it seems to me). Some of that, you've demonstrated, is due to the practical considerations of playing games ~ ie. we have to be able to see the player and where they're going (with some rare exceptions for suspense or effect). So games, it seems, mostly use what would be a crane shot (ie. a mobile camera behind the player) or a steadicam (could also be behind the player, but this is more obviously the equivalent type of shot to FPS) because those are most practical in terms of showing the player and his/her environment.

In cut-scenes, it does seem that games revert to the classical Hollywood grammar of establishing shot, shot/reverse shot for conversation, and so on. And in that sense I think they're mostly trying to emulate films and TV. (In some specific cases, we've agreed that they're deliberately recalling a spectacular, pleasurable moment from film or TV ~ like a slow-motion car stunt).

Some of these choices in gaming "camerawork", I think we agree, are made because players want to feel like part of what they've seen in film and on television ~ because that's their only experience of it, and that's how they understand "authenticity" in those genres (eg. war is going to look "hand-held". Sport is going to follow the conventions of sport TV. Maybe top-down racing games follow police helicopter chase conventions, from news reports. Maybe they're a combination of technical limitations and media convention).


One further thing emerging from your post above is the idea of "on-rails" ~ how what it recalls for me is theme park rides. In my bigger proposal, from which the above first post is extracted, I also try to make some links between the mobile camera and roller-coasters (and escalators, elevators... other technology that offers a moving point of view). They all seem tied together with modernism, with the thrill of the camera that can show you what the human eye cannot, with cinema as a kind of "ride" (this is also how the SQUID is promoted within Strange Days). I think the roller-coaster shares its inception with the major skyscrapers and the first superheroes, and the classical Hollywood cinema, ie. 1930s, broadly. [edit: pretty broadly. The Coney Island Cyclone, featured in GTA IV, debuted in 1927. The Chrysler in 1930, and the Empire State Building in 1931. Superman, of course, in 1938. Classical Hollywood, 1930s.]

And some rides use cinema and mechanics, such as the Back to the Future and Star Tours attractions.

Looooads of ideas, basically... probably too many. Thanks again for these fantastic examples, especially the pics.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
15:20 / 27.01.08
PS. Yeah I have played House of the Dead and Virtua Cop... not very well, but enthusiastically. There's one game where a frame around the machine detects whether you're ducking or not, not sure if it's one of those two. I think Virtua Cop has a pedal for ducking?

Just looked up Bullet Time on wikipedia and it's obvious you could easily write an article just on the history of the one effect... I've only got 3000 words for this thing.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
15:38 / 27.01.08
Here's a bit of Resident Evil 2 that I'll use to explain

I see what you mean now ~ when you said that earlier games required cuts, I thought you meant much earlier. But you could have had moving environments by the time Resident Evil 2 came out in 98 ~ if Doom was released in 93. I suppose the difference is that you couldn't have moving environments in that much detail, in 98.

It's interesting that those fixed camera angles, or rather the transition between them, seems to follow key rules of continuity editing in cinema such as the continuity of movement and direction ~ a character leaves the screen running right to left, and enters the next one running right to left. But then, I suppose the reasons are obvious and there isn't much alternative. Anyone playing that game is going to be used to the storytelling conventions of cinema, and is going to make sense of characters in environments, across cuts, through the rules they've learned from watching films. There must be a big overlap between horror/action movie fans, and horror/action games fans (and TV sports fans with sports games fans).
 
 
miss wonderstarr
16:22 / 27.01.08
Re. Half-Life, is this the sequence you mean?

You were suggesting I think that this is an innovative way of avoiding cut-scenes. But does it play the same role as a cut-scene? Within this sequence, you could walk around, but you'd be constrained (realistically) by the monorail, right? But is it providing the same story information as a cut-scene would, ie. if it doesn't have any secondary characters (though names keep flashing up on the screen, perhaps) or dialogue apart from the monorail announcement, and if it doesn't show your character interacting as a cut-scene would?

half life intro

It's a lot like a theme park ride... what I think are called "dark rides", like (perhaps most famously) Pirates of the Caribbean.


I found this comment interesting:

Best game opening scene ever. It emphasizes how deep into the mountain the facility is, how secure it is, and how difficult trying to get out would be.

Monorails are also interesting as people-moving technology, like slow rollercoasters. And the monorail at Disneyland was, I think, at least as much an attraction as its rollercoasters, in a kind of 1950s tomorrowland way. (It also seems to connect with World's Fair style visions of the future city).
 
 
Spatula Clarke
17:58 / 27.01.08
So games, it seems, mostly use what would be a crane shot (ie. a mobile camera behind the player) or a steadicam (could also be behind the player, but this is more obviously the equivalent type of shot to FPS) because those are most practical in terms of showing the player and his/her environment.

They do now, but it certainly wasn't always the case. Before the whole 3D revolution in game graphics, there were generally three viewpoints - top-down, side-on and (variations on) an isometric style. This is in titles that we can probably loosely classify as 'action' games. It's about the limitations of what's possible in two dimensions - how do you display a two-dimensional world? How do you allow somebody to navigate within that world? It's an entirely different discipline.

The use of the word 'camera' in discussion of videogames still feels quite recent, to me, and I'd guess that its introduction comes with Super Mario 64. I'm not sure what we used to use to describe this stuff before then - it was probably genre classifications, like 'platformer' or 'shoot 'em up', because, to an extent, those terms carried an explanation of the pov with them.

Super Mario 64 popularised the use of the word 'camera' as interchangable with POV in games discussion, thanks to actually having a visible cameraman. The game's viewpoint shifts automatically, depending on Mario's location and the task being asked of you, but it's nearly always possible to shift it manually. When you come to a room that features a wall-length mirror, you can actually see the camera itself. It's also one of the very first things that you see when you start the game - the view shifts around and circles the character who will become your cameraman for the rest of the game, in another strange fourth wall moment (about 1:20 into this video).

The other thing that Super Mario 64 does - well, one of a thousand, but the one most relevant to this thread - is that it introduces relative directional control. Prior to this game, 3D titles worked with a rotational control sstem: 'up' on the controller moved the character in the direction that they were facing, 'back' moved them backwards, and 'left' and 'right' made them turn on a dime - like a cog on a spoke. In SM64, if you move the stick to the left, Mario moves towards the left of the screen - he doesn't circle around, he actually walks in the direction that you're holding.

It sounds really basic now, but at the time it was absolutely revolutionary, and it could cause no end of problems, initially, for those of us who'd been playing games for a number of years already and weren't prepared for it. The camera made it even more of a challenge, because it's constantly reframing the action. If you want to move Mario in a straight line, you can't simply hold the stick in the same direction all the time - you need to readjust the direction in relation to changes in the camera's position. Difficult to describe - watch how the camera starts to circle around when Mario runs towards the wooden bridge towards the beginning of this video.

One further thing emerging from your post above is the idea of "on-rails" ~ how what it recalls for me is theme park rides.

Yes - there are (or have been) actual rides that do this, that give you a gun, place you in front of a massive screen, within an environment that literally and physically moves about in a manner tied into the action on the screen, and works as a game in a similar fashion to things like Virtua Cop. They were popular in some of the big film studio theme parks, I think. And even small arcade games can do this - I seem to remember playing Sega's Lost World lightgun arcade game while sat on a mock-up of the back of a vehicle, with said seat bumping about in relation to what was happening in the on-rails stuff on the screen, in an attempt to increase the sense of immersion.

I think Virtua Cop has a pedal for ducking?

Time Crisis. Different company - Namco, not Sega - but a very similar thing, pedal-enabled ducking excluded.

But you could have had moving environments by the time Resident Evil 2 came out in 98 ~ if Doom was released in 93. I suppose the difference is that you couldn't have moving environments in that much detail, in 98.

Just so. If you watch a playthrough of the original couple of Doom games, you'll notice that all the areas feature repetition of patterns in the environment - the walls, floors, etc. And the character models are all 2D sprites, given the illusion of depth by scaling. By having the environment work in the way it does in RE, the developers didn't just get to use a lot more detail in the player's surroundings - they were also able to use highly-detailed character models, because they were all that the game's graphics engine really had to concern itself with. The hardware doesn't have to worry about generating anything else. There are modern releases that still use pre-rendered backgrounds for exactly these reasons.

Re. Half-Life, is this the sequence you mean?

You were suggesting I think that this is an innovative way of avoiding cut-scenes. But does it play the same role as a cut-scene? Within this sequence, you could walk around, but you'd be constrained (realistically) by the monorail, right? But is it providing the same story information as a cut-scene would, ie. if it doesn't have any secondary characters (though names keep flashing up on the screen, perhaps) or dialogue apart from the monorail announcement, and if it doesn't show your character interacting as a cut-scene would?

It's not dated brilliantly, but, again, it's about its importance to developments that have taken place since then. It's also about the bit that follows directly on from the monorail sequence - you walk into the facility and you walk around it, while characters talk to you and introduce you to the storyline. And this is new, at the time - up until this point, storyline had either taken place in completely non-interactive cutscenes (often FMV) or through scrolling text. Half-Life's importance is that it *never* breaks from this point of view.

Half-Life 2 might be a better example, given that it's more recent. It successfully directs the player's attention by making them care about the characters - you want to watch them and see what happens (there's a lot of clever stuff going on with the non-player characters, like the way that their own eyes work). It also directs you to the place it wants you to look - without you being aware that this is what it's doing - through smart use of sound and light sources. It's very difficult to describe this, because I've not put as much thought into it as I perhaps should do.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
18:07 / 27.01.08
Oh, god, I need to mention Metal Gear Solid 3 at some point. Note to self.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
18:31 / 27.01.08
yeah, Time Crisis... I was about to say Time Cop, which would have been something very different!


it was probably genre classifications, like 'platformer' or 'shoot 'em up', because, to an extent, those terms carried an explanation of the pov with them.

That sounds right: shoot 'em up (back in the day) would imply flat two-dimensional, with the "camera" (not that the term was used) looking straight down. I don't know if it still necessarily implies that perspective. (Just looked up Rez, which isn't top down but 3D, and saw it classified as a "rail shooter" ~ interesting sort of hybrid between on-rails and shoot 'em up, I suppose)

I remember any game with a first-person point of view, back in the 80s, was usually hyped heavily on the packaging (even in the title) as "3D", but I think 3D implied a range of perspectives (or devices to simulate 3D), the main two of which were isometric and first-person.

Interesting that while there were first-person shooters around then (Battlezone, "3D" Deathchase, Rescue on Fractalus are just a few of those I recognise from the wiki page), that wasn't the term used for them.

Did the label "FPS" first come into use with Wolfenstein 3D and Doom?


Super Mario 64 popularised the use of the word 'camera' as interchangable with POV in games discussion, thanks to actually having a visible cameraman. ...It's also one of the very first things that you see when you start the game - the view shifts around and circles the character who will become your cameraman for the rest of the game, in another strange fourth wall moment (about 1:20 into this video).

That is very strange, as obviously a second camera is filming the cameraman for the first part of the sequence. It reminds me a bit of the approach-to-police-HQ in Blade Runner, where you first assume that your point of view is inside Deckard's "Spinner" vehicle, but then the Spinner passes you, implying that there's another flying camera position there, somehow.

So, Mario 64 seems to set the standard for that kind of floating, mobile camera, which I would have seen most in GTA ~ a camera that mostly takes position behind your head and above you, so you can see your avatar and a fair bit of the surroundings, but sometimes moves in or backs off depending on the environment. You can also shift camera position in most games though, can't you? Certainly in driving games, and in driving sequences, you can go for a more distant view, or a position right behind the windshield.

In fact, GTA (San Andreas at least) provides another example of gaming cameras explicitly trying to simulate film and TV camerawork, because with one of those camera choices, it provides a series of dramatic angles (behind the wheel, at the side of the road, a copter view) and cuts between them, in a rhythm that looks cool (ie. looks like a movie) but is impractical for actually playing.

So maybe there's a distinction between practicality and looks again. For actual playing, that Mario-style floating camera (though invisible and only implied in most cases) has proven to be the best option. But then there are options that allow you to try a more cinematic (or televisual) mode, like point of view at the steering wheel, or helicopter, or ground level, and cut-scenes that mostly seem to depart from the practical gaming camera (the Mario camera) and just slip into conventional cinema/TV storytelling grammar (with the exceptions and maybe the movement away from this that you noted above) ~ and also special moments like the replay of stunts, which are again shown in a mode that looks good (ie. looks like something on telly) but couldn't work as a playable angle (you wouldn't want to drive in slow motion and have the angle shift all the time).
 
 
miss wonderstarr
18:35 / 27.01.08
It's also about the bit that follows directly on from the monorail sequence - you walk into the facility and you walk around it, while characters talk to you and introduce you to the storyline. And this is new, at the time - up until this point, storyline had either taken place in completely non-interactive cutscenes (often FMV) or through scrolling text. Half-Life's importance is that it *never* breaks from this point of view.


Right, I think this is also the way Deus Ex works? Though the cut-scene as a kind of mini-movie clearly hasn't gone out of fashion.
 
 
Jawsus-son Starship
20:29 / 27.01.08
Has anyone else seen the new Call of Duty game, which contains an entire level where you play an NPC, who cannot move (as they are tied up) bundled into a car, then driven through a middle eastern city, before being tied to a post and shot in the head. Reminded me of the begining of Half-Life, however the fact that it was pure story telling instead of game+story was interesting.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
20:32 / 27.01.08
I hope this isn't a stupid question, but how is that

a) a game

and

b) remotely fun
 
 
Spatula Clarke
21:54 / 27.01.08
It isn't either of those things. It could have been done with FMV, for all the interaction it contains, but probably wasn't because it's cheaper to stick with the standard game engine for that stuff nowadays.

You can move 'your' head. A bit.

There's a section later on in the same game that does something vaguely similar, but slightly more effectively, because it gives you a small element of control and has you as a character that you've been using for a few levels, by that point. As an attempt to make you empathise with your character's situation it's an absolute failure, but it's at least an attempt. More effective is the environment in which it takes place - the couple of minutes almost immediately after a close nuclear explosion.

Deus Ex, btw, has cutscenes which show JC Denton, the player-character, in third-person. I think it says something about the solidity of that game's pov during gameplay that it's quite easy to think - to mistakenly remember - that the cutscenes all take place from the same pov.
 
 
Essential Dazzler
22:17 / 27.01.08
I haven't played Call of Duty, but is it possible that the designers intended that sequence to deliberately mess with players expectations? I've spent untold hours hunched over a control pad, shoulders tightening, waiting for full control bing given back to me in similar sequences. It would be a nice emotive shock for the presumed escape to never happen.

Of course, on a replay it'd just be really, really shit.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
22:45 / 27.01.08
Not played CoD4 yet, but a friend who has assures me that that sequence was actually quite a headfuck, so it clearly works in at least some cases.
 
 
Axolotl
08:53 / 28.01.08
COD4 does some interesting things with the camera *SPOILERS BELOW*.



There's another similar level where your character has been caught in the edge of a nuclear explosion and spends five minutes crawling around the wreckage before expiring. All through it you expect to get healed up or rescued or something, but then you die.

There's another level where you take on the role of a gunner in a Hercules gunship and the POV exactly matches the news footage you get of these attacks with the grainy washed out light-amplified images. I feel it's an example of the designers using the only "real" experience most of us have of war: the news, in an effort to make the experience feel more real to the player. Of course basing the experience on the sanitised news footage probably makes it wildly unrealistic, but it works for the player.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
13:53 / 28.01.08
Thanks for these contributions. I've been thinking about this at work (and talking to the guy who lectures on realism in cinema, which was really useful) and I may try to lay down some of my draft ideas in a more structured form later today ~ the discussion above really made me think and filled in some of the gaps in my knowledge, so thanks for this so far.
 
 
semioticrobotic
14:24 / 28.01.08
Looking forward to reading it, W. And thanks for your willingness to start this thread; I've learned so much already.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
14:41 / 28.01.08
OK, I've stolen half an hour to type up some of my ideas. This is rough but I'd really appreciate any fleshing-out and feedback. I think it's time I fixed on a structure, which I can then fill out with examples and ideas.

~~~~~~~

When a game describes itself as looking like a film, it’s very different from when a film is described as looking like a video game.

Not least in that the first is a boast – the 2nd more usually a criticism.

The first is a low-status claiming high status. The second is a higher-status derided as low-status.

What does it mean for a film to be “like a video game”? consider all the adaptations –

Hitman
Tomb raider
Mortal kombat/street fighter
Doom
Resident evil
Super Mario
Silent hill

And consider also

Crank
Shoot em up

And some exceptions like Run Lola Run, and Groundhog Day, which draw on some of the storytelling conventions of video games.

What does it mean for a film to be “like” a video game? It implies fast, wacky, funky, youthful – it implies a Tony Scott style of fast cuts, mixed media.

Man on Fire – [and what's that recent bad film about a female assassin?]

Night Watch/DayWatch?
Ultra Violet/Aeon Flux.

Derided – for lack of logic, bad dialogue, lack of story. Pure spectacle.

Bear this in mind for later.

On the other hand, games often seem to aspire to look like cinema,

How do they do this?
In title sequences and trailers
In cut-scenes (Hollywood conventions)
In fixed backgrounds (again, continuity editing)
In adherence to the conventions of the analogue camera (lens flare, water drops)
In spectacle (slowmo replay (Dukes, Bullitt), bullet time (Woo, Matrix), change of angles)
In set pieces where the player is directed into a scene that recalls cinema/TV (French connection, T2)

Why do they do this? because we’re aspiring not to see in a game what we see in real life with our eyes, but to immerse ourself in the authentic “experience” – which is almost always mediated.

We know what war looks like from TV and cinema. (hand-held, interference). Games reproduce or simulate that.

We know what sport looks like from tv. Ditto.

The games are not reproducing an “authenticity” in terms of personal experience or memory. They are reproducing the experience of watching TV or films, and allowing the player to take part in the fiction.


But for the most part, games do not use those camera angles listed above – because it simply wouldn’t be practical. The point in games is to allow free movement and exploration, not to direct where we look.

As such the most common angles are the FPS and the camera above and behind the avatar – from Wolfenstein (and previous) and Mario (and previous)

In cinema, these would be the steadicam and the crane shot, or copter shot. We see the FPS viewpoint only occasionally in cinema, because although it is practical for gaming’s immersion, it is very impractical for telling a story:

- Lady in the Lake (novelty, unsuccessful)
- Strange Days (brief spectacle)
- Doom (tribute, spectacle)
- Horror such as Cloverfield, Blair Witch (for suspense because of lack of information, vertigo, confusion) – and Silence of Lambs? (suspense, pov) – and sequences in Aliens, for same reason
- And of course for occasional POV as part of conventional grammar.

But what is more notable about the 2nd common camera position in games is this: IT DOESN’T CUT. It simply watches impassively. It follows, and records.

It is the Bazinian camera, not the Eisensteinian. If the player is directed to look or move a certain way, this must be subtle (lighting, sound design, environment) or s/he will feel contrained , “on rails” – like the game is a theme park ride, not a true free-ranging experience.

Where do we see this camera in cinema?

Atonement
Children of Men (bravura sequences)
Irreversible? (shock of not being able to look away)
Tarkovsky
Greenaway
Godard
Timecode
Russian Ark
Hidden
Rope

Ie. ART CINEMA.
So ironically, films that are derided as video-game style, or even those that seem to attempt video game style (eg. the end of the Doom FPS clip) are actually doing something opposite.

Games do not cut rapidly or emulate MTV videos. The camera follows like a silent witness, offering the clearest angle, but never looking away.

We don’t often see this in cinema because it would be unvaried – it would be unnerving – it would also be technically very difficult – it would be, actually, UNCINEMATIC, in that it avoids all the conventions of editing from the key national movements (classical Hollywood, Soviet, French New Wave, even early cinema).

As such the closest thing to the visual experience of gaming is actually not youth cinema… but art cinema… avant-garde experiment.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
15:18 / 28.01.08
What does it mean for a film to be “like a video game”? consider all the adaptations –

Out of those listed, the only ones that try to be *like* the films on which they're based are Doom - that clip above - and Silent Hill. This is all afaik, because, nope, I've not seen either. The SH movie was an attempt to replicate the games' sense of dread and edge-of-consciousness terror, if the pre-release hype that I read was to be believed. Otherwise, the games you've listed there are very loosely based on the concepts behind the games' storylines and have little to nothing else in common with what the games are like to play or how they're presented (barring odds and sods like costume design, musical nods, etc).

What does it mean for a film to be “like” a video game? It implies fast, wacky, funky, youthful – it implies a Tony Scott style of fast cuts, mixed media.

I'd argue that this is the movie industry's opinion on what games are, and that it's a mistaken one. Be careful not to side with that opinion in your piece - it's received wisdom and it's wrong.

Oh, sorry, you've got this covered already, towards the end. My mistake.

You might want to mention the most recent three Star Wars films. The Pod Race sequence in Episode 1 was, apparently, included because the Lucas empire needed something to base a licenced game on and there wasn't any other material in the film, until that was added in, that they considered suitable. And I'm convinced that the sequence in the droid factory in Episode 2 - when the heroes are stuck on the conveyor belts and having to time their jumps and whatnot - was either the exact same thing, or a painful attempt to provide a young audience with an immediately recognisable point of reference. It's a platform game, that section of the film.

Neither of those sequences looks towards the conventions of camera placement within videogames - actually, the Ep1 racer bit might, I can't remember if you watch any of it from the front of the pods themselves - but they're unquestionably influenced by the occurences within games.

But for the most part, games do not use those camera angles listed above – because it simply wouldn’t be practical. The point in games is to allow free movement and exploration, not to direct where we look.

I think it's going to be impossible to write an article linking games to cinema without mentioning the Metal Gear Solid series, W. Have a quick look through the MGS2 thread that already exists on this board, because there might be some valid stuff in there - posibly not, because most of the discussion there was coming from a totally different angle - but I'll also try my best to get a decent MGS3-related post typed up and added to this thread by the end of the night.

(Also, have a quick look at teh Killer7 thread - it's less about cameras, again, than it is storytelling within a visual medium, but there might be something of relevance. And the camera in that game is often in a very strange place: behind the character, but placed right down near their feet, looking up and past them. I can't think of *any* film in which I've ever seen even a similarly-positioned single shot, let alone a sequence.)
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
15:23 / 28.01.08
Good start, miss w!

I'm also reminded of a letter in this month's PC Gamer in which a guy who's in the Army says how sick he is of people talking about whether guns etc in games "feel right" or not, given that the majority of them have never fired one. This brings up the related point of how much we actually desire realism in games- and the answer is, for me anyway, not much. It's that whole "mediated experience" thing you were talking about. I may think I want a realistic war experience, but if I look a bit closer into that I don't, really, otherwise I'd sign up. I don't want to die, to kill, or see my friends dying. I don't want to be that cold, or uncomfortable, or tired, or scared. What I actually DO want is to be the hero in a war film, which is an entirely different beast.

I think this is where the aspiration to cinema comes in- as far as realism gets, cinema's about as close as most of us want to be to the things that occur in games. And yes, I think a lot of the time when people talk about "realism", what they actually mean is "closeness to the cinematic experience".
 
 
miss wonderstarr
16:03 / 28.01.08
It was Domino, that bad film about a female assassin.
 
 
Feverfew
17:11 / 28.01.08
Oh lord. "Aye am a bounty hunter".

I'm only passing through, but I'd like to register my joy and interest in this thread, and when I get more time on my hands I'd like to come back and note the effect that Randy's well-illustrated diagram of what you see vs. what the computer's projecting has an interesting effect on emergent gameplay - at least, if you're bloody-minded like me.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
17:21 / 28.01.08
I'm currently split between this board and E. Randy's suggestion, hit reset, which gives me a lot of info but makes it a bit more complicated to maintain discussion.
 
 
Triplets
20:50 / 28.01.08
Oh, another board is it, wonderstarr. How long have you been posting there then, eh?

Eh?
 
 
miss wonderstarr
21:40 / 28.01.08
A big boy told me to do it!
 
 
grant
02:27 / 29.01.08
There's probably something to be said about dying/getting hit in Call of Duty... the ringing in the ears, the redness creeping around the edges of the screen. It's obviously meant to be inside someone's head.

The closest I've seen a camera come to that is 84 Charlie Mopic, in which the camera is a *camera*, being toted around on a soldier's shoulder (assigned to film the unit as it fights in Vietnam).
 
 
Joy Division Oven Gloves
11:46 / 29.01.08
Hey MW, reading this reminded me of a book about video gaming written in 2000 by Steven Poole called Trigger Happy. From memory there is some discussion of comparisons between film and games as well as a potted history of videogames and some exploration of the dynamics of play.

My memory's a bit fuzzy here, but I think the book coincides with a period (around the time when XBox and PS2 were released) where the future of gaming was often imagined as the creation of interactive movies and the book's general argument is that games are a fundamentally different experience to film.

Anyway, it might be useful to you and if you're feeling lacking in gaming knowledge might help fill in a few more blanks. There's a version on Google Book Trigger Happy or I can lend you a hard copy.
 
 
semioticrobotic
15:32 / 29.01.08
(Also, Trigger Happy is available as a complete, free download.)
 
 
miss wonderstarr
15:42 / 29.01.08
Good point, thank you for the reminder. I actually have Trigger Happy, and the similar book Joystick Nation (J C Herz), though they are both in a box right now.

One side-thought I had today is about games that adapt films ~ for instance, the first Star Wars arcade games ~ may be more likely than others to actually try to simulate title sequences and cut scenes. The Lord of the Rings games on PS2 have live-action cut-scenes that morph into what I think you would call "engine" driven graphics, and don't a number of games promote themselves on having the original voice cast?

One of the early spectacles in the Blade Runner PC game from Westwood is its very close copy of the film's credit sequence ~ and the game itself actually looks pretty similar to the film, to the point where it isn't necessarily a very good game, because your movement around and interaction with the lavishly atmospheric sets is limited.

That might be an interesting comparison with film adaptations of games, which seem for the most part only to take the game as a starting-springboard and basically tell their stories just as films always have, with a couple of exceptional scenes such as the FPS sequence in Doom.

It sounds from the Metal Gear thread as though that game includes a huge amount of cut-scene footage. Isn't that frustrating and annoying, in terms of slowing the game and taking away a sense of your own agency? Isn't it a bad game, if the experience of "watching a film" starts to dominate ~ or does the fact that you earned those film sequences by gaming to a certain point make it feel different, as though you decided which clips would be shown, and deserved them through the hours you put in ~ and anyway, the cut-scenes affect "you" as player/avatar, and will shape your next actions by showing you a new set of relationships, or giving you a new goal?

It's also interesting as a side-note that the way I'm looking at games like Killer 7, on YouTube, isn't as a game... but as a short film clip.
 
  

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