Trigger Happy
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catches this point when he dismisses one early
example, Video Hustler, as “like playing marbles.” A
similar sort of disjunction might be argued to operate in
G-Police, where the multiplicity of viewpoints on offer
creates different game styles within the same
environment; the aerial cam, especially, which is more
useful than the standard perspectival cockpit cam for
lining up bombing raids on ground targets, harks back
to classic two-dimensional top-down shoot-’em-ups
such as Xevious.
Normally, of course, we don’t encounter these sorts
of problems in real life, because our eyes are (sensible,
prescient Nature) hard-wired into our bodies. It is only
the creative alienation of videogames, which translates
physical action
here
(on this piece of plastic, in my
living room) into visual effect
there
(in this
otherworldly arena, at once viewed through my eyes
and mediated through the prosthetic, virtual eyes of the
videogame camera), that throws up such novel
perceptual conundrums.
But ignoring for the moment the difference
between watching the action of a film and
implementing the action of a videogame, presumably
this “camera” analogy between the media still holds to
some extent? No, it does not. Videogame camerawork
