Trigger Happy
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is activated, providing an opportunity to relax and rest
those tired wrists. FMV sequences can be graceful and
beautiful in their own right (especially in the Final
Fantasy games, where they alone can eat up $4 million
of the budget), but they are something of a red herring.
These sequences are simply there to be watched; they
cannot be played with. They are merely tinsel around
the real gameplay.
The question remains: what kind of cinematic
action happens, not as self-contained intervallic
episodes, but in the thick of videogame play itself?
Camera obscura
When videogames were flat, two-dimensional affairs,
the player was furnished with a God-like objective
viewpoint. The gameworld of Pong or Space Invaders
is laid out flat before the eye; everything takes place in
the same horizontal plane. You can see everything at
once, because you can see the entire universe. The
problem once three-dimensional games became the
norm was that in a solid world every viewpoint is
subjective, and no viewpoint enables you to see
everything. So videogames began to offer the player a
choice of windows on their worlds that could be
switched at will, depending on the task in hand. In a
