Hey, so I've been writing videogame articles for a friend's blog for a while now, but I've been trying to get them a bit more professional, so I thought I'd see if you guys could give me some feedback.
Double-Take: understanding the First Person Perspective
This starts off a new multi-part series. I've been interested lately in a very important question in the analysis of videogames, namely how one can understand ?action?. While it may seem obvious what ?action? is in videogames (a medium predicated entirely on being played), it is not quite so simple. To that end, I'm going to look at how ?action? in videogames is both related to, and very different from, how one understands older media (books, movies, music, etc.).
Video games, as a newer medium, will always be compared to and analyzed with older mediums. We see this with film, being described through and often broken down into musical score, visual makeup (mise-en-scène), actors' performance, script writing, etc. There is often even crossover between media, as with the symphonic poems of Liszt, or the performance of stories through dance.
However, such comparisons, while interesting, can never capture the whole of a new medium, as new media have a certain Gestalt not found in those parts composed of older media. A film's musical score is, if done well, integral to the whole experience of the film and complements the other parts in ways that elevate the whole work. I am talking about film so much because I want to delve into an area of film theory and, more explicitly, show how it is incompatible with video game theory.
Now, action is not something new to artistic mediums, but videogames have many different forms of action, and I want to focus on one major form that is incredibly prevalent these days, namely the FPS (First Person Shooter). Seemingly the easiest starting point for understanding this type of game if from film, which necessarily is shown from a First Person Perspective (FPP for the purposes of this article) of sorts a la the camera. While there is some merit to this approach, in the end I find the tools used for understanding film perspective very much lacking. While I don't have a good replacement for this analytical tool, I do have some suggestions that might point in the right direction.
Within film there are several ?looks?, each encompassing a different kind of seeing, though they are not entirely exclusive. The first look is that of the camera, which is fairly self-explanatory and the most obvious look. Whatever the camera sees constitutes the film, so in a sense the film itself is composed of the first look. The second look is that of the audience seeing the film. While the first look creates the image, the audience still must see it, and might choose to focus elsewhere, or pick up on different things. For example, in the famous opening scene to Apocalypse Now, the audience may focus on Willard (Martin Sheen), the images of burning forests, the helicopter, etc. In fact, this scene very much confuses the first look in that it is a compilation of different episodes of the camera's seeing, but I only want to point that out, not dwell on it.
The third look is that of the seeing done by characters within the film ? when characters look at each other, for example. This can be used in conjunction with the first look when the character focuses on something, and then the camera takes the spot of their eyes to show what they are seeing. While never quite the same as human vision, it is an attempt to connect both the third and first look. The fourth look is that of the characters to the audience, an awareness of the status as a viewer created by the film looking out, so to speak. It can be very disconcerting, which is why in most documentary films, those being interviewed look off to the side rather than straight at the camera, maintaining the audience as unacknowledged.
Hitchcock famously used the fourth look in his film Shadow of a Doubt when Uncle Charlie addresses younger Charlie, but is looking directly at the camera, and by extension the audience. Here, we have all four looks coming together, younger Charlie looking at Uncle Charlie, the camera looking at Uncle Charlie, the audience looking at Uncle charlie, and Uncle Charlie looking at the audience. However, even in this moment, these looks can be teased apart in a way that may diminish the shot as a whole, but is nonetheless possible to do. Video games, in many instances, cannot have their seeing broken down in this way, so I want to take a look at how these looks both apply to and fail to describe the FPP.
For the second installment of my series on action in video games, I want to go into what might actually pass for an understanding of action in first-person games. The FPS is, as the name would imply, a ?shooter? played from the first person perspective. I have ?shooter? in scare quotes as there are games which have little to no shooting in them which would still fall under the category of FPS (the Elder Scrolls series and Condemned: Criminal Origins come to mind). However, I want to include not just combat-oriented games, but also those that involve minimal or entirely absent combat. To that end, I want to use the term FPP (First Person Perspective) so as to include games such as Mirror's Edge and adventure games in the vein of Myst. Most noticeable about these games is that one takes on the position of the player character, which is a rather unique gaming experience.
Many take this experience for granted, but simply give a person who has never played a FPP game before a controller and a game, and the results are less than exceptional. Everything from a wildly flailing screen to motion sickness can occur, whether the player is using a computer or console interface. What makes FPP control so jarring is that not only is it unique to games (and thus to those who have not experienced them before), but it is typically an experience of first person perspective position, not subjective perspective.
The first person in first person perspective games is misleading, in that there really is no person whose subjective position is being taken up. The HUD (Heads Up Display, i.e. health meters) is one of the many elements which signal the lack of a person behind the screen, so to speak. Ammo counters, health readouts, stealth meters, etc. all bring this artifice to light. None do so more than the actual controller, though. Even events such as the screen shaking when the player is hit by enemies, or jostling when running, feel less like realism and more like a mechanical reaction. Those few instances which might approach a subjective perspective are almost always scripted events or cutscenes, such as the torture scenes in Call of Duty: Black Ops.
The fact of the matter is, adding control removes the possibility of a subjective perspective that doesn't reveal its artifice. To discuss the FPP game, we need to move away from describing ?look? and ?seeing? as they are used in film, for those are necessarily physically inert and voyeuristic. For a medium such as games, whose perspective necessitates, and whose artifice is revealed through, the elements of control, those elements of control and what I will call degrees of freedom are what will serve best to understand these games, and the differences between them.
Rather than ?seeing?, these games are about ?doing?. As Alexander Galloway points out in the second chapter of his book Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, this perspective is ?primarily about motion through space...gamic vision requires fully rendered, actionable space.? Motion through these games is not mere motion, as motion can also be a non-interactive event (such as motion through ?space? in film); this is actual penetration (for lack of a less gender-loaded term) into the world of the game. It is our active engagement with the world of the game which allows for this unique position, which is, as noted before, not subjective. This unique position might better be termed a disembodied engagement with the game. Though the player's avatar exists in the diegetic world of the game, it is almost a non-entity in FPP gameplay, replaced entirely with an extension of the player acting on the space of the game world. Taking the position of the player in FPP games to be about doing, not seeing, allows us to come to the tools for describing the differences between various games.
I want to first start with the huge variation between FPP games which allow direct control over motion and on-rails shooters (though even this line can be blurred in games such as Suda51's killer7). The differences between a game such as Halo: Combat Evolved and House of the Dead are readily apparent. Halo allows one control over their movement through the world of the game, while movement in House of the Dead is restricted, predicated on the player defeating all the enemies on a given screen (and sometimes choosing between different paths). If we were using film terminology, one would say that Halo is a game of the first look, while House of the Dead is a game predicated on the second look (the viewer's look separated from the camera's look). However, even in House of the Dead, the player is in control of the movement through space, limited as it is. The game cannot continue forward until the actions of the player motivate the movement, unlike film, where no amount of action on the part of the viewer will affect how the camera engages the filmic space.
Here instead, we can talk about the difference in the degree of freedom on the part of these games. Halo allows for a direct relationship between player actions and action on the space of the game, where the motion of the thumbsticks is directly correlated to motion through space. House of the Dead is predicated on indirect control of action on the space of the game, where an action of one kind (shooting enemies, shooting one's choice of path) results in action of another kind (movement along the path of the game). While there are similar events in games such as Prey (where certain enemies must be killed to advance), those are restrictions on the actionable space and not on the type of action allowed.
Given the distinction between direct and indirect action on the space of the game, there are more minor distinctions one can make, such as that between a game like Brink, which allows for incredibly dynamic movement through space using free running elements, and those such as Doom, whose control allows for comparably minimal movement through space. This difference is not one of type, as both have direct correlation between player action and action on space, but rather a difference in the actionable space itself. An example of this difference is that of the Forge mode of Halo 3. One has nearly complete control over engagement with space while building, limited only by the size of the map, and these controls are quite similar to those when controlling Master Chief. The difference comes in the restrictions on the motion. Now we can talk about types of action as well as degrees of freedom, dictated by the restrictions on actionable space. While it is conceivably possible to occupy space unreachable during gameplay, it does not constitute actionable space as it is impossible to act on this space directly.
The last major distinction we can make is on movement-based action and non-movement-based action. There is a fundamental difference between moving to a space in the game world where an object is visible and using some modified vision (such as a scope or special sight) to make such an object visible. Both are penetrations of the gamic space, and both are direct control of the actions, but the difference is whether it is the player's position which motivates this penetration, or the player's perspective which motivates this penetration.
Metroid Prime allows the use of numerous scan visors to see objects and enemies which would otherwise not be visible. This is still an action upon the gamic space (and often a penetration of some kind, such as through walls) and is directly connected to the player's actions of choosing and activating the visor, but it is based on a change in the actionable space of the game through sight. While that description may sound strange, as anything viewed through the visor was ostensibly there before, it was not actionable through sight, and thus an action has been performed on the space of the game through player action. The use of a scope of some kind is another way of engaging the space of the game, one that is taken for granted today as an expected feature, but is not by any means a necessity of FPS games.
Perspective in FPP games must be viewed as about action, not ?seeing?, and the type, degree, and kind of actions available on the actionable space provide us with tools to analyze this perspective. While I do not hold that this is a fully developed theory of the FPP, I think it is a starting point, at the very least. This also allows us to analyze those games which break the accepted traditions of FPP gaming, such as killer7, and make sense of moments of the first person perspective in other genres such as the games in the third person perspective.
Double-Take: understanding the First Person Perspective
This starts off a new multi-part series. I've been interested lately in a very important question in the analysis of videogames, namely how one can understand ?action?. While it may seem obvious what ?action? is in videogames (a medium predicated entirely on being played), it is not quite so simple. To that end, I'm going to look at how ?action? in videogames is both related to, and very different from, how one understands older media (books, movies, music, etc.).
Video games, as a newer medium, will always be compared to and analyzed with older mediums. We see this with film, being described through and often broken down into musical score, visual makeup (mise-en-scène), actors' performance, script writing, etc. There is often even crossover between media, as with the symphonic poems of Liszt, or the performance of stories through dance.
However, such comparisons, while interesting, can never capture the whole of a new medium, as new media have a certain Gestalt not found in those parts composed of older media. A film's musical score is, if done well, integral to the whole experience of the film and complements the other parts in ways that elevate the whole work. I am talking about film so much because I want to delve into an area of film theory and, more explicitly, show how it is incompatible with video game theory.
Now, action is not something new to artistic mediums, but videogames have many different forms of action, and I want to focus on one major form that is incredibly prevalent these days, namely the FPS (First Person Shooter). Seemingly the easiest starting point for understanding this type of game if from film, which necessarily is shown from a First Person Perspective (FPP for the purposes of this article) of sorts a la the camera. While there is some merit to this approach, in the end I find the tools used for understanding film perspective very much lacking. While I don't have a good replacement for this analytical tool, I do have some suggestions that might point in the right direction.
Within film there are several ?looks?, each encompassing a different kind of seeing, though they are not entirely exclusive. The first look is that of the camera, which is fairly self-explanatory and the most obvious look. Whatever the camera sees constitutes the film, so in a sense the film itself is composed of the first look. The second look is that of the audience seeing the film. While the first look creates the image, the audience still must see it, and might choose to focus elsewhere, or pick up on different things. For example, in the famous opening scene to Apocalypse Now, the audience may focus on Willard (Martin Sheen), the images of burning forests, the helicopter, etc. In fact, this scene very much confuses the first look in that it is a compilation of different episodes of the camera's seeing, but I only want to point that out, not dwell on it.
The third look is that of the seeing done by characters within the film ? when characters look at each other, for example. This can be used in conjunction with the first look when the character focuses on something, and then the camera takes the spot of their eyes to show what they are seeing. While never quite the same as human vision, it is an attempt to connect both the third and first look. The fourth look is that of the characters to the audience, an awareness of the status as a viewer created by the film looking out, so to speak. It can be very disconcerting, which is why in most documentary films, those being interviewed look off to the side rather than straight at the camera, maintaining the audience as unacknowledged.
Hitchcock famously used the fourth look in his film Shadow of a Doubt when Uncle Charlie addresses younger Charlie, but is looking directly at the camera, and by extension the audience. Here, we have all four looks coming together, younger Charlie looking at Uncle Charlie, the camera looking at Uncle Charlie, the audience looking at Uncle charlie, and Uncle Charlie looking at the audience. However, even in this moment, these looks can be teased apart in a way that may diminish the shot as a whole, but is nonetheless possible to do. Video games, in many instances, cannot have their seeing broken down in this way, so I want to take a look at how these looks both apply to and fail to describe the FPP.
For the second installment of my series on action in video games, I want to go into what might actually pass for an understanding of action in first-person games. The FPS is, as the name would imply, a ?shooter? played from the first person perspective. I have ?shooter? in scare quotes as there are games which have little to no shooting in them which would still fall under the category of FPS (the Elder Scrolls series and Condemned: Criminal Origins come to mind). However, I want to include not just combat-oriented games, but also those that involve minimal or entirely absent combat. To that end, I want to use the term FPP (First Person Perspective) so as to include games such as Mirror's Edge and adventure games in the vein of Myst. Most noticeable about these games is that one takes on the position of the player character, which is a rather unique gaming experience.
Many take this experience for granted, but simply give a person who has never played a FPP game before a controller and a game, and the results are less than exceptional. Everything from a wildly flailing screen to motion sickness can occur, whether the player is using a computer or console interface. What makes FPP control so jarring is that not only is it unique to games (and thus to those who have not experienced them before), but it is typically an experience of first person perspective position, not subjective perspective.
The first person in first person perspective games is misleading, in that there really is no person whose subjective position is being taken up. The HUD (Heads Up Display, i.e. health meters) is one of the many elements which signal the lack of a person behind the screen, so to speak. Ammo counters, health readouts, stealth meters, etc. all bring this artifice to light. None do so more than the actual controller, though. Even events such as the screen shaking when the player is hit by enemies, or jostling when running, feel less like realism and more like a mechanical reaction. Those few instances which might approach a subjective perspective are almost always scripted events or cutscenes, such as the torture scenes in Call of Duty: Black Ops.
The fact of the matter is, adding control removes the possibility of a subjective perspective that doesn't reveal its artifice. To discuss the FPP game, we need to move away from describing ?look? and ?seeing? as they are used in film, for those are necessarily physically inert and voyeuristic. For a medium such as games, whose perspective necessitates, and whose artifice is revealed through, the elements of control, those elements of control and what I will call degrees of freedom are what will serve best to understand these games, and the differences between them.
Rather than ?seeing?, these games are about ?doing?. As Alexander Galloway points out in the second chapter of his book Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, this perspective is ?primarily about motion through space...gamic vision requires fully rendered, actionable space.? Motion through these games is not mere motion, as motion can also be a non-interactive event (such as motion through ?space? in film); this is actual penetration (for lack of a less gender-loaded term) into the world of the game. It is our active engagement with the world of the game which allows for this unique position, which is, as noted before, not subjective. This unique position might better be termed a disembodied engagement with the game. Though the player's avatar exists in the diegetic world of the game, it is almost a non-entity in FPP gameplay, replaced entirely with an extension of the player acting on the space of the game world. Taking the position of the player in FPP games to be about doing, not seeing, allows us to come to the tools for describing the differences between various games.
I want to first start with the huge variation between FPP games which allow direct control over motion and on-rails shooters (though even this line can be blurred in games such as Suda51's killer7). The differences between a game such as Halo: Combat Evolved and House of the Dead are readily apparent. Halo allows one control over their movement through the world of the game, while movement in House of the Dead is restricted, predicated on the player defeating all the enemies on a given screen (and sometimes choosing between different paths). If we were using film terminology, one would say that Halo is a game of the first look, while House of the Dead is a game predicated on the second look (the viewer's look separated from the camera's look). However, even in House of the Dead, the player is in control of the movement through space, limited as it is. The game cannot continue forward until the actions of the player motivate the movement, unlike film, where no amount of action on the part of the viewer will affect how the camera engages the filmic space.
Here instead, we can talk about the difference in the degree of freedom on the part of these games. Halo allows for a direct relationship between player actions and action on the space of the game, where the motion of the thumbsticks is directly correlated to motion through space. House of the Dead is predicated on indirect control of action on the space of the game, where an action of one kind (shooting enemies, shooting one's choice of path) results in action of another kind (movement along the path of the game). While there are similar events in games such as Prey (where certain enemies must be killed to advance), those are restrictions on the actionable space and not on the type of action allowed.
Given the distinction between direct and indirect action on the space of the game, there are more minor distinctions one can make, such as that between a game like Brink, which allows for incredibly dynamic movement through space using free running elements, and those such as Doom, whose control allows for comparably minimal movement through space. This difference is not one of type, as both have direct correlation between player action and action on space, but rather a difference in the actionable space itself. An example of this difference is that of the Forge mode of Halo 3. One has nearly complete control over engagement with space while building, limited only by the size of the map, and these controls are quite similar to those when controlling Master Chief. The difference comes in the restrictions on the motion. Now we can talk about types of action as well as degrees of freedom, dictated by the restrictions on actionable space. While it is conceivably possible to occupy space unreachable during gameplay, it does not constitute actionable space as it is impossible to act on this space directly.
The last major distinction we can make is on movement-based action and non-movement-based action. There is a fundamental difference between moving to a space in the game world where an object is visible and using some modified vision (such as a scope or special sight) to make such an object visible. Both are penetrations of the gamic space, and both are direct control of the actions, but the difference is whether it is the player's position which motivates this penetration, or the player's perspective which motivates this penetration.
Metroid Prime allows the use of numerous scan visors to see objects and enemies which would otherwise not be visible. This is still an action upon the gamic space (and often a penetration of some kind, such as through walls) and is directly connected to the player's actions of choosing and activating the visor, but it is based on a change in the actionable space of the game through sight. While that description may sound strange, as anything viewed through the visor was ostensibly there before, it was not actionable through sight, and thus an action has been performed on the space of the game through player action. The use of a scope of some kind is another way of engaging the space of the game, one that is taken for granted today as an expected feature, but is not by any means a necessity of FPS games.
Perspective in FPP games must be viewed as about action, not ?seeing?, and the type, degree, and kind of actions available on the actionable space provide us with tools to analyze this perspective. While I do not hold that this is a fully developed theory of the FPP, I think it is a starting point, at the very least. This also allows us to analyze those games which break the accepted traditions of FPP gaming, such as killer7, and make sense of moments of the first person perspective in other genres such as the games in the third person perspective.
