Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 141)

Trigger Happy
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seemingly robust analogy with film, they are known as
player-controlled “cameras.”
If it can be argued that the film camera in some
sense creates the onscreen world rather than passively
recording it,
20
such a theory can be taken rather more
literally with videogames. For, of course, there is
nothing really there for the videogame “camera” to
shoot in the first place. Instead, there is a complex
mathematical model held in computer memory that
only ever erupts into visual “solidity” for an instant,
before fading away and being replaced with the next
frame. The world is drawn perspectivally from one
moment to the next, depending on the camera settings
the player has chosen.
Videogame cameras (“cams” for short) have fairly
recently settled into a group of standardized viewpoints.
“Follow cam” is usually offered in driving or flying
games, and sets the viewpoint to a position behind and
slightly above the vehicle under the player’s control.
Sometimes this is differentiated from a “chase cam,”
the latter taking a tighter and lower
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20 While AndrÉ Bazin famously likened the film image to a “window on
the world” on the analogy with Renaissance theories of geometrical
perspective, other film critics, such as Pascal Bonitzer, insisted that the film
world could never extend outside the frame and so constituted a
microuniverse in its own right.