Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 227)

Trigger Happy
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range of vision (and thus what the computer has to
draw) is markedly limited. Objects or monsters can
loom out of the mist with stylish effect, passing
smoothly from blued-out fuzz to sharp delineation.
Often, fog and general darkness make an effective
means to heighten tension in horror-related gameplay,
for instance in Silent Hill (see fig. 12), a good example
of how technical limitations can be turned to positive
aesthetic effect.
Some technical limitations, however, run deeper.
The mode of scientific perspective, whether in
videogames or traditional art, inevitably involves some
choices and compromises about how to display visual
information. One of the well-attested problems of
representation in scientific perspective is that of
marginal distortion. Projective geometry speaks of a
“picture plane” in front of the viewer. Imagine it as a
window looking onto a garden.
34
Light rays from
objects are said to subtend angles at the eye: this simply
denotes how many degrees of our visual field they take
up. But objects also have “plane projections,” which is
their apparent size on the picture plane—the
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34 The term “perspective” itself actually comes from the Latin for “to look
through”—to look through something like a transparent picture plane, or
window.