Space Game Camera:
the perspective interface, the virtual camera and the simulation of I
This lecture and paper examines the roles of the virtual camera and spatial composition in the construction of game interfaces and modes of interaction. It draws upon a language of the moving camera to make an argument for treating the Player as Cinematographer and defining game genres by the feeling-states their cameras evoke. Delivered as the Keynote lecture at the IADIS Games and Entertainment conference Freiburg, Germany. July 2010
View the presentation slides above, Download and Listen the mp3 audio podcast of the lecture or read the text below.
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I feel perpetually as a fish out of water. I come from a background in screenwriting and video post-production but I spend much more time talking about cameras and shooting rather than editing and writing. I teach filmmaking in a film-school but I spend many more hours playing video games than watching movies. And Im a scholar on narrative and cinematic processes and yet im presenting at a conference on Human Computer Interaction and Games. I have clearly jumped right out of the fish bowl.
And, Yet I suspect we are all fish out of water. Having strayed out of our fish-tanks, soggy and with gurgling gills, we flop our way through foreign environments seeking to comprehend the unknown in the context of the known.
This is the departure point for my topic today. In exploring ideas of the virtual camera as a touchstone for articulating game interfaces and interactions
I will begin with the premise that it is a Mistake to assume Difference. That it is far better to assume similarity and from a point of recognising what is common, identify difference. Just as a goldfish having flopped out of the bowl might - assuming breathing air is nothing like breathing water - fundamentally miss-comprehend the common idea of respiration. So to do we risk missing the obvious, the tangible and the useful in our search for the new and different if we do not start from what is known and similar.
So, in order to stage my discussion Im going to make some big bold assertions. I have no intention of wholly defending these assertions in the short time I have but will use them none the less as a means to position a set of perspectives. Ideas that are focused on making concepts around game interface aesthetics and experiences primarily useful for game-design rather than purely for game analysis.
My assertions are these:
First that video Gaming IS Cinema. Not that gaming borrows from cinema or that it tries to emulate cinema, but that video gaming essentially IS cinema. I make this claim based on a simple- almost unassailable -observation; that Cinema is the art of the moving image.
Whilst we can sub-define cinema as an institution (a national cinema) an experience (a cinematic happening) a quality (a cinematic feel) or a building (a cinema theatre) such definitions are restrictive and transitory; they fail to be holistic in describing the cinema art as a noun.
Just as inuit peoples have dozens of words for snow, we perhaps are in need of some extra descriptors of the moving image media that surrounds us. Descriptors that come form a unified core but which can account for variation and difference. However, in the absence of such a vocabulary I shall use cinema holistically to define the art of the moving image.
The second assertion is that Narrative is Spatial. Citing Michel De Certeau‘s notion that each story is a travel story and a spatial practice, I would contend that the traditional binary of Time and Space is a problematic one as neither can exist without the reference point of the other. Thus to conceive of narrative as only temporal - this happened, then that happened, then that happened… - is ignoring the very construct that makes temporality possible. The narrative of experience requires a spatial, locative, positional understanding - where am I in the moment of now?
Following this logic we must also recognise a truism about cinema - that cinema IS technology. That unlike virtually all other arts, cinema is wholly reliant on technology not just for its acquisition but also for its reception. Without that apparatus cinema can neither be made nor experienced. This notion ensures that we cannot discuss cinema’s aesthetics, receptions narratives or experiences without considering its technology and its tools.
The final assertion is that the Camera - not as a physical machine but as a conceptual apparatus - is the common denominator of all ‘cinema’ - gaming included.
In 1962 Van Borge commented that “It is quite feasible to produce a film without actors, but a film without a camera is a sheer impossibility.” I would contend that this statement holds true despite of - and perhaps because of - its simplicity. And it’s this idea of the camera as interface experience paradigm rather than physical apparatus that I want to explore.
Rather than focus on the screen I’m interested in the camera as interface paradigm. A specific, tangible reference from which to understand and articulate the rather abstract idea of cinematic game space. To comprehend a space, one needs to ‘occupy’ that space. The camera - in both real-world and game world - is the vehicle of occupancy.
In simple terms, the camera construct gives us something very firm to talk about when considering space - a known entity and a long established vocabulary to build on. There’s no need to re-invent the wheel.
SLIDE (Myst quote)
Bernadette Flynn, in writing eloquently about navigation in gaming, describes the game-navigation mechanics in Myst III: Exile as ;
a “camera on tracks. More akin to the experience of floating through water in a houseboat than the rhythm and tempo of a human stroll, the process of navigation has a mesmeric dislocating effect.”
Here we have interface and experience constructed and understood through camera aesthetics - the distinction in feeling-state between a dolly-shot and hand-held. This camera-language is one that has a hundred years of history, it’s only right and proper that we would use the language of the camera as the language of the game interface - as the game interface is the art of the moving image.
If we are going to assume commonality in order to explore difference we must begin an examination of the game camera from a filmic vocabulary. In this regard it would be impossible to discuss the game interface camera aesthetic without discussing Mise en Scene.
Birthed to the film-scholarly world by the wave of French critics in the 1950s, the term is almost literal “to put in the frame or on the stage” and has been variously used to define both a process and a particular aesthetic of filmmaking.
Jaques Rivette unties concept with process with the idea that Mise en scene is :
“The creation of a precise complex of sets and characters, a network of relationships, an architecture of connections, an animated complex that
seems suspended in space.”
Where as film critic Andrew Sarris takes a less prosaic approach with the notion that:
“Cinema is less an art of origination than of magnification… it is the only art I know where more comes out than goes in, and the difference may be called mise en scene… it is the gap between intention and effect”
Certainly there are thousand descriptors of what Mise en scene is and what it comprises but to focus on Mise en Scene as a descriptor of process in relation to the camera John Gibbs has given us food for thought that is both informative and problematic.
“On set or location, filmmakers do not stage the action and only subsequently think about where the camera is going to be placed in order to record it. Similarly, to discuss the lighting of a shot without reference to the position of the camera is to misunderstand how films are made – one does not light a set and then set about deciding where the camera is going to be placed.”
Are you sure about that?
From the fact that Cinema IS technology we cannot fully comprehend its experiential aesthetics without first understanding how cinema is made.
Gibbs assertion of how camera-based media is constructed pre-supposes the position of the camera as a determining element of production process. But in game production process this is tangibly and decidedly untrue.
In the game production environment it is the Level, the Space, the Topography, the Architecture that is ‘composed’. And this composition is done so to a large degree without a prescribing of camera position and vantage point. In game production, elements remain infinitely flexible at any time in the production process; indeed the very notion of ‘Production’ and ‘Post-Production’ stages are rendered largely irrelevant concepts.
A scene can be ‘re-shot’ at any time; the identical environmental elements maintained or changed at will; virtual ‘lenses’ can be swapped after the fact of shooting and staging. The possibilities of this technology driven production model go beyond increased flexibility and adaptability of the form - rather they introduce a new conceptualization of what ‘screen composition’ is.
Rather than Composing and Staging For the camera - Gaming Composes and Stages the camera itself.
As an aside, I should point out that I would argue theres is nothing new about this idea and that Gibbs has in fact always been wrong. That traditional film production has long been predicated on spatial staging first, before positioning or even deciding upon camera placement second - but thats an argument for another day.
To stick with the game camera, lets consider some examples:
In this simple model the composition of architectural space precedes the defining of the camera. It is the city that is built first, not the camera path. Indeed, whilst the final destination of the camera may be known, the manner, mode and structure of it’s path is unlikely to be presupposed. The city was not staged for the camera, but the camera staged into the city.
In this example from the World War 2, real-time strategy game Company of Heroes, the omnipotent camera is wholly player controlled. The camera is the central tool at the players disposal for eliciting control and governing experience. The camera is the prism for the construct of the game interface. But in production process it would be impossible to stage FOR the camera as the camera cannot be predicted. The dramatic, artistic, interface composition is the space itself into which the camera is staged.
Even in a traditionally assembled 2D platform or side-scroller game the virtual camera is none the less present and tangible. It may function under more restricted spatial parameters - it cannot move from macro to micro as it does in Company of Heroes - but as the camera both follows the avatar and responds to it - at times pre-emptively - the composition is still one of spatial layout rather than framic dictation. Mise en Space rather than Mise en Scene - an idea I shall return to later.
A definitive first-person-shooter game in the form of Bioshock also poses the same spatially-derived composition. The virtual camera is this time embodied anthropomorphically but in being so the game world is not composed for the camera/player but rather the camera/player is composed into the game world.
The parallel to this aesthetic of spatialised drama can be found in classical landscape architecture where it would be a mistake to think that the paths I walk and the views I take in are a matter of free will. Good landscape architecture consistently guides the viewer, shapes their vision and experience of spectacle and space, vista and foley, prompting the visitor to look in a certain direction at a certain time from a certain vantage point. The garden is not composed FOR the visitor, the Garden composes the Visitor themselves.
Recognising the persistence and variety of the virtual camera across gaming interfaces potentially delivers us a very effective means to articulate the idea of Genre in gaming and the Genre of Interface Experience. Current game genre descriptions are woefully dysfunctional and decidedly inconsistent. First-Person Shooter, Turn-Based Strategy, Platformer, Real-Time Strategy, Sandbox - all these terms commonly used as genres amongst players, critics and developers are highly problematic because they are inconsistent, they dont compare apples to apples.
I would contend that Genre - in the broad sense applicable to a diversity of arts - is about the evocation of Feeling States - that in watching a movie or playing a game i know to be of a particular genre, I expect to feel a certain way (scared by horror, thrilled by a thriller, awed by SciFi). In this way Genre is a contract - an agreement as to how the experience of the work will make the viewer feel.
In the case of games these traditional genre’s certainly exist as a kind of genre of content but not necessarily of form and game play. The Virtual Camera - as the paradigm for game-player-interface experience - is here then a highly viable way to classify game genres by the type, mode and function of the virtual camera. Each form of virtual camera introduces its own feeling states -
The immersive Immediacy of First-Person, the Tension and Pressure of god-view in Real-Time Strategy, the visceral puppeteering of Third-Person. Moreover classifying game genres by the nature of their virtual cameras provides something consistent across all kinds of games
Within the game interface paradigm, the entity of the virtual camera becomes proprioceptive. Not an apparatus of moving image capture but rather a spatially specific vanishing point of perception. The virtual camera is the spatial moment of temporal consciousness composed in partnership between designer and player into the scene.
Jon Olav Eikenes has coined the term Navimation as
“a high-level concept, denoting the phenomenon of intertwining the activity of navigation with the appearance of visual motion in screen-based interfaces”
This is a constructive and tangible idea but there is a distinction I want to make in regard to the notion of ‘appearance’. The implication of Navimation is the simulation of movement - what I would suggest is that game interfaces built on virtual cameras aren’t a simulation of movement but a simulation of self - a simulation of ‘I’.
The physical camera has long been associated with the human ‘eye’, indeed as a simulation of the ‘eye’ and in doing so is rooted to a physical, tangible exploration and depiction of space that obeys rules of physics. The virtual camera, by contrast, moves beyond this into a different conceptualization.
The game interface virtual camera becomes a simulation of ‘I’ - of self - a simulation of viewer presence in space and of space that doesn’t survey the scene but is a part of it. When the player is a tactile part of the ‘composition’ of the game the game world can no longer be said to being simulated for the viewer, but simulating Viewing itself.
Tan has examined this idea in the form of what he calls the diegetic effect:
a “beholder in a position that is defined in relation to an imaginary space behind the window formed by the picture plane and the frame”
Thats all very nice as a concept but what does it mean for human computer interaction in game design? In simple terms it allows us to re-think what the player is - no longer player as Audience but player as Cinematographer.
Here the compositional process is inverted in its relationship to the frame and to Mise en scene. It is the player who - through various gameplay and interface mechanics, is composing the cinematic ‘frame’ for themselves. Conducting their own framic experience of the greater composition. The players camera framing becomes the final filter, a means for the user to interpret and present the composition to themselves.
One way to think of this shift is from a diegetic game-camera understanding of interface to a mimetic one. Certainly this terminology has a long history in Ludolgy and game studies but I wish to use it here in very literal and specific terms and directly connected to the virtual camera. The bare bones understanding of Diegesis and Mimesis is Telling versus Showing; Narrated as opposed to Experienced.
Through a Simulation of I - the player as cinematographer - we may perceive the game interface paradigm as a mimetic experience where the interface construct does not narrate but rather show - placing the notion of Experience over Communication.
Edward Brannigan describes the function of a moving camera as “to create a sense of the continuous presence of the present” and this notion of the significance in-game interaction as predicated on ‘whats happening now’ as opposed to ‘what happened then’, links to the metaphor of the player as active cinematographer, simulating themselves into composed space.
Bolter and Grusins theory of Remediation provides a mechanic to understand how new media remediates old media, how new media forms evoke and exploit the language and tenets of old media before finding their discourse. Thus Photography remediated Painting, early Cinema remediated Theatre and even the sald-days of the Internet remediated Print Publishing.
It is tempting to use Bolter and Grusins ideas of remediation to think of the game virtual camera as a remediation of the physical camera. But such thinking only takes us so far and accounts for only so much. The virtual camera, as a spatial vanishing point, arguably goes further.
Remediation uses the notion of Immediacy;
A “style of visual representation whose goal is to make the viewer forget the presence of the medium.” But the virtual camera with a perceivably non-diegetic persona - evokes a lack of mediation, an un-mediated presence.
Conversely Hypermediacy refers to an apparent presence of the medium. In the context of non-physical game space the awareness of the vehicle of perception is apparent but not necessarily as an apparatus of construction. Rather it is an unmediated vehicle of experience.
Subsequently both Immediacy and Hypermediacy in regard to the virtual camera seem unfulfilling from the point of view of development process.
What perhaps provides greater clarity is to re-invent Mise en Scene as Mise en Space. Game interface design process predicated on Player AS Cinematographer and the art of placing into the Space rather than into the Frame.
The purpose of these ideas is simply to be useful.
Its useful to assume commonality to identify difference
Its useful to think of a game world as a composition Of the player not For the player - Asking Not what the player Sees but rather Where the player Is?
Its useful to conceive of game interface design as one of constructing the player as cinematographer.
Its useful to conceive of a simulation of I - as in SELF - rather than Eye - as in SIGHT.
There is opportunity here to unify game concepts in a way that acknowledges the uniqueness of different game experiences - and the needs of their interfaces - whilst at the same time not reinventing the wheel or ignoring the obvious common denominators.
Moreover we should not be afraid to build on what has gone before or employ the language of other media remediated into the canon of gaming. To ignore that knowledge-base does the art of gaming a great disservice.
LISTEN TO THE AUDIO PODCAST OF THIS LECTURE
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REFERENCES
De Certeau, M, The practice of everyday life, Berkley, University of California Press, 1984.
Börge, V - Translation Snell. 1962, ‘Cinema: A Camera Within Us’, The london magazine, vol. 1, no. 12.
Flynn, Bernadette. 2003. “Languages Of Navigation Within Computer Games.” Paper presented at the 5th International Digital Arts and Culture Conference, RMIT, Melbourne. Also available at http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/papers/Flynn.pdf (accessed 10 July 2010).
Rivette, J., 1954. The age of mettuers en scene. In Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 134
Sarris, A., 1973. The primal screen, New York: Simon and Schuster. p85
Gibbs, J., 2002. Mise-En-Scene: film style and interpretation, London: Wallflower Press. p 54
Eikenes, J., & Morrison, A. 2010 Apr 27. Navimation: Exploring Time, Space & Motion in the Design of Screen Based Interfaces. International Journal of Design [Online] 4:1. Available: http://www.ijdesign.org/ojs/index.php/IJDesign/article/view/622/284
Tan, E. S. (1996). Emotion and the structure of narrative film. Film as an emotion machine. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum. Cited in Thomas Schubert and Jan Crusius Five Theses on the Book Problem: Presence in Books, Film and VR www.igroup.org/projects/porto2002/SchubertCrusiusPorto2002.pdf accessed 140906 (p 53)
Branigan, E. 2006, Projecting a camera: language-games in film theory, Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, New York. (p9)
Bolter, J.D. & Grusin, R., 1998. Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge: {MIT} Press. 272-73)
