ABSTRACT
Three-dimensional video games remain a rapidly evolving new medium, bringing together gameplay, narrative, architecture, computing, and cinema. Correspondingly, for a number of existing schools of inquiry, they raise absorbing questions about game theory, storytelling, space, human– computer interaction, and the moving image. In the space of this chapter, our ambitions are necessarily modest; we wish to concentrate on only one of the devices that arises out of the trading between cinema, television, and gameplay that is nevertheless at the heart of the video-ness of video games: the camera. How we play video games is dependent on and generated by the uses of the camera: a game-camera is modelled upon the optical set-ups of mechanical and digital cameras and yet, as we shall see, is distinct from them. For instance, the game-camera is an invisible point without virtual representation. Game-cameras are central to playing 3D video games because they present a mediated view into, and a perspective upon, the “visibility arrangements” of the game (Watson, 1997). They are at the core of analysing, at any moment, what has just happened, what is currently happening in the game, and what might happen next. The interplay between using the game-camera and the visibility arrangements of the game produce not just the experience of 3D spaces but the very play of the game.
