Original Post
Very, very early in the history of motion pictures, movies generally just looked like stage plays. The camera was a fixed, unparticipatory entity set up front and center. No cuts except between scenes, no camera moves. Later the "no cuts" thing was relaxed when it turned out that, for bizarre reasons that we still don't entirely understand, the brain is totally okay with it when your viewpoint suddenly and drastically changes. But still, for a time, cuts were a purely utilitarian thing. When your main character moved off the frame, you cut to a different viewpoint so you could see him again. It's unsurprising that this was the case, because the guy behind the camera was not an artist--why hire an artist to run a machine?--but a technician. The technician's job was to make everything work efficiently and well, and that included putting the camera in as "useful" a place as possible. We have Edwin Porter, an early and hugely influential director, to thank for bringing this ugly situation to an end. It was Porter who realized that in the new medium of film, the natural way to delineate a film was by shot rather than by scene. Porter paved the way for later directors, such as Orson Welles, to control shot composition and continuity in a way which heightened emotion and artistic effect rather than just faithfully recording them. In Porter's hands, the camera was not just an observer--even an active one--but a performer, perhaps the most important performer at certain points. Fast forward a bunch of decades. Are we game developers the unartistic technicians behind the camera? Obviously in first-person games, the decision of shot composition is more or less forced upon us, but what of everything else (games which I will refer to as Third Person Camera, or TPCs)? Our RTSes give us a maximally utilitarian view which we control via scrolling, and our third person platformer cameras orbit frenetically around our characters, ducking stalactites and reluctantly swinging to a head-on view when we back Ms. Croft into a corner. We have excuses. First of all, as anyone who played an early TPC (and even some recent ones) can attest, getting a camera to act even in a purely utilitarian manner is no mean feat. It's surprisingly difficult to keep an unoccluded and undisorienting view of the character without frantically weaving and zooming. Recent tools like GPU occlusion tests have made things a little easier on us, as have the experiences of games gone by. Also, of course, a game camera has more duties than a film camera. Players are expected to not only watch the game, but to control a character as well... and to do that, they need a fair amount of usable information regarding the area around the character. This need is reflected in most TPCs' "mouselook" mode... but who the hell wants to be ducking into mouselook mode every five seconds? Grim Fandango taught us that dramatically placed cameras could be rather disorienting, as the angle of view became disassociated from both the character's angle of view and the global reference frame. And Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time showed us that view-relative control could be just as disorienting, as the prince ran into a new shot and suddenly turned on his heel and ran back due to an opposing new view direction. Clearly, then, we cannot improve on the camera without simultaneously improving, or at least modifying, our control schemes. Lucasarts and Sierra point-and-click adventure games such as Full Throttle worked fine with cinematic camera angles, since control was both view-relative and position-exact. It's unclear whether this would work in an action game. But if we can surmount this difficulty, we have decades of knowledge about cinematography to draw on. Things like the line of action and the 30-degree rule were designed precisely to keep things from getting too disorienting, and many of them can work without modification in computer games. Best of all, most such rules really are expressed as rules rather than wishy-washy "things to keep in mind", meaning that we can code our game to do most of the cinematography for us just as it does most of the camera control for us right now. What do we gain? Well, dramatic effect, of course. But that's not all. While replaying Sands of Time the other day, I noticed I could classify every single disorienting camera move and cut by the well-known rule of cinematography it was breaking. Left suddenly becoming right? Breaks the line of action. A few bewildered milliseconds figuring out where the heck the Prince was after a cut within an unfamiliar setting? Rule of thirds. Wishing I could see if the Prince had anywhere to jump to, or was about to leap to a temporary but annoying death? Balancing the shot while accounting for the weight of the gaze. Film directors have been all over this stuff, for a long time now. They've gotten really good at it. It's not going to translate to the video game camera without a bit of work, but isn't it time we started listening to them?
