Smile For The Camera
As part of The A.V. Club’s 1996 Week, we took a look back at the revolutionary interactive camera system in Super Mario 64, talking about its influence, its limits, and the novelty of how Nintendo explained such a newfangled concept. The camera wasn’t just some unseen entity that you happened to control. It was a character within the game itself, a Lakitu cameraman who was documenting Mario’s journey. Down in the comments, Wolfman Jew noted Nintendo’s history of explaining difficult concepts in similar ways:
I just want to harp on John’s point for a sec, because I’ve become somewhat fascinated by it. Nintendo has this unique, and I’d say agreeable, tendency to make mechanics and systems into a fundamental part of how the game works, not just through gameplay but narrative as well. Like how Splatoon and Metroid Prime are both shooters based around the concept of shooting and what exactly you shoot, with the latter’s Scan Visor allowing you to access lore and further the image of Samus as exploring a landscape. Or how Navi acts as a personality for the Z-targeting system in Zelda: Ocarina Of Time. They introduce these complex ideas and concepts as forces within the world itself, sometimes anthropomorphizing them but always making them an explicit system that must be understood and learned. I really like this, because it makes the aspect of “play” fundamental and almost creates these larger themes for the mechanics themselves.
And Mister Evil remembered a couple more games that integrated their abstract elements into the reality of their worlds:
I appreciate any time the interface is integrated into the game world in an interesting way. There are two that always come to mind for me as sterling examples. The first is Dead Space, where upgrade menus and maps and such were holographically projected in front of the player character by their environment suit, and you could even swivel the camera around and see the “back” of the projection.
The second, and really my favorite, is Far Cry 2, specifically the map and compass in that game. If you haven’t played it, pressing the “map” button causes your character to physically pull out a paper map and compass and hold it up while you figure out where you want to go. I loved this, and it created some of my favorite moments in the game when I was desperately trying to drive away from a bunch of maniacs with machine guns, glancing up at the road and back down at the map, dodging bullets the whole time. The physicality of it all felt like a revelation, and it remains one of my favorite elements of the Far Cry series.
Elsewhere, Venerable Monk took a cue from one of Ignatiy Vishnevetsky’s points and expounded on the impact interactive cameras had on games’ level design:
I think a big part of that is developers having to consider the concept of sight lines for the first time. In any 2-D game from that era, you know exactly how the player will see the environment because the screen will always be the same size and will scroll along at the same speed relative to the player character. Handing control of the camera over to the player means you no longer have one single angle from which everyone will see the action. Things that are readily apparent and well telegraphed from one perspective will be a complete surprise from another. A reveal loses all its power if the player is staring at the floor when it happens. And it would be really jarring to watch enemies spawn in, so those actions are generally performed outside of the player’s sight line.
I was reading about the development of Abzu earlier, and I guess they ran into a problem when they introduced the “fish eating other fish” system. They noticed pretty quickly that all the small fish would be gone if they just kept getting swallowed up by the bigger ones. So instead of despawning a fish after it’s eaten, they just change it’s location to somewhere behind the camera. The total population in the environment stays flat and the player is never witness to the little man behind the curtain.
Another Dimension
Also this week, Anthony John Agnello wrote about Capcom’s slate of 2-D games from 1996, and how the storied developer reached a new peak of craftsmanship in that form while 3-D games were finding their footing. Bizarro Sacrelicious reasoned that this tends to happen in most artistic media that’s impacted by technology: