Kent's final post: Cameras

Fatal Frame II and Bioshock both require the player to use a photographic camera within the game to take pictures of enemies. In Fatal Frame II, your camera is your only weapon. When ghosts attack you, you have to raise the camera to your eyes and snap some pictures of them or else they will kill you. Since your camera has “exorcismal powers,” you can “kill” the ghosts with your camera. In Bioshock, your camera is equipped like any other weapon, but it does not harm your enemies. It is a “research camera,” and if you take enough pictures you are given upgrades. Taking enough pictures of spider splicers, for example, will allow you to use their organs as medkits.

The use of cameras in these two games is interesting on several levels. The view through the camera in the game makes you especially aware that you are looking through a machine. The camera is, of course, related to cinema. When the character and player observe the world through the camera before and after taking a picture, it’s like the filming of a movie. Both Bioshock and Fatal Frame II have a very cinematic feel even without the use of the camera. FFII is clearly reminiscent of Japanese horror films, complete with creepy dead girls, a traditional village and screeching flashes of gore. Bioshock uses tons of interesting scripted events that play out behind panes of glass that you can’t get through, almost like cut-scenes. The screen of glass becomes like the movie screen. You can only watch things happen; you can’t effect them. The use of the camera reminds me that I am not only observing a movie-like scene. I am in effect also filming one. The character in the game serves as a both figure within the film, a spectator, and the cameraman.

In a game, the machine vision of the camera is combined with the subjective vision of the person holding the camera. When you move quickly with the camera equipped in Bioshock, the screen goes out of focus for a second and then refocuses. Ironically, this convincing depiction of machine vision makes me feel like I’m in the head of a person. I’ve seen real life through that lens. I’ve pointed my camera in a new direction only to have to refocus it. When my in-game eye has to make the same adjustment, it makes the game seem closer to reality.

Unlike in video games, in real life I have peripheral vision. When I raise a camera to my eyes, though, my peripheral vision is cut off. While playing games, the player’s vision is limited to the scope of the screen. When I am using a camera within a game, this lack of peripheral vision makes more sense. In Bioshock the player’s visual range is not truncated any more than usual, but the necessary restriction of vision required by a television screen seems more natural. Fatal Frame II chooses to even cut off the sides of the image that the player can usually see. Using a camera in FFII makes me feel visually claustrophobic. I know that there is something attacking me somewhere, but I often can’t find it quickly. The game makes me choose between the ability to damage my enemy and the ability to easily find my enemy. When the camera isn’t raised, the character can move faster, pivot her vision more easily and see a wider range of things, but she is totally helpless if the ghosts catch her. Ultimately, I must restrict her (and my own) vision and movement in order to defeat my enemies. Fatal Frame II uses a familiar situation—restricted range of vision caused by looking through a camera—in order to create a believable fear. In Dead Space, necromorphs can often creep up on you due to your lack of peripheral vision and the sluggish movement of the game camera. This is scary, but it isn’t scary in a realistic way. If I was actually an engineer on a space station who was being attacked by mutant reanimated corpses I would be scared, but it wouldn’t be because I was unable to see them standing right next to me! The fear created by limited vision in Fatal Frame II makes more sense than it does in Dead Space.

Looking through a real-life camera imposes a sort of heads up display over your vision. You are almost always given some sort of circle or light grid in order to help you position your shot. In some cameras, you are even shown how many photos you have left, or the current setting of the aperture and shutter speed. This is similar to the H.U.D. that almost all shooter-style video games provide (Dead Space being a notable exception). The camera-view in Bioshock and Fatal Frame II has a H.U.D. that is a cross between what you would see if you looked through an actual camera and the normal heads up display that exists even without the camera raised or equipped. Bioshock tells you how many pictures you have left and provides you with a centering grid, but it also tells you how much eve and health you have left. Fatal Frame II provides a very antique looking camera frame, the number of pictures you have left, and your health bar. It also has a light at the top of the screen that illuminates when the camera is pointed at a ghost. When a ghost is in an optimal position, the circular centering lines illuminate and the camera hums. This is explained diegetically by the camera’s supernatural properties. What are we to make of the relationship between the camera H.U.D. and the game H.U.D.? Since I am more involved with games than with photography, I tend to see the view through a camera as a “game vision.” The camera is older than the digital game, though, so perhaps game vision is in fact a form of photographic vision. In either case, the camera allows us to accept the H.U.D. as an understandable visual element within a limited perspective.

The camera lens and the television screen are both parts of machines. When I use a camera within a game, I am looking through two types of lenses. I’m seeing a mediated image of an imaginary space. I look into the screen, in which the character who I am controlling looks through a camera lens. What I see on the screen when I play a game—the heads up display and the limited vision—is familiar because of other digital and mechanical devices like cameras. It is machine vision. By rendering the game perspective through the lens of a camera, Fatal Frame II and Bioshock are able to more closely mimic and more explicitly explain our already digitally mediated visual experience of our surroundings.