Reverse Shot A different angle on moving images—past, present, and future

The way we see a game—whether we can control the camera or not, whether the frame moves or is static, how the frame moves—is an artistic quality as important as (and often interlocked with) its interface, its methods of immersion, and so on. In this multiplayer roundtable, critics Kambole Campbell, Forrest Cardamenis, Cole Kronman, Esther Rosenfield, and Dan Schnidel discuss various permutations of how the camera is deployed in gaming.

Dan Schindel: One of the earliest 3D third-person games was 1996’s Super Mario 64, and it had to reorient a whole generation of gamers who were used to 2D. It did so by getting the player to consider the camera as a diegetic element, one directed independently of Mario. At the start of the game, we watch a Lakitu (a friendly, bespectacled turtle fellow flying on a little cloud a la Sun Wukong or Goku) dangling a camera on a fishing line as he swoops down through the clouds. As Mario arrives via a pipe emerging from the ground, the frame's perspective switches from an omniscient third person to the camera the Lakitu is operating. One of the first instructions the player receives is how to control the camera following them. Looking back, I recognize that this instilled in seven-year-old me an awareness of how cinematography is an active part of gaming.

Kambole Campbell: I like that you've highlighted player control over the camera, because the first example that came to mind of how the camera affects gameplay was one that often takes control away from the player: Nier: Automata. The game mainly has a player-operated third-person perspective, but the most striking moments come when it restricts that view, locking you into one of a number of fixed perspectives. One of my favorite moments is the Theme Park level—you get onto a rollercoaster, and the camera switches to a 2D, side-scrolling perspective for the duration of that segment, a trick it returns to in various forms. That loss of autonomy feels appropriate for the dollhouse world of Automata, whose story is about androids fighting a proxy war for humans against an alien invasion, the aliens themselves also using robots to do their fighting.

It’s not just thematic—the game also uses camera alterations to signal changes in gameplay. In the opening level, you're locked into a top-down, shoot-em-up point of view as you pilot a ship from space to a landing zone on Earth. And in another section it homages side-scrolling action games and even the likes of Space Invaders through a pixelated hacking game. These sections are a fun way to flip the script on a player expecting the visual conventions of a 3D open-world game. They’re also in conversation with the history of game design and the medium's methods of visual communication.

Cole Kronman: It’s probably because I’m in the middle of replaying it right now, but the first game that comes to mind for me is Shenmue. Its director, Yu Suzuki, has been trying to push technical and formal boundaries his entire career, and the game came out in 1999, at a time when Sega hadn’t yet dipped a toe into what we now think of as “cinematic storytelling.” They were a very arcade-centric business for a long time, while Shenmue is a granular life sim—mechanically concerned, for the most part, with day-to-day existence in a small town—with the tonal, narrative, and aesthetic shape of an ’80s Hong Kong action flick. You play as this teenage kid, Ryo, investigating his father’s murder at the hands of a martial arts master.

But the game’s visual language is not modeled on any film. When I look at Shenmue’s cutscenes and the ways it moves its camera, I think of “attract modes”—the non-playable demos that run on idle arcade cabinets, designed to entice patrons. For 3D games, these demos will often display camera angles and movements that aren’t achievable during normal gameplay. They’re trying to impress you by pulling the curtain back on visual minutiae you would not otherwise see. Shenmue does this constantly. During conversations, the camera will do a slow pan around the current speaker, and you can glimpse tons of tiny details in the character model, expression work, environment design, lighting, and so on.

It’s cinematic in a way only a video game can be. Its camera placement and movement, its cuts, its compositions are all intentional and thoughtful, but in motion it only resembles other games. Shenmue isn’t interested in being an “interactive movie.” It makes no attempt to hide the seams separating its gaminess from its more measured elements. Most of it is about walking around, talking to people, and killing time. Occasionally you need to beat some hooligans up, and when you do, it becomes this flashy, heightened, absurd thing with combos and meters and special attacks. It has these two almost diametrically opposed modes, and the visual language marries them.

DS: You said the magic word: “cinematic.” It frustrates me how when a lot of people in gaming spaces call something “cinematic,” they mean it looks like a movie—specifically the visual tropes of blockbuster films. But there's a lot more potential to how cameras and framing can be utilized.

Esther Rosenfield: The 2018 quasi-reboot of God of War has this strange visual conceit. It's a third-person action game, and the camera will flow in and out of cutscenes. You control Kratos until you trigger a scene, and then you will watch a video of the story continuing, but it will play as though the camera has not cut. It’s visually seamless but totally ridiculous. The “single unbroken long take” can be an obnoxious tic even in films. It can signify seriousness and even pretension in ways that aren't additive. It’s trying to be immersive. But in God of War it constantly conflicts with the way the game is trying to tell a story.

There's a bit where Kratos fixes the strap on his son’s quiver. He's big, he's scary, he is aggressive, he’s the god of war, but this is a moment where he's being very tender and having this sincere, intimate connection with his son. The problem is that Kratos is so big that you can't see what he's doing because the camera is behind his back. The game could have cut to a close-up of his hands fixing the quiver, or to the son’s face to see his reaction. But because the game is shackled by its stupid conceit, all you see is Kratos's back. The game is so committed to this one-take gimmick that it misses out on the ways a cut can communicate a story more effectively.

Forrest Cardamenis: I think we are highlighting three separate but interrelated issues. The first is this application of “cinematic” as a positive term. But it’s not used the same way it was just 25 to 30 years ago, when it referred to narrative scope and the use of cutscenes. It was applied especially to JRPGs, whose gameplay consisted of movement through a series of screens with fixed-camera setups. Today it refers to things like God of War, games with over-the-shoulder and behind-the-back camera placement, a minimum of visible cuts, sweeping panoramas. The label is now used more to instill a sense of artistic seriousness than consider how a game’s cinematography is creating meaning or influencing tone.

The second is this question of choreography, which Esther's point gets at. If you’re watching a film, the timing and the marks of both the actors and the camera are frequently predetermined. In a game, the camera is usually fixed to the player character, while NPC movement is decided by scripts rather than the movement of the camera or player. So you can’t have a sequence like the one at the beginning of Werckmeister Harmonies, which uses choreography to establish the scene. You can do this in a cutscene, but not if the goal is to avoid cuts to “maintain immersion.”

The third, which envelops both, is a production issue. The people designing a game’s visual engine and the people making its assets—the “sets” and the “costumes,” if you will—and the people placing character models are not working closely with the people writing the script. The people making God of War a one-take game and the people devising this moment when Kratos fixes the quiver are never working directly together. So do you break the entire visual conceit for this one moment?

CK: The one-take approach feels like such a modern conceit, but you can see the seed of it in early 3D games. Final Fantasy VII is a good example. Until then, Final Fantasy games were framed from an immobile top-down perspective. But in FFVII, every screen is a pre-rendered background with a specific composition that places the characters on variable axes of movement. To sell the illusion, the game frequently transitions from a cutscene (which was itself rare in games at the time) directly to gameplay, seemingly eliminating any demarcation between the two. The most well-known example is from the opening, in which the camera extravagantly follows a train pulling into a station, eventually settling into a fixed position, and then the protagonist Cloud Strife jumps off the train, and you can control him, because at some point the frame quietly became a playable space. Final Fantasy VII Remake, released in 2020, does the exact same thing. Nearly every cutscene ends with the camera positioning itself behind a character, and suddenly you’re playing the game.

ER: We’ve all seen this before: You exit the cutscene, and the camera slowly swings back around behind the character, and then you're in gameplay again. It's trying to communicate to the player that the part you watch is over and the part you play has begun, but these two things are connected. It's not the harshness of cutting in and out of a video file, which feels totally separate from gameplay. That’s what cutscenes often were in the early days.

FC: They were the reward for having played well.

ER: Exactly. This type of camera move was created to communicate the idea that what you just saw in that cutscene is directly connected to what you're about to do in the game. The God of War single-take gimmick is intended to be the evolution of that. But I think the problem is that you lose the ability to use something like shot/reverse shot or more basic cinematic techniques, which are hugely effective storytelling tools.

DS: Games often mix elements where you have more authority as a player with moments when you cede control of what's happening to premade parts. There’s that almost-omnipresent trope in first-person shooter games of the 2000s in which the camera circles the player character before zooming into the back of their head and dissolving into their point of view to communicate who the first person doing the shooting is. It also ties back to Mario 64’s diegetic camera. But Mario 64 also doesn't really have cutscenes, so it just uses that introduction, and from then on the player is the cinematographer.

With pre-rendered cutscenes, the player has no input over the cinematography, but now a lot of games have a mix of visual conceits. Kam, you talked about how Nier: Automata does this, and how it’s thematically relevant. The idea of the player as a cinematographer becomes more apparent as we enter the 3D era. But there is an art to static framing in games as well, one that’s a bit lost since games don’t tend to have pre-rendered images as still backgrounds anymore. When you watch a Béla Tarr film, you don't have control of the camera, but like with a lot of slow cinema, you are free to take in the whole frame at length, encouraged to search for details. There’s a similar dynamic at play with, for instance, classic point-and-click adventure and mystery games, where you have to search out the relevant aspects of a detailed environment. Cinematography isn’t just how the camera is placed and how it moves; there’s also what's within the frame and how it moves.

CK: When people talk about “cinematic” moments in games, they often refer to moments when control is ceded considerably, if not entirely. So sometimes it can be tricky to say whether a game feels cinematic because of it or because of you. One series that got tossed around a lot as an example in the 2000s was Uncharted. Those games are essentially playable action movies. But most of their setpieces that people think of as cinematic basically consist of you holding the control stick in one direction while stuff collapses behind you. Sometimes you move around a falling pillar or jump over a ledge, but you’re not really that engaged on a mechanical level.

ER: It's interesting how Mario 64 more or less invented how the camera works in a 3D game space. It feels intuitive to us nowadays because so many games use the exact same control scheme. But I see it trip up people who are new to playing games, the idea that you are not just controlling the character but also the camera, simultaneously and separately. You can’t pan the camera away from the character to get a shot of the surroundings, right? If you're playing Elden Ring, you can't detach the camera and go zoom around and go look at the horizon. So your control over the cinematography is quite limited. The compositions you're able to put on your screen are always going to have your character right in the middle, and they're limited by where the character can physically be.

DS: Can anyone think of games that don't have this conventional camera scheme established by games like Mario 64? It’s second nature by now to use the right analog stick mainly for a camera.

KC: In Baldur's Gate 3, you can detach the camera. This makes it immediately different from the games we’ve mentioned so far. You're mostly observing from a bird’s-eye view, but you can also control the angle a bit, you can zoom in a little closer to the ground to create what’s effectively the standard third-person perspective. I suppose it’s a side effect of the game being rendered in so much detail. In most games with a map of that scale, just flying the camera over into the distance would be such a headache. I think I could hear my PS5 wheezing a little bit when I would try and move the camera over to a different side of the city.

DS: One kind of game that isn’t locked to any character is the god game, like strategy or sim tiles. Those have this omniscient point of view on the world, and you can look at whatever you want to. I played a lot of Age of Empires II when I was a kid, and I remember the first time I bumped my mouse and steered away from a battle. I had inadvertently made a jarring smash cut. Everything is happening at once on the map, and events will proceed without your intervention. You can look at a lone sheep by a river instead, if you want. This demonstrates again how often a game camera is tied to point of view. Games can play with their relationship to the audience in all these ways that most other media don’t—or can’t. There's so much room for experimentation.

FC: I think The Witness can add a lot to this conversation. It’s a first-person game, so the character effectively is the camera. And an enormous part of it is placing that camera so that all the little elements in the frame—trees, rocks, water—align to allow you to solve an environmental puzzle. You trace a line from a tree branch to a river and along its path, not because these things are actually contiguous, but because the exact place you are standing creates the optical illusion that in this 3D space rendered on a 2D screen, the end of the branch appears to lead directly into the river.

ER: That makes me think of Superliminal, which is a first-person puzzle game where the perspective you have on objects can physically alter them. If you pick up a block and bring it close to your face, it will obviously appear much larger than it really is. But then if you drop the block, it will actually become as large as it appeared from that perspective. You use this mechanic to resize and reshape objects. It's all about how things look different from different perspectives.

FC: Yes, it’s a very similar concept! It isn’t necessarily cinematography, but it shares a concern with what it means to render a 3D space in two dimensions, whereas The Witness requires you to find the optimal mise-en-scène, so to speak. But, significantly, this only works because the game is exceedingly still. There is nothing besides the player character that is alive in the world. Early 3D games were empty because they needed to be, technically. But The Witness reveals that as games start to populate their worlds and become more “immersive” or “realistic,” they might be less “cinematic,” insofar as we would define “cinematic” as demonstrating a high level of interest in what the frame ought to look like at any given moment. It forces you to stand here and put the camera there, in a way that most games do not and even cannot.

That dovetails naturally with the game’s narrative and themes. You’re solving puzzles, but really you are looking for signs of authorship. The island is created not just by the designer of the video game but perhaps, diegetically, by some other creator. People criticize the game for this, and I understand why. It aligns with the modern urge, so common in certain tech circles, to describe our own world as a simulation. But as you play more, you see how the gameplay is highlighting the visual design, the narrative, and everything else, and vice-versa. You find beauty in a fabricated world, which is just a metaphor for art.

It probably isn’t fair to call the more active, anything-goes, lived-in environments of an open world game “unauthored.” There is a long tradition in cinema of watching and praising fiction films for their documentary aspects and documentaries for how they construct stories. It stands to reason that there can be more populated games that make use of blocking, lighting, cinematography, and other aspects of visual design in a similarly insightful way. But if there is more to do, more to see, and more happening, it does naturally pull a game from an experience of visual exploration toward one of taking more game-like actions. If a game gives the player freedom to go wherever they want and move the camera as they please, it’s never framing anything for them to see, except in a cutscene. All the things that we think of as good composition and visual storytelling are almost lost as soon as the game has been conceived, before it’s being made. It’s hard to reintroduce these formalistic and aesthetic concepts into games made by hundreds or thousands of people who are working at cross-purposes.

ER: My wife started playing Elden Ring recently. There's a moment when you enter the second main area after you’ve just beaten a big boss; you come out of a castle and see this beautiful view of the huge region you're about to explore. Except she didn't see that vista, because she went off to the right and started picking plants. I think Elden Ring is designed really well to present these fantastic images and compositions, but you necessarily risk the player never seeing them, because they have the freedom to look at whatever they want.

KC: When Elden Ring was released, the primary comparison point was Breath of the Wild, which also has a big moment like that, when the camera pulls back to show you the whole wide world. And then you kind of veer off to go pick some apples or whatever you want to do. The game takes control away just a little bit to give you that sense of grandeur, then lets you on your way. And the player has the wheel until the end of the game.

CK: I like Breath of the Wild as an example, because the game’s environments are very carefully designed around the notion that, due to its open nature, no two people will have an identical experience. The developers have talked about how their goal when designing the overworld was to make it so that no matter where you are or what direction you’re looking, you will always see something interesting. Any “cinematography” it might have unfolds very organically. And the highly systemic nature of Breath of the Wild’s mechanics means very little of it is just window dressing; almost everything can be interacted with in some way.

A more recent, very different game comes to mind: Alan Wake 2. It has the meticulous photorealism that a lot of modern AAA games are chasing, but it’s also very stylized in lots of clever ways. No matter where I put the camera, I was looking at something compositionally compelling. I think you can largely chalk this up to the game’s smaller scope, since the developer, Remedy, was able to put an immense amount of effort into fully realizing every iota of relatively modest and contained areas.

ER: Alan Wake 2 also breaks the sacred compact of the cutscene, because it will cut in during gameplay with jump scares. You’ll be exploring an area, and suddenly a brief cutscene will interrupt you. It's effective because, while you generally expect that a cutscene could be triggered at any moment while playing a game, you don't expect that it will be so abrupt, and then gameplay will resume just as suddenly.

KC: I think Alan Wake 2 opened up a bigger toolbox of what we’re calling cinematic language. It goes back to Remedy’s Control, which might be the first game I’ve played to use dissolves and superimpositions. Both games are about this liminal boundary between the real world and another, more alien one, so it makes sense that Alan Wake 2 continued along that track.

FC: Return of the Obra Dinn, is another puzzle game that is very still. You play as an insurance investigator whose job is to determine how all 60 people aboard a ship were killed. As you find a corpse, you hear over a black screen the audio of the moments before their death, and then are free to explore a tableau frozen at the exact moment of their death. You can see who else was present, try to determine what they were doing, look at other parts of the scene, and whatever else about that instant in time can help you identify people and how they died. It's an exercise in telling a story with 3D stills and offscreen sound, and your goal is to determine the intentions of the designer. Games from Silent Hill 2 to Bioshock to Dark Souls are lauded for their environmental storytelling, but their environmental details often feel like window dressing, more about feeding fan theories than communicating ideas. Obra Dinn is entirely about telling stories with environmental detail.

DS: One of my favorite games that frequently plays with perspective is Kentucky Route Zero. The creators of that game were influenced by stagecraft and theater rather than cinema, which is one reason it looks so different. One scene might have the traditional overhead view. Another could take us inside a house or a boat with a cutaway dollhouse effect. There’s an incredible sequence late in the game which is told entirely from the points of view of different security cameras observing the player characters as they explore this facility. The game’s flexibility here ties into its refusal to center any single main character—the man you control at the start of the game exits the narrative in the fourth (out of five) acts. The variegated presentations emphasize that it’s the heteroglossic look at a whole community and its struggles to survive.

ER: This reminds me of a sequence in Red Dead Redemption II. It’s an open-world game, so there are a lot of periods where you're riding your horse from Point A to Point B. There’s this feature you can toggle on where you can let the game automatically pilot your horse, and the camera will shift to all these different perspectives. The aspect ratio changes, and instead of the typical behind-the-back framing, you’re watching the player character ride down the road in a wide shot that captures the surroundings, or from above, or from right on the horse’s hip. It's sort of corny, but the game is introducing this experimental element to an otherwise visually anodyne aspect of gameplay. You're not fully giving over control in the sense that a cutscene does; you are sort of sharing control with an AI director of what you’re being shown.

CK: I can think of few modern games that are so invested in this idea of being an interactive cinematic object. Red Dead II is structured around the notion that every player-dictated action is another inflection point in a constantly unfolding story. It doesn’t want to break that spell and remind you that you’re playing a video game with limits and rules. At times the game is so beholden to this that attempts to find alternative modes of play result in a fail state. If you’re chasing an outlaw and fall too far behind, the game usually won’t let that situation unfold organically, but will boot you out of the quest and make you try again. This is the contradiction at the heart of so many discussions about what makes a “cinematic” video game. If the camera needs to be in a certain place, what happens if you want it to be somewhere else? Games are interactive. What if you want to interact with them in ways that may run counter to what the developers have set up?

ER: If the player is the director of a game, then Red Dead II gives the feeling of working with a really overbearing studio executive.DS: That attests to one of the central dilemmas of video games. They’re trying to grant players this illusion of agency, when in fact, due to the limits of technology, there's only so much that you can actually do. Every game must negotiate that illusion.