What's your camera angle?

Curse me for the terrible habit of losing track of interesting articles. It makes it so hard to properly cite a post. Please forgive the fuzziness in this first bit…

There was a developer interview recently for one of those John Woo-style console action games, like Stranglehold, Max Payne or Wet, although it wasn’t any of those. The developer was talking about how vital it was to them that the player experience fluidity in their motion. Control in these games treads a very fine line between predictability and speed. Guessing at what the player wants sometimes leads to incorrect actions, forcing the player to fight against the engine, which is always a problem.

Consider the question of what to do as the player is approaching cover, common to all these games. Are you simply moving near the cover point? Attempting to get into cover? Vault over a small wall? How can a player unambiguously express which action they were trying to take? Selecting among all the context-sensitive animated actions on the wall is a non-trivial problem. Mistakes are unavoidable, no matter what choices the engine makes.

This developer felt that he had come up with an especially intuitive way of selecting an action when you approach a table. If the camera faces upward, you vault over the table. If it is facing downward, your character slides under the table. Perhaps a similar logic will be used for the low walls: look up to hop the wall, look down to dive into cover.

The reason I didn’t tag the article for later retrieval is that I thought he was wrong — that wasn’t an intuitive solution. My exact thoughts were, “Yeah, but I’d always be sliding under the table.” And that is because when I am given control of a 3rd person camera, I always face it down. You can see it in the various screenshots I have posted on this site, including the one above.

I was playing the new Playstation 3 game Uncharted 2 recently. A wonderful game, smoother in every detail than its predecessor. The puzzle/climbing elements were much streamlined from the first game. Before I would get stuck on maybe 20% of the climbing segments, having failed to guess at exactly which improbable jump was actually doable. In the new game the only times I needed the in-game hints to point me forward were when the next surface was more than a meter above head level — outside the frustum carved out by my downward-facing camera.

Another recent incident brought this home for me. I was walking through my neighborhood with a friend of mine when I spotted a rusty nail on the sidewalk ahead of us. I stopped him, picked it up and threw it in a nearby trash can. He thanked me and remarked that he’d have never seen it because he doesn’t watch his feet that carefully. I do. Noticing it was not a quirk. I continuously scan the ground ahead of me for threats. And it’s a habit I’ve had since long before I started playing Warcraft. That’s when it finally hit me that my real life “camera” was also pitched downward.

I wonder whether the fact that I point my game cameras down is related to the fact that I do the same thing in real life. In Warcraft, obviously, the prevalence of environmental hazards makes it a survival trait. The same cannot be said of the sidewalks around my house (despite the occasional rusty nail). Nor is it a particularly successful strategy in many 3rd person action games. I don’t have an explanation for it, either.

The only way to answer it is to see how rare it is. So I’m asking you — where is your camera pointing?