Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 146)

Trigger Happy
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method of inducing tension: the player can get killed by
zombies not because the environment is cleverly
designed but because he was deliberately hindered from
seeing them coming until it was too late. And, crucially,
Resident Evil 2 doesn’t let you choose the shots in the
way Mario 64 does. As with film, shots are done to
you. Silent Hill, meanwhile, sometimes lets the player
control the camera when walking around the streets, but
dive into a dim alley and the tilted overhead shot is the
only perspective you’ll get. And this shows how a
purely filmic notion of camerawork cannot work in a
videogame context. Film manipulates the viewer, but a
game depends on being manipulable.
There is an even more fundamental formal
distinction to be made between the structures of visual
imagery in films and videogames. Modern film relies
for its storytelling and conceptual effect on a highly
sophisticated grammar of montage, a technique
invented in cinema’s youth, and perfected by Sergei
Eisenstein. In simple terms, it describes the process of
“cutting together” discontinuous shots—something so
common now in dynamic visual media that we hardly
notice it at all.