Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 217)

Trigger Happy
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movement—only the walls of the room moved; and the
enemy soldiers were constructed by bit-mapped sprites,
which means they were basically flat drawings. When
the enemies got nearer, they grew perspectivally by the
simple means of enlarging every pixel in the drawing,
so that they looked fuzzy and “blocky.” But another
innovation Wolfenstein made has been copied by every
first-person shooter since: at the bottom of the screen is
a representation of hands clutching a gun, drawn
foreshortened so that the gun appears to be pointing
“into” the screen. This was a clever effort to try to cross
the barrier between onscreen action and the player’s
physical situation— those are my hands, so my head
must be in this world too—and the animations of recoil
and reloading have become ever more impressive.
But the purpose of this gun onscreen is purely
cosmetic and psychological, rather than operational. It
is not used for aiming, for while Wolfenstein and Doom
have the gun pointing straight into the center, other
first-person shooters, such as Goldeneye, have it
coming into the screen at an angle (usually from the
right, which sadly compromises believability for
lefties), so it is impossible to judge its precise direction
and range. Of course, anyone actually using a gun