Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 233)

Trigger Happy
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from the cinema: the player’s point of view is explicitly
defined, as we saw, as that of a “camera,” whose
movements can often be controlled as if the player were
a phantom movie director, floating about on an
invisible crane.
The external view of the player’s character,
although putatively less “realistic,” is very often more
desirable in gameplay terms than the fashionable
firstperson view. Just as old-school blasters like
Asteroids or Defender are only playable games in two
dimensions, because the player is given an overview of
the action surrounding his ship, so Tomb Raider
enables the player to navigate far more easily and
intuitively around the playing areas, because she can
see immediately how close Lara is to a side wall, or just
how far away that nasty spiked ditch is, in order to
navigate its edge safely.