Grow Home and the pleasures of a world you can touch

[Administrator]

If you play enough first-person shooters, something really weird can set in from time to time - something strangely off-putting. In certain games the depth of the environment can drop away after a while, the world steadily losing its tangibility, and you start to realise that, underneath everything - or maybe somehow above everything - you're just a reticule scudding over the screen, roving and hovering and blasting.
It's so odd when this happens - when a rich 3D world suddenly becomes entirely 2D, when the animations become little more than dressings for hit boxes, when you realise that you are little more than a deadly camera passing across the environment from a polite and uncrossable distance. It's not only first-person games, either. The original Mercenaries, good as it was, could often turn into a reticule experience. Even the first Uncharted did it on occasion.
This probably helps explain why developers spend such a lot of time laying on little elements that draw you back into the fiction of the world - back into the fiction that there is a world in the first place. Here's your hand working away during a reload. Here's a little bit of motion blur as you turn. Here's splattered blood or splintered light playing against the lens of the game, to suggest to you that there is a lens - not that this would make it any more real, of course, but for video games realism must be approached from a jaunty angle - and that there is a landscape beyond the lens.
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