The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker From ... - Douglas Wilson

y perennial Mario character Lakitu). For the sake of convenience, camera movement
was often automated to guess the most desirable view. However, players were given
some say in the final camera positioning. Using the Nintendo 64 controller’s C buttons,
players could directly control the camera’s rotation and zoom, much like “a phantom
movie director, floating about on an invisible crane.” 36
At first glance, the third-person view might seem disruptive of the immersive
trance. After all, we want to feel as if we ourselves – and not some computer-generated
character – are in the virtual environment. But, contrary to Poole’s claims, the third-
person view does not necessarily lead to disembodiment. In the 3D Mario and Zelda
games, for example, the view always centers on the player’s avatar (Mario or Link
respectively). This constraint, which prevents players from flying the camera around at
will, binds us to our character, thereby enforcing a constant degree of avatar
identification. In other words, players cannot fully dissociate their virtual identity from
that of their avatar.
We should also note that the purported “realism” of the first-person perspective is
itself far from perfect. As Poole argues, the first-person perspective faces problematic
technical constraints. Planar projections that subtend larger angles at the eye suffer from
marginal distortion. That is, objects at the periphery of a picture plane look exaggerated.
In the material world, we avoid such distortion because our vision is never fixed; our eyes
use micro-movements to assemble a multitude of visual fragments into one total picture.
But because 3D games are by necessity rendered on a single two-dimensional picture
plane (the television or computer screen), these distortions are unavoidable. It is no
coincidence, then, that videogames, like many paintings, “keep the angle of vision
artificially narrow.” 37 This narrowing removes peripheral vision, which interferes with
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