False Alarm

Last post I was overjoyed that somebody was kicking the VIEW-BOB elephant out of the room. Or at least giving him a total make-over. It was a false alarm.

I've played the Mirror's Edge demo, and I love the game so far. But when you throw a right punch, your "vision" tilts to the left. When you perform a simple standing jump, your view moves up then down (which is perfectly normal) but also "shakes" a little at the beginning and end of the jump. When you run, your vision shakes around as your speed increases. All of this stuff makes my head hurt.

The behavior of the camera clashes completely with the producer's statements that Mirror's Edge would try to represent eye movement whereas previous first-person games had misguidedly represented head movement (which is absolutely true).

I don't know how much more I could beat this horse: human vision does not experience jarring during physical activities like punching, running, wakling, or jumping. We have an extremely stable perception of the world, even while our head might be moving all over the place. Only a knock to the head disrupts it.

The visuals of the game do represent "vision" in interesting ways unrelated to body movement, for example the use of focussing/blurring effects on the periphery of the player's visual field in certain situations. But the tired use of head-bob is the same as all of the head-bobbing games that have come before it.

Boo.

Now for the record, my hatred for head-bob in First Person perspective games does not come from an obsession with psychological accuracy. It comes from the fact that many uses of head-bob give me a headache. OK, plus plus plus the fact that head-bob is a ridiculous and inaccurate fabrication that has somehow been taken as design gospel. THE SOLUTION IS SIMPLE: like some older first-person games, give the player an optional setting to adjust the degree of head-bob or disable it completely.