The gesture of centring: rationalisation, control and its absence

It is useless to draw the bow, unless you have a target to aim the arrow at (2004: 59)

Leon Batista Alberti, On Painting 1435

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Erwin Panofsky’s work Perspective as Symbolic Form (1997) charts the development of regimes of calculated perspective in the renaissance as a specific outgrowth of changes in

understandings of optics and space. In the mathematical construction of the central vanishing point and the appearance of spatial infinity (1997: 65) that renaissance perspective could achieve, Panofsky read a symbolic articulation of broader epistemological changes occurring in the fifteenth century in Europe. In short, Panofsky interprets the visual construction of the infinity of space as an expression of the emergence of ideas in the renaissance of an infinite experiential world and thus a claim to the real, as well as a challenge to previous,

understandings of reality.

For Panofsky, this mode of perspectival construction represented ‘an objectification of the subjective’ (1997: 66). The author understands linear perspective in terms of its ability to

translate the subjective world of representational forms into the appearance of an objective and infinite visual reality. Thus, if we apply Panofsky’s insight to the FPS’s perspective construction it appears as a product of the values of its time and a ‘symbolic form’ not a simple matter of replicating human (or gamic) vision, or producing an illusionistic spatial reality. Steven Poole has argued that the FPS should be aligned ‘with the strain of Western art from the Renaissance up until the shock of photography, were hell-bent on refining their powers of illusionistic

deception’ (2000: 137–138) (see also Crick 2010: 261). For Panofsky:

The picture has become a mere “slice” of reality, to the extent and in the sense that imagined space now reaches out in all directions beyond represented space, that precisely the finiteness of the picture makes perceptible the infiniteness and continuity of the space. (1997: 61)

If there is a relationship between the symbolic form of the renaissance as understood by Panofsky and the FPS, it lies in a mutation of the image, rather than its homogeneity. In the FPS, the finiteness of the gamic skin and the player’s place in the game is utterly enclosed by a fully

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rendered threatening space. In the following pages, I would like to suggest that infinity is both made finite and threatening in the FPS, forcing the player to protect themselves and rationalise the image by centring on enemies, aiming and firing. I am not suggesting the FPS

straightforwardly replicates the values of the renaissance. However, the desire to subject the image and the world to a mathematical rigour leveraging epistemological and philosophical changes or advancements can be understood as a recurring topos of Western culture, legible in developments in image forms as diverse as the scientific turn in cartography (see Harley 2001:

77) and the cinematograph’s application as a device for capturing and mastering an index of the body (see Rabinbach 1990). If both the construction of three-dimensional environments and graphic elements of the HUD puts the values of single point perspectival construction into play and has a relation the painterly construction of three-dimensional space, it must be coordinated with its context, rather than chained to a narrative of historical descent.

It is noteworthy that a central building block of Baudry’s argument discussed above is the way the spectator’s transcendental identification with the image is facilitated by regimes of

perspective and composition that have endured in Western culture since the renaissance (1974:

41). While Baudry’s psychoanalytic model might have been challenged in Film Studies and cannot be applied uncritically to the FPS, he makes some interesting aesthetic observations.

Importantly for our consideration of the FPS perspective, Baudry notes that the cinematic frame has a monocular point of view that ‘elaborate(s) a centred space’ (1974: 41). In film,

photography and perspectival painting, objects are arranged within the frame according to its fixed borders around a central vanishing point arranged to coincide with eye level. For Baudry, this compositional convention feeds back into the corporeal and psychological positioning of the viewing subject, meaning the viewer is encouraged to orient their gaze and body towards the centre of the image and away from considerations of its artifice.

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Figure 4.1: On first-person shooting. Screen grab from Call of Duty Black Ops (Activision, 2010)

Important to note here is the distinction that Jonathan Crary (1992) draws between classical forms of vision and those constituted by modernity. For Crary, where classical vision is

predicated on a separation of subject and object, technologies such as the cinema articulate a moment when the spectator or ‘observer’ is repositioned ‘outside of fixed relations of

interior/exterior…and into an undemarcated terrain on which the distinction between internal sensation and external signs is irrevocably blurred’ (1992: 24). This suggests a form of

contamination between the image and the spectator wherein the stable subject–object relations of the renaissance is replaced wholesale by modernity’s tendency to abstract and discipline vision and sensation into a modifiable and exploitable commodity. While Crary’s analytical framework is historical and bodily rather than psychoanalytical, it shares Baudry’s blurring of the lines separating spectator and image. However, Baudry’s work connecting the centring visuality of the renaissance with the cinema suggests that we are never dealing with wholesale ruptures between cultures of image and spectatorship. Conventions like centring persist, even if the particularity of the way in which they are deployed, perceived and sensed may alter in different historical contexts.

Despite the total control that the game’s code exerts over the FPS’s multiplayer map, the fact that the in-game camera mirrors the player’s gestures means that the importance of centring

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appears diminished. The player does not simply project their gaze into the space where an interception of their vision by the apparatus is effected, but is involved in an intense corporeal exchange in which any entrance into the game space must be effected by a crossing of the skin of the HUD by the player’s action of aiming and firing. This affective exchange and gestural quality to the movement of the perspective raises the question of how centring seen as the imposition of a compositional convention executed by an external authority can persist in this context. The answer here is that centring as a compositional regime determined by the author of an image mutates into the action of aiming and firing, which must be undertaken by the subject. Because of its relationship with immersion and the protection of the player’s affectivity, the action of aiming and firing – whether expressed by gestural ticks or more authoritative play – dominates all movements of the FPS perspective by the necessity to centre it on threatening elements.

Michael Kubovy has noted of Italian Renaissance painting that ‘The most obvious function of perspective was to rationalize the representation of space’ (1986: 1). Here, the image is

composed by set mathematical conventions, ensuring that the illusion of depth on a flat surface is achieved. This calculation flows from the perspective of the painter (and later the viewer) and the space and proportions of objects are organised accordingly. This need to calculate and mathematically produce the image is what Alberti meant when he made his fifteenth century appeal to painters to calculate and rationalise perspective in their images or be rendered like an archer who has drawn his bow, without identifying a target (2004: 59). However, it might also be said that the painter who uses the techniques described by Alberti has made the

construction and rationalisation of space his or her target, which is a gesture of control of the

‘violence inherent in every model…to the transformation of real space into a figure ruled by laws of reason and abstraction’ (Jacob 2006: 23). The archer also attempts to take hold of and control his target. Both the aim of the painter and that of the archer are legible as acts of violence because they exert a power over the real: controlling and rationalising its openness or life.

In the FPS, the illusion of depth is maintained regardless of changes in the player’s perspective because the space has been fully calculated and constructed to be viewed from all possible angles. This means that the player is unable to compose, rationalise, or exert an enduring authority over the space. This lack of control over the composition of the space, combined with

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the ability to engage in gestures of centring via movements of the gamic skin mean that the player must behave like the upbraided archer in Alberti’s metaphor by always having his or her bow drawn, seeking to align the HUD in such a way that they are prepared to aim and fire, to bring the image into a state where its object is centred and rationalised. The act of aiming and firing not only removes threatening and unpredictable enemy players from the game for a duration but does so when the player gestures a centred image into being as they open fire.

Indeed, the movement of the FPS perspective appears an attempt by the player to control the game’s spatial and temporal contingencies and their affective power. Here, firing and

rationalising are combined in a gesture aimed at controlling the threatening potential of a multiplayer match, acting to secure the player’s space of identification or skin-like HUD from shocking invasions from the game’s maps. This suggests that the key to understanding the persisting nature and significance of the relationship between renaissance regimes of centring and the FPS’s HUD, lies in the dynamic and mobile relationship between the player’s gamic skin and the three-dimensional multiplayer map.