Author: Seb-O-Mat

Literature on In-Game Photography

Blogs

Super Mario Odyssey features photo-mode

The latest iteration of a video game icon, Super Mario Odyssey, is now equipped with a photo-mode, too.

Kotaku collected in-game photos taken by players of Super Mario Odyssey (attention: contains a few light spoilers):

https://kotaku.com/players-are-taking-amazing-super-mario-odyssey-photos-1820006202.

 

Gamespot produced some in-game photos of their own:

https://www.gamespot.com/gallery/super-mario-odysseys-photo-mode-is-crazy-fun/2900-1591/6/

 

The same goes for US Gamer:

http://www.usgamer.net/articles/super-mario-odyssey-fans-are-using-photo-mode-to-take-some-hilarious-pictures

HunieCam Studio (2016)


A game about explicit voyeurism and sex in Manga-style which deals with photography to some extent, too. While the player can satisfy a male gaze on all sorts of female parts (the Steam-version of the game is edited in terms of explicitness compared to the non-Steam version), the lack of male subjects to voyeurism makes this game suspicious of promoting a tiny bit of sexism.

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From the game’s greenmangaming.com description:

Courtesy Warning: The sexual themes in this game are mostly for fun/humor and don’t make for particularly great fapping material.

In HunieCam Studio players take control of a sleazy cam girl operation. Rake in stacks of filthy internet money and attract as many disgusting fans as you can in this fast paced, click happy and thoroughly perverted take on the business tycoon / management sim genre!

Recruit cam models from an eclectic cast of cuties who have probably made some poor life choices. Manage your girls’ daily errands/activities to keep them stress-free and productive. Invest in various aspects of your business to improve functions and expand operations. Optimize your cam shows by promoting girls who match popular trends/fetishes. Abandon your morals and disappoint everybody who cares about you!

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1979 Revolution

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They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but what about a videogame? The first episode of 1979 Revolution, a game that places you in the middle of the Iranian hostage crisis, speaks to just how important visibility can be when corruption and misinformation run rampant. You play as Reza, a photographer tasked with capturing the chaos of the regime change and subsequent protests. In this context, a picture becomes as dangerous as a stray bullet, rendering you a big target. A well-researched passion project from creator Navid Khonsari, 1979 takes you back to this important moment in history with a Telltale-style branching narrative. The consequences of your actions are palpable, your choices affecting the families and the splintered factions forming around you. Pushing both the medium and player to new heights, 1979‘s first episode can not only educate an unaware American audience, but also help us see our own role in the turmoil (source: Killscreen)

 

see also: https://killscreen.com/articles/1979-revolutions-to-explore-the-black-friday-massacre-this-april/

find the game here: http://inkstories.com/1979RevolutionGame/

The in-game camera in Far Cry 3: it’s like a vacation gone wrong

Far Cry® in-game photo mode

Far Cry 3 in-game camera mode

The game Far Cry 3 (2012) features an in-game camera mode by pressing “Z” the protagonist, Jason, from whose first person perspective one plays the game, draws a camera and we see the game world through a viewfinder view similar to the one of modern DSLR cameras, featuring something like focus points in the center of a framing rectangle. We can zoom in and out with the camera using the mouse wheel and take a picture by clicking the left mouse-button. So I went on a little photo safari in Far Cry 3 trying out my gear and taking a couple of shots in this beautiful wilderness. At some point I landed in a small cemetery where two men of the same faction as the game’s protagonist were kneeling in front of a tombstone mourning the death of another faction member. I was somehow touched by this encounter and wanted to capture the situation in a photo. So I went around the two, not too close, keeping some distance in respect of their loss. I decided to take some pictures from behind with the tombstone in the center, the two men facing the tombstone, kneeling left and right from it. It took me a while to find the right composition for the situation. Some time later I wanted to take a look at the pictures I had taken. They had to be somewhere, right? In the inventory? No. I ended the game and looked into my Steam account. I remembered from earlier sessions with Far Cry 3 that the photos I took were saved in Steam. I could not find any photos but some quick web search provided the solution:

Far Cry® 3 photo-mode marking a villain and an ostrich

Far Cry 3 photo-mode marking a villain and an ostrich

It turned out that the camera mode in Far Cry 3 is different from the in-game camera mode in Euro Truck Simulator 2. The modus is not meant to take photos. In the game the camera is used to mark villains, predatory animals and herbivores in order to track them even if they get out of direct sight and hide behind bushes or even small hills. Above the framing rectangle in the camera view we see a little row with symbols which show up in the camera image if we point the camera at villains or animals (see the second picture of this article) where we see the respective symbols above the heads of the villain and the ostrich. In some missions the camera mode is uses if the protagonist has to take photos of target persons. When I understood what had happened to my photos I felt a bit like the user Fun With Your Cat in a forum on Steam who experienced the same problem and said

it’s like a vacation gone wrong.

Nevertheless, one can take screenshots in the game using the F12. This is how I took the pictures in this article.

It is interesting that ranging the woods, beaches, hills, ruins and pathways of Far Cry 3 while looking for potential photographs one feels indeed somehow “embedded.” While the player searches for interesting motifs the game world keeps behaving as it was programmed to, in other words it keeps living on which allows to experience all kinds of strange situations: After I had taken the imaginary photos of the mourning soldiers I was getting close to a river where I saw a civilian standing on the river bank. I took some “photos” of him when out of nowhere (in fact out of the water) an alligator jumped at the guy and killed him in front of my eyes and my simulated lens. The beast bit him and submerged into the river. The man’s body kept floating inanimately on the water surface. I was so astonished that I kept pressing the left mouse button (i.e. the shutter-button) in order to have proof for my encounter still hoping to show the pictures later on. While I moved closer to the river and took pictures of the man’s body, the alligator emerged again out of the river facing my camera with its huge jaw and killed the protagonist whom I was controlling.

The second photo in this article is taken right before another strange and unexpected event which I did not photograph because I did not expect such a thing to happen: In the picture we can see that the villain and the ostrich who face each other are marked with symbols indicating their dangerousness. Only shortly after I had taken this picture the ostrich attacks the villain and strikes him down while he unsuccessfully tries to defend himself with his machine gun.

In-game photo mode in Euro Truck Simulator 2

The truck simulation game Euro Truck Simulator 2 (ETS2, SCS Software 2012) is interesting with regard to in-game photography because it does not force the user to push the screenshot button on the keyboard in order to take a picture instead it features an in-game photo mode. This feature was introduced in update 1.12 and works like a photo studio to go so that users can take crisp snapshots of their trucks wherever they are in the game world. In the best tradition of car photography they take location, lighting, setting, interior or exterior details, etc. into account for the right composition. Users can upload and share their photos on the game’s World of Trucks which partly functions like a flickr for ETS2 players.

The photo mode interface in ETS2.

The in-game photo mode interface in ETS2.

To get the right look the interface of the in-game photo mode allows to tilt, pan, and roll the camera. The player can move the point of view to get the right composition. Particularly interesting is that one can change the field of view (FOV), the depth of field (DOP), as well as the focus which adds essential photographic features to the screenshot.

Changing the FOV corresponds to changing the focal length with a zoom lens or to changing prime lenses of different focal lengths. Changing the DOP corresponds to changing the aperture of a camera which allows for a blurry background effect in case the the DOP is chosen to be rather narrow around the focus area. Eventually, users can use where to place their focus.

Apart from this the mode also allows for some configurations which are normally part of the photographic post-processing. As such the user can choose to change the color balance of their image as well as the saturation.

And, yes, that’s my truck in the second photo!

“The Art of in-game Photography”

An interesting and inspiring article by the journalist Rainer Sigl from the Austrian blog Videogametourism is “The Art of in-game Photography” from 2012. Sigl remarks that the subject of in-game photography is “still […] [an] unexplored […] country” and discusses a couple of in-game photographers and their particular aesthetics.

The photographers and their blogs are

Duncan Harris and Deadendthrills

Iain Andrews and Steam Postcards

James Pollock and Virtual Geographic

Josh Taylor and NOTRL

Leo Sang and VRP