Specter Snap (Tim Ned Atton, 2015)
Specter Snap!
You’re a walking exorcist camera, out to save the world by snapping ghosts. Take a spooky close-up or zoom out to capture large swaths of ectoplasmic baddies. Jump around to get the best shots, for the most points. Only you can prevent a spectral selfie epidemic!
source: https://timnedatton.itch.io/specter-snap
screenshots from game, played on 2018-07-05 (online)
Pictura (budha, 2017)
Pictura is a photography game where you use you phone as a window into different worlds. Take pictures to trigger events, find creatures, and progress through different settings.
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Summary
Pictura is an exploration game where your phone acts as a window to a virtual world, supporting both touch and accelerometer controls
Gameplay
Using a virtual camera as a main gameplay mechanic, Pictura has you taking pictures which you can then sell to upgrade your camera, adopt new pets and travel to new locations. Each world is littered with hidden events, triggers, puzzles, simple story elements and easter eggs for you to find.
Style
Pictura has a general calm vibe combined with a few adventurous moments. The visual style is driven by photography elements, meaning it is rich in post-effects. Different lenses, filters and camera can help personalize the look and feel of each pic.
Worlds
Each world has its unique setting, challenges and moments of awe. Following a semi-episodic format, a new world will present its own set of challenges, puzzles, surprises, visual style and minimalist story line.
source: https://budha.itch.io/pictura
Photo Fight! (Christine Gagne, Garrison Davis, Jayson Fitch, Jim Arnold, Matt Gall, Rob Cigna, Tristan Meere, 2015) submitted to Ludum Dare 32 (April 17th-20th, 2015)
Are you ready for a photoshoot? In “Photo Fight,” up to four players duke it out in the craziest networked camera FPS deathmatch you’ll ever play! Race across three floating islands as you ragdoll other players by setting up the perfect shot. Collect filters to enable horse masks, floaties, goatees, and more! Prove your photography skills over a strict time limit and watch the bodies pile up. Line up the perfect shot and utter the words of power: Say Cheese!
NOTE: This is a networked multiplayer game, you’ll need some people to join you to engage in combat, but feel free to explore even by yourself!
2-4 players
Networked MultiplayerInstructions: Take photos of other players to gain points. One photo of each enemy will be scored; the game will automatically submit the highest scoring photo. Line up your distance, angle, and zoom to get the best score, and get filters or multiple players on the screen for a bonus multiplier. All photos are scored and displayed at the end of the time limit. Most important: have fun!
source: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=53144
play it online: http://www.darkwindmedia.com/PhotoFight/PhotoFightWeb.html
Dark Clouds 2 is a PlayStation 2 game where photography is both part of the game mechanics as well as an extra feature to offer free photo taking opportunities.
Some pictures will add points to the game and will increase the character’s “photography level”.
Snapshot is the tale of a lone robot lost in an abandoned world. Armed with only his trusty camera, Pic sets forth on his great adventure. A camera might not seem like enough for a puzzle platforming adventure, but this camera is different from most: It has the ability to capture and remove from the world the very objects that it photographs. Not only that, but it can also use its powers to paste the photos it took back into the environment! Everything that the camera captures is perfectly preserved, and when the photos are restored the objects are restored with it. On top of all of that, this amazing camera can also rotate the photos before they’re pasted. Take a picture of an incoming fireball, rotate it and paste it to send it flying into a wall of heavy boxes to knock it out of the way.
Ashley Gilbertson for TIME
The Last of Us Remastered is a post-apocalyptic video game released earlier this year on PlayStation 4 with an in-game Photo Mode, which freezes the game and lets players shoot, edit and share photographs of their achievements.
TIME assigned conflict photographer Ashley Gilbertson to use the Photo Mode to document the game’s protagonists as they fight to survive in a zombie-infested world. Gilbertson writes about his experience.
It is interesting to see how the photographer talks about his experience and comparison to irl war photography practice:
My approach with The Last of Us Remastered was to enter each situation, or level, and work the scene until I was confident I’d gotten the best photograph I could before moving on. It’s the same way I work in real life. Yet, I found it was more difficult to do in a virtual reality because I was expected to fight my way through these levels to get to the next situations. That involved chopping off people’s heads, shooting them point blank in the face or throwing bombs near them. If I failed, I’d have my neck bitten, with blood exploding from my jugular in some pseudo-sexual zombie move, forcing me to restart the level.
I initially played the game at home. But after a short time playing it, I noticed I was having very strong reactions in regards to my role as the protagonist: I hated it. When I covered real war, I did so with a camera, not a gun. At home, I’d play for 30 minutes before noticing I had knots in my stomach, that my vision blurred, and then eventually, that I had simply crashed out. I felt like this could well be my last assignment for TIME.
and he eventually detached playing from photographing by ‘outsourcing’ playing:
So, I moved to the TIME offices where Josh Raab, a contributing photo editor at Time.com and a former gamer, could take the controls and fight his way through the different stages for me. Josh developed a particular style of clearing levels – sneaking up on infected people, strangling them for a while and then stabbing them in the neck. I’d then retake the controls, letting me act more like a photographer. That’s when I started to make better images – the whole experience resembled an actual embed, with someone doing the fighting and me taking photographs.
link to the article: http://time.com/3393418/a-war-photographer-embeds-himself-inside-a-video-game/
26/5/2015 – EDIT: Adi Roberston on The Verge comments on Gilbertson’s in-game photos, highlighting the difference between the photographer’s traditional images and the photos captured within the game.
But the photos? The photos, even at their most dramatic and well-shot, are bland.
Games have certainly included diaries or personal effects from dead enemies for dramatic purposes. But if they choose not to, you can’t look up a character’s parents in a phone book. Virtual people are never going to give you a “behind the scenes” look at their lives. You can’t humanize somebody who doesn’t exist.
Link to the article “An award-winning war photographer futilely attempts video game photojournalism”: http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/15/6152329/an-award-winning-war-photographer-futilely-attempts-video-game-photojournalism
More reaction from Kill Screen’s Zed Tan who writes about the project criticising the “misunderstanding that typically comes out of traditional media outlets attempting to import their practices and modes of production into a medium that it does not particularly lend itself to”.
the relationship between traditional (journalistic and otherwise) media and videogames is not one where each can simply plug-and-play into the other. Building an experience that makes sense when dealing with meshing “real” and videogame worlds needs to be carefully done.
Instead of treating videogames as a medium merely mimics the way our world works, we should be trying to reach a new understanding of videogames. Alexander R. Galloway, videogames scholar, proposes that “[i]f photographs are images, and films are moving images, then videogames are actions.”
Link to the article “WHAT TIME GOT WRONG ABOUT THE LAST OF US”: http://killscreendaily.com/articles/what-time-got-wrong-about-last-us/
in-game photography 