Games, Montage, and the First Person Point of View

Michael Nitsche's paper examines interactive montage in video games, focusing on cuts to and from a first person point of view. Its central argument is that montage in games is not merely borrowed from film but operates under different conditions, since the player initiates each cut and the cut is an integral part of gameplay. The author contends that such cuts succeed when they reinforce the player's spatial positioning and control within the virtual environment, and that this produces a visual style that often refers to yet breaks cinematic conventions.

The analysis proceeds through four illustrative examples: Goldeneye 007's sniper view, which cuts from a first person view to a zoomed-in view; Siren's "sight-jacking" feature, which switches between a following camera and the perspectives of enemy creatures; Doom's map overview, which can be used for navigation and secret-finding; and Fatal Frame II, where cuts into the first person view are motivated by a photo camera. Across these cases, the paper finds that player-triggered cuts remain comprehensible when spatial continuity is preserved, even where they disregard rules such as the axis of action. Siren is presented as a counterexample, where the weakening of player positioning through complex, changing visualizations makes the game harder to read and play.

The paper draws on a body of work in game studies and film theory, including Bazin, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Manovich, and it concludes that Bazin's ideals of long takes, eye-level perspectives, and unobtrusive editing align most closely with the demands of interactive montage. The study is qualitative and text-based, relying on close readings of selected games rather than a survey or large dataset, and it is limited in scope to first person cuts within games that feature player-initiated editing. Nitsche ends by suggesting that montage in video games is still an evolving form, one that may require further development in both designers and players before more expressive possibilities are realized.