This birth of the FPS

With first-person shooters being a wildly successful game genre of our generation, Alexander Galloway explores the origin as well as use of the subjective shot, or a camera shot meant to show exactly what the character is seeing, as if through that character's eyes. In film, the subjective shot has been used in order to emotionally and psychologically align the audience with the character, more intimately expressing characters' feelings of weariness, inebriation, confusion, intensity, excitement, trauma and so on. However, such camera shots can have counterintuitive effects when used poorly or if the representation of a character's point of view does not fall in line with what the audience believes it should.

It is argued that if the actionable space or graphical elements of a subjective shot, whether in video game or movie, are low in quality or too abstract for the audience to be able to engage, the results could be disastrous. Some examples of such failure, or at the very least, failed attempts to engage the audience through a film's use of the subjective perspective, can be seen as far back as 1969 with Alfred Hitchcock's Topaz or more recently, in films such as Doom and Gamer. While film has given birth to the first-person perspective found within many video games today, "specific formal innovations from games have migrated into the formal grammar of filmmaking" as well, giving birth to gamic cinema(Galloway, p. 62). More specifically, gamic cinema refers to a film style that places a large emphasis on the manipulation of the narrative space, ultimately stretching what could be considered a subjective shot. Furthermore, due to the degree of control given to players within video games, versus the control an audience member may exert over the movement of a movie's narrative, video games have become the "first mass media to effectively employ the first person subjective perspective, whereas film uses it only for special occasions" (Galloway, p. 69).