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Trigger Happy
216
Isometric perspective was not a brand-new
discovery. It is very similar, for instance, to the form of
“parallelism” (representation in which parallel lines do
not converge) found in ancient Chinese art, whose high
viewpoint and oddly elongated (to the modern eye)
diagonals are reproduced by Zaxxon and its siblings. In
this case it is irrelevant that isometricity doesn’t
resemble the way we see things in real life.
29
In
videogames, isometric perspective enjoyed a phase as
the most technologically sophisticated means of
building a 3D world, for example on games such as Ant
Attack, Highway Encounter and Knight Lore for the
ZX Spectrum.
Foreshortening implies a subjective, individual
viewpoint, so its absence in isometric graphics, along
with the elevated position of survey, conspired to give
the user a sense of playing God in these tiny universes.
God could not yet move around—he was still glued to
his chair—but he could see everything, he was in
control, and he saw that it was good.
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29 At any distance, that is. In fact, according to modern psychologists, when
scrutinizing objects that are very close in our visual field, convergence
doesn’t operate, and what we “see” actually resembles parallelism more
closely.