Take snaps, not lives: a different kind of first-person shooter

When Pokémon Snap came out in 1999, the idea of a game where you take photographs was something of a novelty. Then, it was a simple twist on a gaming staple: a first-person shooter that swaps guns for cameras, aimed not at enemies but cute beasties you pass during a fantastical safari.

The game’s recent sequel, New Pokémon Snap, emerges in a very different gaming landscape. Today in-game photography is a phenomenon comprising a whole genre. Busy online communities share virtual snapshots and sophisticated tools which allow players to take pictures of their gameplay. Some of these images even line the walls of real-world art galleries.

Photography has been employed in a recent string of indie games to encourage players to engage more with a game’s world. This makes environmental design, often sumptuously detailed in modern releases, the star of the show rather than mere set dressing. Nuts tasks you with photographing squirrels in a forest, Firewatch supplies players with a camera that has limited film to ensure you value each snap, while the upcoming Season gives you a camera to document a stunning landscape in the final days before an apocalypse. Last year’s Umurangi Generation was particularly thoughtful, telling rich stories through its detailed sci-fi environments, offering players complex tools to fine-tune their images and exploring issues around environmentalism and Maori culture.

It’s not just arthouse games that incorporate photography as an alternative to violence. Games such as Beyond Good and Evil and Dragon Quest VIII ask you to take photos of local fauna and landmarks, while The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild offers you an encyclopedia to fill with images of every monster, plant and weapon you encounter. Final Fantasy XV takes a novel approach as one of your team members, Prompto, is a photographer who independently takes pictures of your journey through the game, making for a moving document.

One of the more surprising applications of in-game photography is in the horror genre. In Dead Rising you play a photojournalist who earns points for taking pictures in genres including horror, humour and — somewhat perplexingly for a zombie game — erotica. Meanwhile the Fatal Frame series uses the camera as a weapon to reveal and banish ghosts that are invisible to the human eye. Your survival depends on your ability to frame and take pictures under pressure.

These in-game photography missions are accompanied by a recent rise in “photo modes” in blockbuster games, which allow players to pause the action, detach from the protagonist and swoop around the scene as a disembodied lens. These have emerged in response to the growing beauty and complexity of game worlds, and many allow players to tweak their images by simulating the effects of a real camera to play with aperture, focal length and depth of field. Since these are bonus features, rather than part of the main gameplay, they can be explored purely for aesthetic pleasure with no pesky objectives to limit your creativity.

While a range of games now incorporate photo modes, none can match the outstanding features of Sony’s PlayStation-exclusive titles. In Spider-Man, players can add comic book-style filters and pose Spidey to take selfies, while samurai epic Ghost of Tsushima encourages players to take pictures by framing the player in ravishing locations at the end of missions, allowing you to tweak not just your lens but the weather and time of day.

Today’s gamers are trained directors, experts in aiming and framing

These features are not simply added to allow players to flex their creative muscles. Since the PlayStation 4, most console controllers have been shipped with a “share” button, allowing players to take screenshots and post them to social media. By fostering excited communities of amateur game photographers online, companies have invented a canny new promotional tool — they don’t even need to make their games look good any more, because the players will do it for them.

Some in-game photographers have elevated photo modes to an art form. Petri Levälahti has gained an impressive following for his beautiful framing and innovative subversions of in-game weapons — he might throw a smoke bomb in The Last of Us 2 to make a misty background for a portrait shot, or set his own character on fire in Battlefield 5 to create an emotive colour contrast. Perhaps most striking are the images of Robert Overweg who, rather than enhancing graphics to make game worlds look photorealistic, emphasises their artifice, taking pictures of the liminal spaces where objects dissolve into pixelated wireframes or where a road drops off. A selection of his thought-provoking works were exhibited in the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2015.

When games first took the jump to 3D, long before photo modes appeared, developers gave players control of the in-game camera, allowing them to swing around their character and choose where to look. Today’s gamers are trained directors, experts in aiming and framing. Increasingly they turn these skills towards aesthetic, rather than violent, ends.

The rising popularity of in-game photo modes demonstrates how meaningful time spent in games can feel. They ask us to engage with the virtual environment creatively and lovingly, scanning our surroundings not for objects to shoot but for subjects to observe. We slow down, visit neglected parts of the game map, and accept the role of a tourist. We capture these moments as we would a holiday, returning to these environments sometimes just to idle, wander, bask in their beauty. These are spaces where new memories are made.