The digital game interface is the portal between the player and the game form – a junction point between input and output, hardware and software. Designed to draw together eye, body, and gameworld, the game interface is a complex system comprising both graphical and physical elements such as screens, keyboards, joysticks, controllers, and other peripherals. This complexity has yet to be unpacked in any detail by the field of digital game studies, however, where the graphic interface often stands in for a more thorough rendering of the game interface as an embodied instrument. In a recent article, Mia Consalvo (2006) describes the interface as ‘any on-screen information that provides the player with information concerning the life, health, location or status of the character(s), as well as battle or action menus, nested menus … or additional screens that give the player more control over manipulating elements of gameplay’. Here, and elsewhere, the digital game interface is acknowledged as a physical instrument but theorized as a predominately visual technology.

The history of the digital game interface is typically traced through two historically potent technologies of vision. The graphic interface used in most digital games is the rectangular frame inherited from Western painting and Hollywood cinema. The spatial architecture and visual appearance of nearly all 3D videogames is derived from the perspectival schema developed by Leon Battista Alberti in the fifteenth century. A picture constructed according to the rules of classical perspective is a simple form of graphic interface, enabling the subject to access a virtual world ‘behind’ the plane of the image. Most digital game software – and much of the hardware as well – is structurally married to linear perspective, and theoretically aligned with the logic of classical representational space.[1]

In adopting the graphic interface as a proxy for the game interface in a broader sense, the field of game studies has also taken on board much of the historical and epistemological baggage amassed by the perspective paradigm and the classical theories of representation that followed on from it. Key among these is the form that is ascribed to the gaming subject. More often than not, the latter is assumed to operate in the mode of ‘scopic Cartesianism’  – to behave as a static, monosensory agent, focused on the image in front of it and experiencing the gameworld primarily, if not exclusively, by means of vision. According to the classical schema, what takes place outside of this circuit is not part of the gameplay experience. Few gamers, however, restrict themselves to a fixed viewing position during gameplay, and the introduction of more physically involving interfaces like the Wii and the EyeToy suggests that the classical inside/outside dialectic with its immobile, decorporealized observer, no longer offers an adequate account of the gaming experience (if it ever has). This in turn suggests that the field of game studies requires a different subjective model, one that takes into account the specifically embodied nature of the digital game interface, and of the gameplay experience itself.

Rather than proposing an entirely new model of subjectivity, however, the following discussion re-examines the classical circuit of representation with a view to a broader understanding of the kind of subject that it suggests. I will revisit two signal moments in the history of Western representation – Filippo Brunelleschi’s perspective experiment of 1429, and Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors (1533) ­– examining the way that the classical inside/outside dialectic is challenged or refuted in each of these works. I will go on to suggest that the classical subject of representation can be rethought in terms of an anamorphic subject – a subject that inhabits simultaneously the classical circuit of representation, and the wider environment within which the latter is situated.

Anamorphic images – concealed images in pictures, revealed only when the subject moves away from the intended viewing position – are discussed in almost all treatises on perspective up to the end of the eighteenth century, and are widely recognized as a means of proclaiming the limits of perspectival representation. As a concept of transformation ­– from the Greek anamorphoun, to transform or ‘form again’ – anamorphic images require the viewer to experience the picture as both image and object. In demanding this sort of dexterity on the part of the subject, they pose a challenge to the inside/outside distinction that is generally assumed in classical theories of representation, and counter much of the received wisdom concerning the way that such theories work. Rather than the distanced and immobile subject typically implied in classical models, the notion of anamorphic subjectivity suggests that the relation between subjects and technologies of vision is something more proximate, and more pliable.   

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As a technology of vision, linear perspective is an abstract relation – it exists as a system of rules rather than a material object. As a paradigm, its influence extends far beyond the pictorial realm and the era within which it was initially conceived. As a cultural formation, linear perspective traverses history, functioning as a model for thought, ‘leaving [its] mark on the most diverse fields of endeavour, and [remaining] resolutely unembarrassed by being declared “obsolete”.’ (Damisch xx) Even today, the perspective paradigm carries considerable epistemological weight, acting as a metaphor for human vision and subjectivity in discourses ranging from science to philosophy.[2] Running through the history of perspectival representation, however, is a parallel and far less conspicuous awareness of the perspective interface as a kind of physical machine.

In fact, the earliest recorded use of single-point perspective – an event that is often singled out as the origin of Renaissance perspectival space – involved a physical machine. In 1429, Florentine architect Filippo Brunelleschi built an experimental device consisting of a simple apparatus: a mirror held in one hand, and a small painted panel, pierced at the vanishing point by a small hole, held in the other. Placing their eye against the reverse side of the panel, and holding the flat mirror directly opposite so as to reflect the painted image in it, the viewer was treated to a magically realistic and apparently three-dimensional view of the Baptistry of San Giovanni.

This demonstration can be understood, as Hubert Damisch has noted, as a phenomenological reduction – an intentional act that isolates the viewer from the surrounding environment and from their own corporeal body, both of which, Damisch claims, are excluded from the scene of representation.^[3] This interior/exterior dialectic was also articulated in the image itself. The painted panel showed a closely cropped view of the Baptistry, framed only by segments of the facades of the two buildings on either side. The sky above the Baptistry was not rendered in paint, however, but reflected, from outside the image, in a sheet of polished silver which Brunelleschi had inserted at the top of the panel.  In contrast to the precise rendering of the buildings, sky-dwelling forms such as clouds appeared strangely imprecise, without stable boundary or location. Visible from within the illusion only as the reflection of a reflection, the clouds represented the limits of perspectival representation – an excess that could not be described or contained by the rules of perspective.[4] This excess – understood as the amorphous; that which lacks definitive shape or form – is typically attributed, within classical theories of representation, to the human body and the realm of ‘nature’ to which it belongs.

It is equally apparent, however, that the event of seeing in perspective – which involved the taking in hand of a pair of objects – is underwritten, in Brunelleschi’s demonstration, by the carnal body as its necessary condition. Brunelleschi’s apparatus shows perspectival vision as a real world event, in which the body of the viewer occupies a paradoxical position: necessary to the event of seeing in perspective, but present only outside of the illusion – banished from the circuit of representation.

In 1435, Leon Battista Alberti set down the results of Brunelleschi’s experiment in written form, providing a concise set of instructions for painters wishing to construct pictures in linear perspective. Though it was proclaimed as a sort of ‘natural magic’, Albertian perspective was a regulatory protocol, concerned with the management and direction of the viewer in front of the picture. Alberti’s rules for perspectival construction depended upon three key variables – viewing point, vanishing point, and horizon line. The centric ray  – Alberti’s ‘prince of rays’ – extended from the viewing position to the vanishing point, linking the spectator’s eye outside the painting with the virtual space behind the picture plane. In theory, the perspectival image could only be seen properly if the viewer occupied the true point of sight, maintaining a precise distance – the ‘distance of the picture’ – between this point and the canvas. Viewing the picture from this position, the subject was said to experience ‘a precise identification between himself and the painter’, and was thereby constructed as a subject of representation ‘in the space between the eye and the canvas, in the distance of the picture’. (De Bolla 197) Though this sort of site-specificity did not preclude the collateral presence of other modes of subjectivity (classed, gendered, etc.), the classical subject of representation was distinguished as such through its interpolation into the circuit of representation, and by its agency within this circuit – its ability to read the image.

Costruzione legittima, as it was called, thus furnishes a conceptual link between representation, vision, and subjectivity. Conceived as a static, monocular eye, the subject of representation is called into being by the circuit of representation, and maintains this status only on the condition that the material circumstances of the viewing event – the corporeal body and its surround – remain outside the boundaries of this circuit.As it was set out by Alberti, linear perspective is an isomorphic system: a mode of representation in which interior and exterior are clearly demarcated, ‘mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive.’ (Adams 141-2) From Alberti onward, perspective theory ‘imagines a viewing scene and generates a theoretical description of the practice which erases almost entirely the ‘real’.’ (De Bolla 222) Much Modernist art theory is founded on similarly dualistic systems of perception, in which ‘a rapt, timeless presence of perception is contrasted with lower, mundane, or quotidian forms of seeing…’. (Crary 1999; 46) Like costruzione legittima, such theories assume that the focused experience of an image is incompatible with the empirical conditions of perception.

Perspectival vision is part of the fabric of subjectivity, a necessary constituent of a subject living and functioning within Modern and Postmodern regimes of visuality; a Renaissance technology that sits so comfortably on the body that it is often conflated with physiological vision. Of course, the idea that the subject derives its substance from a circuit of representation that stands apart from the rest of the world has never, in practice, provided a very accurate description of what subjects are or what they do. The following section examines the experience of consuming an image from a different angle.

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Almost from the moment of its introduction, the strict rules prescribed by the perspectival image have been at odds with the practice of viewing. Looking at pictures is a public activity as well as a private encounter, and as such, the practice of viewing is open to all kinds of transgressions and multiple viewpoints. Although it is typically understood as a null space, reserved for the movement of the eye alone, the distance of the picture is a space designed to accommodate a mobile, active agent.

Holbein’s Ambassadors (1533) makes this point explicitly. The picture portrays Jean de Denteville, French ambassador to the court of King Henry VIII, and cleric Georges de Selve. The two men are posed against a large cabinet containing, on the lower shelf, objects representing the terrestrial realm, and on the upper shelf, objects symbolizing the celestial realm. The vanishing point and corresponding position of the viewer in front of the picture are clearly indicated by the precise perspectival rendering of the various objects. Standing in front of the painting, the viewer’s eye is drawn to a mysterious shape that fills the foreground of the image. In order to render this odd apparition legible to the eye, the viewer must approach the painting closely and look obliquely, from a position on the right, about halfway up the frame.

In fact, Holbein intended his picture to be viewed as a dramatic spectacle, a play in two acts. According to Baltrusaitis (105), Holbein was quite specific about the manner in which the picture should be hung. The Ambassadors was to be installed in a room with two doors, each one corresponding to one of the picture’s two viewing positions. In the first act, the viewer enters the room and sees the picture from the frontal position. Captivated by its realism, the viewer is also perplexed by the indecipherable object at the bottom of the picture. Leaving by the second door, the disconcerted viewer casts a brief sidelong glance at the painting, and it is at this point that the strange object resolves itself into an image of a skull. Looking at the picture from the oblique position, the image of the skull is neither close nor distant; neither confined within the frame, nor sharing space with the viewer, who is left with the uncomfortable feeling of being unable to establish a specific distance from it. The anamorphic image seems to belong to a different register of reality than the rest of the image; it is both an aberrant element within representation and a phantom object with a strange density and agency outside of it.

In itself, the anamorphic image is no less legislated than its perspectivally correct counterpart; as De Bolla writes, the anamorphic image is ‘merely the most fully controlled image, demanding a unique viewing position in order to give up its ‘truth’ of representation…’ (201) Anamorphic images do not exist in isolation, however – they are always articulated against the counterpoint of a ‘correct’ image, which they depend upon both to conceal and to signal their presence. Anamorphic images offer up a viewing position in addition to the frontal one, compounding the viewing experience and inviting the viewer into the distance of the picture. The possibility of movement within this space, between two viewing positions, is key to the constitution of the anamorphic picture, which forcefully alters the viewer’s relation to the image and destabilizes the boundary between the interior and exterior of the circuit of representation. Announcing the subject of representation as an embodied agent – one that is free to move and act within the distance of the picture – Holbein’s image reminds us that straying from the proper viewing position is a necessary part of our relationship with an image.

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Foregrounding the temporal and embodied dimensions of the classical circuit of representation, the notion of anamorphic subjectivity suggests that this circuit is best understood not just as a theoretical space, but as a real social space that incorporates both the subject and the technology of vision. This has significant implications for the way that gameplay experience is theorized.

The suggestion that that the space of representation cannot – other than on a purely theoretical plane – be partitioned into ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ domains is not, in itself, a particularly novel one. In refuting false dichotomies of a self interpellated within a circuit of representation and a body outside of this circuit, however, the notion of anamorphic subjectivity enables us to situate the classical circuit of representation within the wider context of the relationship between visual technologies and their users. Engaging with such technologies – whether they consist of simple physical objects like a Claude glass, complex abstract rule systems like Albertian perspective, or digital game interfaces – requires the subject to adapt her/his own bodily movements and perceptual habits. We don’t simply use such technologies, we embody or incorporate them, and our sense of self undergoes a subtle alteration when we do so.[5] Visual technologies, in other words, are best understood not as simple tools or inanimate objects, but in the broader context ofintegrated cognitive systems, where subject and interface are ‘so tightly coupled that it’s possible to see them more as a single temporarily integrated system than as an agent operating on a distinct passive medium.’ (Sutton 131-2) The capacities and characteristics of such systems differ from those of either primitive unit. What is shared by Brunelleschi’s device, Holbein’s painting, and the videogame interface is their explicit treatment of the subject not as a passive, self-contained entity, but as a technologically enabled, embodied self.

These three exemplary interfaces also remind us that the experience of an image involves both the incorporation of the subject in/by the technology of vision, and its immersion within the scene of representation itself. The subject actively invests itself in a virtual world that is designed, in part, to focus and direct the look. Unlike the subject of classical representation, however, the gaming subject engages with moving images and narrative, which suggests that we look to film theory in order to better understand how that subject is positioned. The concept of suture describes how the cinematic text interpolates the viewer into the diegesis. According to this argument, both the filmic narrative, and the relationships between shots – typically the shot-reverse-shot construction – are responsible for constructing a subject position for the viewer and allowing meaning to emerge. Though it is the camera’s gaze that directs the spectator’s look, it is vital that this gaze must be seen to belong to a character within the diegesis, and not to the apparatus itself. The classic film text, as Silverman writes, ‘must at all costs conceal from the viewing subject the passivity of that subject’s position, and this necessitates denying the fact that there is any reality outside of the fiction’. (204) Identification with onscreen events takes place when the viewing subject accepts the position of a fictional character as a stand-in for its own, or when it allows that character’s point of view to define what it sees. The operation of suture is successful ‘at the moment that the viewing subject says, “Yes, that’s me,” or “That’s what I see”.’(205)

The concept of suture has been deployed within digital game criticism to describe the player’s relationship to their avatar. Wolf (1997) has argued that ‘theoretically, many of the same issues are present in video games and film: spectator positioning and suture, point of view, sound and image relations, semiotics, and other theories dealing with images or representation.’ (11) First person shooter games are the most compelling example of the operation of suture at work within digital games. Bob Rehak observes that ‘the FPS’s direct (visual) address, updated in real time, presents one ongoing and unbroken half of the shot-reverse-shot construction, enabling a snug fit between the player and his or her game-produced subjectivity.’ (119) The figure of the avatar, standing in for the player, concretizes for the player their role as the observer of events: ‘The disavowal necessary to gameplay is like the “Yes, that’s what I see” of successful cinematic suture, but goes further: it is “Yes, that’s what I do.”’ (121)

Though gameplay might be imagined to demand a high degree of perceptual synthesis, neither here, nor in cinema, is suture ever fully achieved. The viewer’s identification with the cinematic apparatus events is always intermittent; all films contain moments where the spell is broken and the viewer resists interpellation into the narrative. In digital games, which are both spectatorial and participatory, these ‘intermissions’ take a singular form. On the one hand the gamer is invited to behave as a classical subject: to read the image on the screen through the mechanisms of classical representation and cinema, to identify with their onscreen character and to be interpolated into the narrative as both its creator and spectator. On the other hand, the gamer also engages with the digital game interface as a physical object encountered in space and time.The gamer isimplicated in the dynamics of the viewing experience; actively involved in the creation of this experience rather than passively constituted by it. At certain points in the game (typically, those associated with a failure of the technology or a lapse in technique) the player’s attention is thrown back onto the apparatus. Here, ‘certain associations or body-felt realities registered by the observer have the potential of shifting the subject of the exchange to the identity of the observer.’ (Collins 75)

In short, the gameplay experience is both an internal private matter and an exterior public one; not simply a private and static exchange with an image, but an unstable and shifting awareness of one’s surroundings as patterns of attention group and regroup around various foci. The subject inhabits the virtual world and the subjectivity of the character he/she is playing, at the same time as they inhabit a ‘real’ body – the ‘perceiving, active, oriented being-a-body … that is a constant of all our experiencings.’ (Ihde 69) Like its historical precursors, the gaming subject exists simultaneously within the virtual world and the real social space to which it belongs, enjoying a special kind of doubled agency – two selves, real and virtual, superimposed upon one another and functioning in parallel.

Thinking through gameplay in terms of anamorphic subjectivity allows us to understand the former both as a re-reading of the terms of classical representation, and also in the wider context of historical shifts in the character and understanding of perception. From the mid-nineteenth century onward, Classical models of perception that depend upon a focused and attentive subject have featured prominently in attempts to explain or discover the human capacity for synthesizing an increasingly fragmented perceptual field. Particularly in the late nineteenth century, Western culture saw the active focusing of attention as a means of counterbalancing the phantasmagoric effect of modern image culture, and of shaping the perceiving body into a productive and orderly unit.[6] The need to maintain focus in an environment filled with distractions was, in part, a justification for the manytechniques for imposing perceptual synthesis that developed throughout the nineteenth century. Even in the present day, attentive behaviour in front of computer screens and other visual displays continues to be an ‘integral part of a network of control and observation in which society is bound, another form of ‘disciplinary attentiveness’.’ (Crary 1999; 77)

Some claim that digital games, by attempting to homogeneize both gamespace and gameplay, fall squarely into the latter category. (Garite 2003) It is clear, however, that contemporary digital games offer something quite different than the quasi-automatic functionality imposed by earlier game forms, and, in a broader context, by the global electronic networks that fuse work and leisure, communication, and consumption. The fact is that unfocused and constantly shifting patterns of attention are part of the context of a modern and postmodern technological milieu.[7] Seen in this context, a digital game is not a restricted sensory field, but an expanded one which incorporates ‘mundane’ modes of perception that classical theories of representation sought to deny. Like an anamorphic picture, it is an integrated system which assumes a pliable, multimodal, embodied subjectivity, and which invites creative modes of inattention. It is also a new kind of technological assemblage in which ‘an institutionally competent attentiveness veers into something vagrant, unfocused, something folded back against itself,’ (Crary 1999; 77) and which, rather than an inanimate tool, takes the form of an active, embodied cultural technique. This is the legacy of the anamorphic subject.

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[1] Here, the terms ‘classical’ perspective and ‘classical’ representational space are used to refer to the spatial regimes derived from Renaissance perspectival models and dominant, in Western culture, between the mid-seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. See Jonathan Crary (1995) Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge and London: MIT Press.

[2] See Romanyshyn, Robert D (1989). Technology as Symptom and Dream. New York: Routledge.

[3] “Far from capturing the real directly … this “view” corresponded to a bracketing, to a veritable phenomenological reduction: within the brackets established by the panel and the mirror the real was excluded, was outside the circuit … As was the subject itself, which gained access only by abstracting itself out of the specular relation.” Damisch (1995), pp139-140.

[4] ‘The immeasurability and ubiquity of the sky … and the unanalyzable surfacelessness of the clouds, render these things fundamentally unknowable by the perspective order.’ (Krauss160)

[5] see Ihde, Don (2002). Bodies in Technology. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

[6] The concept of attention, as Crary relates, ‘became an imprecise way of designating the relative capacity of a subject to selectively isolate certain contents of a sensory field at the expense of others in the interests of maintaining an orderly and productive world.’(1999; 17)

[7]  ‘For the last 100 years perceptual modalities have been and continue to be in a state of perpetual transformation … If vision can be said to have any enduring characteristic within the twentieth century, it is that it has no enduring features. Rather it is embedded in a pattern of adaptability to new technological relations, social configurations, and economic imperatives.’ (Crary 1999; 13)