Framing the World

Taxonomy of Virtual Spaces Part II

An important aspect of my "Taxonomy of Virtual Spaces" (Rowe, unpublished) system for analyzing digital environment aesthetics is in defining how the world is framed by the screen. As I detailed in a previous blog post, the concept of the screen as a framing device or "window" through which a player observes a virtual world is one formalized by Clara Fernández-Vara, José Pablo Zagal, and Michael Mateas. In paper published through DiGRA, they state that “The screen is the basic unit of space in videogames, since it frames the interface” (Fernández-Vara et al., "Evolution of Spatial Configurations In Videogames," 2005). The screen can act as a yardstick by which we can measure the virtual space, one screen at a time, at least in most 2-D games.

The screen's parameters and motions are often described in camera terms, like a tracking shot following the player character or zooming in on a target. I argue that 2-D games do not have a concept of a game camera, which would imply a view from a fixed station point (the oculus). 2-D use paraline projections instead of perspectival views and there is no station point. The Unity game engine still uses an allegorical "orthographic camera" object to act as framing device for 2-D games, but does not construct an image of the world the way a camera or an eyeball would.

Virtual Worlds of the NES

BG Planning Sheet used in developing Super Mario Bros.

Nintendo's Famicom/NES game console was capable of displaying a 256 x 240 pixel image on a standard definition, 480i resolution screen with a 4 x 3 aspect ratio. These pixels are slightly wider than they are tall due to the fact that 256:240 is not exactly a 4:3 ratio, so they are stretched horizontally. Game backgrounds are typically divided into 16 x 16 pixel tiles (in truth, 16 x 16 metatiles created from four 8 x 8 tiles), so one screen is 16 tiles wide and 15 tiles high.

Blank BG Planning Sheet from Nintendo

Game developers at Nintendo used an internal form called a BG (background) Planning Sheet when devising the graphics for their games. This form includes a grid 16 tiles wide and 15 tiles high to represent the graphics that can fit on one screen. A CRT television would often have a bezel around the screen that would obscure part of the image, so important objects and data could only be shown on the TV's "tile-safe area" away from the edge of the display. You can see plus signs (+) marking the corners of this area on the sheet above.

Converting to 16 x 9

Mega Man (1987, Capcom) and Shovel Knight (2014, Yacht Club Games)

Yacht Club Games wanted to emulate the look and feel of NES platformer games like Mega Man in their own Shovel Knight. They faced the same problem: how to convert the graphics designed for a 240 pixel tall 4:3 display to a high definition 1080 pixel tall 16:9 display? They solved this by a method they call "breaking the NES." Each "pixel" of graphics in the game is displayed at 4.5 x 4.5 pixels. 1080/4.5=240, giving a effective vertical resolution of 240 pixels. Keeping the same vertical resolution of the NES gives them a 400 x 240 widescreen display area. Screens are still designed to be 15 tiles tall, but can extend further left and right than NES games. See the image above to see Shovel Knight side-by-side with original NES graphics. Yacht Club Games doesn't have to worry so much about a TV's tile-safe area, so they can display text much closer to the edge of the screen than NES developers could.

Super Mario Bros. and my project

This is the approach I've taken with my project as well. I am not trying to emulate pixel graphics as that is not the focus of my research, but I am copying the same vertical screen heights of objects (characters, obstacles, blocks) as seen in NES era platformer games. This preserves the size of objects on the screen, even when displaying on a 16 x 9 monitor.