The Orc camp was a smoking ruin and I looked down and said, “It is good.”

This time it was virtual fun in the world of Divine Divinity. Next time it might be some other planet or plane. But that unique perspective on the game world, up-high, looking down from roughly a 45 degree angle--the isometric perspective--gives any game of any genre a certain feel.

Isometric perspective games, from Diablo and Starcraft through to SimCity 4 all provide a view of the action from an eye in the sky that many equate to a godlike presence on the part of the player. At least, the player is supposed to feel more like god than someone floating above the map in a blimp.

Stephen Poole speaks for a common conception when he writes in Trigger Happy:

“Foreshortening implies a subjective, individual viewpoint, so it’s 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.” (p.122)

Poole is as good a critic as video games has. But something has occurred to me lately, and that is this interpretation is actually wrong in a sort of inside out way.

Scientific perspective is the fairly recent (OK, 500-year-old) invention that realized the way we see things in real life works the way a pair of railroad tracks appears to vanish into a single point on the horizon. In a nutshell, things that are closer look bigger and things that are further away look smaller—even if those things happen to be the same size. So, for example, see a little demon in Doom, get ready to shoot, he's way down the hall; big demon in Doom, shoot now.

The isometric perspective, on the other hand, gives equal weight to height, width and depth. By foregoing foreshortening, this perspective gives the scene a consistency that works well for architectural models and, obviously, video games. Things that are close appear to be the same size as things that are further away.

The notion that this is a “god view” really boils down to the fact that this description is an easy way to account for the point-of-view taking place from somewhere up in the clouds. Who else would be up there looking down on all the action?

What I’ve always noticed is that isometric games are the kinds of games that feel the most like little toy dioramas. Pushing around tanks or dwarves on an isometric playing board does provide a sense of power, but more of one that reminds me of being a kid, playing with a set of toy soldiers than one of being some sort of omnipotent deity.

Take a look at The Sims as an example. A classic isometric game, the title is invariably described as an “interactive dollhouse”

What I think makes The Sims feel like a dollhouse has less to do with the fact that the Sims themselves look or behave much like the dolls most kids play with and has more to do with the isometric perspective. The reason why is because I think that rather than describing isometric perspective as a technical tool for architects, as far as games are concerned we should call it “The perspective of childhood”.

Back to Poole, he drops a very interesting footnote into his discussion of isometric and scientific perspective:

“In fact, according to modern psychologists, when scrutinizing objects that are very close in our visual field, convergence doesn’t operate and what “see” actually resembles parallelism more closely.” (p. 122)

In the context of his discussion,, he is pointing out that scientific perspective (coverging lines meeting at a vanishing points) only works at a distance. Up close things appear isometric (parallelism). Optically, it’s a trick of scale. Without enough space for objects to reveal their vanishing points and relative sizes, everything looks like it was laid out on an isometric grid. The isometric perspective is not the invention of architects as much as it is a way of rendering 3-D scenes as seen from very close. This is the vantage point of children and their toys--down close, the toys filling their entire field of vision, context lost to the immedidate focus on the object in hand.

Try it. Get close to an object or a pile of objects—try a small scene made out of toys. Stuff relatively further away looks as big as stuff closer to the front. Everything looks, well, if you’re looking at a bunch of toy tanks it looks like Command and Conquer.

So tracking back to the notion of isometric perspective in games, I don’t think it does give a godlike view of the world. It gives a childlike view of the world, which for children, is a powerful godlike view of the world. What I mean is, one reason kids like toys is that these objects form a world where they feel powerful. Kids don’t have a lot of real chances to feel powerful and potent in the land of grown-ups. But in play they can be anyone or anything and they thrill at the feeling of being in control (See Gerard Jones’ important and fantastic “Killing Monsters” for more on this). Setting up a dollhouse family gives a kid a chance to boss everyone around and play the person-in-control. A kid that can’t ride a bike can still wipe out an entire miniature army with the wrath of a nuclear strike via tennis ball.

Where that leaves us is that the isometric perspective is about power and control. But it is the free and safe feeling of power that children have when they play. Not the complex adult god who has responsibilities for keeping his creation in line.

How does this matter to video games? Without trying to guess all the ramifications of pointing out the real power of the isometric perspective, I would at least say designers should think twice about the intent of their subject matter when they put a game into isometric perspective. I’m not sure how easy it will be to get players into a mature frame of mind when they are experiencing information in a format that is so closely related to a child-like experience of the world. Then again, the horror of war in isometric perspective will never be greater than the suffering of a little green army man inflicted with a hot match.

All that is to say: Isoemetric approaches mitigate realiasm through the filter of childlike wonder.

(Note: The title of this article is an intentional reference to the fine fantasy works of Terry Prachett!)