As many researchers have pointed out, the advent of such a term historically associated with the technical apparatus of cinema has taken place in the context of the wide-ranging implementation of real-time 3D graphics in the videogame industry (Manovich, 2001 Nitsche, 2008 Perron & Therrien, 2009). For more than twenty-five years, it has been used by designers and critics alike in order to designate the point of view of a game, the specific framing of the gameworld as presented to the player on his screen. The term 'camera' has become a familiar expression in discourses addressing videogames since the 1990s. The mapping of the discursive history of this notion, sketched out in this paper, stems from a larger research study we have conducted on the modes of visualization in video games and their relationship to cinema and television (Krichane, 2018). Taylor, 2016), we will focus on the transfer of the notion of 'camera' within video game discourses. Rather than opting for a formal, technical, or anthropological approach (N. This article focuses more specifically on the history of the 'camera' in the context of video games. Taylor, 2012), among other topics of interest. While intermediality has been a topic of debate in the early years of game studies (Perron et al., 2019), it has subsequently given rise to important work, on the graphic styles of video games (Järvinen, 2002), adaptations (Picard & Fandango, 2008), photorealism (Perron & Therrien, 2009), machinima (Lowood & Nitsche 2011), or game spectatorship (T.L. As such, this work mobilizes methodological and epistemological foundations that come from both game studies and film/media studies. The research presented here is part of the prolific field of studies dealing with the relationship between audiovisual media and video games.

Keywords: Camera, paratext, magazines, 3-D, Historiography, Video game history, Game reviews Introduction In this article, we focus on the earliest conception of the term 'camera' within discourses associated with videogames from the end of the 1980s to the mid-1990s, a framing we refer to as the 'diegetic camera.' Our analysis shows that the word 'camera' bears no stable nor irrevocable meaning in the context of videogames, but has rather gone through a historical process of naturalization determined by the gradual disappearance of the cinematic mindset originally associated with the term. Data extraction has been conducted by the perusal of two leading European magazines as well as several hundred instruction booklets. Our research aims at retracing the emergence of the notion of 'camera' through a close reading of a textual corpus that provides a representative sample of production and press discourses from 1987 to 1998. This reading is often supported by the linear narrative provided by the classical history of videogames. The 'virtual camera' of videogames is therefore perceived by researchers as a direct and stable consequence of graphical and computational procedures (Manovich, 2001 Jones, 2007). The rise of the 'camera' in the context of videogames is generally associated with the widespread use of real-time 3D graphics during the 1990s. When Seeing is Playing: The History of the Videogame Camera by Selim Krichane Abstract

1990s helicopter sim game