Construction, Projection, Distraction: Contexts and Technics of the First-Person Video Game

An investigation into 3D video games as digital Potemkin villages: perspective-baiting decoy constructions employing skeuomorphism and trompe l'oeil. The aesthetic histories, heuristics, and rhetorics which underlie first-person video games are discussed, then fashioned into a critique of the genre through a proposal for a new video game in which players copy and paste 2D textures from and onto structures within the 3D environment.