Not quite so black and white. (Score 1)

Missed the boat on this one but better late than never. The problem with some of the arguments here and elsewhere is that they have very rigid notions of what photography should be, and often what modern videogames are. Comparing screenshots to still frames from a movie assumes that games are just cutscenes rather than virtual worlds, and that the shot-maker has no influence on the subject or its treatment. This is obviously wrong. Going on to say that just because the textures, models, environments and atmosphere pre-exist somehow removes any artistic licence is equally naive. Muhammed Ali pre-exists: his face, body and the arena around him, not to mention the atmosphere of fight night, aren't the work of a photographer. Does that strip sports photographers of any artistic credentials? Of course not. Photography can many things. It can be capturing the drama of a scene in a new or unexpected way, or creating the scene by choosing what should and shouldn't be included the frame. When it comes to the games in question, nothing in that remit is beyond the power of today's PC players. They have to find the action, freeze it at dramatic point, then find a powerful angle. They have to light it, if not by creating the light or waiting for the right time of day, then by luring the subject into just the right place, and looking for a pose that catches the light provided by the developer. They have to adjust the camera's FOV to perfect the composition, using examples from real world photography to choose the right balance of foreground and background, the prominence of the subject and the peripheral detail. They can apply depth of field to, in some cases, differing degrees, together with things like exposure and colour balance. They can apply a vignette, create or exaggerate noise, and must avoid technical pitfalls like aliasing and visual artefacts. Then, thanks to the openness of many game engines, they can control the environment itself in ways a real photographer often can't. Put simply, the ingredients and requirements of a great, artful photograph are certainly available to a gamer. Not always, of course, and not the extreme degrees that separate 'high art' from most other kinds. But given that photography does, in its broadest and most popular sense, boil down to angles, compositions, movements and moments, it's simply obtuse to exclude a virtual camera and its user from the club. To put it another way, so long as it's possible for one screenshot of a scene to be markedly different and more captivating than another, videogame photography has its place. And where the fuck are my line breaks going?