A very good analysis of the evolution of video game camera:
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. 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). This reading is often supported by the linear narrative provided by the classical history of videogames. 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. Data extraction has been conducted by the perusal of two leading European magazines as well as several hundred instruction booklets. 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.
See it here: http://gamestudies.org/2102/articles/krichane