Just the other day, I was driving at 160 mph around a pool in a principality in the south of France and I had a thought. What is the Queen’s middle name? It turns out it’s “Rani,” Who knew. Ok, stupid joke about a woman who has outreigned every other monarch aside, I did have a thought. The aforementioned speed may have gotten to my head and I might have lost all sense of relative time, as humans became not but a blur holding flags. Photo modes and taking screenshots have become a huge hit in recent years. Thinking like a normal person playing a game 20-years ago, you wouldn’t have dreamt of it.

Now, since the explosion of YouTube and Twitch, along with other factors normalizing this small part of nerd culture; we don’t think twice of how screenshots and gameplay footage are captured. Hearing the “horror” stories of how E3 was to work in 2003, many early gaming sites would be ripping the master tape and running through halls or pointing a camera at a TV. Ah, simpler times they were. With the PS4 and Xbox One featuring in-built screenshot, recording, streaming, and social media functionality in the software, it is easier than ever for anyone to grab a moment in a game.

In essence, gaming has caught up with where the phone got to in just over one hundred years. Yes, we’ve invented the camera phone. If all you know is the lord of the iPhone, look up “the brick” or Nokia 3650. In relative terms for that metaphor, we’re still some ways off from catching up in that respect, but nonetheless, it is just as important. It’s important now because a lot of games have photo modes, in-game cameras, and so on. Some work in-world, like Red Dead Redemption 2 including Ye old-timey camera and Mad Max (2015) telling you to go hog-wild on that thing. It is to a point when a game doesn’t have one, it is seen as disappointing.

I can see why. There are many reasons one might want to use a photo mode: Capture a bug, capture a personal desktop wallpaper, or perv on every character’s Barbie and Ken-like genitals. Of course, I use it to get images for articles when I can be bothered to. However, every now and then, I use these modes as a form of looking at something in greater detail, seeing the dodgy work a developer did when they weren’t expecting me to look down the game’s pants. The equivalent of saying, “My, what big graphical glitches you have there behind that wall, on the far corner of a room, the one I can’t get into.”

Of course, with the camera being in-world like Grand Theft Auto V‘s phone, the player restrictions already apply. Mad Max and the F1 games, in particular, give you free rein within a specific area. In truth, I can maybe think of three games that actually use the camera for gameplay purposes: Beyond Good and Evil, Life is Strange, and 11-11: Memories Retold. In two you are a photojournalist of sorts, and the other you are a teenager at a high school for hipsters and a perv. For the most part, cameras are regimented into taking photos of classmates in Bully, or big guns in Memories Retold.

I don’t know what images I’m using yet, but I know one thing. The games in question didn’t tell me to take those pictures. I thought: “That looks interesting.” They may not be perfectly framed, I might not be using the right effects to capture something someone else would have, but they do something. They are showing that games, no matter how unrealistic, unaltered, or how simple and un-bullshot-like they are, capture something special. I’m clearly going to use a Monaco F1 shot, possibly from the swimming pool chicane going 160 miles per hour. It is an unrealistic shot but special nonetheless.

That is something video games can do unlike any other; capture the moment a blue man flies through the air, a car coming towards a camera at 160 mph around a bend, or capture moments while fighting an ungodly horde of zombies or a massive beast. Yes, films could most likely do the same, but you can see where it was faked and you weren’t there. With video games, you are in that Mad Max car explosion, that Metal Gear Solid V battle with a metal dinosaur with nuclear weapons, or you are standing on The Prydwen in your power armor. It is the control you have over the situation.

If we can really do just about anything with video games, why don’t we have games about being a journalist as a Cloverfield monster rips through a city? I don’t want to capture a still shot of the monster, I want to capture the people as they run away. I don’t just want to capture a dreary shot of a depressed Englishman at war, I want to capture bullets flying past during the D-day landings. I’ve shot all the men and monsters with guns, give me a camera and some chaotic action of cars, war, destruction, and so on, because that is interesting.

You want to play with photo modes? I want a game that is nothing but a photo mode, in fact, I want multiple games. Let me observe every exciting moment, but instead of me chopping down trees for survival, I have to not be shot, stabbed, run over, or squished to survive. That sounds fun, I want that now!

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