Free look

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Free look (also known as mouselook) describes the ability to move a mouse, joystick, analogue stick, or D-pad to rotate the player character's view in video games. It is almost always used for 3D game engines, and has been included on role-playing video games, real-time strategy games, third-person shooters, first-person shooters, racing games, and flight simulators. Free look is nearly universal in modern games, but it was one of the significant technical breakthroughs of mid-1990s first-person perspective games. Many modern console games dedicate one of the several analogue sticks on the gamepad entirely to rotating the view, where as some older console games, when gamepads usually had fewer or only a single D-pad or analogue stick, had a feature where the single D-pad or analogue stick would move the view instead of the character whilst the player held down another button at the same time, often labelled in game as the "look button".

In games whose free-look systems are controlled fluidly via a pointing device, such as a mouse or the Wii Remote's infrared pointer, the camera will change angle when the cursor moves near an edge of the screen. To lock the camera angle, the player can position the cursor in a central region of the screen called a dead zone, named so in that it prevents the camera from moving. This allows the player to keep a steady focus on what lies forward, and the extent and size of the dead zone may be customizable in certain games.