In video gaming, so much depends on a player’s sightlines. How does a developer’s decision to situate a game in the first-person or the third-person impact the playing experience? Which perspective is better?
Noah: Perspective rarely makes or breaks a game for me, but, on balance, I prefer to play in the first-person. While I’ll concede that first-person games are more disorienting than third-person ones—just park a parent in front of a Halo title and you’ll see what I mean—the fact that the first-person perspective is limiting actually results in a much more rewarding (i.e., better) experience. I feel compelled to reiterate, though, that this is strictly a matter of preference: anyone who seriously contends that first-person games are uniformly superior to their third-person counterparts stands in ignorance of the many other factors, like narrative and mechanics, that determine a game’s worth.
A lot of the noise that’s made about the merits of the first- versus the third-person revolves around the relative ability of either perspective to make the gaming experience “immersive.” For those unfamiliar with the term, allow me to explain: immersiveness is kind of like gaming shorthand for the ability to uphold the suspension of disbelief, except that the quality of being immersive is more about creating a sense of realness and urgency than it is about believability.
Call of Duty’s Nazi Zombies, for instance, is one of the most immersive games I’ve played—yet, in all my playthroughs, I have never once thought, “I’m totally Nikolai, a drunk Russian locked in a theater who must kill undead fascists with the guns I have ‘bought’ from a glowing box using imaginary points.” This is to say that I’ve gotten really into Nazi Zombies without believing the game’s premise for an instant.
Now, gaming pedants like to argue that the first-person perspective does a far better job of cultivating a sense of immersion. They say that, because the first-person perspective in gaming is very true-to-life (since, you know, your locus of vision in the real world isn’t five feet behind your head), the resulting experience is much more immersive than what’s offered by any third-person game. Underlying this argument is an assumption that the only good game is an immersive one, which I find questionable—but for brevity’s sake, I’ll concede the point.
I think people who make this argument are confusing immersiveness with believability. If first-person games are more immersive, it’s because they close the gap between the player and their in-game avatar. When you play a first-person game, you own your choices, triumphs, and failures in a way that you just can’t in the third-person. That sense of connectedness can add a lot of emotional value to a game.
What really draws me to the first-person, though, is a need to retain my agency, and my limitations, when I’m playing a game. It keeps me grounded and engaged. Moreover, I relish feeling like the protagonist rather than a set-piece in a digital environment. The first-person perspective doesn’t let me see the monsters coming in Amnesia: The Dark Descent. It doesn’t give me any idea of the best post-assassination escape route in Dishonored. In other words, it truly challenges me—and that transforms a game from a diversion to an experience.
Chris: When it comes to perspective in gaming, I’m less interested in how it changes my immersion, and more about how it changes the utility of a game. This is rare considering I’m driven to enjoy a game primarily by the quality of its narrative. That being said, a game has to be playable in order for it to be enjoyed, and for that reason I’ll generally choose to play a game in third-person.
The first, and perhaps most utilitarian, reason for steering away from first-person is the lack of peripheral vision. Skyrim was a phenomenal game, and lots of people loved playing through the eyes of their character, but nothing was more frustrating than making it to the final chamber of a Nord Catacomb, and getting blindsided by a Draugr Death Overlord, which inevitably leads to losing valuable items and a broken controller. First-person completely removes the sense of vision from either side of the eyes, making reacting to action happening just off screen next to impossible.
Sometimes a game is just not made for first-person. The addition of first-person perspective to Grand Theft Auto V was met with much fanfare, but the first time gamers hit a jump in a Zentorno at the wrong angle and spun mid-air, most probably discovered the wonders of motion sickness.
Finally, on the subject of immersion, when I play a game, I don’t want to necessarily be the character, I want to understand the character, and then relate to the character. In games like Halo, where there is clearly a story, but a silent protagonist, I found the adapted novels and read them so I could better understand the character I was playing as, since the games did such a terrible job of explaining that. Sure I felt like I was gunning Covie bastards, but I had no sense of the man I was portraying. This also applies to games where you can make your own character. The Elder Scrolls has always allowed for character creation, but what I create is a character. The experience of playing is immersive enough that I don’t feel the need to embody every aspect of the person (or cat creature) I’m playing.
Also, screw CoD, Am I right?
