The Third-Person Disconnect
By Phill Cameron
My dad always used to race from inside the car when we played Project Gotham.
I could never understand it, confused as to why he wouldn’t want to watch the car drift gracefully around the corners, or shunt into the opposition. Thing is, when he’s driving a car, he drives it like he does in real life - from behind the wheel. Without a license, the only experience I’d had driving cars was Scalextrics and Hot Wheels, where I’d been able to see just the exterior the whole time while racing - so, naturally, I ended up picking the slightly more detached view of behind the car when in-game.
It’s not really as simple as all that when you replace the accelerator with a trigger, and suddenly you’re playing as the superhuman protagonist of most games. You see them performing all these incredible feats, and yet, really, they’re not quite you. Not in the same way that you’re the protagonist in a first-person game, the only disconnect being the hands at the bottom of the screen that aren’t quite like your own. There’s a detachment, a once-removed mentality that is almost subconscious when we make the shift from first-person to third-person, that, while mostly irrelevant, makes a real difference when concerning the actions you’re either forced or driven towards.
//Who’s who?
Assassin’s Creed is an undeniably enjoyable game, regardless of the overly repetitive side missions, or the lack of versatility in the actual assassinations. But equally, lead character Altair is undeniably a dick. The game starts with his arrogance culminating in the death of one of his fellow assassins, and throughout the game he displays contempt and pettiness towards almost everyone he meets. The fact he’s got an utterly nonsensical American accent that’s both snarky and dismissive at the same time hardly helps.
It doesn’t really matter, though, because he’s not you. He’s just another action figure you’re playing with. His decisions are not your own, and it only grates a little because you don’t particularly like him, yet he’s omnipresent during your play time. It almost doesn’t matter that he’s hugely entertaining to control, from his ability to climb almost anything to the ease and brutality with which he dispatches guards and the insane alike.
It’s a question of analogy, really. In the third-person game, you’re the puppet master or the child with his toys, orchestrating events. Your only concern is with the progression of the story, and making some really cool stuff happen. Remove that disconnect, and the puppet master becomes at best an actor, placed in a situation where his actions are his own, despite just playing a role. For the most part, games manage to avoid the rather sticky situation by providing the player with the luxury of choice, and anything he doesn’t want to do he can merely opt away from. Recently, however, things have been pushing in a different direction.
Far Cry 2 had you playing a mercenary in an unnamed African nation plagued by civil war and lawlessness, driven by the single goal of finding an arms dealer named The Jackal. Along the way you meet other equally violent mercenaries, an entire countryside hell bent on killing you and you alone, and various representatives for the games two factions. They give you missions, such as blowing up mines and killing opposition leaders, and your character mindlessly accepts them, driven only by the need for more diamonds to fuel his hunger for ever more deadly weapons, which will, of course, help him find the Jackal.
[Continues...]
Pages: 1 2
Jaw = Dropped.
How so?
To answer with a pair of faux-quations, This Article = Jessica Rabbit, Me = Bob Hoskins
You’re investigating the framing of another article and this one’s implicated and… what? ¬_¬
I think he’s saying that he loves this article in the same way Bob Hoskins in ‘Who Killed Roger Rabbit’ loves Jessica Rabbit. Or something.
Well that’s just splendid.
That’s interesting.
I reckon it works the other way round; because I have more control in 3rd person I fell a bit more attached and i spend more time doing things because i get more information the screen. And you seem do “bigger” things in 3rd person games Shadow of the Colossus for example, intsead of constantly ajusting the view or aiming at something.
I am biased though, I’ve never really gotten the hang of first person games.
But i can see what your saying and i think first person games could handle a more poiniant subject matter better because it does resonate a lot better when you can see what your charictor is seeing. Not to mention the significance of having eye contact.
Prototype however I don’t think would be ten times more horrific, it would be quite a lot more shocking - changing your driving perspective in GTA to 1st person and then driving through a crowd of people proves that - but after so many kills it would go back to that Josef Stalin quote: One death is a tragedy; “One million is a statistic.”
I wrote an article a few weeks back about the effect Prototype had on me. In fact, I emailed this very site about possibly publishing it, but I never got a reply.
Which email address did you send it to? Don’t think I ever got it. Andy may have, but he’s away at the minute.
Throw me an email at lewis.denby[at]resolution-magazine.co.uk
I’d emailed Andy, I believe. If he’s away, that might explain the non-reply. I posted on my blog in the end (link over that way <—.) I’d love to write for the site in the future, I’ve been enjoying it since I first found my way over a couple of months ago.
[...] off some piece from other people. I have to mention Phill’s piece on Resolution about the Third Person Disconnect which is a very interesting analysis of how the third person perspective in games. On Gaming Daily [...]
[...] off some piece from other people. I have to mention Phill’s piece on Resolution about the Third Person Disconnect which is a very interesting analysis of how the third person perspective in games. On Gaming Daily [...]
[...] at Resolution they are a-posting. Lewis talks about the effect of a third-person game versus a first person game – the most interesting observation being that sense of distance from a third-person avatar [...]
[...] love it for the sheer damn spectacle of it. It’s not Alex Mercer who’s a bastard, as some people like to claim; it’s us, the players, who become the murderous nut-jobs. The Alex Mercer of the cut-scenes is [...]