The Third-Person Disconnect
The problem arises when you look at the missions he’s being asked to do. Destroy medicine production lines. Kill two of the opposition leaders as they meet to discuss peace, just so the mercenaries will still have work. Blow up some water pipes. Almost every mission you undertake has some potentially deadly side effect for the civilian population. On top of all of this, your ‘buddies’ ask you to take on separate missions during your missions to get them out of the not-so-morally ambiguous situations they’ve lied and cheated their way into. It’s telling that at the end of the game, your character is left with the choice between a bullet or an explosion, either one at his own hand. After the things the game makes him do, it’s a mercy.
It grates far more that it’s you who are doing these things, not a predefined character you’re playing. The fact that Far Cry 2 gives you a collection of preset characters to pick from could almost be seen as a way of pushing that idea across, making you think that you’ve got some say in all of this. That you don’t could be brilliant commentary on the nature of war, but it’s considerably less than comfortable to experience – something that would have been avoided by the invisible wall between player and player character provided by the third-person.
//Staying in control
There are exceptions to every concept, of course. The third-person disconnect only goes so far to shield you from the actions of the player, and sometimes a protagonist comes along that’s so devoid of morals and qualms that you become guilty for him. Prototype, the recently released game by Radical, sees you playing as Alex Mercer, some form of mutated being who can turn his biological makeup into anything he wants. It provides some truly horrific acts of violence on military and mutant alike, giving you Manhattan as a playground to witness the carnage wreaked through having swords for arms.
There’s a little ‘Battle Report’ you get after each fight has died down, detailing how many deaths were caused in military, infected and civilian varieties, along with the total cost to the American government. It’s the civilian number that really grabs the attention, a constant worry as the number escalates from hundreds, to thousands, to tens of thousands by the end of the game. While each death isn’t directly caused by your actions, if you hadn’t had that fight, the majority of those people would still be alive. To run around waving their arms and get eaten by zombie mutants, perhaps, but still. Life is life.
It gets so bad that, by the end of the game, you have no idea which side you’re on. Are the military really the good guys putting the all-powerful monster in the ground? Is there some hugely courageous soldier with his own game centred around him, fighting his way to a climactic battle with you, the final boss? The longer the game goes on, the more likely this seems, and while the elusive hero never does turn up, you’re half hoping for the encounter, just so someone can end the guilt. Despite the utterly bonkers level of power and violence at your fingertips as Alex Mercer, you grow to hate him for what he’s done, and what he’s made you do.
When I imagine Prototype as a first-person game, each crime Alex commits gets multiplied tenfold, every consumption of an innocent life made all the more horrific. Prototype forces you to control a truly deplorable person, but at least it doesn’t make you that deplorable person. The directness of seeing those two hands at the bottom of the screen, and the acts those hands commit, is so much more powerful and emotive than anything you’ll do as just another character on the screen. Not necessarily better – each perspective, of course, has its place – but the responsibility of the first-person perspective is simply lost as you make the switch to third-person, and take on a clearly defined role the developers have created for you.
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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 [...]
Added to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you down teh road!
Bye Bye