So, these are sort of confusing terms, but they have a really, really long history.
The tl;dw: a first person is like the object in a sentence, they are a thing doing an action—speaking, perhaps. Who are they speaking to? Well, that would have to be a 2nd person. Very literally. We’re just counting bodies in the scene. If those two people were talking about someone else, that would be a 3rd person. From this, we can imagine a 4th and a 5th, but as an analytical framework, they’re not fundamentally different from 3rd, so we just consildate them into one category: collectively ‘them’. ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘they’.
So, in order for a game to be 2nd person, it has to treat you, the literal audience-member you, as the second person in a conversation. They have to speak to you directly by breaking the 4th wall.
Games actually do this all the time. Any time you’re asked to press the ‘A’ button, they’re speaking to ‘you’, you are the 2nd person.
So, what does a 2nd-person camera look like? There are ways we could think about this. The video I linked presents some. But altogether, it’s probably more underwhelming than you think. These aren’t really a science as much as they are somewhat mangled metaphors for specific kinds of software or design problems. I imagine, partially from experience, that when people think about 2nd-person cameras, they’re excited about discovering a new kind of physics, sort of like learning that you can in fact take the square root of -1. It feels a bit like forbidden magic. But it’s probably more like the arcade Ridge Racer taking a booth photo of you for its leader board rankings.
That’s a lot of words, and they do pretty well at explaining the nuance, but you missed the opportunity to show off the simplest example of the concept:
Dating simulators
It’s a game format that literally talks directly to you
I’ve seen a video about this:
https://youtu.be/LTaQnuQY9fY?t=5m36s
So, these are sort of confusing terms, but they have a really, really long history.
The tl;dw: a first person is like the object in a sentence, they are a thing doing an action—speaking, perhaps. Who are they speaking to? Well, that would have to be a 2nd person. Very literally. We’re just counting bodies in the scene. If those two people were talking about someone else, that would be a 3rd person. From this, we can imagine a 4th and a 5th, but as an analytical framework, they’re not fundamentally different from 3rd, so we just consildate them into one category: collectively ‘them’. ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘they’.
So, in order for a game to be 2nd person, it has to treat you, the literal audience-member you, as the second person in a conversation. They have to speak to you directly by breaking the 4th wall.
Games actually do this all the time. Any time you’re asked to press the ‘A’ button, they’re speaking to ‘you’, you are the 2nd person.
So, what does a 2nd-person camera look like? There are ways we could think about this. The video I linked presents some. But altogether, it’s probably more underwhelming than you think. These aren’t really a science as much as they are somewhat mangled metaphors for specific kinds of software or design problems. I imagine, partially from experience, that when people think about 2nd-person cameras, they’re excited about discovering a new kind of physics, sort of like learning that you can in fact take the square root of -1. It feels a bit like forbidden magic. But it’s probably more like the arcade Ridge Racer taking a booth photo of you for its leader board rankings.
That’s a lot of words, and they do pretty well at explaining the nuance, but you missed the opportunity to show off the simplest example of the concept:
Dating simulators
It’s a game format that literally talks directly to you
So games like inscryption and doki doki do it really well? And if memory serves psycho mantis in metal gear solid?