RR6 | Music 256A

Cody Hergenroeder

10/31/21

Ge Wang's 'Artful Design': Chapter 6

This week I'm reflecting on Principle 6.8: All Games are Played in the Hyper-1st Person (317). I hadn't thought about games this way; I am used to thinking in terms of 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person games, where the only real Hyper-1st person comes out of Virtual Reality experiences, replete with goggles, spatialized audio, and haptic feedback. However, as Ge says here: you are "embodied through control" by any video game because "the game world does not proceeed meaningfully without you". This is the first-person, and it's everywhere. This is a hot take but I can see its validity.

Previously I have thought for various reasons that the camera perspective is simply synonymous with perspective. After all, the perspective we have on our day-to-day experiences matters a lot. People who report having an out-of-body experience (OBE)/near-death experience (NDE)--perhaps almost drowning in a pool as a child--report one of the most profound things being that their internal perspective changed. It is very common that they suddenly see themselves from above, looking down at their body as if in the 3rd-person. We can also tell that third-person shooters distinguish us from the person *doing the shooting*-- in Grand Theft Auto IV (GTA IV), for example, we are not the ex-military Russian immigrant Niko Bellic, but we are merely playing as him or watching him commit his grand theft autos.

However, this idea that perspective simply is camera perspective, or that we aren't *really* Niko Bellic, doesn't hold up to snuff. In Grand Theft Auto V, the player is given the option to enter First-Person mode at any time, changing the camera perspective appropriately. This should entirely revolutionize the gameplay, right? Imagine the millions of kids all of a sudden feeling the crushing guilt of the thousands of murders on their hands... And yet this sudden moment of realization, or the click of "I am this character" has never happened. I think we realize--when it finally looks like the gun is in our hands, and we can see our feet below us and we're at the same height level as the characters we interact with on the street--that not a lot has changed. We were always that character, moving the camera merely moves us along an axis of embodiment that we were already a part of.

Think about it. When you play GTA IV and get shot dead by the cops, or lose a mission, your gut crunches. Boom, immediate feedback: you've failed. Full stop. There's nothing that needs to be more embodied than that to be first person, and you can get it from a 3rd person game. It's ever-present, this force that tells you you've failed and compels you to give it another go because you have to. It's the same drop in your stomach you get when you're Mario and you jump wrong and land in a pit--YOU'VE died, and now YOU'VE gotta do it again. It's no longer about Mario. Maybe we thought we needed VR to have a First-Person experience, but '3rd person' games like Mario are just like having a VR experience from far away or something like this--still 1st person, just less direct, and lower-bandwidth in terms of realism.

Bonus: the only 2nd-person video game experience I'm aware of can be found in this game. The video I've linked does an incredibly artful job of articulating the beauty and surprise that comes from the 2nd person experience--watching yourself from the perspective of another person.