Quest to Nowhere

A First Person Problem: Objective Storytelling in Videogames Part 2

While I was writing the last piece I came to a realization about an additional rule/criteria for what is needed to tell a good objective story in a videogame. It is however somewhat unrelated to the previous two rules, since it’s not about narrative or gameplay, but rather how the game is presented to the character.

3. The game should not take place primarily in the first person.

This rule basically outlines my problem with a lot of narratives in first person games, most recently Resistance 3 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The problem with the first person view point is that it implies to the player that they are the character, that the story is subjective when it’s actually not.

The problem with this is that doing this separates the story from the actions the player is taking part in. For example with Resistance 3 you are playing a guy who is leaving his family behind to maybe make a final blow against the evil alien invaders. And while the cut scenes tell a rather interesting personal story of a guy who wants to be with his family, but knows he’s on a suicide mission to maybe save them, and is able to convey the emotions of his situation well. When I’m then trust into his perspective for the actual gameplay stuff I completely forget all that, because I’m not the one experiencing that that guy is.

Basically it creates a disconnect between ourselves and the character, because we can’t see ourselves as that character since we aren’t experiencing those moments as the character. Now if you look at the Half-Life 2 games or the Portal games, you are playing as someone who isn’t you, but for all intents and purposes they are you. They might be named Gordon Freeman or Chell, but everything they do you as the player have control over. Everything they experience, you experience from their perspective. There is never that break where suddenly you are reminded that your aren’t actually that character by showing them in a cut scene, and that makes the experience all that more personal and real for the player.

Would Resistance 3 have been better in the third person? Yes, because then I could have at least had a connection to the character. I might not have been him, but I would have developed some empathy for him that would have gone from the cut scenes into the gameplay.

This was one of the great things about the Uncharted games, especially Uncharted 2. You aren’t Nathan Drake, but you can empathize with him, and the team at Naughty Dog really play that up in the animations he does during the gameplay. When you see a cut scene where Drake is shot in the gut, and then you have to control him while he limps through the level wincing it’s a lot more powerful to the player then if it were in first person and the camera kind of wobbled and they began to move slowly, because even though we aren’t Drake we empathize with him and that’s just as powerful.

For the next post about objective storytelling I’ll probably discuss my problems with the storytelling in Deus Ex: Human Revolution since it’s a good example of a game breaking all these rules I’ve set forth so far.