A question of perspective

Woke up early this morning and watched the trailer for Metro: Last Light. A couple of things occurred to me:

1. The environments, atmosphere and characterisation are awesome
2. I would watch a whole movie like this
3. This is not 1st person perspective, this is POV

The first point is great news for 4AGames and THQ, I will probably spend now until release date extolling the virtues and my chest tightening excitement for this game.

The second point I was not expecting at all. I hate television with a fiery passion. I seem to have a real problem with passive entertainment. After years of gaming I can honestly say that I would rather be playing than watching. So this was a new development for me. Which leads me onto my final revelation.

Don’t get me wrong, Metro: Last Light looks to be an exciting departure from the drudgery of many, so called “First Person Shooters” but it will, inevitably still be labelled as a member of modern gaming’s largest genre. But this term is a misnomer, there is no first person perspective being displayed here. What we are seeing is the world through someone else’s POV, their point of view, not their perspective.

Their perspective is dictated by their comments, their personality and how they see the world. We are along for the ride, sitting in the cinema inside the characters head, pulling levers to shoot and move but essentially following a greater story.

To explain this further, let’s look at the Quantic Dream games. Within Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophesy you play as multiple characters in connected situations on either side of the law. Sometimes you play as the killer and sometimes as either of the detectives. This gives you, in essence, multiple perspectives to view the story from. More than that you actually form your own perspective, that of an omniscient narrator who has access to the combined knowledge of all the characters. To call this game a 3rd person adventure just because the camera angles are not fixed within a characters head is a ridiculous simplification.

Next example on the block is Bioshock. Consider yourself *SPOILER* warned from this point on.

As the game progresses you hear the voice of Atlas, a seemingly helpful chap who points you in the right direction and provides background history on what has happened in Rapture as well as the current situation. That and sounding like the offspring of a U2 groupie but that’s beside the point. So, through the game we are playing with a POV camera but what perspective are we playing through?

The clever dicks amongst you might think, “AHA! This is clearly a real example of a first person perspective game, given that everything we understand is what we hear and see”. But what about when many things are proven to be false, have we not been tricked by an unreliable narrator? And if the narrator has been telling us the story the whole time and shaping our understanding of the world around us, is this not actually a second person, anecdotal game?

The Prince of Persia: Sands of Time used a similar technique to superb effect to deal with death and save games. Upon dying during gameplay the Prince, in voiceover, would remark “No, no, no. That’s not what happened.” Allowing you to return to an earlier point in the game as if the whole diegesis was taking place as part of your imagination of his anecdote. It is clear by the end of the game that this story was being told to Farah. Are we therefore, not her? If so then the story is all the more fantastic as it was told to us from an acquaintance from an alternate reality that we have not experienced. The feeling is sublime but we have no language to describe this story telling in the games industry because we have wasted it on camera angles.

As trailers for Remember Me are surfacing, showing the powers of perception, memories and thought I am reminded that this medium can be a powerful way to tell stories. Perhaps if we can recapture poorly used terminology we can discuss games in more erudite terms and reach the next level of gameplay experience and story telling not just graphical capability.