Okay, here’s a small rant against a common approach to storytelling in games: Cutscenes can be point-of-view, but they are never first person.
First person means “I”. If I am not inhabiting the character, then your “I” is not first person. When you take away control, then it has now become second person, or worse, third person. “I” has become “you” or “them”.
If you are separating the player from their character, then they are no longer in that character. They are only watching, which means that to the game, “I” really means “you”. It places a clear boundary between the player and the game, saying “we cannot trust you with this”.
Now, if you are presupposing that barrier, as is often the case in many third person games, then this is not strictly an issue. You and the character are separate. You choose their actions, yes, but narratively that is because you are a stand-in representative of their “will”, rather than being embodied in the game. You are playing the part. You are an actor. You are not freely in the game, you are helping tell their story.
And this is not a problem.
Not until you go into the first person.
See, I have nothing against the use of point-of-view. It’s a perspective, a camera trick. It’s done in film, and it’s done in literature. It makes sense, and it affords you an elegant way to tie the framing together.
But first person is a decision about storytelling. And it’s something that no other media can truly explore.
When we have point-of-view, we are sometimes accompanied by inner monologue, or similar narrative techniques. This is functional, and something I do in some of my writing. But something told in the first person differs from something that is first person.
One is a representation of the other. What is first person is lived experience. We all have it, and when we recount it, we often present it as such. But this retelling is now distinct from that original experience, and we know this because the same person can recount in different perspectives, including those to which they have no claim of experiencing.
Again, this is natural. To claim a third person, objective view of events is to claim a perspective that was never there, and that we never experienced. We can, however, infer from this fictitious perspective, and therefore may construct it in such a way as to distil truths from the meeting of subjective experiences.
All the meanwhile, we only ever had the one, first person, experience, and could not experience it any other way.
So, when a game is first person, it means it hands control over to the player. And that’s it. There’s a degree of trust, but only so far as we assume the player has intersecting intent with ourselves. Do we probably expect most people to follow the narrative, like they would follow along to a film or book? Yes. But we also expect others will not, and recognise that there is something valid in this performance that the player provides, to which we provide them the freedom to do as they will.
In simple terms, if they want to break it, let them. It’s their art now, after all, they are the performer.
If I chose to play Beethoven’s Fifth but change some things here and there, that is valid. It’s my right as a performer. Maybe others will ask why I changed it, to which I may or may not be able to provide an answer, but they cannot say I was not allowed to. That’s performance, and it’s always different in timing and framing and substance. Perhaps not by much, but it’s there.
That’s because performance is inherently first person. Only the performer truly experiences it. All others are, instead, constructing this illusory third-person perspective, inferring thought and intent, including any other performers. So this perspective is clearly valid! Performers in an orchestra are not having a lesser experience than their audience, after all, simply a different one.
But that’s something lost on a lot of games. The focus is on the perspective, rather than the experience. If you want to make a film, but rendered in 3D, and with a POV perspective, go for it. But a game is not just that. Not many games get that. A few feel it, subconsciously “getting it” with their experiential focus on gameplay and storytelling and so forth. Fewer acknowledge it, either by establishing it as a rule for the game’s design and presentation (see Half Life, God of War 2018), or even more so by directly referencing this in the game itself (see the Stanley Parable).
We praise some games for never breaking the flow with a cutscene. Meanwhile, those same games still have sections where you are locked in, listening to dialogue or watching a scripted sequence, perhaps waiting for a door to open.
This is not contradiction. This demonstrates that the only thing that you need to change is whose hands the control is in. All other things are equal.
I want more games that are first person. I don’t care about the perspective, I simply care that I am free to embody myself in the character, and that at no point will the game itself interrupt that.
I don’t demand that every game be like this, of course not. I simply ask that more people making games be conscious of this, and try to work it in where applicable. Most of it is, after all, just asking that a game not get in the way, and that it has polished presentation.