A Point of View

Copyright 1997 Noah Falstein

First published in CGDA Report

In the last issue of the CGDA Report I started with a plea for suggestions for topics. I'm pleased to report that I received an overwhelming response. The best suggestion for a new topic came from Jeff Brown. He beat out the tough competition from a grand total of zero alternates. So faced with the difficult decision among the one submissions, I feel compelled to write about Jeff's suggestion. He has the additional advantage of having submitted a very good suggestion. So, down to business.

One of my main interests is the intersection of the two crafts of writing and interactive design. I'm indulging in one such intersection now by writing ABOUT interactive design. The craft of writing is an old one, with millennia of experience in areas such as literature and theater. Even the relative newcomer of writing for the screen is about a century old. But interactive design, at least in the electronic realm, is at best a few decades old. We interactive designers constantly compare ourselves to other forms of entertainment. What can be learned from examining the issue of POV in literature, film, and theater?

In literature, there are two main points of view used. First person POV puts the reader into the head of the protagonist: "I walked down an empty street late at night, listening for muggers". Third person, the most common, puts the reader into an omniscient detached view: "He walked down an empty street late at night. His thoughts were filled with images of muggings." Much more rarely used is second person: "You walk down an empty street late at night. Your head fills with images of muggings". There are many theories offered to explain the relative frequency of these points of view in literature. What I hear most is that third person is easiest because it gives the writer the most freedom, moving from one scene to another with impunity, letting the reader see first with the eyes of one character, then another, giving a detached, impartial view or subjective experience with equal impunity. First person, by the same reasoning, is more restrictive. It has the advantage of being more personal, but the writer is limited to what the main character can perceive of the world. Second person is very rare because it violates the reader's sense of self. To take the example above, it's easy enough to read about someone else walking down a street, either in their own point of view or from an impartial one, but when a reader is told "YOU walk down a street" it requires a larger stretch of the imagination. The reader is likely to balk and think, "No, I am not walking down a street, I'm reading a book", or "I wouldn't think of muggers, I would think of dinner, I'm hungry!"

The case with film is somewhat different. Film is a visual medium, and so POV takes on a more literal meaning, describing how the camera is used. Most modern films use a variety of views, usually staying in a detached third-person view, but occasionally letting the viewer see through the eyes of the main character in a very personal first-person view, and much more frequently than in literature, playing with a second-person view. A good example of second person in film occurs in many one-on-one situations. A man and a woman have coffee together in a restaurant, sitting across from each other. After an establishing shot showing us a third-person view of the two of them at a table, the man begins to speak. As he does so we suddenly see him from the woman's point of view. She replies, and the camera sees that from his point of view. But there's not the rigid "you" of literature here. Sometimes the camera cuts back and forth between the two as one person talks. Frequently the camera is offset by a foot or two, so we see the person talking, not directly to us, but rather to someone who seems to be next to us. An important point here is that the visual medium of the camera makes it easier to do second-person without the odd discontinuity of telling the viewer they are someone other than themselves. But that same freedom is a limitation when it comes to first person in film. Although there are many novels written in the first person, there have only been a handful of movies that stuck with that POV for even a substantial fraction of the film. Again, theories abound as to why this is the case, but viewing the few films or TV episodes that are shot as if from one person's eyes immediately give one a sense of limitation, even claustrophobia compared to the usual free camera movements. Also, first person in film has some of the problems of second person in literature, the rebellion of the viewer/reader who feels, "No, that's not me, I didn't do those things", or "I want to watch him, not be him".

Theater appears to be almost entirely third person, as is dictated by its physical nature. You can get inside an actor's head as they indulge in a soliloquy or hear their voice projected with an echo effect as they "think out loud", but you lose the close-ups and camera eye of film, and the omniscient view of literature. On the other hand, theater gains an immediacy over film by being able to perceive the actors first hand instead of on a screen, and they share the advantage of the actors' abilities that can help deliver the emotional impact of the story.

And theater does have a second-person mode that has become more prevalent recently. I'm thinking of the participatory drama of shows like Tamara, where the action takes place simultaneously in many rooms, and the audience moves freely among them, or Tony and Tina's Wedding, where the actors blend with the audience and encourage them to participate. Even more second-person are the "do-it-yourself" murder mysteries sold in game stores or live action role-playing games where the participants are told "You are a suspect in a murder investigation", and then expected to actually play the part. These are less popular than other forms of theater, perhaps because they're more complex and demand much more from the audience.

But to gamers, second person narrative should have a familiar feeling. Perhaps this rings a bell: "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. You see a pointy stick here." Classic text adventures were often written in second person, implying that "you", the player were somehow participating in the adventure described. In fact, "the medium of participation" is a basic definition of interactivity. So what does that mean to the game designer who is deciding what point of view to use?

In interactive entertainment, as in film, there are two varieties of POV. The first is the physical point of view: where do we put the camera? Should we use a first-person eyeball POV as in Doom and all its kin, or a removed 3rd person view seen in most strategy games and action games like Crusader? Adventure games, being the closest interactive cousins to film, and action games like Wing Commander and Super Mario 64 have begun to use film's roving and changing point of view as well, moving from first to third person and back. The increasing power of the target machines and enhanced 3D capabilities have given designers much more latitude with the physical point of view.

But the second kind of POV is much more germane to the comparison with other media. Whether you're playing Duke Nukem or Wing Commander, Warcraft or Super Mario 64, you're asked to take on a persona, a kind of psychological POV. It can be subtle or overt, suggested or spelled out in 3D glory, but this second-person dominance is as pervasive in interactive titles as it is rare in literature.

That's not to say that every interactive piece has to be second person. We share in common with other media a flexibility, and the physical POV is sometimes dictated by the available technology or by the needs of the game interface. But it's the nature of interactivity itself to draw the audience in, allow them to interact with an imaginary environment. Furthermore, interactive media transform the audience of passive media into a player, making choices that affect the experience. For this reason, the natural choice of POV in interactive is psychological second person. But the actual manifestation of this point of view is often ambiguous, sometimes intentionally so.

Just who is the "you" of "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike"? Some games show the player a protagonist that the player controls. But are "you", the player, becoming that person, controlling him, or merely making suggestions for him? At LucasArts we debated this issue constantly as our first adventure games were under development. Maniac Mansion had a cast of characters, and the player could choose from several to form a three person team. One character, Dave, was always included, but mostly for story reasons, not because the player became Dave. In that and subsequent games we indulged in the twist of having the on-screen characters talk back to the player, giving the sense that the player was some sort of voyeur merely making suggestions. But when you ask an adventure game player to describe the game they've just completed, you'll hear them speak in the first person more often than the third, saying, "I picked up the tools and used them to fix the lights" more often than "Dave picked up the tools and used them to fix the lights". Sometimes you'll even hear echoes of the second person, as in, "I told Dave to pick up the tools and fix the lights", or even explicit second person descriptions, like, "You tell Dave to pick up the tools and then tell him to use them with the lights to fix them". In fact, this very ambiguity is one of interactive entertainment's strengths. Some games go to elaborate explanation of how "you", the player, happen to be in the situation of the protagonist, invoking amnesia or robot probes with human brains, or remote cameras to explain their chosen physical or psychological POV. But as masters of linear media have discovered, our audience just doesn't need much to explain a POV if it is carried off skillfully and consistently. It's to our advantage as designers and writers to keep things slightly ambiguous, giving us the latitude to have a first-person physical perspective of a dangerous leap on the one hand, and have our character tell us "I don't think I should do that" when we attempt the leap without a running start on the other.

What kinds of points of view are likely to be important in the future? I'll be conservative and say that things will stay pretty much as they have so far. Online multiplayer environments give players the possibility of having direct participation, so they're not controlling a character but are simply being themselves. Yet if one looks at the biggest mass-market uses of online entertainment such as chat rooms where people can simply represent themselves as they are, fanciful names and adopted persona are the rule rather than the exception. Particularly when entertainment is concerned, I think we'll see a lot more of the 'second person ambiguous' conventions that we've already become accustomed to in the interactive realm.

As always, comments on this article or suggestions for future topics in interactive design are welcome at nf@theinspiracy.com