All games are second person. Because second person is you we don’t mention it because it would be boring, first and second person shooter or second and third person shooter. Don’t have the same ring and wastes words. Technically top down and second person RTS would be long ass genre name.
there was a 7dfps entry like this a few years ago (don’t remember the name) where your camera perspective was always from the view of one of the enemies you were fighting
extremely confusing
Have the repost bots arrived on Lemmy? I’m sure I’ve seen this question on Reddit before and also on Lemmy.
I’ll do you one better. What about fourth person shooters?
Or 7¾ person?
This bit in the first stage of Battletoads comes to mind. It won’t let me upload a screenshot here for some reason, but here’s a video. https://youtu.be/iqyeq7iC5YY?t=200
I’ve seen a video about this:
https://youtu.be/LTaQnuQY9fY?t=5m36sSo, these are sort of confusing terms, but they have a really, really long history.
The tl;dw: a first person is like the object in a sentence, they are a thing doing an action—speaking, perhaps. Who are they speaking to? Well, that would have to be a 2nd person. Very literally. We’re just counting bodies in the scene. If those two people were talking about someone else, that would be a 3rd person. From this, we can imagine a 4th and a 5th, but as an analytical framework, they’re not fundamentally different from 3rd, so we just consildate them into one category: collectively ‘them’. ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘they’.
So, in order for a game to be 2nd person, it has to treat you, the literal audience-member you, as the second person in a conversation. They have to speak to you directly by breaking the 4th wall.
Games actually do this all the time. Any time you’re asked to press the ‘A’ button, they’re speaking to ‘you’, you are the 2nd person.
So, what does a 2nd-person camera look like? There are ways we could think about this. The video I linked presents some. But altogether, it’s probably more underwhelming than you think. These aren’t really a science as much as they are somewhat mangled metaphors for specific kinds of software or design problems. I imagine, partially from experience, that when people think about 2nd-person cameras, they’re excited about discovering a new kind of physics, sort of like learning that you can in fact take the square root of -1. It feels a bit like forbidden magic. But it’s probably more like the arcade Ridge Racer taking a booth photo of you for its leader board rankings.
That’s a lot of words, and they do pretty well at explaining the nuance, but you missed the opportunity to show off the simplest example of the concept:
Dating simulators
It’s a game format that literally talks directly to you
So games like inscryption and doki doki do it really well? And if memory serves psycho mantis in metal gear solid?
That’s just called the American education system
Your username fits well, because with that humor you’re going to hell ^^
I don’t know if any whole games, but a lot of games have boss battles or segments that are in 2nd person. Where the perspective is from the target, and you can see the character you are controlling through their eyes.
Off the top of my head, this boss fight from Ratchet and Clank 3 comes to mind.
It’s hard to do this for extended periods for a few reasons. Part of why this is reduced to boss fights so that if you have sections with dozens of enemies, whose perspective do you take? What happens when that enemy dies, or if that enemy needs to suck under cover or go down a stairwell or look down at their weapon to reload?
Even for boss fights, it only works if the boss’s behavior is controlled pretty strictly, like in that Ratchet and Clank example.
You could kind of make an argument about sections where you view your character through some sort of diagetic device, like a security camera. Technically you could count Lakitu from several Mario games in that sense.
Talking about this is giving me ideas though, especially for stealth games. Something that lets you see through the enemy’s eyes and make sure that you do NOT appear in their line of site could be really neat. Maybe.
Screencheat is a ridiculous competitive split-screen first-person shooter where everyone is invisible, so players are forced to look at each other’s screens to win. Supporting both local and online multiplayer, combat in Screencheat is fast and furious with a wide variety of one-hit kill weapons.
Show me a third person omniscient shooter
Omniscient perspective is easy if you’re making a 2d game.
Superhot maybe?
I’m not a gamer, so I had to look up the definition of a third-person shooter. It seems like very poor terminology; it’s actually a second-person shooter. There’s the player (1st) giving commands to an on-screen avatar (2nd). Where’s the 3rd person?
I’m thinking a true third-person shooter would consist of an NPC shooting at your unarmed avatar?
The terms are used because of the narritive forms of a story.
1st person is from the point of view of the character, thus the view from the eyes of the playable character.
3rd person is he/she perspective. You follow the character from the narration of an external narrator. You see the playable character do actions from a perspective that isn’t their own or someone’s else.
2nd person would be from the point of view of a person involved with the character but isn’t it. So you would see the actions of the character through the eyes of an NPC. There was a demo floating around YouTube where a player was shooting zombies, and the camera was from the POV of thr zombies. It made it look pretty weird.
I imagine certain tactics games could possibly count in this vein - you as the commander on the uplink give orders to the team what does the actual shooting.
What, that you’re the one being shot?
That’s just me attempting to play any multiplayer fps
Being hunted
If first person shooter is when you shoot the second guy, and 3rd person shooter is when you look at the shooter shooting the second guy, then 2nd person shooter would be you getting shot by the first guy. So uhh maybe you control the first guy but see through the second guy.
Actually i remember some short indie game based on this.
ScreenCheat. Someone else posted a link above, bit I used to play it with friends. You play by viewing other players screens.
Actually i remember some short indie game based on this.
Sounds like a fun idea for a game jam or something
I think it might be a result of a gamejam? I can’t remember but i remember how unique that sound, but i can’t find that one i saw though. I googled a bit and it seems a lot of indie dev attempt on this idea.
2nd person is watching your character from the viewpoint of someone else.
3rd person is when you see your character from the viewpoint of someone who doesn’t exist.
Mario 64 is played through the viewpoint of a guy in a cloud with a camera. Which makes it 2nd person.
If the character wasn’t there it would be third person (like the side scrolling Mario games)
There is one better example of second person perspective than Mario 64, which I don’t really agree with since the disembodied camera isn’t a character’s perspective per se. Unless it is. I don’t really know the lore of Mario 64. So I shouldn’t comment.
In one of the need for speeds you are pursued by the cops and then the camera goes from your normal racing game perspective into the cops perspective, but you’re still driving your car, so you’re seeing your car that moves around and responds to your controls from the cop who’s chasing you’s point of view. Pretty trippy.
I never played it myself, but I once watched a YouTube video about second-person games. And this was the example they used.
Isn’t Project Zomboid a second person shooter?
Yeah me too. Please let me know if you find it because it’s bugging me now lol
Screencheat on steam 4 players everyone’s invisible and the only way to see what’s happening is look at other players screen
Can’t seems to find it now, but there’s a lot of attempt on this idea though, so we might actually saw a different game. I remember seeing it in early or mid 2010s.
I also remember something like it around that time. There were definitely a few YouTubers playing it against eachother. Iirc you could see all the other player viewpoints, but not your own.
Yeah I remember hearing about it a while ago and wondered how it would work.
I don’t know about shooters, but there’s second person driving. https://youtu.be/mC8QoRa8y_Q
Glad someone beat me to mentioning that.
