The First-Person

Some people have said things like ‘Games are the only artistic medium that can provide you with a first-person perspective.’ And something like that is probably true. Suppose I read a book, I watch a film, and I play a game. And also suppose that they are all adaptations of more or less the same story and so set in the same world. But I do not relate to the book or the film in the same way that I relate to the game. In the game, I can play a role in the story. I can be in the middle of things. I can partially shape the events that occur in this particular playing of the game through my choices and actions.  I can watch a soccer match from the stands or I can play on the field. In a sporting event like this, there’s typically a clear difference between the spectators and the players—even though players and spectators are both attending to the match in a way. And certain forms of art allow us to attend to one and the same “world” in different ways.   Non-agentive media give us a vantage on the world and the narrative that unfolds there, like spectators in the stands, and games allow us to act within that world and narrative, like players on the field. And so I could read about Ahab trying to kill the white whale Moby Dick, or I could watch Gregory Peck play the role of Ahab and see him hunting the whale, or I could play a game set in that world where I could play the role of Ahab and hunt the whale myself. In the last case, my actions somehow make it into the game which includes a world and a story that my actions might shape or alter. Not only are my actions altering the game, but I feel like my perspective is in the game. I am there in that world. And I am there as Ahab. And that’s interesting.

I can imagine reading a novel entirely written in the first person which focuses on a single character. The character thinks things like ‘I did this. Something happened to me. I thought that. I felt something. I wanted something., I loved this person. I hated this other person.’ When I read this, I don’t fall under the illusion that I myself did, thought, or felt those things. I do not feel that I am the subject of the story. I do not come to occupy, in any strong sense, the first-person perspective of the character within the story. These actions, these experiences, these thoughts and, these desires are not my own. I will always feel that I am observing someone else’s life. Reading a book like that might feel a bit like overhearing an extended monologue. Or it might feel like finding and secretly reading someone else’s personal journal. And it may be a very moving journal—but it never feels like reading your own journal. 

By contrast, games seem to let me take up a first-person perspective on the world in the game as I play. And games can do this because they essentially involve my agency. Agency and the first-person perspective are like two-sides of the same coin. The fact that I can act in a game is part of what makes it seem like I am “in” the game at all. When I play a game, I can do things. I can choose to do this and not that.  I can use this particular opening in chess instead of a thousand others, I can see the bet or just fold, I can pay the shopkeeper or walk out with what I want. When I do things in a game—even when I’m controlling a character that does not really resemble me—I feel like those choices and actions are mine. And, in some sense, they clearly are. I am responsible for them and their consequences.

And those actions of mine change the state of the game. Depending on the game, this means that my actions might change my prospects of winning, or the path of the narrative, or the surface of the game world, or affect the experience and prospects of other players. I do these things and I have to own them—for better or for worse. And this is one of the places we should focus in on in order to understand something interesting about the medium.

Agency introduces new aesthetic possibilities and one thing it introduces is the truly first-person perspective. This is one thing that distinguishes games from other, non-agentive, art forms. The first-person seems kind of special— but it is a bit difficult to pinpoint the aesthetic experiences it opens up. What experiences can we have when we take up the first-person perspective  that we cannot have from another perspective? When we look over our mental life, we find that there are uniquely first-personal states: mental states, emotions, feelings, and judgments.  These first-personal states are all dependent on or directed at myself, my actions, or some aspect of myself like my mood or my thoughts. The most intuitive examples might be pride and guilt. First, I do something, then I feel a certain way about it. If it was a good thing, I may feel pride; if it was a bad thing, I may feel guilt. A story can tell me about a character’s acts and the resulting pride or guilt they feel, but it doesn’t make me feel prideful or guilty. I may feel happy for them in their success or feel uneasy about their misdoings. And the way the characters feel about their actions may resonate with me in certain ways. But I had nothing to do with the things they did. In a game, by contrast, I can do something, recognize that I am responsible for what I have done, and then feel a certain way about it. So the emotions that arise from this sort of first-personal reflection are not quite the same as the emotions we could have if we were thinking about someone else’s actions.

If so, then we’ve identified a space that cannot be explored in non-agentive media. Designers have always been exploring this space in one way or another. And the ways they explore that space shift and become richer as the medium grows. For example, games have always sought to elicit certain first-personal emotions relating to challenge, success ,and failure. They often want me to feel great when I win and bad when I lose. And as the medium has grown we see more variations in the type of first-person emotions games seek to elicit in this context. Competitive games like sports or chess and many early video games like lightly themed arcade games were designed around that basic principal: they were intended to make me feel bad when I lost and really good when I won (or bettered my last score.) As games were set in ever more fictionally rich worlds, this sort of thing remained true. Often -losing means dying and that feels bad; winning meant living and overcoming a dangerous challenge and that felt good. The fiction is richer, but the core affective experience structuring our play remains the same.

But more elaborate fictions allow for another possibility: the winning feels good and losing feels bad hedonic structure can be overlaid with moral valence. Moral sentiments can be brought into the fiction—not only can you feel pleased when you reach your ludic goal but you might also be made to feel that you did the morally correct thing when you killed that dark lord and so saved the world. This moral overlay reinforces the hedonic structure at the heart of the game. Winning feels good on a purely instrumental level and is, according to the fiction, a morally good thing to do.

On the other hand, some fictions provide moral overlays that subvert the feelings arising from our play. The classic twist is by now well known—after a long struggle to reach the goal present in the game, I finally reach it, and then the fiction cruelly informs me that this was not such a good thing to do. In order to win, I might have to do something that is morally abominable in the fiction (though I may or may not know this at the time) and so feel regret and guilt when I win. Another status the designer might try to attach to the win condition in a game is moral ambiguity. And this happens sometimes in games after hours and hours of play— you kill that monster and that’s your crowning achievement, but then suddenly feel that maybe you should not have done that after all. You feel good that you were able to kill the monster, but don’t quite know if it was a good or bad thing to do. Winning is now sometimes followed by a question mark. Games have always let us revel in our own successes and made us hate our failures— and, through some of the dark arts of narrative, they can make us hate our successes too. They can call the value of their own goals into doubt.

Each of these aesthetic possibilities is unique and a worthwhile space for the designer to work within. I see no reason to think that one moral overlay is automatically superior to the others— there’s a time and place for (almost) everything. But the self-directed moral emotions that arise from our ludic actions, wouldn’t be experienced at all if we were not taking up the first-person perspective while we play a game. So the type of moral emotions we feel as we play can help us see two things. First, the self-directed moral emotions, in a way, count as proof that a game can provide a truly first-person perspective on a fiction. Second, the raw power of the self-directed moral emotions such as pride and guilt also illustrate the aesthetic power the first-person brings with it.