Through the Player’s Eyes

I was reading an essay called “Art and Answerability” by Mikhail Bakhtin the other day, where he makes the claim that one of the most important differences between novels and dreams is that in novels, we see the main character from the outside.  And as so often happens when I’m ostensibly reading something for my real job, I immediately started thinking about how I could squeeze a blog post out of it.

With regard to literature and dreams, this statement of Bakhtin’s is one of those ideas that seems accurate, but can never be tested.  I’ve never heard of anyone having a dream where another person was the main character, but that doesn’t mean it can never happen (and I did once dream a non-representational laser light show, which was pretty weird), and even if it  never does happen, that doesn’t mean that this is an important differance.  And Choose Your Own Adventure books aside, there’s not a whole lot of novels out there that situate the reader as the experiencing subsect of the book.  Yes, rewriting The DaVinci Code in the second person might make it more dreamlike, but while writing in the second person might create a dreamlike effect, but it’s mostly just going to jump out at the reader as an affectation. It’s too unnatural to be taken seriously.  So pointing out that a narrative needs to depict its characters from the outside is accurate, but it’s also nigh-tautological, kind of like pointing out that the story needs to be made up of sentences and words.

That, at any rate, was the state of affairs when Bakhtin was writing.  Luckily, the times have now caught up with him, and we have a new form of narrative where both 2nd and 3rd person narration are common.  I’m talking about video games, and will continue to do so after the jump.

Before we go too far, let’s just clear up the terminology a little.  In games, third-person narration would be a game in which you see the character that you are controlling on the screen.  Second-person narration would be a game like Wolfenstein 3D, where you are looking through the character’s eyes.  Of course, this is what most people call a FIRST-person shooter, but the narration is actually second-person.  If you wanted to describe a game of Wolfenstein to someone who could not see, you’d say, “You start in a Nazi prison cell, holding a handgun and a knife.  The corpse of the guard you just killed lies on the ground before you, and when you’re ready you can open the door and begin your escape.”

Now if you’re really old school, this kind of writing has probably already reminded you of text adventure games, and specifically of Zork (which in my experience is the only text adventure that anyone has actually played).

Games like this are literally made up of second-person narration.  Mind you, you could theoretically write Super Mario Brothers in this style too…

:: The Mushroom Kingdom, World 1-1::

You are standing on a wide plaza of terra-cotta tiles.  The sky is bright blue and studded with fluffy clouds, but you cannot see the sun anywhere, and nothing casts a shadow… Hovering in front of you, without any apparent support, is a metal block decorated with a glowing question mark.  There is an exit right.

> Go Right

:: The Mushroom Kingdom, World 1-1, a little further to the right::
You are standing underneath the question block.  You still can’t tell what’s holding it up, which makes you a little nervous now that you’re right below it. Off in the distance to the right, you see a Goomba.

> Inventory

You are not holding anything.

> Jump

You leap into the air and smash the question block with your fist.  It gives a satisfying “Ka-Ching!” noise.  You can’t see through the block from below, but for some reason you get the feeling that something went flying out of it in response to your actions.

> Inventory

You are now holding:  one coin. Well that’s odd.  But hey, free coin, right?

> Go Left

Nothing doing.  Everything behind you has been swallowed up by an impenetrable black void.  Normally this kind of thing would have you gibbering in terror (especially since you and Luigi stayed up late last night watching Dean Stockwell in The Langoliers), but considering the walking mushroom slowly approaching from the right, you think you (and your sanity) have more pressing problems.

… but as you can see, it would come out pretty stilted and weird.  Wolfenstein, on the other hand, would work all right.  You would lose all of the gameplay aspects that make Wolfenstein Wolfenstein (unless you train your parser to recognize strings like “aim a couple of pixels more to the left” and “walk into the wall at a 45 degree angle as you go down the hallway to check for secret doors”), but it would still work as a game, and it would still be recognizably Wolfenstein, whereas the Mario example that I just made up is only a travesty of Mario.  By the same token, you could do a third person rendering of Wolfenstein, and this would also be something of a travesty.  It’s fine to describe the start of Mario as “Mario is standing in the middle of the screen,” but it seems stupid to write that “B.J. Blazkowicz is staring down at the strangled Nazi guard.”  B.J.? Who’s this B.J.?

But this is one of the places where I want to turn things over to the readership, or maybe just to Perich.  I’ve never played Half-Life or BioShock, but from what I understand, the protagonists in these FPS games have a lot more personality than poor old Blazkowicz ever did.  When you’re playing these games, do you think of yourself as controlling a character?

(Obviously the indentification between the player and the character is never entirely severed.  Even when we’re playing Mario, we still say things like “Oops, I just died.”  But I think anyone who has played both kinds of games will understand the difference I’m talking about.)

And as long as I’m asking, here’s the second question I’d like people’s opinions on.  Does 2nd-person narration (or first-person perspective, if you like – it’s the same thing) interfere with emotional involvement?  If this kind of game really is, per Bakhtin, more dreamlike, a lack of emotional involvement would kind of stand to reason.  I rarely remember my dreams.  When I do, I don’t remember them for long.  And the handful of dreams that have shambled over into my long term memory have no emotional resonance at all, even when they’re about things that are notionally “emotional,” like death and bereavement.  Contrariwise, the slightest, most commercial, most debased little scraps of narrative can provoke a powerful emotional response in me, such as that one episode of Garfield and Friends where he thinks that they’re going to put Odie to sleep and he sings him this little song as they’re taking him away, and I – just – give me a minute, I’ve got something in my eye.

The emotions that dreams do inspire tend to be lizard-brain stuff like fear and lust, and when the dream’s over, they go away.  This again is consistent with my experience playing games like Zork.  Sure, in the moment, I may find myself afraid of being eaten by a grue, but it doesn’t linger.  And even then, the fear wasn’t so much fear of the grue as it was fear of losing the game, because I hadn’t saved and I was damned if I was going to start all the way over from Outside of the House AGAIN.  Now compare this to a “graphic adventure” game like King’s Quest III.  Functionally, these games are almost identical to games like Zork – you still have to type stuff like “jump” and “look at cat,” but unlike the earlier games you can see the character that you’re controlling.  And whether it’s because of this or just a coincidence, you begin to feel something for the character as well.  Death here isn’t just frustrating, it’s actually just a tiiiiiiny bit sad.

Let’s look at another example:  Final Fantasy vs. Dragon Warrior.  These are two of the most venerable and wildly successful console RPGs available.  Each series has its defenders, but there’s probably not a lot to distinguish between them as gameplay experiences.  One fundamental difference between them, though, is that Final Fantasy has always presented a side view of the combat, using crude animation to show you the results of your commands, while Dragon Warrior always presents the combat through the characters eyes.  Seems like a paltry thing… but even back when I played video games, I never got all the way through a Dragon Warrior title.*   And I think it’s because I didn’t care about the characters.  The implication is that I did care about my Final Fantasy I characters, which seems ludicrous since – remember, I did most of my video gaming back in the 8-bit era – and no, I’m not that old, I was just behind the times – they never at any time do or say anything other than stab monsters and occasionally put on a new shirt.

But I really did care!  Actually, I made them lead rich internal lives… They even had little alliances:  at one point I decided that two of the characters were friends, and made them protect and heal eachother at the expense of the rest of the party.  Plus I was convinced that if I didn’t spend equal amounts of money on each character’s equipment, the random number generator would punish me by blowing all the attack rolls.

On closer examination, this looks less like a rich internal life and more like incipient obsessive-compulsive disorder on the part of the player… but hey, we’re talking about a first-generation CRPG here.  Sometimes you had to make your own fun.

Anyway, this kind of imaginative fantasy is not possible in a game like Dragon Warrior where you usually can’t see the character.  By the same token, I never managed to summon up the appropriate sadness when, playing Oregon Trail, that any of my children had died of CHOLERA or SNAKEBITE.  Might this be because I never actually saw them?  (Not even on their birthdays!  I was a horrible virtual father.)

Of course, it there are going to be exceptions.  The second most dreamlike game I ever experienced is third-person, so that’s one strike.  The most dreamlike of all is Myst, though, so the theory’s got some legs, at least.  At the very least, it’s worth thinking about.  Again, I turn it over to you.  Can 2nd-person narration ever have the same emotional punch as 3rd-person?  Are there things you can get out of 2nd-person that you can’t achieve in 3rd-person?  Is bringing up Bakhtin, and the whole question of dreams vis-a-vis narrative, really even helpful?  Sound off in the comments!

*  By the way, when I say that I don’t really play video games anymore, it’s not because I think I’m too cool.  I don’t play video games anymore for the same reason that alcoholics don’t hang around in bars.  So yeah, video games are a surprisingly deep source of enjoyment, and an important aspect of modern pop culture, and many responsible adults make room for them in their lives.  The same is true of gin.