Would something like Lifeline count as a "second-person" game? In Lifeline, you don't have direct control over your character; you're stationed in this security room, watching the main character on the security cameras and shouting directions at her via a USB microphone plugged into the PS2.
I don't thinki so it would constitute 2nd Person. I think it's just 3rd person via an indirect (and frustrating!) control method. I do not think that a true 2nd person POV is possible in a game just like I don't think it is really possible to have a true 2nd person movie. 2nd person literature is the narator telling the reader what he or she is doing. I don't see how one could really translate this into a game.
When I had last researched the FPS genre, SPS came out. A Japanese game developer was experimenting with it. Except, you saw from your enemy's eyes. It was odd. What would happen if multiple enemies were on-screen?
When I had last researched the FPS genre, SPS came out. A Japanese game developer was experimenting with it. Except, you saw from your enemy's eyes. It was odd. What would happen if multiple enemies were on-screen?
Check out the game that SimonForsman linked to earlier in the thread. It is a Unity Web game that handles the multiple enemies in an enjoyable way. Fun little game.
Why nobody uses 2nd-person POV: You would see the player character's face, looking at you. His face would be center of screen, and you would see the world at the sides of the screen. As you move forward into the world, he would walk backwards.
Absolutely reasonable, but that's because a "third person" is considered the narrator, so a ghostly presence up and behind.
I can imagine a 2nd person also in another way, the face is not looking at me, we are both looking in a direction and he is just on my left or right side. So it would be a kind of lateral 3rd person.
A second-person narrative in literature is one where the reader is the protagonist and the narrator uses 2nd-person pronouns - e.g. "you walk down the stairs" / "you see movement up ahead" / "it was the worst day of your life".
It seems to me that games are already closer to a second=person experience than most books, as the player directly witnesses events in the story. Making a second-person game therefore would not require a change in camera perspective - a game with a "1st-person" camera could have a second-person narrative if the storyline/narration/other characters support the idea that the player is actually taking part in the action themselves, i.e. the player and their avatar are the same person.
Imagine a game which takes place in a world similar to our own, where the player never sees their avatar's reflection, hears them speak, hears others refer to them by name, or anything else which would confirm that they are a different person to the player - you could create a storyline with these constraints where the player is conceivably playing as themselves.
For example, the game could play out like a premonition of future events: the player finds themselves in the middle of some disaster in 2020 and fights to survive and help others - in this situation it would be quite reasonable that the player's life prior to the events of the game is never mentioned, and so there is little risk of introducing contradictions between the history of the player and the in-game version of themselves, The game is then a story about a series of events happening to the player themselves - this seems to me the closest parallel to a second-person narrative in literature.
