A Comfortable Mistake
Video games are routinely sorted into neat perspective boxes: first-person and third-person. The terms feel intuitive, established, and beyond dispute. An FPS shows what the character sees. A third-person game shows the character from the outside. A second-person game doesn't truly exist, per se. Case closed.
Except that this framing quietly borrows language from literature and then uses it incorrectly.
In grammar and narrative theory, person is not about camera placement. It is about who is the acting subject. Once we apply that definition consistently, a strange realization emerges: what the games industry has long called third-person does not actually describe a third-person relationship at all.
This article is the first in a short series. Its purpose is not to reclassify games yet, but to clear conceptual ground. Before we can argue about first, second, or third person in games, we need to be precise about what those terms mean.
Camera Angle Is Not Narrative Person
Before redefining perspective, one clarification is essential: camera angle does not establish narrative person.
Games inherited the terms first-person and third-person largely through visual analogy. The distinction became shorthand for what the player sees on screen, not for how the player is positioned within the system of action. This shortcut made the terminology easy to teach, but conceptually unstable.
In literature and narrative theory, a scene can be described from any imaginable vantage point without changing grammatical person. A third-person novel may describe events from directly behind a character’s eyes. A second-person text may position the reader outside their body. A first-person account may briefly describe the narrator from an external viewpoint for dramatic effect.
By tying person to camera placement, game discourse quietly collapsed two distinct ideas:
Cinematography: where the viewpoint is located
Narrative person: who the acting subject is
Untangling these concepts is the key to understanding why the familiar labels begin to break down under closer inspection.
What “Person” Actually Means
In language and literature, person refers to the relationship between the speaker and the subject of action:
First person: I act ("I walk down the road")
Second person: You act ("You open the door")
Third person: They act ("She draws her sword")
Person describes agency and identity, not point of observation. It answers a simple question: who is doing the acting?
This definition has remained stable across centuries of grammar, rhetoric, and narrative theory. What changes from medium to medium is not the meaning of person, but the techniques used to express it.
Game terminology drifted away from this definition by anchoring person to the camera rather than to player representation. Once that shift occurred, the labels continued to function socially even as they lost their original precision.
Clearing the Ground
At this stage, no games need to be reclassified. The only claim established here is a foundational one: camera placement and narrative person are not the same thing.
If person is understood as a question of who acts rather than where the camera sits, the familiar categories of game perspective become less stable and more interesting. Some labels begin to feel strained. Other labels begin to feel incomplete.
The next article in this series builds on this groundwork by proposing a player-centric definition of perspective and applying it directly to video games.
Continue to Part II: A Player-Centric Model of Game Perspective.
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