First-Person 3Cs: Character

I’m talking about systemic implementations of the 3Cs in first-person game design, and this is the part about characters. We’ve already talked about the value of empathy and touched on things like showing the player avatar’s body. But there’s a lot you can do with who you play in first-person games.

There won’t be any pseudocode in this part of the discussion, since it doesn’t quite fit. How you make your player’s alter ego readable in a first-person game is complex and games have represented characters in many different ways through the years, but it’s not really an implementation problem. It’s an aesthetic choice. In some cases, it’s merely the choice of how to write dialogue.

We’ll look at who you are and how that is represented, but also what you do and how this is rewarded.

Make Believe

One of the great sadnesses in game design and game consumer expectations, in my opinion, is that we’ve conflated the term role-playing with gamification. Experience points, skill unlocks, even narrative “quests” have become the essential building blocks of a “role-playing game” and many fans will complain if these are not present in some form.

Traditionally, once D&D went from “wargame where you play just one character” to what it has been ever since, these components were just a mechanical layer on top of something else. Something I will call immersive role-playing. Role-play focused on pretending to be someone else. Role-play in the sense that kids do it, or some subsets of tabletop role-players do it.

This style of role-play means that your own imagination is an important part of the experience. Pretending to be the character you are playing, or at the very least imagining what the character is going through, whether a character someone else wrote or a character you imagined yourself. You’re not just there for the content, but for what this make believe makes you feel and experience. The content isn’t something to consume, but fills distinct functions. You then roll dice and you use various numbers to generate an output that aids your imagination.

Every time someone complained that V in Cyberpunk 2077 didn’t have a “character arc,” I wanted to scream that it’s because in a first-person immersive role-playing game all that narrative development is your development. It happens in your head. It’s your own personal growth within the game, your own personal understanding of the world and the characters you interact with. It’s not some character or plot arc created through screenwriting, and it shouldn’t be.

Take this consideration with you before you think about who the player’s avatar is: decide if you are making a game where content tells the player what happens, or a game where the player’s imagination is also a part of the game’s canon. It will greatly affect how you treat your game.

Who You Are

It matters who the player plays, even when games have little story context to speak of. DOOM may not aspire to Shakespearean heights of Olde English tongue-wrangling, but the player is certainly playing “Doomguy.”

Here are descriptions of some of the whos that first-person players have played through the years.

Party

With modern first-person games arguably taking their first stumbling steps deep underground, in the dungeon crawlers of the 70s and 80s, the concept of playing a whole party of adventurers and not a single character is inherited. Of course, it can be argued that it’s not really “first-person” (singular) if your experience is that of a group and not an individual, but ignore that for a bit and instead consider the strengths of this format.

Each character becomes a specialised member of your group with abilities and equipment all their own, and the death of one party member will affect how you continue playing. If the healer dies, you know your healing is now severely restricted and you may have to rethink how you level up the party in the future to regain access to those abilities.

It’s a clear and concise way to communicate complex things. Particularly to those gamers who know exactly what you’re talking about when you say Thief or Elf. It also makes things personal in a nice way, and leads to some incredible designs. Such as Wizardry, where the death of your whole party meant you had to create a new party to go get your stuff back.

Face Model

Some of the dungeon-crawlers in the early 90s, like Eye of the Beholder, used character portraits to show you your party in a more graphical way. In a similar style, the first-person shooter had entered the stage, and in Wolfenstein 3D we got an animated face model for our alter ego that would get more bloodied with lost health and grimace menacingly in response to certain in-game events.

Though iconic, this realtime face model is more charming than useful, particularly at modern screen resolutions where you would have to flick your gaze away from the action to see what your character is up to, or put a giant-sized bust on the screen. But if you are inspired by oldschool so-called “boomer shooters” the face model can still be a nice nostalgic touch.

View Model

With anything placed in the viewport being constantly visible, your character’s arms is the best canvas you have as an artist or storyteller. Gun drills, flavorful sword flurries, and variations on finishing moves and “glory kills” have been done using visible view models and/or animation synchronisation. Not to mention disgusting insect infestations on your arms and hands, syringe injections, self-surgery, and countless others.

Anything visible on your arms and hands, from tattoos to jewellery to scars to weapon addons, will get prominent screen coverage. It’s smart to consider how you use it. Even for storytelling, it can be powerful to see a bandage where you were injured at some earlier point in the story, for example.

Many games use a specially constructed view model that is only arms, while other games use a full-body animated mesh more like a third-person character. Games that let you choose between first- and third-person will use different sets of models and animations for both. This is because what looks good in first-person rarely looks good in third, and vice versa.

Cinematic Point of View

Digital games in first-person sometimes mimic the establishing shot methodology of movies by zooming in into the head of the game protagonist before switching to a first-person view. This can be preceded by a cutscene where the protagonist is talking or interacting in other ways.

It can also be done so that the game switches to a third-person view with an animated protagonist for specific occasions. In the game The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, the main character is shown climbing, interacting with healing stations, and speaking dialogue in third-person while the main gameplay interaction is first-person. These “action cutscenes” are sometimes partly interactive, and serve to show the hero of the story as a reinforcement of who you are playing.

Body Model

Something that made Halo more immersive for me was that, when I looked down, I could see those well-armored green legs of John-117’s (a.k.a, Master Chief). In Thief: Deadly Shadows, I remember pushing a bottle over a ledge with my foot. The bottle fell and alerted an already suspicious Pagan. In both cases, it felt like I was a character in a world and not just a floating camera.

But body awareness is a tricky thing in first-person games. Partly because the player is still usually behaving as an axis-aligned bounding box, and partly because the authoritative camera makes characters move in jittery ways. Turning on a dime, spinning in place, walking backwards and sideways and in other unnatural ways that make perfect sense for gameplay but no sense at all for a living person with actual bones under their skin and a desire not to break them. Not to mention foot-sliding: when the feet don’t actually touch the ground at the Roadrunner-rate they should but seem to slide over the ground.

Depending on your approach to body awareness, the camera may follow part of an animated skeletal mesh (such as the head or at least a point between the shoulders), or the skeletal mesh may follow the camera and blend its animations with respect for the camera’s authority.

In Halo 2, your legs were just a pair of animated legs and nothing more–but it was more than enough for the illusion to work.

Cockpit

First-person fits other genres than murder simulators and party-based dungeon crawling. Space ships, fighter jets, battlemechs/meka, and many other types of machines have been ours to pilot, turning our screen into an instrument-choked cockpit view.

Whether it’s a hardcore simulation (like Steel Battalion) or built for arcade action (like TIE Fighter), representing your place in the fiction using a cockpit model is quite effective. Sometimes, this will also include hands and arms interacting with the instruments, or respond to where in the cockpit you are looking (like in Elite: Dangerous).

There’s simply a lot you can do with a cockpit, and the role of pilot is often a compelling one. Not to mention games that mix it up, like Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, where you mix playing on-foot and piloting a mech.

Visor

An alternative to the full-fledged cockpit is a visor. Some curvature to any in-game UI to make it look like a helmet-projected head-up display, and it immediately adds +75% scifi feel. Many games make clever use of this, from windshield wipers that remove water to the brief flash of Samus Aran’s face reflection in Metroid Prime.

It can also be a restrictive feature. For example, when you wear a full knight’s helmet in Kingdom Come: Deliverance, your vision is narrowed by the helmet’s eye slit shape used as a camera overlay.

Camera

With film often serving as our visual reference it’s not uncommon for first-person shooters to reinforce the sense that our screen is a camera. This makes very little fictional sense, unless our character is a robot watching the world through artificial lenses for example, and is something that I’ve mentioned before as an odd artifact from our Hollywood obsession.

From my perspective, there are no benefits to this whatsoever. The most likely reason you are doing it is that everyone else is doing it, while the camera’s job should be to communicate the game’s information. Not to pretend to be a physical camera.

Interface

Whether a TV-operated missile that you guide in first-person, or a sniper bullet, or the simulated FLIR of the AC-130 Gunship cannon operator in Call of Duty, sometimes you’re not really in the thick of it directly but you’re steering a gun or projectile. Usually through some kind of interface.

This can serve as an effective reminder of indirection, portray the absurd nature of a real world operator’s job, or simply strive for an added layer of realism in a simulator.

First-Person Voice

In many first-person games, the character you play will also talk. It may be commentary on the game story, or what’s happening in the gameplay, or to convey what the player needs to do. Maybe jokes or taunts. But it can also be used to provide more story context, like John Blade’s interactions with his operator (JC), in SiN. It can really be anything.

This is an effective way to remind you that you are playing a specific character and not just a camera and to build dynamic or provide information through dialogue. This is extra powerful in a first-person game, since it means you can have dialogue that plays without having to pause the player’s direct interaction with the game.

Some games rely on the first-person voice to narrate events, like in What Remains of Edith Finch or Gone Home. Others are only in it for the one-liners.

Second-Person Voice

Half-Life is famous for having a silent protagonist. (Whether the writers are happy with that in hindsight is a different discussion.) What’s funny is that the game still has a well-known protagonist in Gordon Freeman. We never see Gordon Freeman in the game–only on the box cover. Instead, people we meet in the game reinforce our identity as Gordon by talking to us as Gordon. Do this, Mr Freeman. Do that, Mr Freeman. No don’t do that, Mr Freeman! Please God no, Mr Freeman! Why, Mr Freeman?!

We get to know we are Gordon because people tell us we are Gordon. A second-person invitation into the narrative. Also, it means that when people blame Gordon, we don’t have to take it personally, because it’s just Gordon. But when they credit Gordon, we can take full credit, because it was us. Just like bad managers!

The most common argument for second-person voice rather than first-person voice is that it allows you (the player) to occupy the protagonist’s shoes without forcing you to play a specific character (even if that’s obviously untrue with Gordon Freeman).

What You Do

Who you are and how that’s represented is a good starting point. But character is maybe more about what you do, and in video games this is mostly a game design matter. At a high level, it comes down to what the game allows you to do and what it rewards you for.

Moving

Video games are somewhat obsessed with traversal. It’s probably the one thing they do most. Walking, running, jumping, sliding, flying, gliding, climbing, swimming, etc. But why not, when it’s so much fun, and much less work to be athletic in the digital space than in real life.

Many movement-based games have artificial restrictions, which lean into what they allow. It’s not unusual to have invisible walls, for example, or weird obstacles placed to restrict your access to a seemingly more open space. It’s therefore important to be very clear what your game’s movement modes allow and where you can’t go as a means to reinforce where you can go.

A sense of momentum can often be its own reward, meaning that boosts in speed and the overcoming of obstacles is often good enough to keep players playing. There is a subset of these games–the walking simulators–that have their whole genre defined by their movement style and limited interaction.

Navigating

Traversing is one thing–finding your way is another. Some games don’t bother too much with navigation, leaning more into a kind of rollercoaster ride where you are clued in on where to go next by having enemies or obstacles appear (some call it “breadcrumbing”). Other games provide you with a larger space and expect you to find your way, maybe go off the beaten path on occasion to take in the sights, find juicy loot, or explore alternative solutions.

We often use words like “linear” to describe when a game has only one available path, while a place we come back to repeatedly can be a “hub,” and a larger more open space can be either an open world or a cohesive open space like the style of world you find in a metroidvania. The area of design that’s most prominently involved with navigation is of course level design. A whole field separate in its own right.

As with moving, navigating can be its own reward. Reaching a place that’s hard to reach, or completing an encounter so the door opens and you can continue, or maybe even bypassing an encounter entirely through the overhead vents.

Shooting

In a genre prominently called first-person shooter it makes perfect sense that there’s a ton of pow-pow and pew-pew. But shooting can take many different forms and have countless flavors.

One of the classic disputes is whether a game uses hitscan or simulated projectiles to determine hits. Which one you prefer is mostly an aesthetic choice, but it can affect how a game feels to play. Simulating a projectile, with gravity, wind effects, and so many other things, is fairly rare outside warsims, but having a visible projectile allows you to see where a shot is coming from and may sometimes let you dodge it by stepping away or using a specific mechanic for the purpose.

Another question is whether you fire shots from the center of the screen, based on the camera’s location in world space, or from the barrel of a 3D gun inside the viewport. The biggest difference this makes is that the latter is again more simulation-like. It means that the gun’s physical placement, sometimes affected by inverse kinematics and other additive effects, also affects the fired projectile. Say, a blocking wall or even cover. Or if you have an interposed ragdoll and take a hit you may end up firing your shot at a weird angle because your character flinched.

When it comes to rewards for shooting, this is much more about feedback than simply making the shooting itself satisfying. Enemies die like gut-filled piñatas and hallway plaster crumbles to reveal the rebar underneath. There’s smoke trails, flashes of light, particles, heat hazes, and so much else. When it comes to making it satisfying to shoot (and hit), games may actually have tried more kinds of feedback than for anything else.

Fighting

One of the hardest problems to solve in first person is arguably the lack of depth perception. In real-life, everyone except those of us with certain vision impairments can judge the distance to something by glancing at them. This is how we can intuitively reach out and grab something, for example, or don’t accidentally bump into walls all the time.

But since a first-person game is rendered to a flat screen, unless it’s in VR, this is simply not possible. We can’t accurately judge distance in a first-person game.

So when it comes to punching or stabbing people, which is another popular pastime for video game characters, there’s no easy way to make it feel as intuitive as shooting. But that hasn’t prevented many games from trying.

The most common way to do melee attacks in first person today is probably the nearly ubiquitous quick melee attack. It’s used in Halo, it’s used in Call of Duty, and Duke Nukem 3D had its classic kick button that behaves the same way. This can be a way to quickly kill an already wounded enemy, to push enemies away from your immediate camera vicinity so you can shoot them instead, or to trigger special animations like DOOM (2016)’s glory kills.

It’s common for this to tap into the same instantaneous (direct action) approach as other first-person actions, by having the animated attack start from the point of impact and then let the animation play back to the neutral stance from there. This may look a bit “janky” if you watch over the shoulder of someone playing the game, but feels right while playing. What can look even jankier still is if enemies get too close to the camera.

Rewards are mostly the same as when defeating enemies with shooting.

Skulking

That you can hide in shadows is a gameplay staple, much like red barrels exploding when you shoot them. On a moonless night or in the countryside, maybe there’s some merit to this, but in most cases it simply means that the game is always dark or sharply contrasted. It’s one of those gameplay choices that easily enforces an aesthetic as well.

One consequence of skulking around in hiding is that you will sometimes be able to observe the world in relative safety. This provides excellent space for atmospheric storytelling, as you eavesdrop on the secrets of plotting nobles or competing skulkers, and is arguably one of the reasons many immersive games use stealth as a key feature–to provide in-game room for world building.

Rewards for skulking can be alternative navigation, even allowing you to bypassing whole level areas or combat encounters. But there can also be other rewards, like patiently skulking around and killing the officers in Wolfenstein: The New Order in order to prevent enemy reinforcements from spawning.

Dying

Something we’ve been doing in first-person games since before the agonized scream of Doomguy was imprinted into our brains is to die. Gruesomely and often. (At least if you’re as bad at games as I am.)

We’ve been killed by our friends in multiplayer games and forced to spectate until a new round begins, in Counter-Strike. We’ve been killed in BioShock only to respawn in a confused state and run straight back to face the same Big Daddy once more.

One popular adage in single-player design is sometimes called “learning by dying,” where you must repeat the same activity until you complete it successfully, and whenever you die it simply restarts. Something that’s used to great effect in Hotline Miami, but becomes more tedious in many single-player campaigns where you must continue until you figure out the “right” way forward.

Obeying

Guns are synonymous to war as war is synonymous to the Nuremberg defense. There’s something primal about being told what to do. At least when it doesn’t include your taxes or the dishes.

Sadly, obeying orders may be the most common of all the things you do in first-person shooters, next to shooting and moving. Even to the point where BioShock was praised for making its iconic plot twist centered on having no choice but to obey. A sort of fourth-wall plot twist that only serves to highlight that the only choice you had along the way was to quit the game.

Do what the commander says. Follow the GUI navigation markers. Stay in the circle while the progression bar climbs. Wait for the timer to run its course. Go here, go there, go back again. Kill X enemies, find Y things, craft Z resources, and so on and so forth. The reward is usually in the form of content, or score. Just indulge the voice in your head and you’ll be fine!

Fiddling

I had no better way to describe this activity than “fiddling.” Imagine a classic movie dialogue scene, where the characters are doing various things while talking. Maybe smoking a cigarette, having a beer, loading a pistol, searching through some drawers, or whatever fits the theme. The activity is secondary to the narrative message, except in the way it anchors the player in said narrative.

Turn the valve. Press the button. Pull the lever. Move the crate with your gravity gun. [Insert busywork.] Done right, this stuff will immerse you like few other things, even if you’re mostly just keeping your idle hands busy while the grown-ups are talking.

One of my absolute favorite scenes like this is Lewis’ Story in What Remains of Edith Finch, where you are performing his repetitive chores at the cannery while his imagination conjures up castles and knights. If you haven’t played that game, just go and do it now! It’s an absolute master class in interactive storytelling.

Managing

I wanted to be cheeky and call this “Excel:ing,” but resource management is relevant in many games and being cheeky is the lowest form of comedy.

Management often makes use of fullscreen modal windows with lots of numbers and text and stacking options and so on. Grids, equipment slots, ammo types, vendors, stashes, containers. Funny thing is that I know you know what all of those are.

Humans are hunter-gatherers. Collecting and optimizing stuff like this triggers primal instincts. It’s also a perfect space for what game designer Nicole Lazzarro would call “easy fun.” A great way to relax between bouts of “hard fun.” For many types of players, collecting and managing stuff is its own reward.

Talking

Dialogue in games is almost exactly the same today as it was 30 years ago, or even 40 years ago. The visual quality has increased, but the prewritten quips and branching dialogue trees are almost exactly the same.

Since first-person shooters tend to be direct-action and rely less on states, they haven’t done player dialogue to the same extent as some other genres. But it definitely exists, and usually in the form made familiar by games from Bethesda: modal states with branching dialogue. You find this in everything from The Darkness to Deus Ex.

My favorite example is still Kingpin: Life of Crime and its mapped yes and no direct actions that provided contextually accurate responses without requiring a separate state. But if anything, this is an activity I’d love to see more experimentation with!

Working

With the popularity of survival games, many of Robinson Crusoe’s desperate measures have been turned into first-person activities. Chopping wood. Crafting tools. Collecting twigs. Making camp. Hunting wildlife. Cooking. Expressing colonial values.

Basically, work. But these games–from Rust to Subnautica–often do a great job with story context or player competition to give real meaning to the work. If you don’t feed yourself, you die. If you don’t light up your dark hallways, the Creepers spawn and explode it to death.

Maybe this direct connection to dire consequences, paired with the near-intuitive clarity of the value of the work is what makes it so rewarding.

Collecting

One of the many conflicts between fans of first-person shooters is whether games should require interaction to collect things like health, ammo, or weapon replacements, or if such things should be collected by walking over them.

It doesn’t have to be items and healthpacks either. When you go around scanning things in the environment in Metroid Prime, reading books in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, or listening to audio logs in your favorite BioShock, it’s the same type of activity.

One thing this can sometimes do is that you start looking at the 3D environment, searching the world space for things to collect, and you stop searching for UI navpoints.

Interacting

A final activity that’s worth mentioning is general interaction. Opening and closing doors, flushing toilets, using medical packs, pulling levers, triggering faucets. The difference between this and fiddling is that, where fiddling is mostly cosmetic, interacting has a direct effect on the world.

In Duke Nukem 3D, you can use the interaction to do many different things, but this probably shines the most in the style of game sometimes dubbed “immersive sims,” where many interactions are the consequences of systemic interaction. Heat + fish = cooked fish. Fire + wood = burning wood.

The reward can really be anything from generating a sense of simulated immersion to causing the game to progress.

Actions as Identity

That covers who you are and what you do. Let’s combine those two and see what happens. I’ll use the excellent game Horizon: Zero Dawn (HZD) as an example, and use control schemes to illustrate what I’m even talking about.

Ostensibly, HZD is a game about exploration. “The game features an open world environment for Aloy to explore, while undertaking side and main story quests,” says WikiPedia. Emphasis mine.

The below slideshow has five images of Horizon: Zero Dawn‘s control scheme, to check how this converts to reality.

• The first slide is just the controls.
• The second slide underlines platform requirements for the PlayStation 4.
• The third slide underlines combat actions.
• The fourth slide underlines movement actions.
• Only the fifth slide underlines actions that could be considered exploration specifically.

As you can tell, the exploration slide has only two things: Interact, and Toggle Focus Mode. One is a context-sensitive button you use to activate things in the game world, and the other is an overlay/scanner thing that directs you towards points of interest and provides extra information.

This is not to say that the game is bad or doesn’t feature exploration, by the way. It’s a great game. This is only to say that the control scheme doesn’t seem very focused on exploration. Aloy’s identity, as the player’s activities would have it, is much more combat focused. This ratio of high combat vs low exploration definitely seems fitting when I think about my own personal playthroughs of the game.

This is where the Character, as a compound of Who You Are and What You Do, starts to really matter. Aloy moves, navigates, and fights against robot dinosaurs. These are the things that feedback and narrative need to reinforce, and what the player should be rewarded for doing.

Conclusions

Who You Are and What You Do. Combined with the genre-defining Camera, and the many intricacies of Controls, this covers most of what makes up the 3Cs of your first-person game.

As always, there are so many nuances, thematic differences, and preferences mixed into this that it’s impossible to provide one conclusion. But these three articles were written as companion pieces for first-person game design. At least in the form of uninviting lists of really hard choices you need to make.

If you think anything is missing, have strong opinions about this, or would want to hear more or dig deeper into something, don’t hesitate to comment on these posts or e-mail me at annander@gmail.com.

You’re welcome!