To be nobody.

I’m becoming weary of this choice we have in videogames between first person perspective and third person perspective. I just want to be in the game world sometimes without having to be somebody.

In film this is perfectly normal. As a viewer you are not any of the characters. And you are not looking through an invisible character’s eyes (none of the characters in a film ever pays any attention to you).

Board games ditto. I’m not a character on the chess board. I may be moving a pawn around. But this pawn does not represent me in some way. Neither am I, the player, an entity in the fictional system that is the game. I look at it and I interact with it. Without having to be part of it.

I love virtual worlds. Realtime 3D environments that are alive, in which things happen. Is our designation of the player as one of the entities in this world a clumsy attempt to prove that indeed this world is happening in real time, and is not prerecorded, that it is alive. Is it so important that we prove this? And doesn’t the player of videogames know this by now already?

Sometimes I just want to have a world that simply exists, with characters that I can observe. Without those characters representing me or even acknowledging my existence. I want to figure out how to do this in realtime 3D.