I'm just going to leave this here.

"Half-Life Trailer by James Benson." Would body awareness work properly like this in an actual game?

First Person Films - Combat in the First Person: Haruti

Watch this amazing 7:33 real-life helmet cam video of a battle in Afghanistan, edited by the New York Times.

Required viewing for FPS-afficionados everywhere: this is exactly the source material we steal from, and it is clear how much more we must steal. Some observations:

• It's kind of funny how desaturated and colorless the video is. Just like in the video games!
• At one point, Watch the second time they come under fire. Watch the squad and the "player"; they go to great lengths to avoid stepping into the irrigation ditch. On a strategic level, maybe the water would get their equipment wet and less-functional -- but wouldn't the trench give them more cover? On a cultural level, slimy irrigation water is gross. How do we represent the consequence of materials / materiality in an FPS? Portal 2 presents a really blatant treatment of materials in the form of brightly-colored gel; but will it ever possible to represent how gross wet toilet-paper feels?
• They hold their fire / conserve their ammo a lot. I think it's pretty clear we don't want to model this, though, because running out of ammo isn't "fun."
• Reloading your gun while running seems pretty hard to do in real-life.
• Covering fire plays a huge role. (Brothers in Arms was the first to formally mechanize this, I think.)
• They almost never fire when standing. (Since Counter-Strike, FPS games now model this.)
• They do not know the exact layout of the level, but they know rough architectural schemas: "this 150 x 150 enclosed orchard was unusual for that area." If we wanted to model that thinking, maybe we should only have procedurally-generated levels, in order to encourage pattern-recognition over rote memory.
• They blew a hole in the wall. Currently, only the Battlefield: Bad Company series models that, and other games less interestingly with pre-placed static "breaching charge" locations for demomen player classes. Dynamic deformation is probably the most crucial real-life combat mechanic to explore in military arcade FPS games. (For more, see "The First Person Ruin")
• At the end, they hug each other. Hugging is clearly important to the narrative of this battle. Why isn't "hugging" a game mechanic? Why aren't there any first person huggers? (Other than Portal 2?) Dear Activision: I want to kiss my squadmate's forehead at the end of a round.

First Person Films: "Charlie Bit My Finger" and "Smack My B*tch Up"

A more recent addition to the "First Person Films" post... described by the creator as a "Left 4 Dead" short film, essentially one extended POV shot. Enjoy.



Ah, vulnerable children in survival horror contexts never gets old, eh?

And as a bonus, here's Prodigy's "Smack My B*tch Up," a (NSFW) first person music video that came to mind when watching the above. I remember watching this on MTV back when they still played music videos...



Look at what the first person mode can do! And look at how narrowly we use it in games! Loooook!

First Person Films: Doom and Enter the Void

The "point of view" shot is ubiquitous in movies -- an actor glares at something off-frame, then the next shot is an eyeline match to the thing they're glaring at, mimicking their point of view -- but full, sustained sequences with substantial camera movement that doesn't break the rules of first person navigation? Pretty rare, I think. (Please leave a comment if you know of any other films.)

Doom (2005) is an obvious example, and probably the most immediately consumable: you see the gun at the bottom of the screen, bobbing and swaying with the movement of the camera, as it seems to glide up stairs and through metal corridors.



The problem with this (occasionally cool, I guess) scene from Doom is that it confines itself to the boring commonplace parts of the FPS game tropes (reloading a gun that many times?) and ignores what playing Doom 2 was actually like: strafing like mad, back-pedaling like a lunatic -- firing, always firing! -- in a linear, confined metal corridor instead of a non-linear open plan layout.

Or maybe the problem was that they were adapting the powerful sedative that was Doom 3? That's right, I said it.

Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void (2009) does it better, mostly because it does stuff with the first person view that we can't do very well in first person games. Here's the first 10 minutes, omitting the crazy nauseating opening credits: