Most 3D, character-driven video games
can be pretty easily placed into one of two categories:
either first person or third person.
In a first-person game, you see the game world
through the actual eyes of the player character
as though you were that character,
and in a third-person game, you see the player character
from the outside - often from behind their back
or from a fixed isometric perspective.
But the existence of these two perspectives
begs a question:
if this is what a first-person game looks like,
and this is what a third-person video game looks like...
what exactly would second-person look like?
Now, I'm not the first person to wonder about this -
the question of whether or not
a second-person shooter could actually exist
is one that has plagued video game message boards
just about as long as the Internet has existed.
It's also served as the premise
for some pretty good comedy sketches over the years,
like this one from Mega64:
- [Announcer] Introducing the world's
first second-person shooter.
(video game music)
(rock music) - No no no no!
- And this one from The Onion.
- To enter second-person shooter mode,
you just simply adjust the narrative slider
from first to second.
- You are walking down a long corridor.
Suddenly, a Nazi leaps out from around the doorway
and unleashes a hail of machine gun fire in your direction.
- But to help us actually figure out
what a second-person game would really be,
I think it would be helpful to look at this grammatically.
In written language, the term "first person"
denotes any writing where the point of view
uses phrases like "I" or m"y"
to tell the story from the perspective of the protagonist.
Third-person writing, on the other hand,
uses third-person pronouns -
for example, "he went this way," "she went that way," et cetera -
to talk about characters from an outside perspective.
Now, second-person writing does exist,
but it's kind of a weird one -
in second person, the primary pronoun used is "you."
"You do this," "you go there," et cetera.
The second person is actually a lot less common
in narrative writing,
and it's actually something you're more likely to encounter
in, say, a list of instructions
or a choose-your-own-adventure book.
Now, the analogous video game camera perspectives
for first and third-person writing are obvious -
but what about for second-person?
We know what an "I" game looks like
and we know what a "he" game looks like,
but what about a "you" game?
Strangely enough, I actually found the answer to this
before I even came up with the question,
and, believe it or not, it came to me courtesy of a game
you may have heard me talk about once before -
and that game is Driver: San Francisco.
See, for all the interesting missions
in Driver: San Francisco - and there are plenty of them -
there's one mission in particular
that I swear to God I think about all the time.
The mission in question is called "The Target"
and it's the final mission of chapter six of the game.
In the game, you play as a cop named John Tanner
who, for reasons I won't get into here,
basically has a superpower that allows you
to take over the bodies of any other driver,
and has begun using that superpower
to foil a possible terror plot
from a gangster named Jericho.
Over the course of the game Tanner decides
that the best way to unravel Jericho's plans
is to do it from the inside,
and in order to do that, Tanner takes over the body
of a low-level henchman named Ordell
and uses his driving skills
to help move Ordell up the ranks.
The final mission in this story arc
sees you inhabiting Ordell's body one last time
to complete a major assignment from his boss Leila,
who is this international assassin
and Jericho's second-in-command.
Tanner's plan?
Warp into Ordell's body and, without arousing suspicion,
drive Leila and Ordell directly into police custody.
Now, the mission begins as normal
with Tanner and his partner Jones
driving their iconic orange Dodge Challenger,
and soon enough, you warp into Ordell's body
with Leila in the passenger seat
where she gives you some clarity on the mission.
(car engine roaring)
- [Leila] Ordell, I need nothing but your best today.
- [Tanner] What's going down?
- [Leila] Jericho's got a problem he wants fixed.
Get me to the target and I'll fix it.
- So you drive to the destination
she's given you, closing in on your target,
and as you get close, this happens:
(car engine roaring)
- Slow down.
We should acquire the target any time now.
(car engine roaring) (tires screeching)
The yellow Dodge, up ahead.
Stay close but don't be obvious.
- ...that's my car.
- What?
That's the cop that's been getting in our way.
- Do we follow him to the target?
- ...he IS the target.
- [Narrator] It's you.
You've been assigned to kill... you.
(music)
Now, after that cutscene ends,
you are back in Ordell's body in the first person
with Leila sitting to your right.
But then... you press the throttle to accelerate,
and the car in front of you moves.
You steer to the left and to the right...
and the car in front of you moves
to the left and then to the right.
And then, quickly, it sinks in that the car you're controlling
is actually the car you're following.
Your perspective as the player is entirely separate
from what you're controlling as the player.
In other words, you're pursuing... you.
Now, as you can see, the car that you're sitting in
is moving, too - but, crucially,
you're not the one who's controlling that car.
The car you're sitting in is moving automatically,
seemingly operated by an AI-controlled driver
who's tailing the car you're actually controlling.
It's basically like a chase mission in any other video game
just like you've seen countless other times -
except for this time, it's flipped on its head.
This time, you're the one being followed,
while simultaneously seeing it all unfold
from the perspective of the car doing the following.
And while it's hard for me to guess
how well this comes across on video,
all these elements combine to make something
that is very, very odd to play.
There's something shocking and disorienting
about seeing a first-person perspective on your screen
but also not controlling that perspective
while remotely operating the car that you're tailing.
It's the closest a video game has ever gotten
to feeling like a true out-of-body experience,
and it's an experience that has stuck with me
ever since I first played this game back in 2011.
Now, when I first played Driver: San Francisco
eight years ago,
I kinda just played through this mission once,
start to finish, marveling at the unique perspective
that this mission granted you,
but then moving on to the rest of the game.
But I've always felt like if I ever came back to this game,
I'd wanna pick this mission apart
and see what makes it tick,
and that's part of what I hope to accomplish
with this video.
See, as cool as this mission is, it's also pretty linear.
The whole thing takes place with you driving down
this completely locked-down race course
with no exits or detours -
pretty much just a straight shot to the exit.
I've always assumed that the developer Reflections
designed this mission this way
due to the technological limitations
of this weird second-person camera
that they built just for this mission.
Perhaps there was no way for them to get this camera
to behave properly in the actual open world
with all the various streets, elevations,
and alleyways you could dip into -
not to mention the other street traffic.
And on top of that, they built this mission
with a pretty strict countdown timer,
forcing you to hit the checkpoints in rapid succession -
something that I've always assumed was placed there
to keep you from ever veering too far off the path
and breaking the game somehow.
Still, I've always wondered about
the actual limitations of this mission,
and I knew that this time around I wanted to test out
whether or not there was any way to escape -
so before finishing the mission, I paused,
started it over, and then this time,
instead of starting the race as intended,
I swung the car into a 180,
driving the car backwards in the wrong direction.
Now, when I do this, the AI driver
immediately begins panicking,
rapidly spinning the steering wheel
trying desperately to keep my car visible in frame,
and then eventually, it turns around 180 degrees
to reveal what looks like the entire open world
of Driver: San Francisco -
seemingly 100% accessible to the player.
Now I drove away from the racetrack and began exploring,
and I kept bracing myself to hit some kind of invisible wall
or failure state for going off course,
but it never happened. It all actually worked.
I merged into traffic
and the second-person camera followed me,
immaculately bobbing and weaving
through the other cars on the road.
It was around this time that I noticed...
there was no timer.
It turns out that Reflections
had generously designed this mission,
intentionally or unintentionally,
so that the mission countdown timer
doesn't actually begin until you reach the first checkpoint -
meaning that if you never hit that first checkpoint,
you can drive around forever.
(car engine roaring)
(car passing on right honks)
This led to what I can only describe
as a transcendent video game experience.
It felt like I was seeing something
that I was never meant to see.
This ability to explore the city as much as I wanted to
all from this wholly unique,
extremely surreal second-person viewpoint:
it felt like a magical experience
and one that almost nobody else
has experienced for themselves.
Now, revisiting this mission
and managing to escape the confines
laid down by the developers all those years ago,
I really wanted to try and push this thing to its limits.
I couldn't resit trying to break things a little:
I drove the car off ramps, into upcoming traffic, all of it.
But surprisingly, it held together perfectly.
That is, until I tried one specific thing.
See, I haven't talked about it before,
but this mission actually does have a failure condition.
In the lower-right corner of the screen
there's a health meter,
and it represents the health of Tanner's car:
the car you're chasing / driving.
But if you get into one too many collisions
while driving this car in the second person,
you can actually run out of health,
causing Tanner to die and the mission to end in a loss.
This is actually pretty hard to achieve
on the default mission path they laid out,
but driving into oncoming lanes of traffic
and ramping off car transporters
had taken its toll on my vehicle
and I only had a small sliver of health left.
Wanting to explore this mission as long as possible,
I gingerly pulled Tanner's car into a narrow alleyway
and then decided to try out the one thing
I hadn't attempted yet:
I turned around and drove the car,
in the second person,
directly at myself.
(music)
This put the AI driver in a weird position.
It now had to drive backwards just to keep me in the frame,
and it was also narrowly sandwiched
between the two walls of the alley,
giving it almost no room to maneuver.
I kept driving towards myself,
putting on the pressure, closer and closer, and then...
(car engine roaring)
(car screeching)
(cars crashing)
- [Leila] Nice work.
- It broke.
All at once, the second-person vehicle shoots into a wall,
clips through it,
and then launches hundreds of feet into the air.
Briefly, one frame at a time,
we can get glimpses of the chaos that unfolded:
we see the car inside the wall,
then we see the car's front console flipped over;
we see what appears to be the ocean floor
and then the pavement as seen from underneath;
we see rooftops, the driver's arm,
the sky, trees, abstract geometry -
and then the city from above,
flooded with unloaded geometry.
After that, we see the car spinning and spinning in mid air,
giving us glimpses of San Francisco from above,
before finally getting so high
that nothing can be seen but endless ocean.
And then,
black.
(music)
Suddenly, all at once, the car snaps back to earth.
The health meter for Tanner's vehicle turns blindingly white
and then the second-person viewpoint
fills with an orange-yellow hue: Tanner's car.
Quickly it becomes clear that the second-person car
has somehow spawned inside of Tanner's vehicle,
dealing infinite damage to the car.
(cars crashing)
A deafening crash sound can be heard
and shattered glass flies everywhere,
and then, for a brief moment, right before the mission ends,
the camera inexplicably shifts into Tanner's car
where the car is balanced on its nose,
its windshield shattered,
thrust impossibly through another vehicle.
And then, horrifically, the camera clips
through the back of Tanner's partner's head
and shows us the backside of his eyeballs and tongue:
a truly terrifying second-person perspective
if ever there was one.
(music)
Shaken by my other-worldly encounter seemingly brought on
by pushing this already existential mission to its limits,
I reset the mission
and played it beginning to end one last time -
this time careful to do it the right way,
not wanting to disturb whatever eldritch being
I'd upset by breaking the mission in the first place.
After all, I thought, I know that every mission
in Driver: San Francisco
ends with a continue and retry option,
so if I really wanted to explore this mission again,
I could always hit the retry button to give it another shot
after running through it normally.
So I proceeded to complete the mission as intended -
a mission, by the way, that ends with the antagonist Jericho
actually taking over your body
and attempting to drive you into a lethal car accident:
(car engine roaring) - You mean... Jericho!
- [Leila] Sit back and enjoy the show.
Not many people get to watch themselves die.
- ...a problem that Tanner decides to solve
by, disturbingly enough, shifting
for the first and only time in the game
into his partner Jones' body.
Yes, that partner.
- [Jones] What the heII is going on?
- Anyways, I go to finish the mission
the normal way, staying on the path,
fully expecting the restart option
that appears after most missions to show up.
Instead, I get to the end of the mission, and -
for some reason that I still can't explain -
the only option was continue.
The reset option had vanished.
Panicked, I quickly hit ALT+F4 and existed the game,
hoping I could load up my save file
and play through the mission again, but it was too late.
It had already autosaved over my file
and the mission was gone with no way to replay it again.
(music)
Look, Driver: San Francisco is a game
full of weird, interesting, strikingly-designed missions -
but, to me, "The Target" has always stood out
as the perfect example of what makes this game special.
Video games are an entire medium
built around taking over others' bodies,
and Driver: San Francisco is a richly existential
and metatextual reflection of this idea.
This mission in particular brought these ideas to the fore
in a way that I wasn't fully prepared for
and that I'm only now beginning to wrap my head around,
years and years later.
Even writing the script for this video
felt like a mind-bending exercise
in trying to explain something
that is borderline unexplainable.
You really have to play it for yourself
to get a full sense of how crazy this mission feels.
In designing this mission, Reflections took decades
of 3D video game conventions and turned them on their head
to create what feels a truly out-of-body experience.
That, to me, is an accomplishment worth celebrating.
Please play "Driver: San Francisco."
(car engine roaring)
- [Leila] If you're here, who's in your body?
- [Tanner] Well, no one.
...oh God.
(door shuts)
(keys jingling)
(car revving)
- All right, so a couple quick updates
on the "Driver: San Francisco" situation.
The petition to get Ubisoft to re-list the game
that I mentioned at the end of my last video
is now at over 70,000 signatures, which is insane.
Please, if you have any interest in this game,
please sign this petition.
It now feels like 100,000 is within our grasp,
which is crazy, and I can't believe I'm saying,
but it could happen -
which, to me, feels like an unignorable number.
But! In the meantime, as you might have noticed,
Ubisoft has not re-listed the game -
they have been ignoring the 70,000 signatures we have.
And on a totally unrelated note, not connected at all,
Driver: San Francisco, since my video last month,
has been in the top 10 most downloaded games
on The Pirate Bay.
...totally no relationship there,
not mentioning that for any reason at all.
Just saying, the game is not available
and it's also one of the most pirated video games,
and has been in the top 10 most pirated games
for the past month.
Just a coincidence.
Also, totally unrelated to the fact
that this game is apparently very popular on Pirate Bay,
did you know that if you go to NordVPN.org/babylonian
you can go to websites, illicit or non-illicit,
without being tracked by your ISP or anybody else?
So that means that, for example,
if you were to go to - and I'm not saying you should -
a website that allowed you to download a video game
that is no longer available and can be easily pirated
with just a few clicks
and you don't wanna get an angry email from your ISP
saying you can't do that,
you should invest in a VPN. (laughs)
If you go to NordVPN.org/babylonian
and use coupon code "babylonian",
you'll get 70% off their three-year plan
and get one full month of VPN coverage free.
But yeah, if you enjoyed this video,
please share it with anyone you think would like it,
and/or subscribe to my channel
if you'd like to see more stuff like this in the future.
I've got a lot of videos
in various stages of production right now
that I'm really excited to get out into the world,
and I can finally start thinking about them
now that this one's done.
So yeah, that's it from me for this time.
Hopefully the next video comes out a little quicker.
I've got a lot of ideas that have nothing to do
with Driver: SF, I just... this one
has been on my mind for a while
and I'm glad to finally have it done.
So thank you for watching, and I'll see you next time.
(music)