Point of view

What this element is

Point of view is the perspective from which the player experiences the game world — first person, second person, third person, top-down, or something in between. Flanagan and Nissenbaum note that a game's point of view has a large impact on how players perceive the virtual environment they are in.

Why it carries values

Your camera is an immediate declaration of what the game will put front and centre: the learner's embodied presence, their emotional relationship to others, their grasp of a complex system, or their comfort and safety. Point of view shapes realism, empathy, responsibility, accessibility and player comfort — and the designers in this study chose perspectives to serve those values even when it meant rejecting familiar game conventions or more obviously engaging options.

Patterns from practice

VR and first person

VR is intimately linked with first person, enabling a sense of body ownership that makes the self part of the experience. In the space game, the head-mounted display essentially is the character: the astronaut suit is a sealed, autonomous unit that constantly provides a spatial frame. Players cannot just turn their head to look around — they must reorient the entire suit, exactly as they would in orbit. That constraint is authenticity, but it is also care: giving players a virtual anchor to spatialise themselves reduces motion sickness.

The learner-driver game is first person in both VR and PC versions, putting the learner directly in the driver's seat for accountability and realism. And the environmental developer summed up the ethical weight of the choice: VR is "more than first person, that's you're the person" (P7). First person makes the player directly responsible, not an observer — which is precisely why designers of safety and clinical training reach for it.

Second person

Second person is rarer, and it exists to create empathy and direct moral address. The youth social services designers decided against any visible player character. They rejected a superficial character "bouncing around the screen" because the scenarios would then be something happening to that character — a person the player could watch from a safe distance. Instead, characters in the game address the player directly, inviting them to take ownership of the story as a moral and social agent. The perspective choice deliberately encodes emotional and ethical learning over conventional gaming values like fun or exploration.

Top-down or god's-eye view

Where the subject is a system rather than a person, pulling the camera back is the value-aligned choice. The environmental games use third-person and god's-eye views because narrative is not the main concern: the broader view gives systemic control, clarity and accessibility, letting learners understand the mechanics of an ecosystem with a degree of autonomy and experimentation. A first- or second-person version, the developer reasoned, would have been more didactic.

Comfort drives the same decision from another direction. The physiotherapy developers tried first person for one game and found it left players disoriented and nauseous. Serving an audience not especially familiar with gaming — often older patients in rehabilitation — they moved to third person because it was more accessible and comfortable. Perspective was chosen for the actual audience, not the imagined gamer.

Questions to ask your team

1. What do we most want the player to feel: personal responsibility, empathy for someone else, or understanding of a system? Does our camera match that answer?
2. If we're using first person, are we prepared for the player to feel directly accountable for outcomes — including failures? Is that appropriate for this audience?
3. Would putting a visible character between the player and the scenario create useful distance, or let them off the moral hook?
4. Who in our audience has never played a 3D game? Have we tested our perspective with them, not just with gamers?
5. What is our motion-sickness and disorientation plan — anchors, reference frames, a third-person fallback?
6. Are we defaulting to first-person VR because it serves the learning, or because it demos well?
7. If the learning goal is systemic (an ecosystem, a supply chain, a ward), would a god's-eye view teach it better than embodiment?