Exploring 'Second-Person' Gaming through 'Driver San Francisco'

[Music] most 3d character-driven videogames 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 what 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 is plagued videogame messageboards 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 Mega 64 and this one from the onion to inter second person shooter mode you just simply put just a narrative slider from first a second you are walking down a long corridor suddenly a Nazi leaps help them around a doorway and unleashes a hail of machine gunfire in your direction but to help us actually figure out what a second person 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 my to tell a 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 etc 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 etc the second person is actually a lot less common in narrative writing and is 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 eye game looks like and we know what a key game looks like but what about a you game strangely enough I actually found the answer to this before I even came up with a question and 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 c4 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 is 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 in his 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 inhabited or Adele's body one last time to complete a major assignment from his boss Layla who is this international assassin in Jericho's second-in-command Tanner's plan warped into ordell's body and without arousing suspicion drive Layla 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 Layla in the passenger seat where she gives you some clarity on your mission or tell I need nothing but your best today what's going down Jericho has got a problem he wants fixed get me to the target and I'll fix it so you drive to the destination she's giving you closing out on your target and as you get close this happens [Music] slow down we should acquire the target anytime now 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 it's you you've been assigned to kill you now after that cutscene ends you are backing or Del'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 is 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 well it's hard for you 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 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 kind of just played through this mission once start to finish marveling at the unique perspective that this mission granted you but then moving on with the rest of the game but I've always felt like if I ever came back to this game I'd want to 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 reflexions designed the mission this way due to the technological limitations of this weird second person camera the 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 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 emerged 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 [Music] this led to what I can only describe is 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 resist trying to break things a little I drove the car off ramps into oncoming 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 generally pulled Tanner's car into a narrow alleyway and then decided to try out leave one thing I hadn't attempted yet I turned around and drove the car in the second person directly at myself 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 nice [ __ ] 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 the 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 has 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 midair 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 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 horrific ly the camera clips through the back of Tanner's partner's head and shows us the back side of his eyeballs and tongue a truly terrifying 2nd person perspective if ever there was one [Music] shaken by my otherworldly encounter seemingly brought on by pushing this already existential mission to its limits I reset the mission and played beginning to end one last time this time careful to do it the right way not wanting to disturb whatever eldritch of being I had 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 Jericho sit back and enjoy the show not many people get to watch themselves time a problem that Tanner decides to solve by disturbingly enough shifting for the first and only time in the game into his partner Jones's body yes that partner anyways I go to finish the mission in 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 continued the reset option had vanished panicked I quickly hit alt f4 and exited the game hoping I could load up my save file and play through the mission again but it was too late and it already auto saved over my file and the mission was gone with no way to reply it again look try for 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 turn them on their head to create what feels like a truly out-of-body experience that to me is an accomplishment worth celebrating please play a driver San Francisco here who's in your body well no one God alright so a couple quick updates on the driver San Francisco situation um the petition to get newbie stuff to relist 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 it which to me feels like a nun ignore balumbo but in the meantime as you might have noticed Ubisoft has not really stood 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 ten with pirated games for the past month just the coincidence also totally unrelated to the fact that this game is apparently very popular on the Pirate Bay um did you know that if you go to Nord VPN org slash 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 then you don't want to get an angry email from your ISP saying you can't do that um you should invest in a VPN um if you go to Nord bpn org slash Babylonia and use coupon code Babylonian to get 70% off their three-year plan and get one full month of VPN coverage free but have 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 for me for this time hopefully the next video comes out a little quicker I 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] you [Music]

[Music] most 3d character-driven videogames 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 what second person look like now I&#39;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 is plagued videogame messageboards just about as long as the internet has existed it&#39;s also served as the premise for some pretty good comedy sketches over the years like this one from Mega 64 and this one from the onion to inter second person shooter mode you just simply put just a narrative slider from first a second you are walking down a long corridor suddenly a Nazi leaps help them around a doorway and unleashes a hail of machine gunfire in your direction but to help us actually figure out what a second person 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 my to tell a 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 etc to talk about characters from an outside perspective now second person writing does exist but it&#39;s kind of a weird one in second person the primary pronoun used is you you do this you go there etc the second person is actually a lot less common in narrative writing and is actually something you&#39;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 eye game looks like and we know what a key game looks like but what about a you game strangely enough I actually found the answer to this before I even came up with a question and 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 c4 all the interesting missions in driver San Francisco and there are plenty of them there&#39;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&#39;s the final mission of chapter six of the game in the game you play is a cop named John Tanner who for reasons I won&#39;t get into here basically has a superpower that allows you to take over the bodies of any other driver in his 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&#39;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 inhabited or Adele&#39;s body one last time to complete a major assignment from his boss Layla who is this international assassin in Jericho&#39;s second-in-command Tanner&#39;s plan warped into ordell&#39;s body and without arousing suspicion drive Layla 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&#39;s body with Layla in the passenger seat where she gives you some clarity on your mission or tell I need nothing but your best today what&#39;s going down Jericho has got a problem he wants fixed get me to the target and I&#39;ll fix it so you drive to the destination she&#39;s giving you closing out on your target and as you get close this happens [Music] slow down we should acquire the target anytime now the yellow dodge up ahead stay close but don&#39;t be obvious that&#39;s my car what that&#39;s the cop that&#39;s been getting in our way do we follow him to the target he is the target it&#39;s you you&#39;ve been assigned to kill you now after that cutscene ends you are backing or Del&#39;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&#39;re controlling is actually the car you&#39;re following your perspective as the player is entirely separate from what you&#39;re controlling is the player in other words you&#39;re pursuing you now as you can see the car that you&#39;re sitting in is moving too but crucially you&#39;re not the one who&#39;s controlling that car the car you&#39;re sitting in is moving automatically seemingly operated by an AI controlled driver who&#39;s tailing the car you&#39;re actually controlling it&#39;s basically like a chase mission in any other video game just like you&#39;ve seen countless other times except for this time it&#39;s flipped on its head this time you&#39;re the one being followed while simultaneously seeing it all unfold from the perspective of the car doing the following and well it&#39;s hard for you to guess how well this comes across on video all these elements combine to make something that is very very odd to play there&#39;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&#39;re tailing it&#39;s the closest video game has ever gotten to feeling like a true out-of-body experience and it&#39;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 kind of just played through this mission once start to finish marveling at the unique perspective that this mission granted you but then moving on with the rest of the game but I&#39;ve always felt like if I ever came back to this game I&#39;d want to pick this mission apart and see what makes it tick and that&#39;s part of what I hope to accomplish with this video see as cool as this mission is it&#39;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&#39;ve always assumed that the developer reflexions designed the mission this way due to the technological limitations of this weird second person camera the 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 always assumed was placed there to keep you from ever veering too far off the path and breaking the game somehow still I&#39;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 emerged 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&#39;t actually begin until you reach the first checkpoint meaning that if you never hit that first checkpoint you can drive around forever [Music] this led to what I can only describe is 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&#39;t resist trying to break things a little I drove the car off ramps into oncoming traffic all of it but surprisingly it held together perfectly that is until I tried one specific thing see I haven&#39;t talked about it before but this mission actually does have a failure condition in the lower right corner of the screen there&#39;s a health meter and it represents the health of Tanner&#39;s car the car you&#39;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 generally pulled Tanner&#39;s car into a narrow alleyway and then decided to try out leave one thing I hadn&#39;t attempted yet I turned around and drove the car in the second person directly at myself 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 nice [ __ ] 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 the time we can get glimpses of the chaos that unfolded we see the car inside the wall then we see the car&#39;s front console flipped over we see what appears to be the ocean floor and then the pavement has seen from underneath we see rooftops the driver&#39;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 midair 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&#39;s vehicle turns blindingly white and then the second person viewpoint fills with an orange yellow hue Tanner&#39;s car quickly it becomes clear that the second person car has somehow spawned inside of Tanner&#39;s vehicle dealing infinite damage to the car 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&#39;s car where the car is balanced on its nose its windshield shattered thrust impossibly through another vehicle and then horrific ly the camera clips through the back of Tanner&#39;s partner&#39;s head and shows us the back side of his eyeballs and tongue a truly terrifying 2nd person perspective if ever there was one [Music] shaken by my otherworldly encounter seemingly brought on by pushing this already existential mission to its limits I reset the mission and played beginning to end one last time this time careful to do it the right way not wanting to disturb whatever eldritch of being I had 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 Jericho sit back and enjoy the show not many people get to watch themselves time a problem that Tanner decides to solve by disturbingly enough shifting for the first and only time in the game into his partner Jones&#39;s body yes that partner anyways I go to finish the mission in 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&#39;t explain the only option was continued the reset option had vanished panicked I quickly hit alt f4 and exited the game hoping I could load up my save file and play through the mission again but it was too late and it already auto saved over my file and the mission was gone with no way to reply it again look try for 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&#39;t fully prepared for and that I&#39;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 turn them on their head to create what feels like a truly out-of-body experience that to me is an accomplishment worth celebrating please play a driver San Francisco here who&#39;s in your body well no one God alright so a couple quick updates on the driver San Francisco situation um the petition to get newbie stuff to relist 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&#39;t believe I&#39;m saying but it could happen it which to me feels like a nun ignore balumbo but in the meantime as you might have noticed Ubisoft has not really stood 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&#39;s also one of the most pirated video games and has been in the top ten with pirated games for the past month just the coincidence also totally unrelated to the fact that this game is apparently very popular on the Pirate Bay um did you know that if you go to Nord VPN org slash 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&#39;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 then you don&#39;t want to get an angry email from your ISP saying you can&#39;t do that um you should invest in a VPN um if you go to Nord bpn org slash Babylonia and use coupon code Babylonian to get 70% off their three-year plan and get one full month of VPN coverage free but have you enjoyed this video please share it with anyone you think would like it and or subscribe to my channel if you&#39;d like to see more stuff like this in the future I&#39;ve got a lot of videos in various stages of production right now that I&#39;m really excited to get out into the world and I can finally start thinking about them now that this one&#39;s done so yeah that&#39;s it for me for this time hopefully the next video comes out a little quicker I 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&#39;m glad to finally have it done so thank you for watching and I&#39;ll see you next time [Music] you [Music]

Transcript for:Exploring 'Second-Person' Gaming through 'Driver San Francisco'

Transcript for:
Exploring 'Second-Person' Gaming through 'Driver San Francisco'