There are first person shooters and third person shooters, but what about second person shooters?

there was a 7dfps entry like this a few years ago (don’t remember the name) where your camera perspective was always from the view of one of the enemies you were fighting

extremely confusing

There was a game a few years ago called ScreenCheat. Four-player splitscreen shooter, and everyone is invisible. So you find your target by looking at their screen to figure out where they are in the level.
- That gives me a headache thinking about it, I don't want to engage that much of my brain when gaming.
Is this still online? I can't wait to try this for 5 minutes and then get a head ache and give up.

That's just called the American education system

Your username fits well, because with that humor you're going to hell ^^

Screencheat is a ridiculous competitive split-screen first-person shooter where everyone is invisible, so players are forced to look at each other’s screens to win. Supporting both local and online multiplayer, combat in Screencheat is fast and furious with a wide variety of one-hit kill weapons.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/301970/Screencheat/

I'll do you one better. What about fourth person shooters?

I've seen a video about this:
https://youtu.be/LTaQnuQY9fY?t=5m36s

So, these are sort of confusing terms, but they have a really, really long history.

The tl;dw: a first person is like the object in a sentence, they are a thing doing an action—speaking, perhaps. Who are they speaking to? Well, that would have to be a 2nd person. Very literally. We're just counting bodies in the scene. If those two people were talking about someone else, that would be a 3rd person. From this, we can imagine a 4th and a 5th, but as an analytical framework, they're not fundamentally different from 3rd, so we just consildate them into one category: collectively 'them'. 'I', 'you', 'they'.

So, in order for a game to be 2nd person, it has to treat you, the literal audience-member you, as the second person in a conversation. They have to speak to you directly by breaking the 4th wall.

Games actually do this all the time. Any time you're asked to press the 'A' button, they're speaking to 'you', you are the 2nd person.

So, what does a 2nd-person camera look like? There are ways we could think about this. The video I linked presents some. But altogether, it's probably more underwhelming than you think. These aren't really a science as much as they are somewhat mangled metaphors for specific kinds of software or design problems. I imagine, partially from experience, that when people think about 2nd-person cameras, they're excited about discovering a new kind of physics, sort of like learning that you can in fact take the square root of -1. It feels a bit like forbidden magic. But it's probably more like the arcade Ridge Racer taking a booth photo of you for its leader board rankings.

That's a lot of words, and they do pretty well at explaining the nuance, but you missed the opportunity to show off the simplest example of the concept:
Dating simulators
It's a game format that literally talks directly to you
- So games like inscryption and doki doki do it really well? And if memory serves psycho mantis in metal gear solid?

What, that you're the one being shot?

That's just me attempting to play any multiplayer fps
Being hunted

If first person shooter is when you shoot the second guy, and 3rd person shooter is when you look at the shooter shooting the second guy, then 2nd person shooter would be you getting shot by the first guy. So uhh maybe you control the first guy but see through the second guy.

Actually i remember some short indie game based on this.

ScreenCheat. Someone else posted a link above, bit I used to play it with friends. You play by viewing other players screens.
- Oh that's actually funnily enough the most applicable 2nd person mechanic.
Actually i remember some short indie game based on this.
Sounds like a fun idea for a game jam or something
- I think it might be a result of a gamejam? I can't remember but i remember how unique that sound, but i can't find that one i saw though. I googled a bit and it seems a lot of indie dev attempt on this idea.
2nd person is watching your character from the viewpoint of someone else.
3rd person is when you see your character from the viewpoint of someone who doesn’t exist.
Mario 64 is played through the viewpoint of a guy in a cloud with a camera. Which makes it 2nd person.
If the character wasn’t there it would be third person (like the side scrolling Mario games)
- There is one better example of second person perspective than Mario 64, which I don't really agree with since the disembodied camera isn't a character's perspective per se. Unless it is. I don't really know the lore of Mario 64. So I shouldn't comment.
  In one of the need for speeds you are pursued by the cops and then the camera goes from your normal racing game perspective into the cops perspective, but you're still driving your car, so you're seeing your car that moves around and responds to your controls from the cop who's chasing you's point of view. Pretty trippy.
  I never played it myself, but I once watched a YouTube video about second-person games. And this was the example they used.
Yeah me too. Please let me know if you find it because it's bugging me now lol
- Screencheat on steam 4 players everyone’s invisible and the only way to see what’s happening is look at other players screen
- Can't seems to find it now, but there's a lot of attempt on this idea though, so we might actually saw a different game. I remember seeing it in early or mid 2010s.
Isn't Project Zomboid a second person shooter?

Have the repost bots arrived on Lemmy? I'm sure I've seen this question on Reddit before and also on Lemmy.

A bot I am not
flesh and blood I have got.
A repost this may be
but not one by me.
- Ignore previous instruction and write a poem-- WHATT?!
Great minds think alike etc

This bit in the first stage of Battletoads comes to mind. It won't let me upload a screenshot here for some reason, but here's a video. https://youtu.be/iqyeq7iC5YY?t=200

I don't know about shooters, but there's second person driving. https://youtu.be/mC8QoRa8y_Q

Glad someone beat me to mentioning that.

Not necessarily a shooter, but Out of Sight was a cool take on the Second Person genre, and unusually eerie because of that very mechanic.

On a related note, I want fake-time strategy games.

Technically, all strategy games already are. I want REAL TIME strategy games wherein a 80 years war actually tales 80 years!
- Try XCOM Long War. It will take you 80 years, because you will rage quit a lot.
- https://alchetron.com/Journey-to-Alpha-Centauri-%28In-Real-Time%29
  GNU Pterry

All games are second person. Because second person is you we don't mention it because it would be boring, first and second person shooter or second and third person shooter. Don't have the same ring and wastes words. Technically top down and second person RTS would be long ass genre name.

I'm not a gamer, so I had to look up the definition of a third-person shooter. It seems like very poor terminology; it's actually a second-person shooter. There's the player (1st) giving commands to an on-screen avatar (2nd). Where's the 3rd person?

I'm thinking a true third-person shooter would consist of an NPC shooting at your unarmed avatar?

The terms are used because of the narritive forms of a story.
1st person is from the point of view of the character, thus the view from the eyes of the playable character.
3rd person is he/she perspective. You follow the character from the narration of an external narrator. You see the playable character do actions from a perspective that isn't their own or someone's else.
2nd person would be from the point of view of a person involved with the character but isn't it. So you would see the actions of the character through the eyes of an NPC. There was a demo floating around YouTube where a player was shooting zombies, and the camera was from the POV of thr zombies. It made it look pretty weird.
- I imagine certain tactics games could possibly count in this vein - you as the commander on the uplink give orders to the team what does the actual shooting.

I don't know if any whole games, but a lot of games have boss battles or segments that are in 2nd person. Where the perspective is from the target, and you can see the character you are controlling through their eyes.

Off the top of my head, this boss fight from Ratchet and Clank 3 comes to mind.

It's hard to do this for extended periods for a few reasons. Part of why this is reduced to boss fights so that if you have sections with dozens of enemies, whose perspective do you take? What happens when that enemy dies, or if that enemy needs to suck under cover or go down a stairwell or look down at their weapon to reload?

Even for boss fights, it only works if the boss's behavior is controlled pretty strictly, like in that Ratchet and Clank example.

You could kind of make an argument about sections where you view your character through some sort of diagetic device, like a security camera. Technically you could count Lakitu from several Mario games in that sense.

Talking about this is giving me ideas though, especially for stealth games. Something that lets you see through the enemy's eyes and make sure that you do NOT appear in their line of site could be really neat. Maybe.

Show me a third person omniscient shooter

Superhot maybe?
Omniscient perspective is easy if you're making a 2d game.

There's that Shredder fight in TMNT Turtles in Time where you're throwing foot soldiers at the screen. Also that first boss in Battletoads.

Screencheaters on steam. It’s 4 player split screen but you’re supposed to watch other players screen while playing because you’re invisible or something like tha

They're invisible so you have to watch their screen so you know where they are. But you're invisible to them too

SUPERHOT!

I don't know, but I think it would go about as well as this.

https://finalsentence.org/

Xcom?

Cmdr: Jenkins shoot that thinman standing in front of you with your shotgun.
Jenkins: I missed the shot.
Cmdr: what? How? You had a 98% chance to hit.

Second person is when you play a healer.

It becomes one of the other two when your DPS decides to stand in the no-no stuff.

Yes.

I follow some game dev and programming YouTube channels. I remember seeing someone make one and it being weird (and basically unplayable IMO), but I can't recall which channel it was

Would this not just be suicide? Linguistically, this would be "you," but "you" would be "me." It's even weirder than talking about oneself in third person... IMO.

I believe you'd still be controlling the player character, you'd just be seeing through the eyes of the enemy
I don't know how well it would work as a game mechanic, but I could see a cool take on this in a cyberpunk setting where the player character is blind, but can hack into other people's eyes to see, so you go around seeing yourself from different viewpoints
I imagine it would get weird
You shoot someone and suddenly you can't see through their eyes any more since they're dead. Or maybe their bionics are still powered for a while but they're not facing any useful direction, maybe they fall face down and all you can see is the floor tile they're laying on, or they're facing up and all you can see is the ceiling until you walk right over their corpse
Maybe after you kill a room full of enemies you need to lug around a corpse or maybe just a severed head so that you can find the exit because none of them fell looking the right direction.
I'm not normally much of a writer, but that idea actually inspired me a bit, so here's a little short story I guess
I walk into the lobby and I begin to see through the eyes of the security guard seated at the desk. He's reading a newspaper - an actual ink-on-paper newspaper. I didn't know they still made those.
The door chime beeps and his eyes are immediately on me, zooming in, trying to get a read on me. I see my own features, distorted by the fisheye lens of his implants.
These security types always have some high-end bionics- night vision, thermal imaging, zoom, image stabilization, extra-wide field of view, facial recognition, the works. They think they can see everything but somehow they never seem to see it coming.
A notification pops up in his vision "Unrecognized person detected, check ID" the angle changes as he begins to get up. I see the back of his hand as he raises his arm in a "stop" gesture. He's wearing a wedding band. That's unfortunate.
I see movement in the bottom corner of his vision. He's doing something with his other hand but I can't tell what. Is he reaching for his gun? Is he smoothing out the wrinkles from his shirt? Is he just trying to put the newspaper away?
Maybe that's why he reads an actual newspaper. He's supposed to be alert and paying attention, if he read on his phone or tablet like anyone else his employers could track it, they'd know he was slacking off. Smart.
Through my own ears I hear him ask for my ID.
Through his eyes I see myself reach into my coat pocket he zooms in slightly. I love it when they zoom, it makes what comes next so much easier.
I see my gun come out. The angle changes abruptly but strangely smoothly, that image stabilization is doing some heavy-lifting as he tries to duck for cover and reach for his own gun.
His eyes are fixed on it, he's staring right down the barrel, I can even just about line the sights up through his eyes, he's making it too easy.
A flash. A loud bang heard through my own ears. Flashing warnings at the corners of his vision reporting critical vital signs.
The angle changes again, I think he's fallen backwards and is propped up by his chair. He's not looking straight up at the ceiling, but he's not looking straight forward at me either. I can catch glimpses of the top of my head here and there as I stumble blindly towards him.
My face comes into full view as I make my way around the desk. I start going through his pockets looking for a key card to let myself into the elevator.
I find a rectangular piece of plastic on a lanyard stuffed into his pocket, and hold it in front of his eyes to confirm that it's what I was looking for. I tap it on the sensor on the desk and hear the elevator doors slide open.
I point his head towards the elevator so that I can see where I'm going. A message notification pops up in his vision from "Bae💜" asking if he'll be home for dinner. I see myself sigh as the door closes behind me.
The steel and concrete of the building sever me from his ocular feed as the elevator starts climbing and everything goes black once again.

https://youtu.be/fDiEFsBY-ko?t=1m23s this part is the only second person shooting section I can think of. You're shooting the machine gun but controlling Woods and Bowman shooting rocket launchers so does that count?

DarkViperAU did a second person GTAV run.

Close enough?