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

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/

That's just called the American education system

What, that you're the one being shot?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

If ur shit at the game then its a second person shooter

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 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.

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

Interesting. A first-person shooter is the view from the perspective of the shooter. A third person shooter is the view from a neutral party - a camera watching the action.

A second-person shooter would be from the viewpoint of those being shot by the protagonist.

A telepathic assassin. You read the mind(s) of your target(s), and somehow use their eyes to kill them.

SUPERHOT!

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

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.

Show me a third person omniscient shooter