Leaderboard: Do you prefer first-person or third-person perspective while gaming?

Quantic Foundry, the team behind the Gamer Motivation Model and the modern gamer profiling test, put out a dev blog at the end of January homing in on first- vs. third-person perspective. According to the model, which is based on thousands of surveys of gamers, our preference for camera perspective is somewhat predictable, and it skews based on age, gender, and genre.

For example, the research suggests that female gamers and older gamers are more likely to prefer third-person. But the real difference is in genre: 83% of women and 75% of men (as well as 69% of non-binary players) prefer third-person perspective when playing – you guessed it – MMORPGs. There are similar (but not as dramatic) bumps for action-adventure and RPG games, while shooter fans far and away prefer first-person.

Quantic floats a few rationales for this, including the idea that third-person perspective gamers care less about immersion and roleplaying, which researchers note doesn’t really track with Quantic’s own data on immersion and roleplaying (and frankly made me blink in confusion as the reason I myself prefer third-person is heightened immersion and roleplaying, which is a whole ‘nother article about what those terms means and how we achieve them, most likely). Indeed, the company points out that these cohorts overlap – i.e., it’s not that women/people over 35 prefer one perspective but that those folks are more likely to play certain genres where certain perspectives are more common (and vice versa). And on top of that, it’s worth remembering that only 7% of the respondents were over 35 to begin with, with 60% being under 25 – not exactly the MMORPG market.

In any case, I thought it would be fun to pitch this as a poll to our own MMO community and see if our results vary.

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