Second Person Narratives in Interactive Fiction

"You wake up to the patter of rain on the window.  In the fading echoes of your dream, you also heard the sound of slow scratching on glass.  You lay staring at patches of mold on your water-stained ceiling a more few moments before rolling your legs out over the side of the bed and sitting up.  Through the water streaks and grime covering the glass of the window, the world is a shapeless grey.  There is a man standing by your window staring in at you, and his claws have left white marks along the length of the pane.  What do you do?"

Most stories are told in first or third person, with second person being the noticeable absence.  Second person is challenging for literature, and even when it is done (like in the cocaine-fueled "Bright Lights, Big City" by Jay McInerney), it reads like modified first person.  Second person assumes some knowledge of your thoughts, but most of the time you are still a captive audience, unable to contribute to the outcome of the narrative.  Choose Your Own Adventure series moves the second person narrative into a realm where your actions do change the narrative, but the branches of that series often come after pages of narrative.  You have very few choices and those choices tend to end in events outside your control (and often with no foreshadowing -- "You go left instead of right and fall off a cliff.").

The advent of computer games turned the second person into an art form.  The first text-based RPG, Colossal Cave Adventure (or Adventure for short), naturally takes place in the second person.  The first line of the game begins: "You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building."  This feels perfect in the game because you control one character as he moves through the world.  The results of your actions are recited back to you by a disembodied and starkly honest narrator.  Without visuals, the narrator is essential.  The game designer, William Crowther, could have written it in the first person, but that would have felt wholly unnatural.  Because you are giving the commands, it would be like a separate character taking orders from you and telling you what he did (Player: "Go South."  Narrator: "I go to the South."  If it was in third person, it would put separation between the player and his character; it would be a violation of the fourth wall principle (that there is an invisible wall separating the audience from the stage and if the characters in that play reference that wall the audience regains awareness that the play is not real).  Third person would be an implicit way of telling the player: "You are playing a game."  (Player: "Go South." Narrator: "The man goes south.")

Text-based adventures flourished for a good while (especially in the Zork universe) before computer graphics became strong enough to replace the narrator with visuals.  Second person remains an underlying convention though, and with it comes the idea that the player and his character are tightly connected.  In more recent times, Valve has merged the philosophical aspect of second person into its single player campaigns in Half Life and Portal.  In both of those games, the player's character does not speak.  The company has been explicit that this is intentional, to narrow the fourth wall and bring the player closer to the game.

I still miss the old text based adventures sometimes.

The closest I've seen to furthering the second person and narrator dynamic is Sleep is Death, a small indie title that came out with a bang and disappeared just as fast.  The interface was clunky, the graphics library was 8-bit nostalgic but small, and the gameplay too narrow.  It had a lot of promise, but in the end delivered less than its potential.  I spent a while crafting a world, but never played through with anyone.  It seemed too personal of an experience to share my creation.

To capture that nostalgia, friends and I sometimes make our own impromptu text-based adventures.  The most interesting dynamic we've played with is multiplayer adventures.  Often, the narrator of these creates content on-the-fly, and the other players do not realize who in the world is another character and who is a figment of the narrator's story.  It yields interesting scenarios and bizarre conflicts.  I've considered building a better interface than instant messages, but it seems futile.  The market is too niche, and I doubt I would contribute much that a chat interface does not already have -- perhaps a plug-in for Pidgin or Google chat!

Thought Exercise IV: Further the second person narrative.