That shoulds like a real challenge and would be very interesting to read.
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I wouldn’t really recommend it.
Each one of the perspectives is used to enhance a certain type of storytelling. The first person is good if you want to have a set protagonist, and the second person is good if you want to let the player roleplay their own character, or play themselves.
You have to choose one or the other. There are no middle options.
If you choose a set protagonist, then when you switch to second person, people will identify too much with the set protagonist, and if they don’t have the same mindset as him, they will quickly start to dislike your game, especially when the character’s own thoughts and feelings come into play. (“I don’t like this game because it tells me how to feel.”)
If you’re letting the player roleplay their own character, then the first person is going to seem weird, because it will look as if their own character is narrating their story, and they’ll feel like they can’t properly identify with him. Furthermore, since the main character is just a blank slate, there is no real purpose in using the first person, since you’re not going to display any of his thoughts.
Third person is much too distant, and it is probably going to be universally disliked by everyone barring a very small minority.
Unless you’re planning to write your game with two completely different types of main characters, you’re probably just going to end up with people only using a single perspective( the one that fits), and you’ll have ended up wasting your time on implementing the other…
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Those are all the reasons that would make a project like this difficult. However, if someone were able to do it well, that would be absolutely incredible. Just one of the strange ideas that tends to go through my head.
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Personally, I don’t feel that way about it – though yes, many other people do.
When a story starts telling me how the main character feels, I roll with it and can usually enjoy it (even if it’s told in the second person) as long as the MC has a reasonably consistent personality and I can shape other features of their character to an interesting extent. I still feel like I’m role-playing; I’m just playing a role defined in significant part by the author rather than mostly in my own head.
Some of the most popular games on the site do all the things @Nemeean_lion argues against. Heroes Rise tells us how our character feels all the time, and leaves out some (to me, obvious) options for how we’re able to feel:
It’s CoG’s bestselling series.
As mentioned above, Life of a Wizard is first-person perspective despite not being a set protagonist (indeed, having less personality than almost any other game’s MC – and I say that as an LoW fan).
And while not a lot of games have tried third-person perspective, I think it was the right choice for Divided We Fall, an excellent game which deserves a broader audience and is definitely not universally disliked. I’d like to see more 3rd-p-p stories on HG.
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This would be a LOT easier to pull off in Inform 7 which is set up to change tenses on the fly and includes verb token substitutions.
That is…if you can get into the slightly trickier tools of I7…
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Third person would be a good choice for a Princess Bride-like story where the player is interacting with a storyteller and perhaps prompting or correcting story points as they go.
And then, at my lowest point, I broke into the house, but I only took a dry crust of bread.
*Interesting…
*No, you took the whole loaf
*No, you took the bread AND some candlesticks
*Fess up: you robbed the house blind.
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I’d like to expand on the underlying concept alluded to here:
Each individual author should write in the perspective that they feel will work for their story. Divided We Fall is an excellent story told from the perspective of several different people in different locations all experiencing the same event.
Instead of the story being about any one of the individuals, this work becomes the story of the Spanish Civil War. The author’s point in writing it in the third-person perspective is that each individual added together makes the whole. It is very powerful and it allows the reader to experience the event of the Civil War not only from a singular point-of-view but from multiple points-of-view, some of which conflict with each other.
In my humble opinion, this is one of the best CoG written story-games and it deserves a lot more attention than it gets.
So, each author, really should listen to her (or his) story and let it determine the perspective to write it as. We are mavericks here, writing stories and games that the orthodox in both the writing world and the game world would disapprove - that really is one of our collective strengths and we need to take advantage of those strengths to better succeed instead of ignoring them.
@Havenstone did good in pointing out that here, in our community, we often succeed by pushing orthodoxy and norms. Not just in gender and orientation but in writing conventions as well.
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There’s a neat trick one could pull in this arena.
Treat the narrator as yourself watching observing and influencing the MC from a distance. Kinda like creepy villain or haurdians spirit. An AI or hacker watching through the live camera feeds helping out.
Ei) I noticed you for the first time lost in the dark halls of this rusted station. Tuning the camera in further turning it just a little hoping you’d notice you weren’t alone in this place… but did you notice?
Choice
1 yes
2 no
But any way you get the best of both worlds. Satisfying your urge for First person and the players need to feel at one with their character; )
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I do this with my page-breaks. It’s a great way to provide the reader an insight into your thinking so they gain “perspective” - there is that word again.
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Typically when I read things I imagine the book talking to me. In using 1st POV, I imagine someone is speaking to me like “I went here” oh kewl MC went there. In 3rd POV, I feel like a person watching from the outside “he did x” it’s like we’re talkinh about something unlike 1st POV where the book is telling me how they felt directly. I personally prefer 2nd POV for games like these because of my “the book is talking to me” thing I’ve got going on 
Twine games are often very atmospheric in their use of elements such as page breaks. I’m specifically thinking of Porpentine games like With Those We Love Alive. There are certain of those tricks that would translate into ChoiceScript storytelling, and would enhance whichever perspective you do choose.
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I’ve read past threads about point of view and found everyone’s thoughts interesting. So I would really love to see a poll and what the current readers/players think.
Generally speaking, when playing COG/HG games, how do you prefer the choices to be worded?
- Jump into the water
- You jump into the water
- I jump into the water
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It depends on what you want to say, if it’s a dark secret, then “I” would be best. If it’s “You” then I think that the narrator should have a big role. If it’s just verbs at the beginning, I think it would be more of a story rather than a CYOA. But it’s all just my opinion.
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I recommend writing choices in the same person the story is written in - or otherwise writing them as declarative statements.
It’s always very noticeable when a writer switches the tense of a story (and kind of a sloppy mistake).
When we start with: You race down the cobblestone path.
And end with: I trip on a loose stone and tumble to the ground.
You tend to jar the reader out of the story. I’m not sure how it makes sense to disconnect the choices from the story itself.
CoG’s house style is to have the text in second person and the choices in first person. You may well consider it sloppy, but it’s intentional, not a mistake…
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While I still don’t think it makes sense to disconnect the choices from the story itself, there I was referring to person shifts in the actual story (as opposed to the choices), which is most certainly sloppy. Though I could have been more clear.
At any rate, I think it’s reasonable to assume one would be more prone to making incidental errors when writing the story in, say, second person and the choices in first, rather than sticking with a single track.
I FEEL GREAT!! There precise answer would love to see a first person pov
First person is really weird in COG games for me. There’s always a level of detachment from the character that I seek, and 2nd person offers that. I will admit though, I do have plans for a game where the MC talks directly to the player and the choices in one section will be written in pure 1st person (example: “I don’t know what I’m thinking, I’m not me” instead of “I don’t know what you’re thinking, I’m not you”).
To be clear; most people prefer this,
He looks at you with a smirk, waiting for a response.
#“Idiot,” you say.
#You stand up and leave.
over this,
He looks at you with a smirk, waiting for a response.
#“Idiot,” I say.
#I stand up and leave.
Interesting. I thought it was the other way around.
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Same. The choicescript style guide dictates that narration is second person and choices are first person, and you’ll see that in (I’m pretty sure) every Choice label game.
on the topic of the thread
I detach more easily from 1st person perspective. It feels like someone telling me about their experience, rather than the game informing me about my experience.
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