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Second Person
Aeonite writes "As we all learned in English class, there are three points of view one can employ when writing: first person ("I learned"), second person ("You learned"), and third person ("He learned"). You are about to read a review of Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media, a book that addresses the use of second-person narration in games and related media. You are also likely to be eaten by a Grue."
Read below for the rest of Michael's review.
Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media
author
Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Editors)
pages
426
publisher
MIT Press
rating
9
reviewer
Michael Fiegel
ISBN
0262083566
summary
An exploration of the "You" in RPGs and Interactive Fiction
As Wikipedia helpfully points out, the second-person POV is not common in literary fiction, but it is fairly common in other forms of media, including the subject of this book; namely, interactive fiction (IF), role-playing games (RPGs) and other game-related fictions where the "reader" is generally an active participant in the story, either literally or virtually.
To that end, co-editors Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin have collected 47 essays on various topics related to the second-person, dividing the lot up into three sections covering "Tabletop Systems," "Computational Fictions," and "Real Worlds" (the latter somewhat of a misnomer, as you will soon see). The essays range in tone from highly informal to quite technical, from practical to theoretical, and (in the tradition of old Infocom games) from terse to verbose, the sole uniting theme being the focus on You.
Section One, "Tabletop Systems," contains 15 essays devoted to a discussion of traditional, old-school RPGs, including standout bits penned by the likes of Greg Costikyan, George R. R. Martin, Erik Mona and Ken Hite. It's the most accessible part of the book, and without a doubt my favorite.
Costikyan's "Games, Storytelling, and Breaking the String," starts out with a discussion of the early days of the pen-and-paper industry and their influence on interactive fiction, and moves all the way to MMOs and the current indie RPG movement, spending some time on Paul Czege's My Life with Master. It provides a good overview of the IF industry in its entirety, and might have fit better as a sort of "meta-essay", but still works here as a good introduction and exploration of many of the issues surrounding game narrative, player freedom and IF in general.
Erik Mona and Ken Hite's pieces are more on target. Mona's "From the Basement to the Basic Set: The Early Years of Dungeons & Dragons takes D&D up to the late 70s just before it split into D&D and AD&D, providing an interesting historical perspective on the Gygax-Arneson years. Hite's "Narrative Structure and Creative Tension in Call of Cthulhu talks about the evolution of language within various editions of the CoC RPG, as well as the standardized form of their adventures, and how these things serve to create a narrative tension that has helped the game survive and prosper.
One essay worth mentioning for its terseness is Jonathan Tweet's essay on character creation in Everway, barely managing two pages, and then only by the addition of four pieces of artwork. Another oddity is Rebecca Borgstrom's "Structure and Meaning in Role-Playing Game Design", which addresses Exalted's story structure; the piece is filled with numerous subheadings and language that occasionally makes it read like an outline or a proposal, rather than a finished piece (e.g., repeated references to "this chapter" such as "This chapter views gaming as a computational process."). Both pieces are written well and cover interesting material, but feel unfinished in their own ways.
Other essays in this first section discuss the World of Darkness and the Storyteller system, storytelling and collectible card games (in particular, A Game of Thrones and Call of Cthulhu), Arkham Horror, Mystery of the Abbey, George R. R. Martin's Wild Cards books, and the gamebook On Life's Lottery. Not discussed, and notable by their absence: Steve Jackson Games, and any edition of Dungeons & Dragons after 1980.
Section Two, "Computational Fictions," is comprised of 17 essays by authors including Jordan Mechner, Chris Crawford, Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern. The material here is somewhat denser and more technical, but aside from some linguistic stumbling blocks it's also filled with excellent insights.
Mechner's essay on Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time opens things up with an excellent look at the making of a video game: rules, some broken; discussion of how dialogue works within the context of a game; even a sample from a dialogue spreadsheet that shows why screenplay format is inappropriate.
Somewhat crunchier are essays by Chris Crawford ("Deikto: A Language for Interactive Storytelling") and D. Fox Harrell ("GRIOT's Tales of Haints and Seraphs: A Computational Narrative Generation System"). The former discusses Crawford's early attempt to draft something akin to a programming language for IF, complete with flowchart diagrams and pidgin-sounding syntax, such as "Mom command Billy that Billy not go to lake." Harrell's essay likewise talks about "developing computational techniques for representing an author's intended subjective meaning and expression." Yikes.
The longest piece, "Writing Facade: A Case in Procedural Authorship" by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern, discusses Facade, a game wherein the player can either break up or save the marriage of a digital couple. Ample screenshots and samples from the game accompany an explanation of the situation as it unfolds, with later discussion of the procedural architecture and subsystems behind the game. It's an excellent piece that nicely ties together what a player sees with what a developer has to deal with.
Aside from the generally less accessible language, the section's only major flaws are that the essays from Steve Meretzky (on Floyd from Planetfall) and Lee Sheldon (on the computer adaptation of And Then There Were None) are rather terse considering the rich subject matter. Surely Floyd and Agatha Christie deserve more than a couple of pages a piece.
Other games discussed in this section include the Flash storytelling game Solitaire, Book and Volume, Shade, Savior-Faire, the somewhat surreal art piece Pax, the hypermedia Magritte-esque work The Brotherhood of Bent Billiard, the cinematic Mission to Earth, the audiovisual hypertext Juvenate, Twelve Easy Lessons to Better Time Travel, The Breakup Conversation and the multiplayer IF The Archer's Flight.
The third and penultimate section, "Real Worlds", focuses on shared, IF experiences, the unifying factor being a persistence that runs counter to the transience experienced in both weekly RPG sessions and most computer games. Despite the section title, virtual worlds and MMOs are also discussed here by the likes of essayists including John Tynes, Ian Bogost and Gonzalo Frasca. For the most part the material is engaging and interesting, if a bit esoteric at times.
John Tynes' "Prismatic Play: Games as Windows on the Real World" explores escapism and engagism in games as diverse as D&D, Millennium's End and his own Unknown Armies, concluding that engagist works are those that expand our knowledge through immersion in real world ideas and cultures as opposed to escapist frolicking in EDO (Elf-Dwarf-Orc) fantasy games. As an interesting not-quite-counterpoint, Sean Thorne covers John Tynes' Puppetland in the next essay, and discusses how he incorporated the rather escapist game into a writing curriculum for his eleven-year-old students.
Ian Bogost and Gonzalo Frasca include an essay titled "Video Games Go to Washington: The Story Behind the Howard Dean for Iowa Game," which is about as self-explanatory as a title gets. The duo discuss the launch of the game in December of 2003, development challenges and time constraints, demographics and politics, and provide an excellent post-mortem on the game and its effects (or lack thereof) on Dean's campaign.
Several chapters in a row delve into fantasy MMOs, including World of Warcraft. Torill Elvira Mortensen's "Me, the Other" talks about role-playing in MMOs, the difference between IC and OOC and the controversy of role-playing (which seems somewhat anachronistic; aren't people more worried about GTA than D&D nowadays?). Jill Walker's essay covers Quests in World of Warcraft, and how they introduce and support the overall storyline. Celia Pierce and her alter-ego Artmesia discuss(es) social identity and persistence in exploring the case of Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, an MMO that, when it shut down, caused its player base to propagate to other MMOs such as Second Life and There to keep the community alive.
The one odd bit here is a chapter on Santaman's Harvest by Adrine Jenik, an exploration of a digital performance piece from Desktop Theater that includes more sidebar than text as it reprints dialogue from the play ("sman:: Think Big; farmer #1: Big?").
Other essays discuss the use of role-play in prepping political canvassers, Nick Fortgno's A Measure for Marriage LARP, the evidently crass unexceptional.net ("Guy playing with himself," reads a part of one caption), the Boston-based Itinerant, the I Love Bees ARG, the basic rules of Improv Theater, the interactive play Adventures in Mating, and the collaborative work Eliza Redux, "an interactive telerobotic work couched in a virtual graphical representation of a psychoanalyst's workplace" as well as a revisitation of the Eliza program.
The book's rather sizable Appendix includes three playable tabletop RPGs: Puppetland by John Tynes, wherein players take the roles of puppets; Bestial Acts by Greg Costikyan, which is based on the dramatic theories and aesthetic of Bertolt Brecht; and The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen by James Wallis, a tale-telling game written from the first person perspective of the Baron himself. This is followed by biographies of the contributing authors and a helpful index, always a good thing to see in a book of this size and density.
As is often the case, the book's back cover copy is at best misleading; though terse, it manages inaccuracy in saying that the book features "three complete tabletop role-playing games." However, Costikyan's "Designer's Note" for Bestial Acts on page 357 explicitly says "I've never bothered to finish writing up acts II and III." Not quite complete, then. The same error is reprinted on the front flap; a minor gaffe, but noticeable in a book with few other notable flaws save a few silly typos in obvious charts and tables: "Challange" instead of "Challenge", "real-rime" instead of "real-time." But this is nitpicking. As a whole the book is well-edited, well-laid out and amply illustrated to boot, with over 200 images; would that they were in color.
My only real complaint is not with anything in the book, but with the underlying assumption — prevalent in many places, touched upon here in the jacket copy, and assumed to some degree in many of the essays — that the gaming industry is still an "emerging field" that needs to prove its own maturity. While it might be true that not much in the way of academic discussion exists when it comes to games, it still seems all too comfortable to continue hiding in the soft golden field of "emerging." How much longer can the industry (of which I consider myself a part) continue to use that word?
Consider television in the '50s after it got through its own period of emergence and acceptance: shows like Candid Camera, Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts and Break the Bank were on the air. And 60 years later, what do we have? Shows like America's Funniest Home Videos, American Idol and Deal or No Deal. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Pick any medium and you'll find much the same — for every Citizen Kane there will be a dozen Scary Movies; for every Empire Falls there will be fifty Da Vinci Codes.
Pong was emerging; Zork was emerging. We are no longer emerging — we have emerged. Sure, we have quests in World of Warcraft where you have to collect poop, but we also have Portal; we have the Hot Coffee mod in GTA: San Andreas, but we also have a Dystopian Objectivist narrative in Bioshock.
The 47 essays and 3 games in this excellent book show us where we've been, where we are, and where we're headed when it comes to role-playing games and interactive fiction. That's 50 pieces of evidence to prove the case that gaming is as deserving of attention, acclaim and criticism as any other medium. As an industry, we've been emerging for 35 years now; by my reckoning, that puts us squarely into adulthood. Let's start acting like it.
You can purchase Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
To that end, co-editors Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin have collected 47 essays on various topics related to the second-person, dividing the lot up into three sections covering "Tabletop Systems," "Computational Fictions," and "Real Worlds" (the latter somewhat of a misnomer, as you will soon see). The essays range in tone from highly informal to quite technical, from practical to theoretical, and (in the tradition of old Infocom games) from terse to verbose, the sole uniting theme being the focus on You.
Section One, "Tabletop Systems," contains 15 essays devoted to a discussion of traditional, old-school RPGs, including standout bits penned by the likes of Greg Costikyan, George R. R. Martin, Erik Mona and Ken Hite. It's the most accessible part of the book, and without a doubt my favorite.
Costikyan's "Games, Storytelling, and Breaking the String," starts out with a discussion of the early days of the pen-and-paper industry and their influence on interactive fiction, and moves all the way to MMOs and the current indie RPG movement, spending some time on Paul Czege's My Life with Master. It provides a good overview of the IF industry in its entirety, and might have fit better as a sort of "meta-essay", but still works here as a good introduction and exploration of many of the issues surrounding game narrative, player freedom and IF in general.
Erik Mona and Ken Hite's pieces are more on target. Mona's "From the Basement to the Basic Set: The Early Years of Dungeons & Dragons takes D&D up to the late 70s just before it split into D&D and AD&D, providing an interesting historical perspective on the Gygax-Arneson years. Hite's "Narrative Structure and Creative Tension in Call of Cthulhu talks about the evolution of language within various editions of the CoC RPG, as well as the standardized form of their adventures, and how these things serve to create a narrative tension that has helped the game survive and prosper.
One essay worth mentioning for its terseness is Jonathan Tweet's essay on character creation in Everway, barely managing two pages, and then only by the addition of four pieces of artwork. Another oddity is Rebecca Borgstrom's "Structure and Meaning in Role-Playing Game Design", which addresses Exalted's story structure; the piece is filled with numerous subheadings and language that occasionally makes it read like an outline or a proposal, rather than a finished piece (e.g., repeated references to "this chapter" such as "This chapter views gaming as a computational process."). Both pieces are written well and cover interesting material, but feel unfinished in their own ways.
Other essays in this first section discuss the World of Darkness and the Storyteller system, storytelling and collectible card games (in particular, A Game of Thrones and Call of Cthulhu), Arkham Horror, Mystery of the Abbey, George R. R. Martin's Wild Cards books, and the gamebook On Life's Lottery. Not discussed, and notable by their absence: Steve Jackson Games, and any edition of Dungeons & Dragons after 1980.
Section Two, "Computational Fictions," is comprised of 17 essays by authors including Jordan Mechner, Chris Crawford, Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern. The material here is somewhat denser and more technical, but aside from some linguistic stumbling blocks it's also filled with excellent insights.
Mechner's essay on Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time opens things up with an excellent look at the making of a video game: rules, some broken; discussion of how dialogue works within the context of a game; even a sample from a dialogue spreadsheet that shows why screenplay format is inappropriate.
Somewhat crunchier are essays by Chris Crawford ("Deikto: A Language for Interactive Storytelling") and D. Fox Harrell ("GRIOT's Tales of Haints and Seraphs: A Computational Narrative Generation System"). The former discusses Crawford's early attempt to draft something akin to a programming language for IF, complete with flowchart diagrams and pidgin-sounding syntax, such as "Mom command Billy that Billy not go to lake." Harrell's essay likewise talks about "developing computational techniques for representing an author's intended subjective meaning and expression." Yikes.
The longest piece, "Writing Facade: A Case in Procedural Authorship" by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern, discusses Facade, a game wherein the player can either break up or save the marriage of a digital couple. Ample screenshots and samples from the game accompany an explanation of the situation as it unfolds, with later discussion of the procedural architecture and subsystems behind the game. It's an excellent piece that nicely ties together what a player sees with what a developer has to deal with.
Aside from the generally less accessible language, the section's only major flaws are that the essays from Steve Meretzky (on Floyd from Planetfall) and Lee Sheldon (on the computer adaptation of And Then There Were None) are rather terse considering the rich subject matter. Surely Floyd and Agatha Christie deserve more than a couple of pages a piece.
Other games discussed in this section include the Flash storytelling game Solitaire, Book and Volume, Shade, Savior-Faire, the somewhat surreal art piece Pax, the hypermedia Magritte-esque work The Brotherhood of Bent Billiard, the cinematic Mission to Earth, the audiovisual hypertext Juvenate, Twelve Easy Lessons to Better Time Travel, The Breakup Conversation and the multiplayer IF The Archer's Flight.
The third and penultimate section, "Real Worlds", focuses on shared, IF experiences, the unifying factor being a persistence that runs counter to the transience experienced in both weekly RPG sessions and most computer games. Despite the section title, virtual worlds and MMOs are also discussed here by the likes of essayists including John Tynes, Ian Bogost and Gonzalo Frasca. For the most part the material is engaging and interesting, if a bit esoteric at times.
John Tynes' "Prismatic Play: Games as Windows on the Real World" explores escapism and engagism in games as diverse as D&D, Millennium's End and his own Unknown Armies, concluding that engagist works are those that expand our knowledge through immersion in real world ideas and cultures as opposed to escapist frolicking in EDO (Elf-Dwarf-Orc) fantasy games. As an interesting not-quite-counterpoint, Sean Thorne covers John Tynes' Puppetland in the next essay, and discusses how he incorporated the rather escapist game into a writing curriculum for his eleven-year-old students.
Ian Bogost and Gonzalo Frasca include an essay titled "Video Games Go to Washington: The Story Behind the Howard Dean for Iowa Game," which is about as self-explanatory as a title gets. The duo discuss the launch of the game in December of 2003, development challenges and time constraints, demographics and politics, and provide an excellent post-mortem on the game and its effects (or lack thereof) on Dean's campaign.
Several chapters in a row delve into fantasy MMOs, including World of Warcraft. Torill Elvira Mortensen's "Me, the Other" talks about role-playing in MMOs, the difference between IC and OOC and the controversy of role-playing (which seems somewhat anachronistic; aren't people more worried about GTA than D&D nowadays?). Jill Walker's essay covers Quests in World of Warcraft, and how they introduce and support the overall storyline. Celia Pierce and her alter-ego Artmesia discuss(es) social identity and persistence in exploring the case of Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, an MMO that, when it shut down, caused its player base to propagate to other MMOs such as Second Life and There to keep the community alive.
The one odd bit here is a chapter on Santaman's Harvest by Adrine Jenik, an exploration of a digital performance piece from Desktop Theater that includes more sidebar than text as it reprints dialogue from the play ("sman:: Think Big; farmer #1: Big?").
Other essays discuss the use of role-play in prepping political canvassers, Nick Fortgno's A Measure for Marriage LARP, the evidently crass unexceptional.net ("Guy playing with himself," reads a part of one caption), the Boston-based Itinerant, the I Love Bees ARG, the basic rules of Improv Theater, the interactive play Adventures in Mating, and the collaborative work Eliza Redux, "an interactive telerobotic work couched in a virtual graphical representation of a psychoanalyst's workplace" as well as a revisitation of the Eliza program.
The book's rather sizable Appendix includes three playable tabletop RPGs: Puppetland by John Tynes, wherein players take the roles of puppets; Bestial Acts by Greg Costikyan, which is based on the dramatic theories and aesthetic of Bertolt Brecht; and The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen by James Wallis, a tale-telling game written from the first person perspective of the Baron himself. This is followed by biographies of the contributing authors and a helpful index, always a good thing to see in a book of this size and density.
As is often the case, the book's back cover copy is at best misleading; though terse, it manages inaccuracy in saying that the book features "three complete tabletop role-playing games." However, Costikyan's "Designer's Note" for Bestial Acts on page 357 explicitly says "I've never bothered to finish writing up acts II and III." Not quite complete, then. The same error is reprinted on the front flap; a minor gaffe, but noticeable in a book with few other notable flaws save a few silly typos in obvious charts and tables: "Challange" instead of "Challenge", "real-rime" instead of "real-time." But this is nitpicking. As a whole the book is well-edited, well-laid out and amply illustrated to boot, with over 200 images; would that they were in color.
My only real complaint is not with anything in the book, but with the underlying assumption — prevalent in many places, touched upon here in the jacket copy, and assumed to some degree in many of the essays — that the gaming industry is still an "emerging field" that needs to prove its own maturity. While it might be true that not much in the way of academic discussion exists when it comes to games, it still seems all too comfortable to continue hiding in the soft golden field of "emerging." How much longer can the industry (of which I consider myself a part) continue to use that word?
Consider television in the '50s after it got through its own period of emergence and acceptance: shows like Candid Camera, Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts and Break the Bank were on the air. And 60 years later, what do we have? Shows like America's Funniest Home Videos, American Idol and Deal or No Deal. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Pick any medium and you'll find much the same — for every Citizen Kane there will be a dozen Scary Movies; for every Empire Falls there will be fifty Da Vinci Codes.
Pong was emerging; Zork was emerging. We are no longer emerging — we have emerged. Sure, we have quests in World of Warcraft where you have to collect poop, but we also have Portal; we have the Hot Coffee mod in GTA: San Andreas, but we also have a Dystopian Objectivist narrative in Bioshock.
The 47 essays and 3 games in this excellent book show us where we've been, where we are, and where we're headed when it comes to role-playing games and interactive fiction. That's 50 pieces of evidence to prove the case that gaming is as deserving of attention, acclaim and criticism as any other medium. As an industry, we've been emerging for 35 years now; by my reckoning, that puts us squarely into adulthood. Let's start acting like it.
You can purchase Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Which is why you don't have anything insightful to say about it.
steampunk web design
I really think designers could learn a lot from games like "Half-Life 2," "Portal," and "Bioshock" which go easy on the cutscenes and downplay the protagonist. I like a game that says "you the player are the hero," not games where the hero is Master Chief/Solid Snake/whoever-the-fuck. I never connect to those characters because *I'm* the hero, not them.
Frankly, I wouldn't have even known what Gordon Freeman looked like in HL2 if I hadn't seen him on the box. And that's the way I like it. Too many game developers treat this 2nd-person medium as if it were just a slight variation on a traditional 3rd-person movie.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I rather enjoyed Conan Doyle's first person narrative in Sherlock Holmes.
I would like to see some of his style being introduced in a role playing game some day. Won't ever happen I bet, but there is always hope...
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
Generally, I disregard these book reviews, as I am an American and do not read. However, I vow to read this book and take it to every English teacher I have ever had to rub it in their face. For years I have labored to start a second-person movement. Oh they would whine about and bemoan my efforts, "Macbeth makes no sense when every noun is 'you'! You're just full of it!" WELL THE JOKE IS ON THEM! By the way, this is why I love /., as every now and then something pops up that completely vindicates you with regard to a childish feud you had with a teacher in school.
/., as every now and then something pops up that completely vindicates you with regard to a childish feud you had with a teacher in school.
For example, here is a styling of my second-person movement literature as if the previous portion of the post had been done in such a style:
Generally, You disregard these book reviews, as You are an American and do not read. However, You vow to read this book and take it to every English teacher You have ever had to rub it in their face. For years You have labored to start a second-person movement. Oh you would whine about and bemoan your efforts, "Macbeth makes no sense when every noun is 'you'! You're just full of it!" WELL THE JOKE IS ON YOU! By the way, this is why You love
Wouldn't the world make much more sense if everyone spoke this way?!
I got a catholic block.
Besides the very fun first chapter Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler... , I don't know any literary fiction that uses such a perspective. Maybe someone here can come up with other examples?
Paul Griffiths uses the second person in The Sea on Fire , his biography of Jean Barraque, the 20th century modernist composer and Michel Foucault's lover. The book is written as if Griffiths were addressing Barraque, and it's obnoxious as all get out. One wonders why his editor at the university press that published it allowed it.
Actually, games like Portal and Prey do scratch the surface of that...
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
Are your powers of suspending disbelief so strong that you can believe that you personally are a crack soldier equipped with state of the art weaponry? Since the game is complete fantasy, and I at any rate am always aware that I remain sitting on my ass in my living room, I think a third-person perspective where you play as a character the gam emakers thought up makes sense.
I don't see any no tea here!
Is there heaven? Is there Hell? Is that a Tuna Melt I smell?-Primus
I played all the mass-produced Interactive Fiction games in the 80s, back when Infocom bought ads in BYTE magazine. Hadn't really thought much about the tools to make such games since then, but obviously, the state of the art has progressed quite a lot. About a week ago, I decided to load up a modern tool called "Inform", which in version 7 takes "literate programming" to a whole new level. From an example in their manual:
Inform's output is playable in the same Z-machine standards that were derived from Infocom's original machine, that have been released on cellphones, pdas, palmtops, laptops and mainframes for years and years. I'm having fun developing my own short story, and there are a lot of folks remained in the IF world the whole time who have been churning out dozens if not hundreds of titles you can download (most for free) and try. Some are very short, some are quite elaborate.
[
The question I would ask before I published a book like this is how many people really care much about the game storyline. I myself revel in the glory of Agent 47 and my online character victories. I do not care too much about the story line involved, even though it generally is really a good story. On a related note I was very disappointed with the Hitman movie. While we play video games I believe in the idea of three basic elements, Problem identification and resolution(quests), Task repetition(Grinding), and Violence or aggression task completion(PVP or slaughter). on the whole however, i'd like to take a lo
That's what I studied in my days of D&D. One of the most interesting parts of the 2nd person to me is its interaction with volition. See, a line like "you are likely to be eaten by a grue" simply describes the state of the world as it pertains to them, and "you place the teacup down on the table's edge, but it slips and falls to the ground and shatters" is simply describing the outcome of someone's chosen actions. These don't really bother anyone. But go so far as to narrate actions they did not explicitly choose, throwing in a ringer like "You begin to copulate aggressively with the cantaloupe", and you can throw your players into fits of existential angst, as if by stripping their volition from them you have stripped their very sense of self. This kind of philosophical dilemma can inspire a lot of exciting discussion between players and DM.
Now being D&D, you can explain everything away by introducing an evil wizard or cursed relic that is controlling them, and by giving them a fixed object to which to attribute their loss of free will, the issue can be resolved and the player's angst relieved.
The trick then is to pull the comforting rug of a deterministic universe in which they control their own destinies out from under them, such as with the line: "As soon as you strike the killing blow against the wizard, you notice behind him a large pile of gourds. Over come with lust, you tear off your clothes and leap upon the pile, rolling in ecstasy". What does it mean? Does free will exist? Can it exist only within the confines of those behaviors the universe has forced upon you?
Making players think the deep thoughts -- that's what being a great DM is all about.
The enemies of Democracy are
I would say FPS should indicate a first person narrative, not second.
This whole review reminded of Miss Blair's 5th grade class. The "Choose Your Own Adventure" books were all the rage among the boys, and I figured I would write a book report based on The Cave of Time. I mean it was a book right? So I report went something like 'I woke up in a cave and went back to the age of the dinosaurs. I investigated a t-Rex nest when the Mother t-rex came back and ate me. I died. The End.'
Miss Blair was not amused.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
sorry, can't be bothered with this. Next.
It's too late for you now, but you probably should have considered writing the entire review in the second person (i.e., instead of starting the review with "As we all learned in English class ..." you could have written "As you've surely learned in English class ..."). This would have been an appropriate style for you to use, considering the title of the book you reviewed. It wouldn't have been too hard, and in fact it would have read much like the post you're reading now.
Ye find yeself in yon dungeon. Ye see a SCROLLBAR. Behind ye scrollbar is a FLASK. Obvious exits are NORTH, SOUTH, and COWBOYNEAL.
Only if you're female.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Captain Ahab sets out looking for a whale. The whale proves to be too elusive for Ahab. The whale eats Ahab and he dies. The end.
My blog
Wikipedia is very much a source for the vague, common-knowledge facts like that one.
You must be new here.
You think Slashdotters took English class? "begs the question" and "virii" and all?
"Half Asleep In Frog Pajamas" By Tom Robbins (his much better "Only Cowgirls Get the Blues" was turned into a bad Uma Thurman movie) is an interesting 2nd person novel, if you're into pseudo-philosophical ramblings (i.e., read in high school).
If the fact is common-knowledge, it doesn't really need a source[citation needed]
It's always about YOU, isn't it?
splunge (n) -- A good idea.. but it could be lousy... and I'm not being indecisive!
FYI, the "Deikto" language, mentioned in the article, is a part of Chris Crawford's Storytron product, previously covered in Slashdot (see http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/15/1630249 ). It is now in beta, nearing commercial release.
No data, no cry
Do you want your possessions identified? (yes/no/quit)
mod me funny
are teh ghey. lulz!1
Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City is a 2nd-person narrative -- and a pretty good one at that.
Ugh. The second-person in that book really annnoyed me. Having said that, I'm a huge Robbins fan. "Jitterbug Perfume" is one of my absolute favorite books.
He took a duck to the face at 250 knots.
Fiction: *Bright Lights, Big City*.
There are also a lot of "breaking the fourth wall" moments in many first person POV works of fiction, drama, and verse dialogue/monologue (Browning's "My Last Duchess" is a famous example), but that's a different thing from second person narrative.
Strangely enough, I find that sometimes I think of myself as the character, but sometimes I don't. I play WoW, and my main toon is roughly human looking and the same gender as me. When I'm playing on that toon, I find I'll say things like "I need blah", or "I'm almost level blah". When I'm playing on my alt, who is male and looks nothing like a human (giant bull), I find I tend to think of him as just something I'm controlling. So, I'll say things like "Shiftly is almost level blah", or "Shiftly just got a new blah". Maybe it's the look thing, maybe it's because one's my main...who knows. Anyone else find that?
...no two people are not on fire.
That's one of the more insightful comments I've read in a while. I've always felt that way too, but could never put a finger on what bothered me about some cut scenes.
I also agree that the way Halflife downplays the identity of the main character is a good way to draw you in. It also helps for female gamers like me, so that I'm not _constantly_ reminded that my character is actually a guy, which also doesn't help the immersiveness.
Seinfeld allusion....
Outside of poetry, songs and short stories it's almost unheard of - it's especially uncommon in literary fiction (books considered to have "literary merit," which itself is an ambiguous term - essentially a work of art, which means different things to different people). The only instance of second person I remember directly is the short story "The Haunted Mind" in Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales.
Interactive fiction is probably the most common way to see second person (e.g. Choose Your Own Adventure books), but those would lack literary merit in the opinion of most critics.
Well, I'm the complete opposite, so I don't think you should be telling developers what to do. Master Chief/Halo and Solid Snake/MGS sold enough copies to show that there's a market for a 3rd person game where you're playing as a great character and not some faceless Joe. I like my protagonists with a personality because otherwise, game dialog is pretty flat. A lot of it has to do with the technology not being sufficiently advanced enough so that the player could actually talk (or type) to NPCs with them understanding what you're saying, so games like Portal and Half Life bring you in by not having many very NPCs or the NPCs not really interacting with you and expecting a response. Otherwise, NPCs ask you questions and you're relegated to a multiple choice response that destroys any semblance of character that the protagonist may have, and it alienates the players because through multiple choice, they don't feel like they're the ones making the responses. So, there's room for both, but I prefer heroes to have personality.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
I would agree. I'm even fine with something like CoD4, where who you are changes, because at any given time, you are who you are. You may control different people, but you are never the detached, omniscient observer of 3rd person narratives. Plus, I think there was something incredibly cool about the fact that you get to die in the first person in CoD4.
Fear the penguin.
To leave the room, turn to page 63.
To take some pills, turn to page 72.
I do miss those books.
I am consistently surprised by the people who talk about characters, storyline, being 'in' the game (e.g. 'I, the player, am the hero in this game'). I've only ever played games as puzzles, challenges, tests of dexterity/co-ordination, never as adventures, fantastic voyages, heroic questing etc.
That said, I totally agree that, for example, hl2 delivers its story in a far more immersive fashion than MGS (imho, apologies to those who feel differently). However, I think 1st/2nd/3rd person narrative is irrelevant here, and I think you hit the nail right on the head when you mention cutscenes. I think it's all about uninterrupted player input, not about where you see the action from. That's the way I see it anyway.
Rogue forever!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Charlie Stross recently wrote a novel in second person (Halting State, IIRC). He shouldn't have - it wasn't nearly as clever as he thought it was (which goes for just about everything Charlie Stross writes). This was particularly confusing as the story was told from multiple points of view, but was just a distraction in any case.
:)
But then, Stross got his start writing "color text" for D&D sourcebooks, so maybe he was just confused about his medium.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Sure. Were you never a child? My powers of suspending disbelief were so strong to turn my fingers into a pistol, any stick into a rifle or sword, a small patch of woods into anything from a WWII battlefield to the surface of an alien planet, and myself into a soldier, an astronaut, a superhero, or swashbuckling adventurer.
I don't do a lot of gaming these days - too busy with swashbuckling adventures - but back in the late 90s when I'd play Quake or Duke Nukem 3D, I used the same powers to make my saving throw versus disbelief.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Not directly related, but in 8th grade, after I had moved to Florida from Delaware, I took Latin. At one point, the teacher had the class grade a quiz (by passing it to someone sitting next to you, and the teacher would call out the answers) and she told us to take a few notes on the paper we were grading. One of the things that got written onto the paper were pronouns, singular and plural, first person through third. When I got my paper back from the person behind me, it had something like this:
Singular
1st: I
2nd: you
3rd: he, she, it
Plural
1st: we
2nd: y'all
3rd: they
It's not just a contraction, it's 2nd person plural.
While these are valid opinions, folks who call for fewer cutscenes in games scare me. They're probably lots of work for game companies and I'm worried we'll see less and less of them. Personally, I love cutscenes. I want to have cutscenes so long, I can order (by pressing x) and eat a pizza during them. I want cutscenes so long, I can just put the disc in and watch 40 hours of rendered cinema in between Shadow of the Colossus style playable boss battles. I also want great voice acting. I'm calling for games designed to be enjoyed by fundamentally lazy people like me. Kojima understands me, and he probably didn't design MGS for you. Please play something else.
Yet you're incapable of putting yourself into the shoes of any protagonist that doesn't look like you or say exactly what you were thinking?
Wow. Even books must really suck.
"As we all learned in English class, there are three points of view one can employ when writing: first person ("I learned"), second person ("You learned"), and third person ("He learned")."
Well... maybe in an American class, but in an English lesson it would be "I learnt" "You learnt" "He learnt"
Are your powers of suspending disbelief so strong that you can believe that you personally are a crack soldier equipped with state of the art weaponry? Since the game is complete fantasy, and I at any rate am always aware that I remain sitting on my ass in my living room, I think a third-person perspective where you play as a character the gam emakers thought up makes sense.
I'm going out on a limb here, but I think the GP is referring to the use of his imagination. Generally, games (and fantasy books, for that matter) exist as a tool for users to escape from reality and pretend to be someone/something else.I do believe pretending to be someone else isn't as wildly abnormal as you make it out to be.
ZOMG! A GIRL ON SLASHDOT!
Note to self: Stop putting jokes in my insightful comments so I can get something other than +1 Funny!
Gao Xingjian's Soul Mountain used this in places -- the narrative voice shifts a good bit between chapters. Was a pretty good book really (won a Nobel and everything). I believe Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient, Anil's Ghost, others) uses it from time to time -- maybe in Coming Through Slaughter?
I am also told that Bright Lights, Big City uses the second-person exclusively. You might find that a bit tedious, but you never know.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
That's interesting: I usually look from a different perspective when it comes to playing games with main characters:
If the game views the main character predominantly from a 3rd person perspective (example: any Final Fantasy style RPG you name, World of Warcraft, etc), then I view myself as the director/overlord of the main character, directing their actions much like people direct the actions of characters in The Sims games.
If, however, it is viewed from a 1st person perspective (and for this sake, we assume the player's controlled character has an actual history, like Master Chief), then I take on the roll of the character's Unconsious/Subconsious mind, ensuring the character gets to where he/she wants/needs to go in the game without directing the characters surface thoughts.
In this way I can continue to control a character in the first person without being jarred out of the story when my PC starts saying stuff that *I* would never say.
This also has the unintended side benefit of giving me the "character identification" syndrom (I think that's what it's called) that good movies/plays invoke in their audience, where the audience members almost completely suspend their disbelief and react emotionally to events on stage, despite the events not being real. *I* told that character to go down those stairs, and so I'm partly responsible for what happens in the cut scene when he's captured and then watches his girlfriend get tortured (was there another way? Perhaps a window...?)
I wonder how others place their "roles" within games...?
No, no, no, the poster does *not* understand how to conjugate verbs. "I learned, you memorized, he was indoctrinated."
you insensitive clod!
You anonymous coward!
Fear the penguin.
I was a child. I'm sure of it. I don't remember if I ever used my finger as a gun or not(I have vague memories of playing war games, but not what that involved). Are you sure that you remember it, or are you remembering that you remember it even though you don't remember it?
Of course, I got flack for informing my 1 year older brother that there was no Santa Claus, so I may not have had the best imagination.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Based on a presentation I saw at GDC 08, he is exactly right. Gordon Freeman was one of the characters players identified with the most, and he may have just stumbled on part of the reason why.
Books don't win Nobels. The Nobel Prize for Literature is awarded in recognition of a writer's entire oeuvre.
I disagree; I felt Oblivion was rather disappointing in terms of letting you do "whatever you decide to do". And part of the reason, which I find interesting, is precisely that too much of the narrative is told in the first person.
The problem for me was the journal. Like any quest journal, it records the quests the player has been given and the progress made in those quests; the problem is that it also sets out the next stage of the quest in the first person. It never leaves it as "Fred has offered to give me an enchanted sword if I bring him the Chalice of Chalicity": it always has to go on and end up with something like "Fred has offered me a sword in exchange for the chalice. I must go and get him the chalice immediately!" Excuse me? No I mustn't. I have several more urgent quests, thank you very much, and I will recover the chalice when I damn well feel like it. Kindly stop telling me what to do and let me play the game my own way.
That was bearable, if annoying; what destroyed it for me as a role-playing game was the discovery that I really didn't have any freedom at all, except to decide which quests to undertake. Want to join a corrupt guild and work to undermine it from within? Sorry, if you join the guild then the player-character "I" decides s/he's corrupt and evil too, and constantly bombards you with journal entries revelling in the evil acts that I, the player, had only been intending to carry out because the end would justify the means. When I reached the climax of that quest line, I met another traitor who had been doing exactly what I'd wanted to do -- and the game locked me in a room with him and literally refused to allow me to leave until I had killed him, then praised me for my loyalty to the power that I had wanted to destroy!
Don't get me wrong; I enjoyed the game immensely nonetheless. But I long for a game where I actually get to make meaningful decisions; a game that will let me affect the story, rather than merely deciding which parts of it to participate in.
There's several times when Alyx in HL2 and Episode 1 makes reference to or mock the fact that Freeman never once speaks. The developers deliberately insert pregnant pauses and the like and then Alyx says something stupid or awkward. Its actually quite (meta)humorous.
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
I think it's much more difficult to create a good story without making the character you play an actual character in the story. Don't get me wrong, Half-Life has done an incredible job, but when you have all these characters who seem to really like this guy who doesn't talk (and in my case hits them all with grenades and crowbars). To me, having the one attribute of "courage" isn't enough to warrant Alex falling in love with Gordon Freeman. Now if you had a way of having a character actually talk (ie participate in ways other than just shooting some people and listening to others) but still in some way carry out your (the player) actions as you would do them, then you might be able to craft a good story. However, this kind of game I think is out of the reach of our current game systems, as it would probably require a great bit of AI. But the experience would be amazing.
Yeah, although it was kind of hard to read for me being a non-native english speaking person. But I sure did learn some nifty adjectives.
"Die endgueltige Teilung Deutschlands - das ist unser Auftrag." - Chlodwig Poth
I wasn't trying to be subtle. I'm female. That's really not the point. I was actually thinking back to another slashdot discussion here on MMOs banning people playing different gendered characters. There was a thread in there where a user commented that he didn't feel like he was deceiving anyone because he didn't think of the character as himself - it was just something he was controlling. It wasn't until then that I realized that I think of my two toons differently. That's all. That's where it was coming from. Like I said, it might not even be the gender thing - could just be that one is my main.
...no two people are not on fire.
You for one, welcome your new narrator overlords.
In Second Person, you are the subject. In Soviet Russia, subject are you!
Surely you can think of more memes?
The practical upshot, though, was that the 2nd person dialogue was mixed with a certain element of action on the part of your character that you had no control over. It could be mind-bending at times, and my mind already looked like Uri Gellar had spent a drunken afternoon in the vicinity.
When DMing dungeons, I've rarely ever had a character do something as the result of controlling them. I've seen that style and although it works well for some DMs, it's not been my approach. I've tended more towards complex puzzles, X-Files-like conspiracies, double-dealing NPCs and other nasty surprises, but not random. It's got to be obvious in hindsight, or the players won't scream at themselves for not seeing it and walking straight into an ambush.
(I scripted out some fun live roleplaying adventures using the Spirit of Adventure game system that way. You would not believe the stupidity of some of the players, but generally it seems that players free to make Really Bad Mistakes works out much more enjoyable than single-path games or games that rob players of freedom - or even the illusion of it - too often.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
martinQblank prefers the third person form.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Wrong. For some reason it's unusual and rare but it can be done just fine. (Note: like everything else, not everyone will like it.) One of my favorite books of all times just happens to be Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City which, by the way, was a bestseller. (Click on that link, then the book cover, to read the first chapter.)I have no problem with the style because I always imagine myself as the protagonist when reading a first-person book anyway, and I imagine many others feel the same way. All that matters are the same things that matter in any other book--characters, humor, etc. Some people might be put off by the style but most others won't mind. Wikipedia lists others.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
"As we all learned in English class"
I think you mean "USAian class". No self-respecting English speaker would say "I learned".
"I did not do that and I'm offended that you would say I did," you say in breathy undertones as you stuff the cantaloupe into your pants.
The enemies of Democracy are
Just my two cents, but I'm in a somewhat similar situation in another game.. I have my old main character (human), who I used for quite awhile before switching to another toon, this one some 2 foot tall taru character that doesnt look at all like me. I'm almost never on my human guy anymore, but when I am I usually do the third person "Artos does such and such" thing, while on my short guy that looks nothing like me it's more "I do xyz"... so it might not be a gender thing. Both charactets are male. Personally I feel a bit weird playing a female, not sure why really, but I know lots that do.
Like I said, just my two cents.
I often end up driving home from work during an hour when my local NPR affiliate radio station plays a program that airs old radio shows from the 1930's - 1950's. This program airs a variety of different shows in different genre's. There is one show (I think it is called "The Whistler"), where each episode is about a character who tries to get away with a crime (usually murder), and of course, something completely out of the character's ability to control or even predict always happens at the last second and they get busted. The show doesn't follow any regular characters, but instead a different criminal every episode. The show employs a Narrator who will often describe action sequences, and the character's internal thoughts, in the 2nd Person, "You head for the door, Jack, and as your hand reaches for the knob, you hear someone knocking on the door. You pull back behind the door, waiting for the person to go away. [Woman's voice], 'Anne, are you in there? It's Mary.'. You hear a key sliding into the lock! Quickly, after stepping back into the bedroom, you enter the dark bathroom, and quietly close the door." Etc. (Note, this is just me trying to give a sense of the show - the writing on the show is, usually, quite better than what I've provided here).
The point of using 2nd person, here, I think is to make the story more suspensful to the audience. It's, perhaps, a little more exciting when 'you' are in such a situation, where at any moment your plan could go afoul and you could be arrested for murder, than it is if it's happening to 'him'.
I do generally agree that 2nd person doesn't have as wide of an ability to be applied as first or 3rd person, but it definitely can be, and has been, employed effectively at various times, by various writers.
No perhaps someone can explain to me where the second world went, I can only seem to find a first and third these days...
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
"Man of few words, huh?"
"It's a zombine. Get it? A zombine? Ehhh heh."
Sometimes I think she's the real main character. Final Fantasy tends to work that way too.
That's because you don't relate to your characters much at all... I find that people that use the word toon are often poor roleplayers... not that everyone should be roleplaying if it's not there cup of tea but people who are used to roleplaying are less likely to have trouble sympathizing with forms that are a different gender/race/species than their own.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complicity
Published in 1993, it's the story of a drug crazed, computer game playing Scottish journalist who is tracking a serial killer. Chapters are told either from the protagonist's viewpoint in the first person, or the killer's viewpoint in the second person. The identity of the killer is a major plot device. It's all very funny, if you appreciate the rather macabre humor that Banks often uses. All the victims are killed (or harmed) in a rather spectacular fashion, so the book is not for the squeamish.
I don't see why it can't work both ways. I suppose I think that way at least a little, but cutscenes and such never break my suspension of disbelief. Quite the opposite, they help me become more engaged in the game (like they're supposed to). The way I see things, the main character is still the protagonist, and I'm still the hero; the only difference is that we play separate roles. While the character is the one performing all the actions, I'm the one making all of the decisions, which he must follow. You might say I take on the role of the god/supreme commander/what have you. In fact, I find that this forces me to become more invested in the game: it's one thing to fail when the only one affected is yourself, it's quite another when someone else's life depends on your decisions.
The problem with having YOU be the protagonist as you say, is that you can't build a story centered around them. Good stories aren't just about what the protagonist DOES, they are about what the feel, what they learn, and the decisions they make. Every person is going to be different, so unless you give your hero a personality which affects the story and is affected by the story, your hero and your story will be boring. Half Life is driven by action and mystery. Metal Gear Solid is driven by character beliefs. Half Life may be more immersive and provide a better game experience, but Metal Gear Solid has the better story hands down. Can you tell my why Gordon Freeman is fighting? No, but you sure as hell can tell why Solid Snake is, as it's central to the theme.
That's because most of the critics are idiots who are too afraid to crawl out of the comfort of their little classical box.
The first thing that pops into my head nowadays in any discussion of 1st/2nd/3rd person was a line from a song that was played incessantly at the gym I went to for a while:
I'm the first person
You're the second person
Earlier today, I was in the third person
Heh. Friggin annoying song, but the line made me smile the first time I heard it.
Thanks for the insightful comment. Your intelligent remarks restore my confidence in /. I don't know why your post was moderated as funny.
I tried my hand at this by authoring a TADS game and entering it in the annual IF competition. It turned out to be a lot harder than I originally thought.
One problem that I ran into was subject verb agreement between what the gaming system provides and what you provide. Another problem was in the combinatorial explosion of the interactive nature of the media. In non-interactive fiction, you know what has already happened in the story so you can reference those things while writing. In interactive fiction, the user may not have navigated to a particular room so you have to be careful when you need to refer to another place or event. I have blogged on this elsewhere.
Good to know that /. has given me my own article tag, now.
Anyway, if you'll excuse me, I have some slavering to go do in another part of the cave.
There's this jerk poking around the place, rifling through everything -- but I'm guessing the batteries in his lantern are about to run out any second now....
You know you only got modded up for the cantaloupe reference, right?
No idea what you're talking about.
The enemies of Democracy are
Heh... I got so annoyed with the NPCs in one game, that I shot them all instead of interacting with them. :)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
A very strange thing to do anyways. If I can pretend to be a sword-swinging dragon-killing fireball-slinging Lizardman spellsword living in a completely alien world, then why can't I also pretend to be a -female- such ?
I mean, it's not as if changing the sex is a major deal, compared to changing all that other stuff. Nobody in any game assume that I'm ACTUALLY a Lizardman, so why would they assume I'm ACTUALLY female ?
This is true. But it's a hard problem to solve. There are literally an infinite number of things you may want to do. Any current game has a damn hard time allowing even the tiniest fraction of them. I don't think it's really solvable without a human GM.
You also can't crawl under a table, set fire to a house, pull someones left ear or, for that matter, kill Martin DEAD and join the dark side. (anyone "important" is merely "unconscious")
It's a pre-written story. You can choose what -parts- of it to tell in which sequence. But you can't really change the story as such.
I absolutely adore interactive fiction. It's good to see 2nd person get some attention for a change. It's by far the least used narrative style of the 3.
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel ever other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!" Raise your voice--they won't hear you otherwise--"I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!" . . . So here you are now, ready to attack the first lines of the first page. You prepare to recognize the unmistakable tone of the author... READ IT!
Artificial intelligence is the study of how to make real computers act like the ones in the movies.
I always figured Freeman was actually a mute who was too proud to carry around one of those cards.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Orhan Pahmuk's "My Name is Red" is in the second person. (though the first person keeps changing in every chapter of the book).
> so why would they assume I'm ACTUALLY female?
Because there actually ARE females, but not actually Lizardmen. Crab men? Yes (we have all had the opportunity, at least, to see that episode of South Park), but not Lizardmen.
Does GTA or its successors let you pick between white, chicano, asian, or black? That might be interesting, even if different races had no other effects. I expect that there would then be the same sorts of questions about playing someone of a different race as there are about playing someone of a different sex.
Well Said. I've always had similar issues with those games but couldn't exactly verbalize why.
Wait, I don't understand. Are you implying there's some kind of problem with that quest?
I don't even know if there's a name for it, but it's not 1st, 2nd or 3rd person. Here's a sample:
> one looks
One finds oneself in a dark room. One might be eaten by a grue.
> one goes north
One is eaten by a grue. Would one like to restart or quit?
Suitable for butlers or royalty.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
It is even worse in games where players can control each other (Masquerade anyone?) and the GM gets to decide whether or not the other character can control your actions too.
I used to play a Ventrue alot and became the most hated player because I played against my teammates just to mess with them.
Hardly a convincing argument. There -are- actual swordfigthers, f1-pilots, commando-soldiers and mafia-members too. Nevertheless when I play one of these characters, nobody assumes I'm -actually- the character that I play.
So why should they assume I'm -actually- a female if I play one ?
And yes, there are games that let you essentially choose the "race" of your human, for example in some you can customize hair, skin-tone facial features, body-build etc and you can easily pick features to look asian, or african or whatever. Second Life for example.
I think it's something else entirely: That some insecure male game-players would -like- to have more ACTUAL female players around (and not just female characters), for the fairly simple reason that young males in general like to have young females around (and vice versa) to flirt with, sometimes to start relationships with and so on.
Since many play with blurry lines between character and player (it's not as if RL-events and issues are never discussed by the characters in SL or WOW), they'd much prefer it if the female character that their male character flirts with, also had a female player.
It doesn't bother them to the same degree if the asian they've been flirting with turns out to actually be played by say an italian or Swedish girl.
WIKIPEDIA IS A SOURCE!!!
But depending on the topic, use a grain of salt.
For movie plots, basic info, wikipedia is fine and adequate.
For debateable issues, politics, history, etc., use a few grains of salt.
just made the same point. let me second this point.... jay
Just in case the server gets /.ed, I'm posting full text of the review. Cuz, ya know, this looks like such a hot topic.
summary
An exploration of the "You" in RPGs and Interactive Fiction
As Wikipedia helpfully points out, the second-person POV is not common in literary fiction, but it is fairly common in other forms of media, including the subject of this book; namely, interactive fiction (IF), role-playing games (RPGs) and other game-related fictions where the "reader" is generally an active participant in the story, either literally or virtually.
To that end, co-editors Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin have collected 47 essays on various topics related to the second-person, dividing the lot up into three sections covering "Tabletop Systems," "Computational Fictions," and "Real Worlds" (the latter somewhat of a misnomer, as you will soon see). The essays range in tone from highly informal to quite technical, from practical to theoretical, and (in the tradition of old Infocom games) from terse to verbose, the sole uniting theme being the focus on You.
Section One, "Tabletop Systems," contains 15 essays devoted to a discussion of traditional, old-school RPGs, including standout bits penned by the likes of Greg Costikyan, George R. R. Martin, Erik Mona and Ken Hite. It's the most accessible part of the book, and without a doubt my favorite.
Costikyan's "Games, Storytelling, and Breaking the String," starts out with a discussion of the early days of the pen-and-paper industry and their influence on interactive fiction, and moves all the way to MMOs and the current indie RPG movement, spending some time on Paul Czege's My Life with Master. It provides a good overview of the IF industry in its entirety, and might have fit better as a sort of "meta-essay", but still works here as a good introduction and exploration of many of the issues surrounding game narrative, player freedom and IF in general.
Erik Mona and Ken Hite's pieces are more on target. Mona's "From the Basement to the Basic Set: The Early Years of Dungeons & Dragons takes D&D up to the late 70s just before it split into D&D and AD&D, providing an interesting historical perspective on the Gygax-Arneson years. Hite's "Narrative Structure and Creative Tension in Call of Cthulhu talks about the evolution of language within various editions of the CoC RPG, as well as the standardized form of their adventures, and how these things serve to create a narrative tension that has helped the game survive and prosper.
One essay worth mentioning for its terseness is Jonathan Tweet's essay on character creation in Everway, barely managing two pages, and then only by the addition of four pieces of artwork. Another oddity is Rebecca Borgstrom's "Structure and Meaning in Role-Playing Game Design", which addresses Exalted's story structure; the piece is filled with numerous subheadings and language that occasionally makes it read like an outline or a proposal, rather than a finished piece (e.g., repeated references to "this chapter" such as "This chapter views gaming as a computational process."). Both pieces are written well and cover interesting material, but feel unfinished in their own ways.
Other essays in this first section discuss the World of Darkness and the Storyteller system, storytelling and collectible card games (in particular, A Game of Thrones and Call of Cthulhu), Arkham Horror, Mystery of the Abbey, George R. R. Martin's Wild Cards books, and the gamebook On Life's Lottery. Not discussed, and notable by their absence: Steve Jackson Games, and any edition of Dungeons & Dragons after 1980.
Section Two, "Computational Fictions," is comprised of 17 essays by authors including Jordan Mechner, Chris Crawford, Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern. The material here is somewhat denser and more technical, but aside from some linguistic stumbling blocks it's also filled with excellent insights.
Mechner's essay on Prince of Persia: The Sa