intfiction.org

Most of the time, I don't worry about things like whether "you" means the player or the PC, or who "I" is when the parser gives a message. But suddenly it started looking strange to me. What if the game referred to the player in the third person?

That's creepy. I like it.

(I mean, I don't think that it should be the default for IF games, but a game could make good use of that for POV wackiness.)

I will refrain from the obligatory Silence of the Lambs reference.

I'm probably just old-fashioned, but I think the "conventional" approach of addressing both the player and the player character as "you" is not just convention -- it became the convention because it is, in some sense, natural.

I think back to 1977 or so, when I sat down for the very first time to try Adventure. It was, of course, long before anybody thought about coming up with a theory to characterize what we were doing, drawing distinctions between the player (the guy sitting at the terminal and typing) and the player character (the guy "inside" the game who wanders around and throws daggers at dwarves). It was also, of course, before the time when there was a convention as to how these things worked ; if anything, this was the game that established what the convention was to become. Yet, somehow, whether the game said "Congratulations! You have just vanquished a dragon with your bare hands!" (where "you" refers to the player character) or "You must be more specific" (addressing the player) or "You can't go that way" (which arguably refers to either), we understood what was going on. For me, and I suspect most people, all it took was a few turns to get the hang of what the machine's responses meant. The reason, I think, is that while the distinction between the player and the player character is a useful one (particularly from the author's perspective), it is not essential that the player think about that distinction in order to play the game. Using "you" in both senses allows the player to have fun without forcing him to appreciate and think about the distinction.

Once you depart from that approach, you make it more difficult for the player, by forcing him to think about what "I" or "you" means; the meaning is not self-evident. I suspect it is certainly possible to learn to play a game using such an approach, but I think there would be a lot more learning involved. The issue is whether that additional learning really buys anything in terms of the play experience. I'm not sure I see that it does.


Robert Rothman

"The player undoes that action, or it gets the unwinnable ending again"?

I like it, but then I don't particularly love the default player/character conflation.

But as was discussed in the other "you" thread, the PC in Adventure had no personality to speak of - it was a blank for the player to fit into. In a game where the PC is developed enough to have different reactions and preferences to the player, it might make more sense to distinguish between them.

This reminds me of a book I read about comic books. Some comic books like Tintin and Cerebus have excruciating detail in the background, but the main characters are only minimally illustrated. The point was that when the main character lacks detail, it's easier for the reader to imagine themselves in that place.

Ultimately, I suppose it comes down to one's personal view of what IF is about. To me (and, again, I acknowledge that I'm somewhat old-fashioned in this regard), a lot of the fun I get out of it as a player derives from the role-playing component. In a game where the player character is a Featureless Undefined Character (Kinda), identifying with the character is almost automatic. In the case of a character with more definition, either I can or cannot identify with the character enough for the role-playing aspect to work. If I can do so, then the use of "you" in both senses continues to make sense; if I cannot identify with the character enough to imagine myself as the character, then I probably wouldn't enjoy the game very much.

On the other hand, I can understand that role-playing aspect -- which for me, entails a certain identification with the character -- may not be important to some people. If you take that out of the picture, then the idea of using different pronouns makes more sense. Put another way, the kind of game for which splitting the "yous" is likely to work best is probably not the kind of game which I would be likely to enjoy anyway -- but that's a matter of personal preference.

Robert Rothman

From a historical standpoint, PC as "you" was not universal in early text adventures; as Jimmy Maher points out, Scott Adams' Adventureland (the first home computer text adventure?) had a first-person protagonist and even played with the player/PC dichotomy:



The end of The Count played around with the dichotomy a little more:



And as you can tell by counting the exclamation points, Adams doesn't appear to have been the artsiest IF author.

That doesn't prove that the second person isn't more natural; maybe that's why it came to dominate IF. (But maybe not; maybe that was just how the most successful IFs happened to be programmed and written.

All that said, capmikee's proposal does strike me as unsettling; that's not to say it's bad, but it definitely comes off as stylized to me. (Somehow it reminds me of the parts of Metal Gear Solid, which I've only watched on video, where one of the bosses analyzes the PC's character in terms of your save files.) To me it'd be more natural to refer to the PC in third person and the player in second, like this:



Or first person for the PC, for that matter. If a sort of naturalism is what you're striving for; it doesn't have to be.

Yeah, I'm in a very different boat: I don't think of 'role-playing' and 'strong identification with the PC' as being the same thing. I don't think of AFGNCAAP games as involving very much role-playing, because role-playing involves acting out a character. If there's not much character, there's not much acting: if the PC is just me plus a keyring and backpack, I'm not really role-playing. Imagining that the protagonist is me is not the same thing as imagining that I am the protagonist.

(This is different, of course, in RPG-like games where the AFGNCAAP is just the starting-point for a character that becomes player-defined. But it's very rare for an IF game to do this to any great degree.)

I would venture that what is creepy and unsettling about the original example is that the narrator is addressing the character rather than the player. Cutting the link between the player and the character isn't necessarily unsettling, but if the narrator is not talking to me, the player, then how can I possibly know what is going on? I am immediately turned into some weird ghostly presence who is spying on the PC and the narrator. Brr. (Like Andrew said: it is creepy. I like it.) This should only be done in very special games.


(Although even there, I'd choose starting out with a well-defined PC every day. The Nameless One from Planescape: Torment and Gerald from The Withcer (2) are the only RPG PCs I can really remember, because all the other ones were just "that transmuter with which I generally chose the lawful good option".)