The Second Person

Choose Your Own Adventure books could go down some weird, weird paths.

I've used the language of video games more than once to illustrate points about literature. Take, for example, the basic literary element of point-of-view. First person point-of-view is when the narration of a story refers to the main character as "I", and third person point-of-view is when the narration of a story refers to the main character as "he" or "she" or some other non-gendered pronoun. Video games are also described in terms of being in either first or third person. A first person game puts you directly into the head of the avatar, and you see the world through their eyes. A third person game puts you outside of the avatar you're controlling, often directly over their shoulder.

Lesser known, and even lesser used in literature, is SECOND person point-of-view. A story told in second person is one where the narration refers to the main character as "you." The most famous application of second person POV may be in old school Choose Your Own Adventure stories, the ones that start with passages such as, "You wake up in an abandoned mine shaft. After dusting off dirt, debris, and spiders, you look around. To your left, the shaft heads towards a light. To you right: darkness. Which way will you go?" The text then offers the reader an option: "To go left, turn to page 28. To go right, turn to page 33," and the rest of the story unfolds in this manner, inviting the reader to go back and re-read the book many times over, experiencing a different story each time. The virtual world in the pages of the books is laid out by the author, and you, the reader, get to decide how you experience that world.

I'm wondering if you're starting to see the connection.

It is a connection that clicked for me when I was playing a video game that 1.) I've been playing recently, 3.) I'm way too late to the party on, and D.) is awesome. The game in question: Portal 2, a game about being trapped in an abandoned laboratory and solving environmental puzzles by using a gun that fires reality-bending teleportation portals onto walls. Portal 2 features arguably the greatest character in video game history. No, not the player avatar. The player avatar is a silent protagonist named Chell about whom very little is known. She's importantly unimportant, though, so we'll come back to her in just a bit. I'm speaking of GLaDOS, the wickedly scripted and voiced AI character who runs the dead lab where Chell is imprisoned. GLaDOS is delightfully insane, and her history and past are really at the heart of the world of Portal. In the first game in the series, she is the clear-cut antagonist; in the second, she could still be called such (although more shades of grey reveal themselves as that story unfolds.) As you, the player, in the person of Chell, puzzles your way through Aperture Labs, GLaDOS taunts you and leads you astray, all the time referring to you, as "you".

Portal 2

That alone doesn't mean, "Hey! Video games are all told in the second person!" First person games are so characterized because they ask the player to control a character into whose head the game's "camera" has been directly placed, and Portal 2 is very much a first-person game in that regard. And Portal games aren't necessarily Choose Your Own Adventure books; they're actually pretty linear in their progression as you solve their room-based puzzles in a pre-determined sequence. Portal and Portal 2 both, however, present a story told through the characters in front of you and the world around you. Much of the game's lore is delivered through environmental clues, graffiti tucked away in out-of-the-way corners and on television monitors that come to life in the background of the areas you explore, and it is entirely up to you how much of that part of the story you experience. The series' main character, Chell, is a cipher. Her character appearance is set, but she's a blank slate for you to write on, a vessel through which you experience the game's adventure. She is literally a shell. That's right. Chell is a shell. Valve isn't being subtle here, just as they neglected subtlety in their hit game Half-Life, where protagonist Gordan Freeman is a free man.

Another great example of choosing-your-own adventure gaming occurs in medieval fantasy game Skyrim, one of the most successful single-player video games of all time. In Skyrim you choose your race, your gender, your facial features, the literal and figurative paths you take, the disciplines you learn, the factions in the in-game world you're going to team up with, which ones you'll oppose, and which ones you'll avoid altogether... everything. You do all of this without your player avatar ever saying a word. Everything is a variable, and the world responds to and is shaped by your choices and actions. The game tends to get buggy for that very reason (it needs to be a remarkably malleable piece of programming to try and predict for everything the player may choose to do), but that's the price developer Bethesda Softworks was willing to  pay for developing an open-everything game. Spoiler warning: it totally worked out for them.

Skyrim

And then there's Nintendo, the granddaddy of gaming. Storytelling that presents you, the player, with a world and then steps back to allow you to react to it... that's a storytelling style Nintendo has embraced for a long time. Think of Nintendo's hit franchise, The Legend of Zelda, and its protagonist, Link. Just as Chell is an empty shell that the player is invited to inhabit in order to experience her story, Link is the graphical avatar standing in as the link between the player and his world. Both Chell and Link are silent and seemingly emotionless, and this is so for a very particular reason: both Valve and Nintendo are asking you to react to the game worlds around these avatars with your OWN thoughts, feelings, and responses, not with pre-scripted ones voice-acted for you in cut scenes.

Portal 2 and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild are both games that allow gamers to take control of a silent avatar and explore a meticulously detailed and designed world. When I'm playing Portal or Portal 2 and I stumble across some cryptic graffiti left behind in a cranny warning me not to trust GLaDOS, it's far more effective for the game to sit back and let me respond emotionally and intellectually to this narrative turn as opposed to cutting away to a scene that rips me out of Chell's head and shows me a character I've been role-playing as reacting to the scenario in a way I never would. Same goes for Breath of the Wild. There's two forms of storytelling in Breath of the Wild. There are traditional cut scenes that have been criticized and discussed and which sometimes feel awkward and out-of-character and out of place... and then there's the atmospheric storytelling that unfolds over the course of hundreds of hours of gameplay across the massive, history-laden, go-anywhere kingdom of Hyrule. I don't know about you, but I find exploring a field full of petrified enemies in front of a rotting barricade a far more compelling narrative experience than a cut scene where a bird in a smock makes snide comments to me.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

It stands to reason, when you think about it, that the ideal storytelling in an interactive medium would be interactive, rather than a series of cinematic scenes that rip control away from the player just as the most interesting parts of the story begin to happen. So flesh out your virtual worlds, game developers, as richly as you can, and when you drop me into it, don't signpost me to death. Don't dictate to me how your game should make me think, feel, and react. Just let me run loose and tell me, "You can go left or you can go right. Which way will you go?"