Every now and then, someone tries the trick of writing a novel in the second person singular: referring to the hero not as “I” or “he” but as “you”. Examples include Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City (first line: “You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning”), and Iain Banks’s Complicity (first line: “You hear the car after an hour and a half”). The title of Complicity is as much a description of the character of the chosen literary device as it is a signal of the fictional theme. An author writing skillfully in the second person can indeed draw the reader into involuntary complicity with events and actions that then come to seem too close for comfort.
Our long familiarity with the classic text adventure has perhaps helped to obscure the strangeness of the fact that they, too, were most often written in the second person. This cannot have been the only obvious choice for William Crowther, author of Colossal Cave Adventure, aka ADVENT (1975-6), which begins: “You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building”. How might the genre have been different if it had instead read: “I am standing at the end of a road…”? That would have been a closer verbal analogue to today’s ubiquitous FPS viewpoint; instead, in addressing the player as “you”, the text adventure preserves an explicit separation between player and gameworld, casting the computer system itself as a separate character, an automated dungeon master through conversation with whom the journey unfolds.
What is happening, by comparison, in videogames such as Forbidden Siren, when the player is suddenly given a flash of himself from an unseen enemy’s perspective; or in Phantom Hourglass, when you meet the boss Crayk and realise, in a delirious moment of joyous discombobulation, that you must fight while watching Link through the monster’s eyes? These, too, are creative uses of the secondperson point of view: an underutilised effect, but one with enormous potential power.
What about the firstperson plural, the point of view of “we”? This may sound alien to videogames, but consider a squad shooter that shows a tactical map of all your soldiers: that is arguably a firstperson plural view. A different way of attempting the same perspective occurs in Modern Warfare 2, which is primarily a firstperson shooter both generically and aesthetically, but strives also to be a fiction in the firstperson plural. To mitigate the player’s alienation at playing a confusing variety of grunts around the globe, the interstitial briefing scenes, with their bird’s-eye view of troop dispensations and satellite imagery, and the chatter of commanders, attempt to glue together the disparate kinetic set-pieces with a representation of the community of “us” (which of course mainly means, according to the game’s unreflective cultural imperialism, “I and my fellow Americans”).
The other main contemporary generic descriptor, “thirdperson”, brushes over a greater variety of viewpoints. The over-the-shoulder perspective of Gears Of War or Uncharted 2 is closest in literary analogy to the Flaubertian “style indirect libre”, in which narration occurs in the third person but is inflected by the thoughts and observations of the character in focus at the time. This is not the same as the “third person” of the original Metal Gear Solid or of a standard side-scrolling platformer, closer in spirit to what we have come to think of as the “standard” objective thirdperson narrative (though that is itself a relatively recent literary invention). And then there is the godlike thirdperson view that casts the player as a Central Scrutiniser, able to toy with the very fabric of the game universe: in this way, the stunningly simple web Flash game Continuity is a kind of Borgesian fantasy come to pixellated life.
Of course, that’s not to say these distinctions between points of view have never occurred to game designers before. Indeed, an entire thesis on their psychophysiological effect is crammed into the beginning of every level of GoldenEye, when you see Bond in the third person and then are catapulted, with a rush of the ontological uncanny, right inside his skull. Now you are Bond. Which demonstrates, again, the general truth: not all points of view are equal, and videogames could play more creatively with their differences.
Steven Poole is the author of Trigger Happy: The Inner Life Of Videogames. Visit him online at stevenpoole.net.