Second Person 184
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.
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.
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 |
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.
You didn't read the article (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:You didn't read the article (Score:5, Funny)
SLASHDOT doesn't understand JOKE.
A HUMORLESS MODERATOR attacks! A HUMORLESS MODERATOR does 1 (Offtopic) damage.
You are in a room. You are alone. You are so very alone. Obvious exits: COMPUTER, DOOR, SLEEPING PILLS AND JOSE CUERVO.
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Choose your own adventure (Score:5, Funny)
To take some pills, turn to page 72.
I do miss those books.
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Re:You didn't read the article (Score:4, Funny)
Re:You didn't read the article (Score:5, Funny)
What should we do with the COMPUTER?
>use COMPUTER
You try to use the COMPUTER. It crashes and the monitor, the only source of light in the room, enters the standby mode.
It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
This is why I don't like Master Chief/Solid Snake (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:This is why I don't like Master Chief/Solid Sna (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
Re:This is why I don't like Master Chief/Solid Sna (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:This is why I don't like Master Chief/Solid Sna (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This is why I don't like Master Chief/Solid Sna (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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 wh
Re:This is why I don't like Master Chief/Solid Sna (Score:4, Insightful)
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ZOMG! A GIRL ON SLASHDOT!
Re:This is why I don't like Master Chief/Solid Sna (Score:5, Interesting)
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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 ?
Re:This is why I don't like Master Chief/Solid Sna (Score:2)
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.
Re:This is why I don't like Master Chief/Solid Sna (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:This is why I don't like Master Chief/Solid Sna (Score:2, Interesting)
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 take your point, but I would say that you have simply provided an example of "just a slight variation on a traditional 3rd-person movie" here.
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
These reactions scare me (Score:4, Funny)
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Somebody missed the joke. But a TV series on dvd produced by Pixar would be more fitting. With internet access to Pizza Hut and Shadow of the Colossus paused but ready in between episodes.
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Perhaps you've never played FFX, there's a point at when cutscenes get tedious, cutscenes should be saved for the awesome parts of the game (i.e. Odin cutscene in FF9 for instance), many cutscenes rendered in game with bad art and are just characters talking endlessly while you bash your brain wanting to skip it.
I don't mind games having a movie-esque feel, I loved MGS 3, but MGS 3 was at least A GOOD GAME minus the cutsce
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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 as
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Second Person? (Score:3, Interesting)
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...
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You mean Dr Watson's first person narrative. The other fellow was just Watson's literary agent.
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For a storyline-driven shooter, it's just the right length (fairly short, then, compared to most others), its style is amazing, the story is pretty good, and the gameplay is fast and fun, with almost none of the boring/repetitive stretches that plagued the first one.
Try playing it through on the most difficult mode. Use a cheat to make it available to you, if it's not there until after the first play-through (I can't remember whether it is or not). I found myse
Second person shooter (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, games like Portal and Prey do scratch the surface of that...
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Re:Second person shooter (Score:5, Interesting)
But what I'd like to see was an "herbivore person" game. The screen would be split vertically in the middle, one side showing your right, the other your left, both at exactly 90 degree. And the predators are near. Run!
Now that would be different.
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But what I'd like to see was an "herbivore person" game. The screen would be split vertically in the middle, one side showing your right, the other your left, both at exactly 90 degree. And the predators are near. Run!
Deer Hunter: Brown Shift.
Is the goal of the game to eat, fight, and mate, or get shot by the best hunter?
The point system should be semi-obvious: antler points. And they drop off yearly, so this could be a good play-leveling feature for "Deer Hunter: Brown Shift: The MMORPG. Defend your herd from other Bucks. Defend yourself from Buckshot. Do it all again next year."
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Y'all look mighty good hangin' on the wall above my monitor!
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This is nothing new. Battletoads did it years ago; the boss at the end of the first level was a huge mecha which was far too big to fit on the screen. So they cut to the monster's eye view.
Terrific game, but a bit hard to find nowadays; ring your local GameStop and see if they have any in stock, it's well worth tracking down.
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Pick up no tea (Score:2)
Inform (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Still, Inform 7 is damned impressive if only inasmuch as it is highly readable and writable to nonprogrammers.
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While I'll agree that I7 is highly readable, I find it far harder to write than the average artificial language like Inform 6. The reason? The syntax/grammar. The syntax/grammar being so close to English it is really tempting to try to just remember the differences from regular English. But in reality there are to many differences from English to keep track of. Therefore I tend to write valid English sentences that follow all the restrictions I have memorized, and it still fails. But trying to remember the
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Second person narration as a method of aggravation (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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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 [blogspot.com] at this by authoring [ifarchive.org] a TADS [tads.org] game and entering it in the annual IF competition [ifcomp.org]. 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 no
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That takes me back..... (Score:5, Funny)
Miss Blair was not amused.
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You missed a fun opportunity (Score:2)
Thy Slashdot Dungeonman (Score:3, Funny)
You are also likely to be eaten by a Grue (Score:2, Funny)
Secondary People (Score:2, Funny)
Storytron (Score:2)
The aquator has eaten your armour! (Score:2)
I learned, you learned, he learned? (Score:2)
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For all of our American friends, those are quotes from Yes Minister, a popular British political comedy from the '80s, here's another one:
Oblg. (Score:5, Funny)
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Memes (Score:2)
In Second Person, you are the subject. In Soviet Russia, subject are you!
Surely you can think of more memes?
Old World, New World (Score:2)
Good to know (Score:2)
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....
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Interactive fiction is probably the most common way to see second person (e.g. Choose Your Own Adventure
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But then, Stross got his start writing "color text" for D&D sourcebooks, so maybe he was just confused about his medium.
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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.
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Re:History of Gaming? (Score:4, Funny)
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it is NOT impossible (Score:2)
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 Mc
I heard an old-time radio show a couple times. . . (Score:2)
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Of course, the whole book isn't written that way, and it probably wouldn't be nearly as effective if it were.
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I'm the first person (Score:2)
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.
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Happily our teacher thought it was a good compromise too. But then again he spent all of his college years living in a cave by Arcosanti (an artists commune/
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English used to have distinct 2nd-person pronouns for singular and plural. Plural was "you", and singular was "thee" (as used by Shakespeare, and still used by the Amish). Across just about all human cultures, kings/emperors/tsars are referred to via the plural pronoun (probably because they are identified with their nation/state). Over time, lower members of royalty also start receiving the 2nd-person treatment, then just about everyone with any power over you, and finall
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I don't know if the cycle will begin anew though, since the 2nd person plural pronoun is generally dialectical, and considered gutter speak. When was the last time you heard an educated person (or more importantly someone who represent the popular conception of such) say something like "ya'll"?
The only way I can see it reintroduced into English is probably through a borrow word from Spanish or such.
I do wish it was common, especially since the rhetorical second per