Ooh, good one! I did carefully say "very few" because I knew of one piece of second-person writing (some of the scenes in Iain Banks's Complicity are written that way, presumably to enhance the feeling of complicity on the part of the reader), but that's a much better example.
As are all good computer text adventures. (You do occasionally find ones written for the computer to be the first person "I am in a room. Exits lead north and south." but all the classics are firmly 2nd person.)
Ah, but does that make the game second-person? That's set up, after all, so that the player's input is (usually implicitly) in the first person ("go north" == "I go north"), and one could make a case that that's a more natural definition of "first person" for a game.
Then again, if I can't apply that argument to Choose Your Own Adventure, perhaps I shouldn't be applying it to computerised text adventures either. Hmmm. I think the underlying point here is that for a book to be in the first or third person is a grammatical statement, meaning that the protagonist is referred to respectively as "I" or "he/she/etc", but for a video game to be in the first or third person is a statement about viewpoint, meaning that the player sees respectively what the protagonist sees or what an uninvolved observer near the protagonist would see. So text adventures are second-person in the grammatical sense, but first-person in the viewpoint sense, and hence my confusion.
Perhaps that's why some games put the computer's descriptive text in the first person? It's grammatically consistent, if the character in the situation and the player making the decisions are distinct, that the character should tell the player "I'm in a room etc" and the player should reply to them in the imperative "Then go north".
I think in fact the normal setup is more infinitive than imperative: the computer says "You are in a room etc", and then implicitly (by presenting the prompt) asks "What do you do?". To the question phrased like that, I think, "be cautious" would be more natural than "I am cautious".
I think there's a special "first person imperative" that applies to this sort of avatar situation. I'm now wondering how this is expressed in adventure games in other languages, especially those with a distinct imperative declension:
And, in fact, quite a few into the graphical golden age—one of the differences between Sierra and LucasArts being former keeping the narrator from text adventures ("you stupidly wave your hand through the laser grid and pull back a cauterized stump"), whereas the latter would just have the characters talk to "themselves" ("waving my hand through the laser grid would be immensely stupid").
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Then again, if I can't apply that argument to Choose Your Own Adventure, perhaps I shouldn't be applying it to computerised text adventures either. Hmmm. I think the underlying point here is that for a book to be in the first or third person is a grammatical statement, meaning that the protagonist is referred to respectively as "I" or "he/she/etc", but for a video game to be in the first or third person is a statement about viewpoint, meaning that the player sees respectively what the protagonist sees or what an uninvolved observer near the protagonist would see. So text adventures are second-person in the grammatical sense, but first-person in the viewpoint sense, and hence my confusion.
I assumed it was in the imperative? I can't offhand think of any verb but "be", but I think I'd write "be cautious" not "am cautious" to the prompt.
I think in fact the normal setup is more infinitive than imperative: the computer says "You are in a room etc", and then implicitly (by presenting the prompt) asks "What do you do?". To the question phrased like that, I think, "be cautious" would be more natural than "I am cautious".
> VENE
> VIDE
Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.
> VICE