I need some feedback on narrative voices. There are times when the library will talk to the player, not the player-character. For instance, “Your score has just gone up by one point.”. Should I continue to have these messages targeted at “you”, or would it be a good idea to say instead “My score has gone up by one point.” or “George’s score has gone up by one point.” depending on the kind of narrative voice in effect?
I would say keep them as “you”.
I’d say to keep the same narrative voice, as I feel like it’d affect immersion. However, I also feel like it’s highly dependent on the story itself.
By default, I would try to drop the pronoun wherever possible - ‘the score has gone up by one point,’ that kind of thing. If that’s not possible without awkward phrasing, though, I’d default to ‘you’.
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I7 uses “you” in all out-of-world messages. They’re said to the player directly, not to the narrator/protagonist. The protagonist doesn’t know that someone is keeping score of their adventures.
(Also, “Was George sure he wanted to quit?” or “I only understood myself as far as wanting to …” would be just silly.)
How about “You have won” and “You have died”? Should those change according to narrative voice?
I would leave these messags as-is. An author can always change them.
It seems like they should change, but how would you deal with tense (given that these are in a different tense than the rest of the game by default)?
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