It’s been a long time so I don’t recall all the contents, but we do have an article on our French website on the subject, that goes over the question throughout the history of French IF.
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Woah my French has gotten better than I thought it was. I can actually read this and understand most of it.
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1st person POV is very close to a character’s perspective, but not in it entirely-- like the character themself is telling you, the reader, a story. “Call me Ishmael” (the first sentence of Moby Dick), “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,” (the first line of The Raven), etc. It’s good for many things that involve relating to the character as a “friend”, or maybe a person next to you at a bar. my favorite usage being for quirky, biased, or unreliable narrators, because when they tell lies, they’re telling you, the reader, the lie.
2nd person POV is not the character talking to you about their actions, it’s the story talking to you about your actions (or at least that’s the effect). In static fiction it tends to be way rarer, because a lot of people tend to be confused by being told what they’re doing or feeling while reading a book, and it breaks their immersion, but in games it’s pretty common, because it allows you to be better immersed in the actions the character takes, or you make them take.
3rd person POV is most distanced, like you’re watching someone go about their life and they don’t know you’re watching. The narrator is telling you about someone else’s actions, not the narrator’s own nor your own.
I learned the differences in English class when I was pretty young.
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One of the very first text adventures I played started like this: “I’m Bruce Banner, tied hands and feet to a chair. What now?” So I’m pretty used to both first and second person perspective. This said, the game mostly revolved around pieces like “HULK ANGRY/ HULK SMASH” so I really can’t tell about grammar, here 
On afterthought: while I DO prefer writing in first person, I’m so used to both first and second that I don’t even understand what kind I’m playing until I really stop and think about it. To be clear about this: I played half an hour of The Den before understanding the game was in third person, which is by far the rarest form.
When I make games, I tend to forget what form I am using and wrongly pronoun the PC around until I have to check if I was consistent. And a lot of times I wasn’t.
I don’t know if this is just me (probably) but it tells tons about immersion, at least for me.
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I think the answer can lie in the 1960s/early 70s conversational interfaces (sometime ago I posted the oldest known conversional transcript…) which was inherited from the academic time-sharing milieu where Crowther and woods code Colossal Cave.
perhaps digging into bitsavers (the old mainframe’s equivalent of ifarchive; there’s tens of thousands of .pdf scans from ENIAC to ~1990s) isn’t a bad idea…
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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I was wondering whether this was the case, although I didn’t mention it.
Having German as my first language, I now got curious and had a look at some German games (the original German version of Dust from this year’s IFComp, the German translation of Amanda Walker’s The Spectators, and the commercial game Das Stundenglas from 1990). I made tests with the two words for “eat” (infinitive “essen”, first person “esse”, imperative “iss”) and “read” (infinitive “lesen”, first person “lese”, imperative “lies”).
Interestingly the results were different:
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in Dust / Staub all three grammatical forms were understood
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in The Spectators / Die Zuschauer all forms were understood in the case of “read”, but for “eat” only the first person and imperative were understood, not the infinitive form
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In Das Stundenglas for “eat” only the first person form was understood; on the other hand, for “read” only the imperative form seems to trigger the correct result. The first person form looks like being understood but just triggers a response “You can’t read this” (in German, of course).
So actually this test didn’t really clarify things for me, except that I see that there seems to be no widely adopted and consistent standard, or that my random sample wasn’t well chosen. 
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These conventions aren’t as universal as you might think.
For a while in the 2000s, there was a small spate of readers who complained that first person was confusing because it was telling them what they were feeling. Because it was written in the person of “I”.
This was never a majority of readers, and I think it’s faded away, but I definitely saw people saying that they would not read books written in first person for that reason.
Writers also distinguish between “distant/omniscient third person” and “close third person”. In some ways close-third is more like a variation of first-person.
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I knew imperative meant command, but I only recall that ever being applied to sentences, not verbs way back in 4th grade English, and have only heard infinitives before in the sense of don’t split them, which I understand to be one of those rules invented by prescriptivists with a fetish for Latin that really makes no sense since I understand it’s just not possible to split them in Latin. Still, I feel like I have insufficient nerd levels in linguist for this thread.
I’ve come across quite a bit of static second person fiction, though admittedly, mostly of the reader insert subgenre of erotica.
Second person narration does seem most reasonable for a text-based game, though honestly, I’m not sure I would notice if a game was inconsistant in it’s person/tensing.
Also, not sure if Lost Pig counts as a game written from a third person perspective or if it’s written from a first person perspective and Grunk is just a third person person because of not being well spoken enough to use pronouns.
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le manuel dit « verbes (mots d’action) » – je commence à croire que les anglophones ne sont pas aussi bons en grammaire que les francophones
As an anglophone I’m pretty sure I first learned the words “imperative,” “infinitive,” and “conjugation” in French class.
For what it’s worth, most user interfaces in Esperanto seem to use the infinitive for buttons, links, etc., and so does the one Twine game in Esperanto that I’ve seen, so I would assume the same for parser games in Esperanto if such a thing even exists (although the conjugations are regular so it should in theory be easy to write a parser that accepts all conjugations).
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Point of view can also play into game design, specifically the role of the parser/game text vs whom the player inhabits or represents.
You are standing west of a White House. You see a mailbox.
>OPEN MAILBOX
It's packed full of junk mail. You really ought to empty it out more often so the postal worker doesn't become cross with you.
The IF standard second person is default and likely grew out of D&D and other games with a game-master describing what’s happening to players; usually the parser is the GM telling you what you see and asking you what you want to do in the situation, assuming that you are imagining yourself role-playing the main character which can be AFGNCAAP or a more specific PC either defined by the story (you are you, but as a Belgian Nun with ninja skills) or as a character the game lets you define or roll-up like Choice of Games and RPGs.
A slight variation is parser-as-character. While some parsers might have a bit of a personality and engage in parser-snark [1] the usual role of the parser is narrator/GM. However, some games will personify the parser as an actual character in game or in the player’s head - Violet is probably the best example - and may have its own agency, potentially refusing some commands. This makes sense they are referring to “you” since they are conversing with you and asking what you (and potentially the character played by the parser) should do and not just a disembodied voice in the game.
The less-common tenses can have authorial advantages.
I'm standing west of a White House. There is a mailbox here.
>OPEN MAILBOX
There's a leaflet in the mailbox. It's just junk mail addressed to my Uncle. They must not have submitted a change of address form after he passed away. Typical.
First Person kind of reverses the positions of player and parser in that the PC is doing stuff on the player’s recommendation as if the player is the consciousness or the voice in the character’s head. Again, this is a good fit for a more specifically authored and potentially noncompliant character with their own agency such as in Rameses and part of the gameplay might be convincing the PC to accomplish some tasks. It’s also good if the plot requires the protagonist to potentially engage in behaviors the player might not - such as the protagonist is a hired assassin and the author doesn’t want the player to to feel guilty about plot-required murder. It’s not implied that the events are happening to you and perhaps not choices you would make.
Some first-person games might also just stylistically prefer to use first person because it can also eliminate the detached “voices in your head” duality in the interior monologue, removing the parser voice completely and replacing it with PC internal monologue that might read more naturally than a cricket on your shoulder telling you what you’re feeling.
First-person may also be used diegetically in a conversational IM-style or phone game where there is a protagonist and “you” as separate characters having a literal conversation - Lifeline is a quasi ARG where the protagonist is messaging you (the player as a real person) from a remote location for advice on how to stay alive in a dangerous situation. There was also an IFComp game (sorry I can’t remember the title) where the player is texting or on the phone with a friend who is clearing her stuff out of her ex-boyfriend’s apartment and seeking advice on where to look next and support for how nosy she should be searching through his possessions.
The adventurer stood in front of a mailbox west of a White House.
>OPEN MAILBOX
He decided to check the mail. Nothing but bills and a postcard for his deceased uncle. The adventurer made a mental note to fill out some kind of form at the post office later to remedy this.
Third Person is the standard POV most non-interactive fiction is written in. It allows even more distance from the protagonist(s) and allows a sense of objective authorial removal. The player might control multiple characters but doesn’t necessarily have a physical role in the story, or they might be an omnipresent consciousness in a story which may have simulationist elements.
These are examples and not necessarily “how it has to be done”. Often changing POV and tense can be a tool for the author. In Cannery Vale the story switches from second person (implying the player is an author writing a book) to third-person novel-format when the player-author-PC “writes” the book about a separate fictional protagonist in a separate narrative doing things the player/author likely wouldn’t.
The dry humorous response style that Infocom used a lot, and made it’s way into Inform’s initial default messages “You jump on the spot, fruitlessly” until the default messages in Inform were specifically made more generic since that tone doesn’t apply in every game. ↩︎
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Also, not sure if Lost Pig counts as a game written from a third person perspective or if it’s written from a first person perspective and Grunk is just a third person person because of not being well spoken enough to use pronouns.
Going on the text alone I think you could make an argument for either.
However, I think “first person with bad grammar” is what the game intends. Especially since the author byline says “by Grunk as told to Admiral Jota,” which implies that Grunk is indeed the narrator.
I haven’t looked closely at the text to see if it includes stuff that would be outside Grunk’s POV, though.
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This is why I said “a lot of people” I’ve heard the “1st person is weird” comments from fanfic readers also.
Same here! All the technical stuff about language that stuck, I learned from non-English classes in high school. I did French for six years, Latin for four, and German and Indonesian for a quarter each.
I’d later use these terms when I was in writing class at university (e.g. the pluperfect tense) and then the teacher would say, ‘Oh no, Wade, we don’t call it that in English, we call it the (term that clearly didn’t stick at all.)’
How could any tense be better described than pluperfect? Beyond the perfect tense!
-Wade
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I suggest if you want to learn more about tenses, consult Dr. Dan Streetmentioner.
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nnghrhh
You had stood to the west of a White House for several hours before you realized someone had stolen the leaflet from the mailbox.
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Worth pointing out that the pluperfect tense is supported out of the box in Inform 7 (although it calls it the past perfect tense).
I’d be curious to know if anyone has ever used it.
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Yes, pluperfect is a synonym for “past perfect”. I’m not sure how useful it would be as a default tense for all text in a game since the definition is “something full completed in the past” and make sense in statements like “I had already gone to the store”…maybe it would be used in a situation like my Cragne Manor room where you are interacting as a character in a flashback? I vaguely remember I think I shifted tense temporary to “past” in that situation, but past-perfect would result in the player making decisions but they would be described as having already happened…I guess good for a sense of fatalistic inevitability?
Or possibly for inserting a flashback in a text which is already written in the past tense?
That’s what I was thinking. It’d be weird to have a whole game sit in past-perfect tense, but could be ideal tonally for a flashback.
It might be cool for a a time-travel game where someone is changing things that had already happened pluperfectly. Now that I think about it that was kind of also part of the gimmick in Alice Aforethought but I wasn’t using Inform.
Maybe that’s my problem, I didn’t take French in highschool or at any other time… Had 4 or 5 years of Spanish while languishing in the local public schools before my parents sent me to the school for the blind in4th grade, but that was a guest teacher comes into class one hour a week deal that never really got more advanced than basic vocabulary and how to recite the Spanish alphabet, it took me three years of highschool to barely pass two years of Japanese, and that mostly handled verb conjugation by teaching meanings of verb endings(e.g. -masu is am doing, -masen is am not doing, -tai is want to do, -te is do this, etc.) and even then, I probably remember less than half of the verb endings I was taught… and I bounced off conjugation when I took a semester of German in university)… only tenses I ever learned in English classes were past, present, and future, so while I’ve heard of perfect tense before(though I thought it was strictly a latin thing), I have no idea what it is, and pluperfect is a new one on me.
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