Now that i think about it. Where’s the line between the narrator and the PC’s personality in second person? What is the narrator’s voice and what is the PC’s voice? Are they always separate or can they be one and the same?
This is where (among other things) narrative distance comes into play.
Going back to the examples that i posted; here’s the same action with differing responses:
> x watch
It reads 8 o'clock.
Here we have zero insight into the thoughts or feelings of the PC.
> x watch
You are surprised that it already reads 8 o'clock.
Here we are given a glimpse of the expectations and feelings of the PC, but from an outside view.
> x watch
8 o'clock? Surely, that can't be right.
This time we not only know that the PC is surprised, but it’s also written more or less form the PC’s point of view.
Of course you don’t have to decide on one approach, and stick with it for every response or description. Changing the narrative distance is a great way to let the player know what’s really important to the PC, and what’s not, among other things.
This still seems like the narrator’s perspective to me. The narrator is the one surprised and it doesn’t describe the PC’s feelings on the matter, although it does do the job of hinting that the time is not what the player should expect it be. Unless, of course, that’s being told in first person, in which case the narrator and PC are the same person.
To me, this seems like free indirect style, where a non-first person narrator expresses a narrator’s thoughts. A classic example is from Jane Austen’s Emma:
The longer she considered it, the greater was her sense of its expediency. Mr. Elton’s situation was most suitable, quite the gentleman himself, and without low connections; at the same time not of any family that could fairly object to the doubtful birth of Harriet. He had a comfortable home for her, and Emma imagined a very sufficient income; for though the vicarage of Highbury was not large, he was known to have some independent property; and she thought very highly of him as a good-humoured, well-meaning, respectable young man, without any deficiency of useful understanding or knowledge of the world.
“Mr. Elton’s situation was most suitable” expresses Emma’s thoughts rather than the narrator’s. As opposed to this, say:
The real evils indeed of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself; these were the disadvantages which threatened alloy to her many enjoyments. The danger, however, was at present so unperceived, that they did not by any means rank as misfortunes with her.
which is decidedly an opinion expressed by the narrator and not shared by Emma.
There are definitely some second-person IFs with strongly characterized narrators with opinionated voices who aren’t the narrator; Violet is maybe the most obvious one (the narrator is the PC’s absent girlfriend). Whereas in something like Varicella the narrator’s voice seems clearly to express the PC’s emotions, which the player is not expected to share.
For what it’s worth, I used first person narration in my first published interactive fiction work, and according to one reviewer the protagonist apparently lacked emotions. On the other hand, when I later solicited feedback from my wife, who has little experience with interactive fiction apart from my work, she said she found it easy to transfer her feelings to the protagonist.
This is of course a small, non-representative sample, but I have to wonder if IF conventions have shaped our perceptions of how much a protagonist’s emotional state overlaps with our own.