I’ve seen first person view, I’ve seen third person view, but never second person.
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Hi there! English teacher here.
Recipes and instructions are almost always written in 2nd person point of view. 2nd person is YOU, the reader, and the directions are asking you to do them.
Consider this example: “First, [you] mix the flour, sugar, and spices in a bowl. Then, in a separate bowl, [you] stir together the eggs, butter, and brown sugar. [You] combine all the ingredients well. [You] pour into a greased pan and [you] bake for 40 minutes until done.”
The “you” is normally missing from the directions, but it is still there, hidden. We call this “command” form, and the missing subject “you” is called the “understood ‘you.'”
Other works, like the classic “Choose Your Own Adventure” series, are also in 2nd POV. You, the reader, are the protagonist, and you get to make choices about what happens by flipping to different sections of the book. It’s not a super common POV for a narrative, though. (It’s a little gimmicky.)
An English professor once told us about a second person novel:
“You open the door. You go thru the door…”
It doesn’t sound right. You can’t make it sound right.
In school we were often told that recipe or instruction books could be in second person easily.
Ex. First you get the flour, then you need to pour in water
Naratively, it’s where the reader is the main character, but not the narrator.
Easy way to write a 2nd person story:
Step 1: Write a first person story
Step 2: ctrl+F “I”
Step 3: Replace with “You”
Second person written down, is the pronouns ‘you, your, you’re’ and other similar pronouns. Second person from a persons account, imagine a car chase in a game, you are controlling a car, but your POV is from the car chasing you
2nd person doesnt really apply to video games. 1st, second 3rd is more of a literary device, that we partially co-opted for videogames.
I may be wrong here, but as i recall,
– 1st person is hearing inside someones head, – 2nd person is a narrator (or newsreader even) talking to you the reader/viewer, and
– 3rd person is the writer talking about someone else.
This roughly translates to games in the 1st and 3rd person, in terms of where the camera is placed, but theres no real ‘2nd person’ (that i can think of off the top of my head at least) in games
Think of Choose Your Own Adventure, or Zork.
Second person –
You wake up in a forest. There is dappled sunlight coming through the canopy. To your east you can hear a babbling brook. What do you do?
Vs
1st person –
I woke up in a forest. I could see sunlight filtered through the canopy above. To my east I could hear a babbling brook.
Vs
3rd
He woke in a forest. He could see sunlight filtered through the trees. To his east, he heard a babbling brook.
2nd person doesn’t get used a lot in fiction in general, but I remember the short story “Paper Slippers” being pretty effective.
When you’re thinking about story telling, you’re talking about action. How a person interacts with a person or object is the story. So being told by the person acting is first person (“I did this.”) Third person would be when you view or describe an interaction as a third party, from a distance (“He did that.”) In writing, second person would be used only if the story is being told directly to you, meaning the character is addressing the reader as a character. This is mostly seen in non-fiction, when someone is teaching you something. (“You are doing this.”)
In video games or movies (though rarely movies) the interaction is first person when the action is being done from your perspective, and second when you’re on the receiving end of the interaction. A conversation would flip back and forth between the two perspectives.
>I’ve seen first person view, I’ve seen third person view, but never second person.
Look into a mirror.
Second person is like one of those “choose your own adventure” books. The Goosebumps Choose-your-own-scare series were really popular in the 90’s. I used to cheat and read through all the endings sequentially. A modern implementation is the Black Mirror Bandersnatch episode.
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