It Has to be "You"

For at least the last two decades, young readers have enjoyed a series of participatory, multi-threaded books that are published under various banners like Give yourself Goosebumps or Choose your own Adventure. The instant a reader begins one of these books, they meet something unique – the second person voice, the voice writing teachers traditionally discourage students from using in tradition and formal essays.

As soon as students begin to try writing in the second person intentionally, most quickly come to an understanding of why some teacher in the past discouraged them from using that voice -- yes, the "you" voice does create intimacy, but the question when you are creating Interactive texts is this: Who is it, exactly, you are getting intimate with?

In their book Writing for New Media, Andrew Bonime and Ken Pohlmann point out some of the difficulties that writing in this voice brings. The crux of the challenge is this: imagine you are writing a story and you don’t know any of the following about one of your main protagonists – his or her gender, exact age, intellect, values, culture, or motivations. This means that you can’t, for example, write a participatory love story because romance is highly personalized and subjective. 

Of the twenty literary “master plots” or archetypes that Ronald Tobias lists in his handbook, only a few are truly appropriate for a text with an undefined main character. These include the quest, adventure, pursuit, rescue and mystery, plots that make up most computer games. 

Even here, however, Bonime and Pohlmann warn of the limitations. A mystery in the style of Agatha Christie – with an outsider detective working through observation – will usually work; however, a psychological thriller will be harder to sustain. While a film can create suspense by establishing a main character who fears heights and then place that individual in a position where fear must be confronted, the writers of a hypertext has no way of knowing what will be frightening or compelling to any individual who might engage with their product.