There’s a book I used to keep on my desk in the office. Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney. Every time someone came to me with a design concept that had a particular problem baked into it, I’d hand them the book, tell them to read the first chapter, and let them figure out what the problem was.
The problem was second person storytelling — and it’s one of the most common traps in game design.
What Is Second Person Perspective, Anyway?
Most people are familiar with the three narrative perspectives from school, but it’s worth laying them out clearly because the differences matter enormously when you’re designing an interactive experience.
First person puts you inside the narrator’s head: I pushed open the door and stepped into the dark room. My heart was pounding.
Third person observes from outside: She pushed open the door and stepped into the dark room. Her heart was pounding.
Second person speaks directly to the reader or player as the subject of the story: You push open the door and step into the dark room. Your heart is pounding.
Bright Lights, Big City is one of the most famous literary experiments in second person — the entire novel is written this way, and it creates a strange, dissociative effect that McInerney used intentionally to reflect the protagonist’s alienated state of mind. It’s an interesting literary device. In games, it’s almost always a disaster.
Why It Feels So Bad
The core issue is simple: second person storytelling tells the audience how they feel, regardless of how they actually feel.
In a novel, you can put the book down and remind yourself it’s fiction. But games — especially first person games where you literally occupy the visual perspective of the character — ask something different of the player. They ask for immersion. They ask you to inhabit the character, to make decisions, to feel the stakes. The entire medium is built around the idea that your presence matters.
So when a game looks you in the eye and says you are devastated or you have no choice but to follow him — and you’re not devastated, or you desperately want a choice — the spell breaks instantly. The game has told you how to feel, and it was wrong, and now you’re aware that you’re just watching someone else’s story unfold with your hands on a controller.
This is especially acute in forced failure scenarios — moments where the game requires you to lose, to be captured, to make the “wrong” choice, to watch something terrible happen that you had no ability to prevent. These moments can work when handled carefully. When they’re not, players don’t feel dramatic tension. They feel cheated.
The Easy Trap
The version I saw most often in pitches wasn’t the dramatic forced failure. It was something more mundane: “The player character has to do X, because otherwise Y won’t happen.”
And that’s completely understandable from a design standpoint. Games need structure. Stories need to move forward. You can’t always let players wander off in seventeen directions and still deliver a coherent narrative. The trap isn’t in needing the player to do something specific — the trap is in how you ask them to do it.
Consider the difference between these two scenarios:
A character looks at you and says: “You will go to the old mill and retrieve the artifact.” Quest added: Retrieve the Artifact. Conversation ended.
Versus: A character looks at you and says: “I need someone to go to the old mill. It has to be you — you’re the only one I trust.” And you have a response option. Maybe it’s “Fine, I’ll do it” or “This feels like a trap” or even just “Why me?” The character answers. You still end up going to the mill. The quest still gets added. Nothing about the outcome has changed.
But everything about how it felt has changed. In the second version, you had a voice. You were a participant in the story, not a subject of it.
(There’s also very much a version of the latter where a non-negotiable “choice” is earned throughout the game so the player has been led to agree with the game’s ‘non-option’ — but that’s a topic for another time.)
You Can’t Always Avoid It — But You Can Be Conscious of It
Some second person moments are unavoidable. Tutorials need to direct you. Critical story beats sometimes need to happen in a specific way. The goal isn’t to eliminate every moment where the player is guided — it’s to be conscious of when you’re doing it, and to ask whether there’s a way to give the player even a small sense of agency within that constraint.
A response option that doesn’t change the outcome. A line of dialogue that acknowledges the player’s situation rather than dictating their emotions. A cutscene that shows the character making a decision rather than the game simply announcing that they did.
Now that you know what second person storytelling looks like, you’ll probably start noticing it everywhere — in games you’ve loved, in games you’ve bounced off of without knowing why, in moments where the immersion cracked and you couldn’t quite put your finger on the reason. That slight friction, that moment of wait, I wouldn’t do that — that’s second person at work.
It’s a small thing. And it makes an enormous difference.