Passive voice, first person, and journalists as "characters" in their own pieces

[zerosuited]

I tweeted a bit today about writing in the passive voice. I want to stress that I see this a lot, but this time around, I wanted to reach for my metaphorical red pen because of Jenna pitcher's preview piece about Bioshock Infinite:
http://www.polygon.com/2013/2/21/3994560/more-than-just-a-pretty-face

Relevant excerpt:
"As soon as Booker gets himself free from the rocket chair, he is tasked with getting to an immense floating statue where Elizabeth is locked. You are aware of her in-game presence long before you see Elizabeth in person. The propaganda of her is saturated throughout stunning Columbia — dolls, statues, posters — it seems that she is the city's revered golden child."

And, also:
"Quite a few battles were encountered along the way to Elizabeth's tower, each with increasing difficulty and each time with increasing options to use in combat."

Perhaps Polygon prefers using this distant, passive voice? I can't tell if the editorial staff encourages this, or not. If other people see a pattern here or elsewhere, they can comment. I want to stress here, also, that I am NOT saying Pitcher's writing is "bad" here -- it's a specific tone that some people prefer. It doesn't happen to be my preference, but that's just opinion. Also, Pitcher probably had to put this piece through multiple editorial rounds; more than one person made the decision to keep this phrasing and structure throughout the piece. The decision to use this voice and style rests on Polygon, not Pitcher per se.

To provide a contrast, here are two recent pieces that also describe the experience of a writer at a preview/press event. The first: Cara Ellison's Crysis 3 preview piece.
 http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/02/14/cara-vs-crysis-3-was-never-a-fair-fight/
(Related and also a joy to read: her follow up on press previews in general http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/02/20/theyre-all-like-this-the-weird-land-of-preview-events/)

And, also, Kirk Hamilton's play-by-play of the press event for the new Sim City game:
http://kotaku.com/5978882/my-day-with-the-new-simcity

I love these pieces because the writer makes themselves a character in a story, which provides a sense of immediacy and action, and which helps me better understand the experience of playing the game with them. I think some writers hate this and "just want to talk about the game" -- which, I mean, fair enough. I want to hear about the game. But I also want to hear what that writer thinks about the game -- not what a presumed "anyone" would think. Some people may well prefer that a journalist be "distant", but I'm not sure I think that's possible, or effective.

Let's say that a writer does want to go with the "distance"/"professional"/"businesslike" method of writing. I still don't know if I agree that using the passive voice works to the writer's advantage. What do you all think about this?

More issues that I didn't address here -->
Gender: women writers get more scrutiny than men, and so might want to further distance themselves from their work and/or be afraid to position themselves as an authority. I dealt with this insecurity in my early work, and I still deal with it now.
Experience: writers like Kirk Hamilton can "afford" to take a risk because they have proven themselves to be an authority already.

But why is writing from the first person still considered a risk? Why is including oneself in a story still considered a risk? Why is that considered unprofessional? Isn't it a bit old school for us to still be following the rules of high school essay writing (no first person)? And if we ARE following high school rules, then why the crap are we using passive voice?

[Chris Leggett]

I'm glad you brought this up on Twitter, because it's something I've noticed a lot too.

I occasionally write for a site that insists on keeping first-person out of copy. But I still write for them in active voice; it's quite possible, and often the pieces are better for it.

Another pet peeve is that I see a lot of stuff like, "Kotaku is reporting" instead of, simply, "Kotaku reports." The former reads really sloppily imo, but it seems to be super common.

[zerosuited]

!!Unrelated!! I wonder if there is a way to set replies such that the entire previous message is not automatically contained within them. Otherwise, this will get LONG...

[Bryant Francis]

It all kind of comes back for intended effect versus actual effect to me. I like active voice for all the reasons described, but at the same time passive voice can have a specified use for a reasonable effect. I think in games, when we're writing about an immersive environment, active voice helps transfer the reader into the mode we're in while playing the game. But passive voice might have a use when talking about designers or industry events, to make us seem more like separated commentators than involved stakeholders. Different tools for different jobs

Also, to go big picture, a very academic friend of mine recently pointed out that our fixation on "grammar" isn't as healthy or productive as our English teachers were quite on about. Don't get me wrong, we need to be able to communicate clearly and effectively, but trying to tie our communication to a locked, perfect standard is dangerous, as it doesn't allow room for growth or expiramenting---the latter of which being very important in our young genre.

[Greg Brown]

Here's one possible theory: writers (and editors/publications) will sometimes confuse "authoritative" with "objective", and aim for the latter as a means of reaching the former. But of course, it's a false objectivity—predicated on the working assumptions that drive the industry. So to critique those assumptions, there's a strong pull towards openly subjective writing. It also serves to couch those observations in a personal context, which both insulates and invites criticism by others from different backgrounds.

For me, I personally tend towards more removed criticism like analyzing how the game functions, and doing my best to minimize and declare my assumptions and the frameworks I'm operating in. I'm still grappling with the role of openly-subjective storytelling married with wider-ranging criticisms, largely because I'm personally not as comfortable writing in that mode. I expect that to abate with time, but I do think their use has specific rhetorical tradeoffs that may mean they're not helpful in some cases.

[zerosuited]

I think some of my thinking stems from having read Stephen King's On Writing during my formative years, as well as several other writing books that warn against using passive voice. King in particular stresses that writers should avoid using "to be" verbs across the board, as best they can. "Learn the rules so that you know when to break them," or so I tell myself.

"Kotaku reports," for example, sounds better to me than "Kotaku is reporting" -- not because of the passive voice, but because of the unnecessary presence of a to-be verb jumbling up the works.

Many other people on Twitter told me they like the sound of the passive voice, though. I think it makes sentences sound weaker. I realize not everyone thinks this, however, or even necessarily notices it when they read or correct a piece.

Like I said, I think some of the use of passive voice stems from a fear of appearing too personal. I think it's possible to include first person in an article without seeming, god forbid, too personal. I also don't dislike personal pieces, though, so that biases me.

I wrote on Twitter earlier about other options to use instead of either passive voice or first person: "the player will encouter xyz," "players discover gems," "audiences will find such and such" etc instead of "battles were encountered" or "gems were found". Basically, find a subject that doesn't bug you (either first person, or the name of the character in the game, or "the player") and use that instead of "battles were encountered". However, no everyone even agrees with me on that point. And that's fine! Opinions! Have them. :)

[Greg Brown]

Postbox will automatically chain mailing-lists like this into conversations and collapse the quoted text, as in the groups.google.com web-view. I think there are a few other clients that will do the same, and it may be necessary here just because Google Groups is built on mailing-list assumptions at the lowest level. Not sure though!

[zerosuited]

Related: what do folks think about using the first person even when writing a specialized, technical piece about the experience of playing a game? Not necessarily constructing oneself as a 'character' per se, and not shoehorning in excuses to talk about oneself, just ... happening to use the first person because you're the one playing the game. And still focusing on the game and the content within the experience.

I like that style. Not saying it has to be the be-all-end-all. Just saying I like it.

[Denis]

I prefer such, actually.

Games are an interactive experience and trying to excise that interactive portion rings hollow to me. For better or worse, my ways of interacting, my ways of interpreting how my actions are having an effect, and all those little things seem fairly relevant to me.

[zerosuited]

Also, since I was brave and gave examples, can anyone step up and provide with examples of a personal piece that they think "shoehorns in" a personal element? I hear that critique of personal games writing a LOT -- that the author's personal experience does not help the piece, is irrelevant, etc. Would love to see examples of this (and I have a bad feeling that the examples will end up being pieces that I loved, haha).

[Kaitlin Tremblay]

I like using the first-person, also. I feel that when writing a review your subjectivity and personal viewpoint matters, even with objective pieces. For me it makes sense to include myself to give what I'm writing my own voice and attitude. I know others disagree (for example, my editor at NerdSpan cautions us to avoid first-person), but I feel like if youre forbidden from using it you're limitng yourself in away. And besides, when it comes to  writing on artistic mediums, you can't ignore yourself as a subject interacting with the piece on some level.

[Ryan Thompson]

On the experience of playing game re: first person...

Including first person allows for more individual identity of authorship than third-person does.  For instance, am I reading Ryan's (or Maddy's, or whoever's) impression of a game, or am I reading Polygon.com's (or XBLAFans.com's, or any group that removes first-person voice) impression of a game?  This is a semantic difference, but IMO an important one.

The future changes as we stand here, else we are the game pieces of the gods, not their heirs, as we have been promised.
       -Raistlin Majere
-----------------------------------------------------                             

...until the day comes when God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these words:  Wait and hope!
       -Edmond Dantès, The Count of Monte Cristo

[Cameron Kunzelman]

I think that totally extraneous personal experience has gone out of fashion over the past couple months, so much that I can't think of a recent essay dependent on personal experience that I just went "UGHHHH" over. 

[Javy]

I generally like pieces that use "I" more than those that don't but I'm not a fan of  the "professional" notion that a writer should be distant and maintain a facade of objectivity in the first place. There seems to be an underlying assumption there concerning a reader's inability to discern  facts from emotions and opinions, and know when what they're reading is malarkey.

[Bryant Francis]

Ooof. I have to go into some older (re: not as great) writing to find some stuff like that. (That's not because it's the 1st person stuff...just because of my own writing style). But, if you're calling on us to be brave, I'll try this...

http://www.jacehallshow.com/blog/20110725/thoughtsongaming-what-if-were-wrong-about-video-games/

That's an old article from my first stint writing for my current website---I was trying to search through a proper response to the Norway tragedy, which directly invoked video games. I'm really interested in using 1st person to describe the experience of playing games a little more, but I think this is the best example I've got for 1st person articles

[Sparky]

Last century, when I was learning how to write science for publication in the field of chemistry, all my advisors told me that I should write in the passive voice. This was seen as a more "objective" way to describe an experiment, and in classes, I was docked points on assignments if I ever deviated from this orthodoxy. Many people still use this construction all or most of the time in their papers, but the style has been declining, for two reasons. The first is that scientific papers written in this passive style are just excruciating to read. The second (related) reason is that writing in the passive voice uses many more words for equivalent information payload. Many journals now emphasize brevity, despite often requiring much more (and more diverse) experimental work for publication. As a result, active voice that recognizes the existence of the experimenter has become more common in scientific communications. However, how we feel about things is still limited to snippy exchanges in the letters section and sarcastic asides in review articles. That is "objective" writing that skips passive voice can be a huge improvement over the alternative. "When the protein was diluted by a factor of two, R2 values were reduced," doesn't read or communicate any better than, "Diluting the protein by a factor of two caused a decline in R2 values."

Stylistically, passive voice might be the right decision in some cases. For instance, "Booker is tasked" sounds right to me; the passive voice captures something essential (if obvious) about the nature of objectives in games like this. I'm not as happy with "battles were encountered". It's imprecise, particularly in the context of BioShock's tradition of enemy ecosystems - does it mean that Booker got in some battles, or that he got caught up in some battles already in progress? Also, the voice is inappropriate for the player's active role in how battles play out. Even for writing from an objective standpoint, passive voice is a tool to be used if it makes your communication clearer, not as a matter of course.

For me, the larger problem with Pitcher's piece is a failure to commit. In some places the viewpoint is within the world, in some places it's in Pitcher as "the player" (or "you", which I specially do not like), and at some points it's removed further to the level of the reporter standing behind the player, chatting with the developer. The perspective seems to be all over the place, whereas one of the strengths of Ellison's piece is that it's always with her as someone reacting to the experience of being in the room and playing the game.

[Cameron Kunzelman]

So to address your call for examples Maddy: this.

I think it is kind of Writing 101 to ask "does this angle add anything to the work," but I think it becomes hard to answer that question when the personal is so caught up in the work itself. So in that article, he is making the claim that playing music and playing games are similar processes. I'm totally on board with that, but at the same time I think that he, as a character, makes that piece of writing significantly weaker. It allows him to add personal anecdotes and short asides in place of, you know, just telling me how those things are similar.

So maybe an issue with the style is that, if done poorly, the piece comes off as more puff than anything. It is like someone telling me a story that has a point but they keep getting sidetracked with telling me about various things unrelated to the story and eventually I am fiddling with my straw waiting for the drone to end.

[John Brindle]

Passive voice is a formal device which, like any other, has its uses and its weaknesses...

But - and I realise this is sidestepping a lot of the concerns you were mainly interested in, Maddy, which are worth exploring - I think this seemingly stylistic question might actually mask a big theoretical problem.

Because we've all been there, trying to work out what we should write to indicate things that happen in game - "the player"? What is a player? It opens up a theoretical can of worms, because what is this creature, 'the player', and what kind of assumptions are we constructing about how games are or 'should be' played? Who is this mythical player who happens to share all the responses that we would like to attribute to the game? We could write 'you', which has the advantage of replicating the second-person immediacy for which games are famous, and sounding a bit like a text adveneture, but it's a bit presumptuous. The reader may well say "do I? Am I? That's not me; I'm not like that."

I mean, we have four options, as far as I can see:

• Posit a general 'player' - with general preferences that cut across all identities. This helps us talk about the features games share, the supposed universals, but it risks universalising our assumptions about what 'players' want or how they act, portraying a small section as 'what everyone does'. It may be theoretically unsustainable given how much academics tend to (justly) frown on such acts of synecdoche ("you, the reader, will love all these options or weapon customization, and care intensely about them!")
• Posit an 'implied player'. What kind of player is the game tailored for and what kinds of play, as an object, does it afford? Who would bother to play it in the first place? On the other hand there is again the risk of generalising assumptions and moreover what assumptions we do make is likely to be infected with marketing spiel. i.e. this David Cage game is a smart emotional game for smart emotional players.
• Taxonomy of player types. Several of these have been proposed before, with different kinds of players who seek different goals. Players may often embody more than one of these at once, or rapidly switch, and the taxonomy will take shape according to the questions we remember to ask. Plus, how this would actually work in the context of reviewing or games crit is another question.
• First-person writing. Stop talking about 'the player' and just talk about ourselves, as OP suggests. We can only speak about what we experienced, and if it chimes with others then they are free to generalise. My fear with this is we lose the capacity to explore generalities, to drill down on what the game does which is extra-personal, ie which works for everyone, and to focus on the games as objects independent of players.

I can absolutely see why someone would decide it safest to opt for the latter. But my big problem with this being generalised to the default approach is twofold. First, games are clearly made with a player in mind. Their construction assumes, on our part, a lot of familiarity with gaming tropes and expectations based on previous experience. One only has to look at Valve's playtesting-heavy approach to see that it's possible for a game to be designed against the expected responses of the player (and indeed for those responses to be accurately predicted - or, more interestingly, constructed?). Second, I want to be able to speak about games as separate from ourselves, games as objects with their own independent life, so to speak, and in particular about the way games construct us. Because I don't think we make games 'about us' when we play them so much as games make us about them. They provide a shape for our subjectivity, and temporarily channel it, make us into different kind of subjects, and that effect, which is outside any one person and changes the person who plays, should be examined.

Given all this, thinking in terms of an implied player seems safest, but it remains riddled with theoretical problems and questions begged by the concept itself.

[Zoya]

I was thinking something similar to what John has said. While there is a stylistic argument here, to me I can't consider it without thinking about the theoretical argument that it raises. This is perhaps a symptom of anxiety.

I kind of have this idealised goal of being transparent about agencies. The passive voice hides the agency, which isn't very helpful; surely the point of journalism, history and many other kinds of writing is to reveal the agencies at work?

However, this doesn't mean that "I" is always appropriate either. "Booker is tasked" might be more accurate, if I didn't actually have a choice about the matter. I might write "I make Mario run to the right". And yes, I'm pressing the button and without my interaction it wouldn't happen. But my choice was run to the right or not go anywhere, in which case nothing happens, and I don't actually play the game. So do I really have the agency?

I'm being pedantic I suppose, but this does come up quite often in many different ways for me. Yes, I want to be transparent about agencies rather than occlude them with the passive voice. But some agencies are complicated. I don't always have the space to unpack them. Others are hidden by social factors; we don't really know who makes AAA games.

In reality, there are more than two characters in this story. It's not just me and the game, but it's me, my friend, other players who reviewed the game online, the developer as a monolithic corporate entity, the developer as the director or producer, the developer as some overworked coder whose name I never learned, and then there's the fictional character on screen, other fictional characters whose actions have affected the possibilities that play out in the storyline, and there's the software itself, and my hardware... and where possible, I always want to attribute agency in a way that is illuminating. But I also worry how many characters the reader can handle. And if I introduce a character and fail to establish a strong image of who they are and what they're about, it all starts to get flaky.

So sometimes it's easier to just use the passive voice.

[John Brindle]

As an aside (and a point others made earlier), the passive voice might be the best possible description of how many 'tasks' appear to the player in games...

*OBJECTIVE APPEARS ON SCREEN, FROM NOWHERE*

Corvo has been objective'd!

[Maddy Myers]

I don't think "Booker is tasked" should be replaced by the first person. But who is tasking Booker? Does an objective appear on screen? Does he find a piece of paper on the ground that tells him what to do? Is there another character who assigns him objectives? How do objectives work in this game? How should the player expect to be "tasked"?

I don't like "propaganda of her is saturated throughout" either, for similar reasons. "Propaganda of Elizabeth saturates Columbia" reads better to me and makes me feel like I'm present in the immediate moment.

Someone on twitter told me they prefer the phrase "battles were fought" to "we/I fought battles" -- I don't know if I agree or not. I think I might. But "battles were fought" sounds better to me than "battles were encountered," for sure.

I definitely agree that in some contexts, passive voice makes sense. I'm just not sure it works very well in game reviews. I prefer to feel "present" in the experience of the game along with the author, whether the author chooses to use first person or not.

I think passive voice works if you're trying to create a mood of distance or uncertainty, which could work well with a ghost story .... or a story about a mysterious video game. I'm not sure if that's what Pitcher intended for this story or not. I have to assume she intended it.

I think I need to find some other pieces that use passive voice. If I come across another I'll put it in here. (Mostly this is because I'm sick of dissecting Pitcher's piece -- it's really not a bad piece, and I don't want to pile up on her.)

[Ethan Gach]

This article from the Globe offers an interesting but brief history of passive voice in American writing and usage,

"Of course, this wouldn't be happening if we hadn't started dumping on the passive voice. And I do mean "we"; this is not an ancient prescriptive tradition, but a recent US fetish. Linguist Arnold Zwicky found the passive first described as a weakness in US writing handbooks of the 1930s and '40s, in discussion freighted "with images of strength, muscularity, and action (that is, symbolic masculinity)."

And an example of double-standards from Orwell,

"All good writers use the passive voice. Orwell actually uses it while criticizing it: In bad prose, "the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active," he writes. He could have recast that sentence, but his focus was on the (alleged) stylistic sin; that was the logical subject, even if that required a passive verb."

When it comes to taking the point of view of an avatar or not, I find it depends, for me at least, on how much they actually participate in what's going on, and how much control I have over what they do.

 

Writing about playing a Mario game, I would say Mario does such and such. Writing about Dishonored, I would write in first person becasue Corvo is completely dependent on me to inform his character and actions.

[Brendan Keogh]

I am always fascinated by how often we deploy the second person address when we talk/write about videogames, and how comfortable it feels. "In Super Mario you have to rescue the princess. In Gears of War you hide behind cover and stomp on faces." Actually, i kinda wrote about this last year. 

So when I write, my first drafts normally end up mostly in second person, with a bit of first- and third-person ("the player) thrown in here and there. The vast majority of the time, when I do my second edit, I change the entire thing to first-person, and (importantly) to present tense. It's case by case, obviously (when I write previews it is usually 'the player', and same with Edge where I don't have a byline and thus blocked off from first-person). I think, especially in criticism, it is important to embrace the partiality of your own perspective. You can't see a thing from 'nowhere'; you only understand a thing from seeing it from as many subjective perspectives as possible (this is riffing off Haraway's "Situated Knowledges" which I'm kind of in love with at the moment. Hey. Why don't I attach it? Sorry for all the markups). So i think the partiality inherent in the first-person is important and, essentially, makes your work more, well, honest. 

(All this said, I have plenty of pieces out there written in 2nd person, usually pieces written at the eleventh hour). 

[Brendan Keogh]

[Cameron Kunzelman]

This might be off-base, but based on conversations with a number of people, I think that the act of self-editing and actually writing multiple drafts is a thing that isn't done in a lot of games writing.

And that is horrifying to me.

[Maddy Myers]

... Who are the people not doing this? How do we find them and shame them???

[Nate Andrews]

But it's, like, half the fun!

[Johannes Köller]

You mean to tell me there's a way to write things without throwing everything away and starting from scratch halfway through the first draft?

More to the point, I find that every method has its place and I don't really prefer one over the other. First or third person can feel too personal or impersonal respectively, and liberal use of second person sometimes strikes me as rather assuming, which is to say that while I don't mind things like "You are tasked with X", sentences like "X is something you will come to loath before the end of the game" sometimes rub me the wrong way. Don't tell me what to feel, text!

[Tommy Rousse]

Ethan: thanks for the Globe article.  Interesting link.

As a classicist thoroughly indoctrinated by the passive-loving Cicero, reactionary active voice purist editors fill me with a murderous thirst that can only be slaked by bludgeoning them to death with a copy of the Catiline.  That being said, I try very hard to only use passive voice intentionally, because I was also indoctrinated with Strunk & White's masculinist fantasies about vigor and vitality in language.

This ancillary discussion of first-person and the relationship between the review/player and the character really rocks my hobby horse.  I don't think games will be able to advance as a narrative form unless they teach players how to "act" (2) rather than relying on them to proceed via affordance-based play (i.e. press the buttons until you figure out what works).  I wrote this review about Dear Esther (1) that has more to do with the tension between narrative and affordance than the actual game, and I tried to convey that stylistically by alternating between present-tense first-person "in-the-moment" reports of what I was thinking/feeling and paragraphs that reflected on the game as a whole.  I brought this up in particular in Dear Esther because the first-person narrator spends a lot of time telling the player what they're supposed to be feeling/thinking while leaving a massive lacuna of motivation that doesn't make any diegetic sense whatsoever.

I read a lot of reviews that conflate the player and the character, but the issues that interest me most in narrative-based titles are precisely the relationship between the two and how well the developer treads that line.

Given that the pay for online writing generally sucks, editorial feedback is one of the ways I like to have my wages supplemented, so to speak.  I've found the "editorial" services of lots of sites pretty weak, and I think that helps a lot of writers get away with doing scarcely-edited pieces— doing multiple drafts at $20/piece isn't very cost effective, clearly. It also really pisses me off when I can't edit an already-published piece, as I almost always find post-publication errors in my own writing despite extensively wringing it through the drafting process. Don't even get me started on not being able to edit out errors added by the editors.

I love editing stuff, though, and if anyone has something they want ruthlessly critiqued, I'm usually happy to do a draft-trade. Get at me.

(1) http://www.ludist.com/?p=388

(2) Act as in theater— role-playing games and narrative could learn a bunch from Method acting and improv pedagogy.  I was an acting conservatory student in high school and it still baffles me how the parallels between the role of the actor and the role of the player have yet to be internalized by narrative game design.

[Nick Capozzoli]

As I think about it, it occurs to me that a lot of my usage of 2nd person comes when I'm giving some sort of "warning" to the audience.

 

"When you try to do this in the game, you're going to have this problem."

 

I suppose I'm using it as some sort of appeal. Like "Don't buy this game.....or it could happen to YOU."  :P

[Cara Ellison]

Thank you for mentioning my stuff, that is very kind of you.

I think with regard to 'risk' it is a real thing for me - at least in the way that I feel I am making myself very vulnerable whenever I write honestly and openly about myself and how I relate to games (like in my Simcity preview http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/02/07/hands-on-simcity/ for example, where I make myself very visible as both a woman and as a journalist - deliberately - honestly, fuck people who want to take issue with my being a woman - I want to be as visible as possible without taking selfies and plastering them across my work). However, I feel I am at least shielded in a small way by the legacy of the site I work for - RPS is famed for its (admittedly grumpy white male) writers wanting to write earnestly, passionately and personally about the games they like, and I guess Kieron Gillen's influence particular made it a place that I feel less scared to write in a voice that is direct and personal. Gillen wrote about his sexuality a lot and it has made me less scared to do so. However, there is still a huge resistance in the comments to my making juvenile penis jokes (though the male writers do it all the time) and I feel like it is my duty to smash all those conventions up since I hate the bro mentality most of all.

Incidentally, the style sheet at RPS is a joke: it pretty much says "Write what you like, as long as it is good". That is honestly the main gist of it.

Re: Polygon - you guys do know that Polygon's feature ed is very critical of the first person voice and rarely commissions anything written in it? Most things in that voice don't get commissioned - no gonzo journalism of mine would get on there without a fight - and Leigh's wandering letter series is not the best example of that voice that could be on there, though her name alone probably commissioned it. This makes me slightly annoyed, since good journalism isn't written in one uniform voice, and style doesn't indicate substance - you need both together. Editorial control can be a bit blinkered sometimes - which is perhaps a thing that RPS has spoiled in me as they rarely edit anything i do.

Do I sound fighty? I don't actually mean to, but investigative journalism can only reach its intended audience if the audience is engaged by the writer's voice. And it isn't the only worthwhile thing going on in games writing.

[Cara Ellison]

I guess what I wanted to say is: as long as you are making a compelling, powerful argument that has a clear through-line, you should be able to write in whatever voice you like!

Does that make any sense am I just going nuts

[psepho]

Makes sense to me. As a daily RPS reader I really value the distinctive personal slants that all parts of the hivemind bring to bear.

I was thinking about this just last week. I wrote a really rambling blogpost about the inherently personal and perspectival nature of engaging with a game and how there is room enough for everyone's approach in games writing. But even making that argument for openness (such as it was) felt overly prescriptive and presumptuous and it really made think about how easy it is to slip into a directive mindset. I ended up taking it down a few days later. For me personally I think it is better to shut up and listen instead.

[Tony Perriello]

I've been lurking, but I just want to say this discussion has been fascinating. For my entire life, teachers and professors constantly hammered away at the notion of "no passive ever ever EVERRRR", and its refreshing to see a discussion about passive voice that doesn't solely consist of that.

[Maddy Myers]

I had a tweet-back-and-forth with Philip Kollar about Polygon's editorial voice shortly after this thread began, because he saw the thread and responded to what I'd said in it. Woo, linking to Tweets even though I just mocked people for doing that on the other thread ... Forgive me, these are tweets and thus should not be taken too seriously. https://twitter.com/samusclone/status/304660944850673665

Anyway, I told Philip to join the group and write in here, but I don't think he did (if he did join, he's been very quiet). I'd be interested to hear a Polygon person talk about their editorial voice in a capacity more official than Twitter and/or hearsay.

I should probably create a separate topic thread for just first person and/or "confessional" writing.  Or, maybe this thread can do double-duty for a bit longer? We'll see where it goes.

I wouldn't say I prefer "confessional" writing over "technical" writing, per se. I prefer writing that is good, and sometimes, I do think it's necessary to write in first person to make a piece stronger. I also just ... don't get uncomfortable about reading a piece in which the author has made themselves a character, or has shared personal details about themselves. Some people do become uncomfortable reading pieces like this (reference: http://www.electrondance.com/the-ethics-of-selling-children/). This baffles me.

[Daniel Nye Griffiths]

Another interesting thing about the passive voice, in ludonarrative (guh) terms, is that often it's absolutely accurated. A player character is tasked with something, when an objective pops up in their HUD - and, actually, there is often a difference between what the narrative says and what the game system tells you to do. Your questgiver can say "Now we just need to finish the job", as long as the game system is then able to pop a notifier with three checkboxes telling you, the player, what needs to be done (passive voice intentional) for the questgiver's goal to be achieved, and stick a glowing diamond on your map for each one. The questgiver is telling the character to "finish the job", but I, the player, am being tasked with a set of specific objectives.

One could say the game system tasks me with it, but it's a pretty nice distinction. 

Whereas in the case of BioShock Infinite, someone within the world has clearly set Booker a task, and the action of the player, at least until the second-act twist, is to fulfil that task, by completing a number of subsidiary tasks. This is communicated in the game by intra-diegetic instructions - you find pieces of paper about your person or attached to corpses in the opening minutes of the game. Of course, extradiegetically you, the player, know what your mission is because you have read the back of the box, or seen any one of a huge number of previews. And, within the game world but outside the shared experience of the character (flashbacks notwithstanding), Booker already knows what he has to do, and for him these instructions are simply reminders of a set of instructions he already has, although how detailed those instructions are is unclear. So, the task in play is understood differently.

I wrote up a preview of the first hour or so of BioShock Infinite a while back, and one of the interesting things about it for me was the difference between me, the player, and Booker. There's a moment fairly early on where one has to ring a series of bells (I don't think I'm spoiling anyone's experience, here). Shortly beforehand, the player had seen a piece of paper, which provided the correct sequence of rings. It was interesting to me that Booker, without my intervention, remembered that piece of paper and held it up in my (the player's) field of vision. So, the task of remembering the sequence and recording the sequence had been automated. Which, I guess, raises the question of why the automation stopped at actually ringing the bells, which required button presses. I am ringing those bells, in the sense that I am pressing the buttons, but the game system has done everything for me except actually press the buttons. My only freedom is to get it deliberately wrong, and fail to proceed in the game. So far so BioShock, and indeed so video games.

Agency and how it is experienced is tricky - I think possibly tricky beyond the possibility of limiting the passive voice, or indeed the first person. It's impossible to play a video game wholly objectively, and trying to obscure that fact seems to provide a hostage to narrative fortune...

(Also, hello! I'm a scribbler.)

[Cameron Kunzelman]

Maddy: I think maybe a split off thread on "confessional" writing would be a good idea (and maybe we can try to break "confessional" as a term.)

[Cara Ellison]

I absolutely abhor the attempt to be 'objective' in games writing via voice and particularly the commenters who pop up to say someone is 'biased'. Er, yeah. Sorry, opinions are biased. That's why we all like different things. The only thing we can do is try to explain why.

[TheGameCritique]

Yo.

[Amanda Lange]

Maddy - I thought this thread might be in part about that piece. I think you may be somewhat misinterpreting Joel. He never said that everything should be in passive voice or no one should write with themselves as a character. I doubt he would have a problem with the entertaining previews you linked. "The Ethics of Selling Children" is about the admittedly-fuzzy line between writers discussing their lives versus "exploiting" their lives and those of their families.

[Todd Harper]

Yes to breaking ourselves of the "confessional writing" term. As much as I love milkshakes. </inside joke>

[Maddy Myers]

Ah, see, this is why I should have made a separate thread. Sorry, Amanda, you're right that the piece I linked doesn't actually have much to do with my original post here (nor did I secretly intend it to, even). I originally just wanted to talk about passive voice vis-a-vis the original post I linked about Bioshock. I should have found a more pertinent piece to link, maybe one about being "objective" and not using the first person. That piece isn't about that, it's actually about some other more complicated things ... and I don't think the writer would have any issue with first person so it's unfair for me to put it here. Sorry, everybody.

[Sylvain L.]

I think the choice between the first or third person is mainly a matter of emphasis: does the writer want to insist on the player's agency or on the designer's intentions? I prefer the third person and a passive voice, because for the most part what I choose to do as a player matters less than what kind of choice the game offers me. I'm currently writing a post about this: in Bioshock for example, the game presents the choice of harvesting or rescuing the little sisters. What each player actually chooses doesn't really matter; but what does the game try to say by forcing this choice on the player? In that context, the first person is hard to use: it's always possible to write "when I met my first little sister, I thought such and such" but it puts an emphasis on the player while really these thoughts come from the game.

I don't know, it may be because I come from film criticism, but I tend to downplay the player's role when I'm writing: after all, the player is only as "free" as what the game allows. How the game frames this freedom is the interesting question for me, so in this context the third person and the passive voice seem more appropriate.

(And then, like John said, there's the matter of defining the player's relation to his avatar: who is this avatar: me, a character, a combination of both, or something more complex?)