Inform 7 Home Page / Documentation
§14.4. Adapting text about the player
In second-person-singular IF, the player is always "you". Many messages look like so:
where the subject, or the object, of the sentence is "you". But what if we want to have this text adapt itself to different narrative viewpoints?
The solution is to use the following:
"[We]" or "[we]"
"[Us]" or "[us]"
"[Our]" or "[our]"
"[Ours]" or "[ours]"
"[Ourselves]" or "[ourselves]"
The capitalised and uncapitalised versions are identical except, of course, that the initial letter of the resulting text is upper case in one but not the other. As examples of these:
"[We] [carry] the Queen's warrant."
"The birds drop pebbles on [us]. Right on [our] heads!"
"[Ours] are the burdens of office, which [we] take on [ourselves]."
Notice that all five of these forms are differently worded, in English. That's the reason why we use the plural to write them - the traditional second person plural forms would be "you", "you", "your", "yours" and "yourself", so we wouldn't know if "[you]" was supposed to be the subject or the object of the verb. So the convention with all of these adaptive forms is that we use "we" and its variations. (That's also why the verbs are written in the plural - "[carry]", not "[carries]".)
