The Big Question: First or Third

[Jonathan Meer]

The people above have made fair points about either writing mode, but a weakness I find fairly irritating about first person is that it limits your use of language. You have to constantly speak using words, mannerisms, and emotions that the narrator uses and feels. And, while it can be used as a positive, I often find that first person narrative tends to color the perspective and opinion of everything, which forces you to accept things from a myopic point of view. If you happen to agree with the narrator, this is fine. If you can't relate to it at all, you'll turn off your audience. Using the Twilight example once more, if you're not a naive tween/teen girl or sexually repressed adult woman, you absolutely do not give a crap what Bella has to say because she's a masochistic moron. I cannot fathom for the life of me why the series has a male audience unless they're imagining themselves as Edward or Jacob. With third person, you can make up your own mind.

Third-person limited has the same perspective issues.

Third-person omniscient (ie, perspective-less 'narrator') doesn't have any perspective issues (in theory), but it's also disembodied and weird. When we tell one another stories, we have perspectives, and our experiences color those stories. Purposefully removing that coloring makes it squicky and alien. It also abandons what's interesting/somewhat-unique about written word. If you really want to make a compelling world and plot for someone to discover for themselves, free of any guiding set of values, make it interactive.

The written word just isn't well-suited to a perspective-less story. We used it for years because that was the best we had, but now we can plant someone in a world and tell them to explore and make sense of it. I can't remember the last time I found a third-person omniscient narrative genuinely compelling, but I liked the shit out of Skyrim.

However, the narrator of the game will never be as powerful as the narrator of the text. The text's narrator colors everything about the text; she is, for us, the god of the story. Games just can't get at that. The best a narrator in a game can do is chime in on every phenomenon in the world (a la Cortana), but the experience of the user will always be more fundamental.

If you write because you like to write, and you like third-person omniscient, then go for it. But you just can't compete with games or film. The best you can hope for is making something so awesome that your fans hope desperately that it would get made into a quality game or film.

tl;dr: If you must write, embrace perspective; it's text's greatest strength.