We sometimes slip into third person (“my guy, he won’t move … wait … damn…”) when our ventriloquism fails. Games just love to ask, “What would you do?” and then cut you off before you can really answer. We’re happy to dominate some stiff AI and reap the accompanying achievement, and yet we’re increasingly aware of the limited set of verbs we have to express much of anything beyond shoot and loot. We’ve become quite comfortable navigating these half-lives, one minute a bold, limber demigod and the next our shyer, fumbling selves. The pronouns don’t really bother us, though. We are obviously not the characters we play, but we aren’t fully ourselves either.

It’s tricky, too, just who we think we are in games. We never say: I blew the Alien Queen out of the airlock, or I married Mr. With other media, we don’t claim as much credit. We talk about Master Chief or Cloud or Samus, too, but not as the ones who actually performed these feats. We say: I routed the Covenant, or I defeated Sephiroth, or I beat Mother Brain. It’s tricky, the way we tell our video game stories.