Choose your own Adventure Voice

[Chalkarts]

I'm writing a Choose Your Own Adventure book/screenplay.

I'm doing away with some of the conventions of the Genre, specifically the standard "Short form" story style of the various choices.

Rather than 2-4 pages between choices, I'm writing 10ish.

One problem I've been having, less problem, more preference curiosity,

Is which voice to use.
I've read CYOA in 2nd person,
I've been writing in 3rd person just for ease of flow,
But I'm also curious if 1st person would allow for better immersion.

What say you Giants!

[Daimbert]

I'm writing a Choose Your Own Adventure book/screenplay.

I'm doing away with some of the conventions of the Genre, specifically the standard "Short form" story style of the various choices.

Rather than 2-4 pages between choices, I'm writing 10ish.

One problem I've been having, less problem, more preference curiosity,

Is which voice to use.
I've read CYOA in 2nd person,
I've been writing in 3rd person just for ease of flow,
But I'm also curious if 1st person would allow for better immersion.

What say you Giants!

I think second person actually allows for better immersion here, if you want the person to believe that they're the one in charge. It's more the story telling the person what's happening as a narrator and letting them decide, while first person always runs the risk of the story saying things that aren't true about the reader which will break immersion. In second person, if you accidentally do that they can always dismiss it as the narrator not knowing them and being wrong.

Also, first person in these cases can sound like someone else telling them what happened to the person in the story, which will cause a split.

[GrayGriffin]

If you're doing a screenplay, I feel first-person narration sounds more natural there. Is the whole thing going to be filmed from the narrator's perspective, or are they going to have a presence on-screen? There is also precedent for Choose-Your-Own-Adventure stories starring a more developed protagonist, so you don't necessarily have to make them an audience-insert type.

[Daimbert]

If you're doing a screenplay, I feel first-person narration sounds more natural there. Is the whole thing going to be filmed from the narrator's perspective, or are they going to have a presence on-screen? There is also precedent for Choose-Your-Own-Adventure stories starring a more developed protagonist, so you don't necessarily have to make them an audience-insert type.

A screenplay, when filmed, can also work really well from a third-person perspective, where you're clearly choosing for someone else, and can even open up possible scenes where that character pushes back. In a movie, the actor isn't going to look like you, so you either have to film it only from the narrator's perspective or else you introduce a distinction between the chooser and the main visible character anyway.