2nd person point of view

last december, cheng hung lost his wallet somewhere in johor. then he wrote a short passage about his sad experience. i still remember it because it was written in "2nd person point of view". well, you must be asking how an article can be written in 2nd person point of view... i shall teach you how now.

think about it: when you play computer games, there are only 1st person (eg. counter-strike) and 3rd person(eg. tomb raider). when you read books, there are only 1st person narration (when the author calls the main character 'i') and 3rd person narration(when the main man is called 'he' or 'she'). so what is 2nd person's view?

wikipedia says in 2nd person point of view, the main man is called 'you'. but i don't think it's a perfect definition.

say if i am writing a letter to someone, of course, i have to call the recipient 'you'. is it really 2nd person? no, because i'm the one who's talking to the recipient, so the subject here is still 'i'.

my conclusion is: to build up a 2nd person point of view's environment, two boolean variables must be true: 1/ the main character must be 'you'; 2/ the 'you' must be the author himself.

sounds too philosophical? just try think about it. it's cool...

here's an example

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard lounge. All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder. —Opening lines of Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City (August 12, 1984)

cool shit... like you are really seeing everything the using the author's eyes...