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Re-reading the opening page of the story I'm working on, I realized that although I have a paragraph in there introducing the character that you play, the information that you learn has almost no impact on the rest of the story whatsoever.

In general, do you think that it is better to: a) give the player a particular character to play; b) give the player an anonymous character to play, allowing them to be "themself"?

If a), how important is it to make sure that the particular characteristics of that person are relevant to the story? 

Normally in the stories that I've read on here the characteristics of the MC start out pretty "anonymous" with the choices that you make tailoring the decisions that they make that you aren't given the choice of picking, making it seem as if it is something that you would do if picking that path in the first place.

If your making a story in the first person narrative then it would probably be assumed that the Protagonist would have a more personal backstory and traits beforehand at the start of the story as it would be centered mostly on predetermined character instead of the player. 

In my personal opinion I prefer basic and uncharacterized Protagonists as thats my basic assumption on how all second person narratives usually play out.

Thanks! That certainly makes my job easier =)

There's differing opinions on this but it tends to be an all or nothing thing. Either the character themself isn't the focus and is pretty much a blank slate (a storygame with more emphasis on the game part, maybe), or they're treated like a character in any other story. And very few stories can work when looking at the world through the eyes of someone without a background, personality or opinion on anything they see.

I mean unless they start out as an infant in most cases it's not really possible to have the player define everything about them. Even then you'd be taking on an insane amount of work, and that's not even getting into the amount of setting info that would have to be force-fed
to readers at a point when they're not at all invested in the story. (Fastest way to get them hooked btw = making them care about the main character and their situation. The techniques for that don't change in any dramatic way just because of a switch to second person.)