IF that Breaks the Fourth Wall?

I have readed all posts but have no clean idea of what fourth wall is. Can you write a definition for 4th wall?

Wikipedia : " The fourth wall is a performance convention in which an invisible, imagined wall separates actors from the audience. While the audience can see through this “wall”, the convention assumes the actors act as if they cannot."

But in any IF work player participates in the story, so I don’t understand the meaning of 4th wall for IF games.

  • Jade
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When I posted, I was thinking of games that very directly involved the player, by making them an actual character in the game. But it’s true that IF by definition really has no fourth wall to break, since the player is always being addressed by the game.

There can be some awkwardness to that in some IF, like when you’re totally immersed and the game says “I don’t know that verb.” But I like Ryan Veeder’s approach of leaning into that as much as possible to embrace the possibilities there.

Pretty sure The Beast broke the fourth wall and ran on through to the fifth :grinning:

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That’s the realization I was having upthread. The term “fourth wall” comes from stage plays or live sitcoms where it’s assumed the characters are in a standard room, but one of the walls doesn’t exist because that’s where the audience and cameras are. In a movie, the sets may be fully realized, but the “fourth wall” is the camera lens, which is usually not addressed by the characters.

From a psychological standpoint “fourth wall” means that in most entertainment the audience watches through this “missing” but accepted imaginary wall safe in the assumption the actors will not “break through” the fourth wall - they cannot see nor interact with the audience within the fiction of their story. If you are watching a movie or a tv show (or a stage play in general) one does not usually expect a character to begin talking to you the viewer, who is normally an unseen observer.

When this does happen - on stage with a narrator who addresses the audience, or in certain movies like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off where the character does look straight into the camera and talk to the audience, this is commonly called “breaking the fourth wall”. This is accepted in theater since it is a live performance and is common, but in a movie or a TV show when done unexpectedly this can make the audience feel uncomfortable - “They can see me?” It’s rare in movies for an actor to look directly into the camera lens, though it has been done for effect without breaking the fourth wall in movies like Silence of the Lambs where characters routinely stare directly into the camera lens while speaking to one of the characters in the story as if the camera (and the audience) is the character for a very intrusive and uncanny effect.

As I’ve been realizing IF routinely breaks the fourth wall since the player does participate, and that sort of goes against any concept of a wall separating the observer and the character. Stage plays often break the fourth wall to solicit audience participation or interaction, and interaction is key in IF.

@Zed pointed out that the more unusual state for IF is when it actually calls attention to itself as a piece of fiction - and while that is definitely a fourth wall break, I venture that is actually an ingredient in a higher level of convention breaking involving “meta narrative.” In Doki Doki Literature Club Monika breaks the fourth wall initially by reminding the player to save the game (a common VN trope/joke), but then ultimately reveals her status as a meta-narrative character by changing files and deleting other characters in the game… “You knew this was a game, right?” It breaks the fourth wall on the route to becoming meta-narrative. (In my definition I’m forming here.)

Another interesting example from theater that might apply more to IF: In the play Sleep No More there are no seats. The audience wanders an environment where the scenes and story occur simultaneously in multiple locations. The audience all wear identical white masks (neutral but creepy) and are instructed to not touch or speak to the actors - for safety, to not intrude in the narrative, and so as to be distinguishable from the performers…but also to lend them a bit of fourth-wall comfort in their adventure. The bit of anonymity lended by the masks was discovered to allow the audience be a bit bolder in pursuit of the action in the story. In this production, there literally is no fourth wall since the audience is immersed in fully-realized environmental sets, but the mask lets them maintain some sense of separation from the action. Where this show negates the fourth wall, the player-observer barrier is broken occasionally in segments where audience can get pulled into a “one on one” with an actor where they are talked to directly, given props to deliver, or information no one else receives about the plot - almost exactly like in an IF game!


(Emily Short has written about her experience with Punchdrunk, the creators of Sleep No More and the parallels their immersive-theater style has with IF.)

So perhaps what we initially defined as a “fourth wall break” in IF isn’t so much that as it is a “lifting of the mask”. The player is already through the fourth wall, but wear the mask of a player character - even if the protagonist is an Ageless, Faceless , Gender-Neutral, Culturally-Ambiguous Adventure Person. The parser lifts the mask by saying “You (the player) don’t need to open that door” when the character obviously could, or if the game goes full meta-and becomes about you the player playing the game and leaving the confines of an established Player Character (as Monika does in DDLC: (paraphrased) “I’m not talking to “you” that character you thought you were playing, but you the player… I don’t even know if you are a boy or a girl…”

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This is such a good case to mention. What a wild game.

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Maybe the normal operation of the parser is equivalent to the imaginary stage fourth wall, as we experience the story through it, and unusual parser responses can be used as one way of the story explicitly revealing to us that it is a story.

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Yeah, I think this is right! Funnily enough, in reflecting more on the kinds of games that feel like they break the fourth wall by involving the player and or parser more directly in the narrative - many of the examples already given in the thread, or stuff like LASH or Terminal Interface for Models RCM301-303 - they might actually be better described as reconstituting the fourth wall since they create a diegetic explanation for the narrative-busting interactivity and out of world feedback that otherwise function to rupture the coherence of the fictional world. But I guess because we’re mostly so acclimatized to the Adventure/Zork standard, ironically that way of doing things feels natural and this feels weirder much of the time.

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I wonder the extent to which the tradition actually leans more towards the parser being the possibility vector through which the player interacts, be it Zork where you order a machine to move (Suspended takes that dynamic to an extreme) or Adventure where there is, as Andrew highlighted, an ambiguous conversation between an implicit gamemaster and a player as an adventurer in the gamespace, creating a sense where actually IF that overtly projects the fourth wall is actually the so-called “innovation”, with the prevailing tradition primarily existing on a spectrum of activity/passivity in the fourth wall rupture. IF where you, as a player, are specifically not included in the events, not just as in the sense of the extent to which the PC is closed to player inscription, but as in the sense of your interaction is fundamentally irrelevant to the artwork beyond exploratory actuation of its contents. So what makes, for example, Ramesses a “rupture” (though I doubt such a definitive difference), is that it assumes itself complete beyond the capacity of the player, an active rejection of the prevailing gamey notion that your agency is the driving force of the experience. We might be phrasing this discussion upside down.

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It just occurred to me that there was a game in this year’s IF Comp, Recon, that grabs the time of day based on your computer’s clock settings.

It is not very well acknowledged or clued unfortunately but it is an interesting idea. You could have a game made around choices that the user has made outside of the game (ie. in their choice of browser, operating system, IP address/geolocation, etc) rather than choices actually input into the game.

This isn’t fourth wall breaking in the sense of addressing the player, but it is interacting with them beyond what they expect the boundaries of the game to be.

I’m guessing it has been somewhere else before though, definitely outside of IF.

Metal Gear Solid 3’s sniper boss fight (which you can beat by leaving the system off for several days ) comes to mind.

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Wow, I am really glad that you mentioned this because it reminded me that, a few years ago, I wrote a game for FB Messenger called Prisoner 1282 (alas, no longer online due to hosting costs) that did, indeed, take advantage of certain data that FB hands over such as the user’s (country) location and timezone.

Never once occurred to me to think of this as “breaking the fourth wall,” though, so thanks so much for pointing that out.

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Haha, how much information was it possible to get? I know it’s info the user has made public but I’m not on Facebook for that reason.

Also, how did you use it? Just basic chatbot responses or something more in-depth?

I think it would be interesting to make a game where people in different circumstances got almost entirely different games, but then again IF’s small audience means that it would probably only be amusing to the author at the players’ expense.

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Been a while since I looked at the parameters, but my memory says that FB passes through your:

  • Gender
  • Time zone
  • System language (i.e. English)
  • First and last name

You could also get the user to click one button and send through their current GPS address (something I used in my game), email address, and/or phone number.

The map thing was just used as a gimmick since the Prisoner was in a remote town in Siberia, so he’d always tell the user (after they identified their location) that “you’re too far away to help me!”

TBH, the Prisoner berated the player quite a lot. It was a deeply disturbing game.

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