Breaking the Fourth Wall
Video Games - Acknowledging That They're Just a Game
In live theatre, a stage is composed of three walls that separate the live action from the backstage behind-the-scenes action.
But there's also a fourth wall - the invisible one that separates the actors from the audience.
Some plays, however, break this wall, like Shakespearian asides, where a character reveals additional information to the audience.
The fourth wall in video games would be the video screen. Although the player is pulling the strings, they are firmly on the outside of the screen, looking in at the action they create.
Like the theatre, though, video games have also broken this invisible wall by acknowledging the player's presence or even making them perform real-wold actions in order to continue in the game.
An early example of the latter was in the Nintendo classic StarTropics where in order to obtain a code, the player had to run the game's manual under tap water to find a secret message.
For smashing through the fourth wall like the Kool-Aid man in the 80's, one must look to the PlayStation hit Metal Gear Solid. One of the bosses, psychic warfare fighter Psychomantis, actually speaks directly to the player, commenting on the number of times you've saved and even other games you've been playing.
"I see you're a Castlevania fan," he remarks if there happens to be a Symphony of the Night save file on the memory card.
The wall is shattered further during the actual battle with Psychomantis. In order to prevent him from reading your attacks and dodging them, you must use the second player controller to fool him.
For more recent examples, the Paper Mario series frequently acknowledges its video gameness, be it a DS in the background somewhere or an incognito bad guy instructing the player not to tell anyone who he is.
So, just because like other media, video games can break through that fourth wall, should they?
Many gamers seem to say yes. Gamepro Magazine even listed breaking the fourth wall in their reasoning for including Metal Gear Solid on their list of Most Important Video Games.
Gamasutra writer Ernest Adams, on the other hand, isn't a fan. In his column The Designer's Notebook (sing-up required to view) , he's written that he finds characters acknowledging the play, in ways such as mentioning the controller buttons in instructions, to be cheesy and takes away from the serious nature of games like Metal Gear Solid.
One move through the fourth wall barrier, though, that most gamer's can agree is just annoying was Sega's X-Men. Towards the end of the game, there's a countdown that must be stopped by "Resetting the Computer." How is this accomplished? Reset the console.
In the old days of not having saved games on the cartridges, what gamer in their right mind would reset the game near the end?
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