A Dose of Reality: Breaking the Fourth Wall Part 2
A game like No More Heroes can be given certain liberties when it comes to theatrics. This freedom comes partly from the creator’s reputation and partly from how the narrative is constructed around its subjects. There’s an awareness built into the overall game design that make breaking the fourth wall effective. Someone like Travis Touchdown is able to develop as a character and use his existing personality to break out onto a larger stage. He’s aware enough that he won’t get a bad case of stage fright and have to awkwardly exeunt, stage left. Travis’ awareness also has an expository purpose. He talks to us in order to help decipher the game’s absurd plot. It’s a well executed system that’s both funny and creative. Other games aren’t as lucky to have this intricate design, and theatrics always require a tightrope balance.
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Theatrical techniques in videogames require a suitable architecture to reinforce their use. It’s a lot like walking the fine line between your fanatical devotion to a videogame series and your heartbreaking disappointment when having to write a bad review for a game that you thought would surpass your already high expectations; only to have those crushed by a mediocre story and the convoluted personalities of the bosses… sigh. I digress, but with a point. Travis Touchdown is a character aware of his identity. Part one touched upon this briefly. When Travis looks at you, he is talking to a metaphorical player/audience. In the latest instalment of the series, No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle, he looks into the camera and actually waits for your response. It’s a little campy. It’s also fan service directed towards an audience predisposed to the technique. To help create balance, some developers try to design their game experience around the player. It’s immersive and interesting, but it’s also a narrative pitfall.
A videogame should never sacrifice delivering a strong narrative for the ability to control a character’s every whim, or bowel movement. A favourite example is Fallout 3. Watching someone play this game can tell you a lot about his or her personality. Someone, who will remain nameless, but who will probably smack me upside the head when he reads this, saw fit to help the slave drivers of Paradise Falls. What the hell man? They’re slave drivers! What’s more this same person, of his own freewill, goes around killing as many Brahmin as he possibly can. Think of this person as an assault shotgun wielding Ma'iq the Liar. The problem here is that Fallout 3’s protagonist does not have a personality of his own. Rather, he is an abstract representation of the player’s morality and ethics (in Ma’iq’s case, a lack there of). He’s a blank slate rather than an actual character. In a game whose character is so overwhelmingly driven by moral relativism and choice, there’s no real protagonist to identify with. There’s no true Wasteland Hero. A player needs to have motivation. A player needs a protagonist they can relate to.
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There’s a big difference between an immersive experience and an aware experience. Being immersed is watching Liberty Prime tear down the Enclave stronghold. It’s quite a moment, but it also begs the question, what effect is it having on you? You feel what’s happening in the game. Each laser blast and subsequent explosion rocks you as Liberty Prime bellows about Commies and the coming Red scourge. But what does your character experience? He only has your emotions to feed off of. He doesn’t feel the enormity of the situation, nor does he truly react to the seriousness of the conflict. This immerses you within the experience, but it is also presents you with an illusion. An aware experience is playing Condemned: Criminal Origins and having that once chance to abstain from or use violence. It gives you a conscious choice, and, unlike Fallout 3, Ethan Thomas’ decision derives from his personality rather than your own. This is the conscious use of breaking the fourth wall that pulls you away from the experience and towards a new kind of awareness. It’s aware.
Before reading the rest of this article, check out the trailer here. Coded Arms: Assault directly addresses the player and tells them to stop playing. The voice says something like, “Quit this game at once. This is not a virtual game world. This area is restricted.” Basically, scram or get killed. Unlike No More Heroes, which breaks the fourth wall as an aside, Coded Arms is built on the mechanic. It goes beyond just using the technique and melds it as a part of the game. Coded Arms: Assault has yet to be released, and probably never will be, but it nonetheless presents an interesting way of creating both an immersive and an aware experience.
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There’s an imbedded dream somewhere in the human psyche to be a hacker. Sure, computers only came around in the latter half of the 20th century, but Coded Arms: Assault takes that passion and lets you experience it. So far this sounds shallow, but it gets a little more complicated. Think of the game’s narrative framing like this. You are being jacked into the Matrix, but you don’t wake up as Neo. You wake up as a video gamer. Probably should have taken the blue pill.
Breaking the fourth wall is used brilliantly within this architecture. It creates a representational self within the game, but because it uses the technique as a core narrative device its use becomes self-aware. The game is aware that you are playing a virtual simulation and so is your silent protagonist. Instead of your character being an abstract representation of your morals, ethics and personality, as in Fallout 3, your persona as the hacker becomes the subject of the narrative. Thus, the game immerses you within the framework of the virtual construct through its reliance on the story.
You become the hacker.
It’s a shame that Coded Arms: Assault is never going to be released because there are some interesting ideas here. Breaking the fourth wall as a theatrical technique has to be conscious in and of itself for it to be used effectively. It’s not enough for a character to suddenly look into your eyes, they have to take your eyes and change your perspective on the experience. When that voice came over the intercom during the trailer, I got a slight chill. Wouldn’t it be cool if the game was actually a hacking simulation and you were being exploited for your skills as a video gamer? I could actually justify all those years of gaming and say that my skills are being used to rob military installations of precious data. Man, that would be cool, and then highly illegal, and I’d probably get caught and sent to jail, but I’d go with my head held high. I’d be happy with the knowledge that I actually did something and experienced something that no video gamer ever has, true immersion.
The immersive qualities of videogames are a double-edge sword. On one side, it helps you to become engrossed in the story. You get to feel a character’s heartache when their comrade dies, but maybe you got them killed and it was your fault, and now you have to change how you play in order to prevent any more deaths. This is immersive and in Fallout 3, you have to make these morally and ethically driven decisions to get the full experience. The other side, allows you to experience the self-aware and narrative driven edge of videogames. As an active and interactive medium, games allows for a diverse range of narrative and theatrical techniques.
Distancing the audience from the experience allows the player to see an experience from a new perspective. No More Heroes immerses us and makes us aware of the characters’ individuality. It at once creates a sense of immersion then immediately alienates us from that sensation to make a narrative driven point. Coded Arms: Assault literally brings us into the experience as more than just an abstract representation but as a larger part of the narrative architecture. We become the subject of both the narrative and the character's motivation. Both strategies make for intense storytelling experiences, and whenever we get a stark dose of reality, we have to take a look inside and figure out what our motivations are and how they are effecting the experience.
