Slashdot Mirror
The Player Is and Is Not the Character
Jill Duffy writes "GameCareerGuide has posted an intellectual article about video games which argues there is no such thing as 'breaking the fourth wall' in games. Written by Matthew Weise, a lead game designer for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, the article considers the complex relationship between video game players and characters. Weise says that, unlike in theater and film, video games don't ever really break the fourth wall, as it were, because in games, there is no wall. Players are always tethered to the technology, and the player is always just as much the main character as not the main character. Weise looks at both modern experimental games, like Mirror's Edge, as well as old classics, like Sonic the Hedgehog, to defend his point. He writes, 'Both avatars and the technological devices we use to control them are never simply in one reality. They are inherently liminal entities, contributing to a mindset that we, as players, exist in two realities at once. It's just as natural for a player to say, "I defeated that boss," as it is to say, "Snake defeated that boss," since Snake is and is not the player at the same time. It is likewise natural for a player to say, "I punched an enemy soldier," when in reality, she punched no one. All she did was press a button.'"
video games don't ever really break the fourth wall, as it were, because in games, there is no wall.
Ummm... Yes there is. Play the Donkey Kong Country games for the SNES (and Donkey Kong Land for the Game Boy) and you will find many, many fourth-wall breaking comments.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
In terms of storyline, absolutely there is a sense of breaking the fourth wall. In terms of environment of the game, this article is correct, in terms of the relationship between the game & the player(s0, but depending on the games script, walls may or may not exist.
Circular logic works because circular logic works because circular logic works because circular logic works because...
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Every time I play Tetris, I just... I can't distinguish between games and reality.
A common pet hate that shows there is a 4th wall in games is loading screens.
You know, those messages on screen while the game accesses the disk, explaining that the game is accessing the disk... please wait... *spins-CD-onscreen*
If it didn't annoy anyone it wouldn't be complained about so much, but I've read complaints about loading screens for over 20 years. Amiga Power magazine wrote an article about why it was a "heartbreakingly terrible idea". The Edge wrote a feature on stupid ideas and included it. C+VG complained about disk loading screens. The official playstation magazine wrote about it and mocked one game's animated loading screen as being "worthy of the CDTV. Yes, Amiga.". And Xboxlive reviews frequently complain about network loading screens that tell you you're playing a game.
Reviews frequently criticised games: "Firstly, it prints up "Loading Please Wait" in between each level reminding us that this is not a fantastic world in which we are an absorbed major player. THIS IS ONLY A COMPUTER GAME. Grr."
It seems like this is an excellent case in point to show that the 4th wall does exist in games. People do get lost in games and anything that ruins a carefully crafted mood is a bad idea. There's no excuse for it.
It's just as natural for a player to say, "I defeated that boss," as it is to say, "Snake defeated that boss," since Snake is and is not the player at the same time. It is likewise natural for a player to say, "I punched an enemy soldier," when in reality, she punched no one. All she did was press a button.
I don't agree with this at all. I don't think I've ever heard anyone say anything like "Snake defeated the boss." He's a representation of you and can't do anything on his own. You're the one doing the work to finish the game. It makes no sense for me to give him credit for beating the boss.
I think any game developer that is trying to tell a story should be just as wary of breaking the fourth wall as any author/playwright/director. The point of many/most stories is to draw the audience in. The interactivity in games is a much stronger tool than anything in the other forms of entertainment. This doesn't apply to all games, of course, but developers should be careful about breaking that immersion if they're telling a story.
The confidence of ignorance will always overcome the indecision of knowledge.
I disagree. The video game has a double-layered fourth wall, from a narrative point of view. While it's true that the character does act according to the player's actions, there are two very definite fourth walls visible. The first is the existence of the game period, and is broken when a character instructs you to, say, press the A button, but as if it were a part of natural speech. The character's speech acknowledges the video game, but only in the sense to convey information to the player. The other manner is when the characters actually break the fourth wall (such as in Super Paper Mario, when the player is addressed as "Hey, you! Yeah, you, in front of the TV!" (quote is from memory)).
One of the interesting properties of the video game medium is being the cause of in-game events. Sure, there's programming governing every action that takes place in the game world. But your input is triggering various parts of that programming. Your choices are the character's choices.
Given this, it only makes sense that the player should come to identify more closely with the character being controlled in a video game than with a character in a passive medium, such as TV. Even good books that make you empathize or somehow resonate with characters don't really relate the characters to you; it's as if the character is someone you know going through some sort of drama (the drama being the plot of the book). The character in a book is another person.
I am getting the same thing. Is it just me or is slashdot slowly turning into a web 2.0 turd like sourceforge has become? It isn't anymore functional than static HTML (of which I prefer) and it actually puts me off. Shit is ending up in places where it doesn't belong like as you have pointed out the firehorse is now merged into my user page. :(
This space is not for rent.
It's just as natural for a player to say, "I defeated that boss," as it is to say, "Snake defeated that boss," since Snake is and is not the player at the same time.
I have never once heard anyone ever say "Snake defeated that boss". Not once. Not Ever.
I get what the author is saying, but that was a dud example. Depending on the game, the protagonist avatars may be connected to different degrees to the player. Some games like quake, there is only me. My space marine projection is naught but me. Other games like Sam and Max have very strong characters. I control them, at some of the time, but they have their own personality separate from me. And there is a continuum from one extreme to the other.
Most players that I know instinctively differentiate between things the character does as a direct result of the player control, and the things the character does as a result of the game script. And take or deny 'ownership' of the action appropriately. And sometimes they acknowledge the control... like "Watch me make snake jump off a cliff..." But if Snake does something in a cut scene for example, there would be few players who would would say "I did X..." when describing it.
It is likewise natural for a player to say, "I punched an enemy soldier," when in reality, she punched no one. All she did was press a button.'"
This might come as a shock to the article author, but when someone shoots someone in a movie, in reality, no one got shot either.
I don't think they can.
In a thread that brought out the Fibonacci series of UID's, it was hinted that idle came from higher up in the corporate mountaintops.
If you have "clue" and "no clue", is that zen or just postmodern?
to counter his point.
In the original Sonic the Hedgehog, if you stopped giving input, after a few seconds, sonic would stare out (presumably) at the player and begin tapping his foot impatiently. Direct address of the audience is, if I am not mistaken, the classic example of breaking the 4th wall.
my pet machine
What, is this some sort of Schrodinger's player?
Exactly. When a character, in ANY medium, acknowledges the person, whether they be controlling them, merely watching etc... That's breaking the fourth wall. Many games do this. Sonic was one. I've had other games where the character "taps" on the screen.
Just like in movies (first one that springs to mind is Affleck and Damon in "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back"), if it's done well, it's funny.
I'm just really not sure what the author of this article was trying to get at. It seems like they are grasping at some straws for something to validate some bogus theory they have, missed entirely, and then wrote the article anyway.
The author seems to be saying that because the user has greater connection with the events on screen, there is no fourth wall. He has a point, but he misses the point. Yes, the fourth wall that keeps the user from affecting events on screen has disappeared, but it could never be broken by the actors in movies anyway. What "breaking the fourth wall" really refers to is interfering with complete immersion or complete escapism. A few exceptional cases in film have broken the fourth wall successfully, but most times it is done either in comedies or documentaries. Very rarely is it done in action movies or dramas.
Video games have controllers, and that is a fact. But so is the fact that movies have a 2D screen. Both are attempts to immerse the viewer/player, and both have limitations. As technology improves, the immersion improves. The movies went from silent, to talkies, to color. Controllers have gone from keyboards to unmoving controllers to rumbling controllers. Nothing in these progressions suggests that people no longer want immersion and escapism.
The author mentions that Zork had instructions that referred to the user. Big deal, I remember watching slide shows that contained instructions at the beginning to flip the slide every time I heard a ding. When you have new users or new technologies you have to do some upfront instruction, and perhaps some instruction throughout. But you only do as much as you need to. You don't go looking for ways to break that barrier.
The author also mentions the impatient behavior of Sonic when the user doesn't do anything for a while. The problem with this example is mentioned by the author, but not recognized by the author as a problem. When Sonic acts impatient, the user has already dropped out of the immersion. The user is most likely talking to a friend, going to the bathroom, or is in some other way distracted from the game. So Sonic is not breaking the wall, it was broken by the user.
The Sanity game mentioned seems like an interesting exception. But it hardly makes the case that fourth wall breaking is ok in general.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
It seems to me that the relationship between the player and the avatar, while not without its complexity, is pretty much identical to a relationship with which we are already familiar: the user and the tool. Avatars have the curious property of being entirely virtual; but they are really very little different than the other tools that we've been using since sometime in the "grunting hominids of the savanna" stage.
They have to get us to do the editors' job somehow.
You are missing the point of the article. Which says that the fourth wall in games can't be broken because it doesn't exist in the first place.
Whether or not you agree with that, your example does nothing to counter that point.
That's why those elevator rides take so long in Mass Effect. They added some news blurbs (which sometimes start quests) and conversations to fill the time, but they're mostly to hide long loads. A lot of players have complained about them, but I'll give BioWare credit for finding a way to use that time for plot and character development, not just a progress bar and some hint text.
I hear Dice used the same technique in Mirror's Edge, but without the witty bon mots from Wrex, it just wouldn't be the same.
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The author preemptively counters your counterpoint:
Sonic's impatience (nor anything else about his personality) is not made apparent otherwise. It only becomes evident by watching how he reacts to his relationship with the player. If the player is slow or absent-minded, Sonic isn't happy. This may be a very simple example, but I think it serves to illustrate just how bound up fiction can be with interface elements in games. Sonic is aware of his relationship with the game controller, and with the player, and reacts to them within the psychological parameters set by the game's fiction. Just because he is being puppeteered by the player does not mean that Sonic ceases to be himself. He is holding up his end of the relationship, "So what is your problem?" he seems to be thinking. Should you, the player, fail to perform, he stares at you in frustrated apprehension, as if he were your co-actor on stage and you had forgotten your line in the middle of a performance. Sonic isn't breaking the fiction [i.e., fourth wall] - you are. He's just sitting there, in character, waiting for you to join him in the game world.
(emphasis mine)
It's a complicated argument, but essentially, the author says there is no fourth wall. The relationship between the gamer and the game is different than the relationship between the audience and the conventional theater.
The author acknowledges that the narrative of a game can break the fourth wall (numerous adventure games do this), but he argues that the gameplay itself cannot, because the relation between avatar and player is usually quite interdependent; much moreso than narrator and reader (books), or lead actor and viewer (TV/movies).
I'm utterly convinced those hardware limitations are well beyond the performance we trudge through. As a gamer and programmer, this just irks me to no end. .kkrieger into 97 Kb, deep pocketed houses should manage more than a spinning icon. Again on en masse loadings, why do we need them at all? When you walk through an areaportal, it shouldn't just take the nearby rooms' load off of the graphics card, it should start trashing and loading distant geometry.
When a game is first launching, screw the 3d map loading to display behind the main menu (*cough* HL2, et al.), just give us text and load the pretty if it has time to idle. While a cut/intro movie is playing, the disc drive's lens motor should be going nuts, scanning back and forth between buffering the movie and reading data for the next level (or better yet, the disc would be laid out appropriately for this). With the same tack, do something awesome during the unavoidable en masse loadings; have us read a briefing, let us tweak our tires, show us eye candy, whatever! If Pacman was 13.4 Kb, Dr. Mario was on a 28 Kb chip, and a pair of hackers fit
It's like they're not trying. On the flip side, some recent loading screen news off the top of my head:
Dungeon Siege http://games.slashdot.org/games/07/09/08/0354231.shtml
Resistance 2 interview
It is likewise natural for a player to say, "I punched an enemy soldier," when in reality, she punched no one. All she did was press a button.'"
Likewise, I could say "I punched the monkey" when in reality, all I did was install a keylogger.
What happens when virtual reality becomes as real as actual reality?
What happens when these "threshold markers" [i.e., controllers, or the technological interfaces between game and gamer] become invisible to the user? Has this already happened to some degree?
(I remember playing F-Zero for a long time one day. A few hours later while actually driving, I had a fleeting impulse to double-tap the trigger button to butt another driver off the road. Of course, the car didn't have a trigger button. Still, it was eerie to have an outside stimulus trigger that phantom feeling of a controller in my hand. I don't think this is all that uncommon or even that frightening, but more intriguing than anything.)
I hear there's no spoon either. Now there's no wall. So now I have no privacy in my difficulties in consuming my soup.... Great.
This article is a bad rehash of a 2004 Gamasutra article. It doesn't improve much on that article, although it should. There are some significant issues to explore here.
A good starting issue is the relationship between graphical viewpoint and literary viewpoint. In some games, the player has exactly the viewpoint of the character they're controlling. In others, the player is a step back from the character graphically. Tomb Raider is an example. Note that in Tomb Raider, you're controlling Lara Croft, but you're not her, as her commentary makes clear.
Looking out from the character's viewpoint creates the problem that the player sometimes needs a bigger field of view than the screen provides. There have been a few attempts to fix this problem with VR-type hardware, but those are rare, and if you've ever played a game in full gloves-and-goggles VR gear, you know why. Providing view-direction controls is usually painful for gameplay. That's what drives game designers towards a remote viewpoint.
This is completely independent of the literary viewpoint. There are games where the user is the character, there are games where the user drives the character, and there are games like the Sims where the user can only influence the character. These are literary conventions, independent of the graphical viewpoint. There seems to be a convention that if your viewpoint is from the character's eye position, you are the character. Once the viewpoint takes a step back, the possibility of some disassociation from the character is opened up.
Now consider shared virtual worlds with avatars. In Second Life, your avatar is you - no question. Most MMORPGs are like that. Why? Because you're held responsible for the acts of your avatar. If you're a jerk in Second Life, it has consequences. Life in Everquest has duties; when your guild is raiding, you're expected to be there fighting with them.
All this is well known in the game design community. The article doesn't really capture the subtle issues.
I think multiplayer avatar interactions are much more interesting. In most MMOs, players will not stand directly in each other. I think this is a violation of a player's personal space. Nearby players who are messaging will stand at "speaking distance", even though it makes no difference to the game's chat mechanism how far apart they are. There are many other examples as well.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
... really the whole point of playing an interactive game is to be there, to be present, to be interacting. The "avatar" is merely a game developers idea of what kinds of avatars will appeal generally to a broad audience. Personally the thing that got me so hooked on Galactiv Civilizations 2 and Need for speed underground, was the ability to shape and customize your "avatar" (in GC2 it was ships, in NFS it was cars), to a greater or lesser degree. NFS was limited by the designs of the cars themselves and our expectations of what 'cars' should look like. In Galciv2 you have more leeway and your designs did not have to submit to such expectations of "looking right".
In fact it's a turn off when game developers make characters people don't want to BE playing and have no feedback when you change gear/armor/etc/etc, Diablo and Diablo2 had some amount of visual feedback when users changed equipment and that's what I thought really added to the game - you are there, you are in the game, you are able to modify and change stuff and have that change reflected in the reality of the game world. Their is level of personal investment in characters whether people are aware of it or not, even 'machines' like planes, cars, etc. Because you are the one in control of the experience provided game developers have given you something you want to experience.
That's what I noticed too:
Slashdot is now pushing people into rating articles in a very annoying way. I guess GP is right about Slashdot becoming a "web 2.0 turd"
C - the footgun of programming languages
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Last night I tried out the game Rose and Camellia. Google it, it's great! Anyway, after playing I went up to my wife and said, "I slapped her on the cheek!". My wife then explained to me that going around slapping women until they pass it out is a bad thing. Apparently this is true even though I was a woman while I was doing it. Slapping anyone silly is bad, no matter how fun it looked on South Park the other night.
So, as you can imagine, it was quite a relief to find out that I hadn't really slapped anyone at all. On the other hand, it also means that I didn't really run a whole 20 meters (yeah, that's right!) when I played QWOP the other day. I've now learned that I actually have to move my thigh and calf muscles manually to actually claim that I did some exercise. Bummer.
Crap, I just realised that my sig isn't even real. I'm not really "Clovis", that's just a fictitious name I use on the internet. And the letters that make up that name wouldn't be me even if that was my real name. So, no sig, that is not that guy that I am.
Clovis
^ Clovis, look! It's that guy you are!
Actually, the fourth wall is notably and clearly broken a couple of times in Metal Gear Solid. Once when Campbell tells you to look on the back of the CD case to find Meryl's codec frequency and once when he suggests that you use the player 2 controller so that Psycho Mantis can't read your mind.
There are many more sophisticated ways of breaking the fourth wall than "having a character look out at the screen and engage you". I think the point of the article in question is that the player is always actively engaged by the technology - it requires out input in a way that no other medium does.
And if you want to say that there is some fundamental difference between being told by the game to search the CD case for a code and being told by the game "you press A to fire - now kill these guys" then you are in a much stickier position.
You know it, but... a Jay and Silent Bob movie? Feature length? Who'd pay to see that?
[Holden, Jay, and Bob look into the camera]
Another example would be Max Payne where at some point you take the elevator where the classic annoying elevator music is played. You shoot the speaker (because you can in a game) and Max Payne goes "Thank you.".
First time I played that I nearly fell off the chair laughing :)
Uhm, of course Max takes the elevator and shoots, you just make him... or whatever.
if you've got nothing to say, don't tell me.
And that's not even the biggest 4th wall break in that game.
"You're in a video game, Max"
Well, this all depends upon whether or not you separate the overall game experience from the plot and presentation of the gamestory. In Metal Gear Solid, when psycho mantis comments on the games that the player has loaded on his save card, that is indeed breaking the fourth wall. You can make an arguement about the lack of a fourth wall from a gameplay perspective, but the actual plot construction in video games has very little philosophical difference to that of cinema. Storys take place in the game world, which is NOT connected to the physical world.
The fact that the player identifies himself as the main character is irrelivant. In fact, there have been many studies in litterature and cinema, and to a certain extent, all audiences identify themselves as the main character to a greater or lesser degree, regardless of the medium. Games may have a magnitudinal difference in that regard, but it's not a fundimental one, the same philosophy applies.
Therefor, an RPG that talks about itself being in the context of a video game (Earthbound, for instance), or Metal Gear Solid commenting on some aspect of the player from within the game world, breaks the barrier down in the same way that you will find in postmodern theatre and cinema.
One exception is tutorials, and I only say this simply because they've become an excepted evil, and people no longer really take them at face value. When an NPC says, "press the X button to swing your sword" we translate that as the game creators talking to us (as players) through a game character. It causes a fairly abrupt continuity problem, and we usually completely dismiss the concept that the game character ever said it. Once again, I would give partial exemption to the Metal Gear series, because Kojima is so desperately trying to break the fourth wall, that it's very likely that NPC tutorial explantions are a small offshoot of that... nevertheless, it's still annoying and causes continuity problems. I never like them.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Interesting. After reading all these replies, I'm now really hyper-aware of the 4th wall aspect to video games. I've been familiar with it in theatre for quite some time, and I am a live improvised comedy theatre actor so I know how easy it is to break the 4th wall. I've always thought of it as something that betrays the intended scope of the fantasy. I think games are interactive fiction by design, so you're supposed to be immersed, but interactively so. It's up to the writers to decide what the rules of the game's fantasy are. There's a difference between a soliloquy in a play, and a moment where the actor starts wise-cracking back to a heckler. One is intended, the other is accidental, and is beyond the scope of the play. Furthermore, i've seen desperate attempts to keep from breaking the 4th wall in improv, like when someone in the audience's cell-phone rings, and the actor mime-answers their cellphone, there, the actor deals with the situation within the reality of the play. It's clear that information is passed through the wall, but this is not really _breaking_ the wall, because it doesn't betray the fantasy, it just draws on information that is exchanged between the fantasy and our reality.
Obviously, the video game is trying to set the scope of the fantasy and the degree to which you are expected to be immersed. If that gets radically changed for some reason in a way that suddenly made the laws of the fantasy world seem changed such that they involved more of our reality that you originally thought, you could say that the 4th wall had been broken, or you could just say that the writers were going for that kind of a twist. This can be a great source of humour. I've seen some cool movies where the characters acknowledge that they're making a movie, and it's done intentionally.
Video game designers are given a hard task of justifying phases of the game like the install, the menu screens, dealing with errors, ending the game and restarting, etc.
One of my favourite goofs is when the in-game character speaks out "I have to hit the X button to pick that up" like my character is holding a game controller?!?...what exactly is the perceived reality in those situations? Sure it's self referential, but I believe that those things are just errors that lead to a less immersed experience for the gamer. A much better line would be "You have to hit your X button if you want me to pick that up." Of course it could just be a stylistic choice by the writers to blur the lines as the article said.
I'd like to see a video game that blurred the lines so much that it made me think it wasn't running. So it integrated with my outlook, blackberry, windows desktop etc. It could do crazy things like call me on my cellphone, send me emails, instant-message me. That would be FREAKY!!! Maybe the game will read slashdot and the in-game character will reference real-world events in-character.
> It is likewise natural for a player to say, "I punched an enemy soldier," when in reality, she punched no one.
Yes, and people say "he hit me" when someone hits their car. No, they hit your car. You are not your car. Do not break the "driver's fourth wall".
TFA doesn't seem to really understand the difference between immersion and investiture into a role.
A.
Ultima IX didn't have loading screens, and the occasional pauses were less than a second.
The occasional pauses of laughter at the game's seemingly endless bugs, however, were longer. And watching the Avatar occasionally fall through the world certainly broke that fourth wall.
One game I've played recently that has no discernible load zones is Titan Quest, which lets you run from one end of the world to the other with no waiting.
Another with horrible jarring "LOADING" waiting is the Half-Life 2 series. They don't happen often, but they are annoying.
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The same trick was done in Ritman/Drummond's Batman in the early 1980s on the Spectrum.
Obligatory Wikipedia Link.
Now get off my damn lawn!
...Resident Evil. It had loading screens, but they were well thought out. You'd get to a door and press the action/use button to go through, the screen would go dark and show you an animation of a door opening. Everyone knew what was going on, you could hear the Playstation accessing the CD, but showing that animation instead of presenting a "PLEASE WAIT, LOADING..." screen was enough that you could suspend disbelief if you so chose.
What would you rather have instead of loading screens?
A short, unskippable cut scene. Final Fantasy VII used a blitter feedback effect on the frame buffer when switching from the movement view to the combat view, and it showed the battle debriefing when switching back to the movement view. Super Mario Galaxy shows Mario flying away from the observatory toward a planetary system, and it looks wonderful. To cover loading when you first start a game, put up the copyright screens and info on how to use the controller, like Wii games do. In games with a large, open world that gives no chance to make a cut scene, load the PS1-quality textures first and then fade to the PS3-quality textures once they have loaded.
Have the game FREEZE while data gets loaded?
SMG plays a short jingle and freezes for loads that take less than two seconds, such as transitions between outdoor scenes and indoor scenes within the observatory.
Ok, so you don't often hear "Snake defeated the boss." because people don't want to say snake beat him, it's an achievement that they're proud of and hence they attribute it to themselves. They want to say I did it. But look at what happens when the controls are buggy: People don't complain that "I accidentally pressed O too long and aimed with the gun instead of shooting", they say "snake aims instead of shooting". When the character does what the player wants, it's the player doing it, there's immersion, when the character misbehaves, the player begins to speak as if Snake has a mind of his own.