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The Player Is and Is Not the Character

Posted by Soulskill on from the i-agree-and-disagree dept.

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.'"

25 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. wait a minute! by girlintraining · · Score: 4, Funny

    Circular logic works because circular logic works because circular logic works because circular logic works because...

    --
    #fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
  2. He's right by zombietangelo · · Score: 2, Funny

    Every time I play Tetris, I just... I can't distinguish between games and reality.

    1. Re:He's right by pizzach · · Score: 3, Funny

      Was this you when shopping after playing tetris?

      --
      Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
  3. A rebuttal in by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:A rebuttal in by shentino · · Score: 2, Informative

      What would you rather have instead of loading screens?

      Expect the devs to be such good engineers that they are not needed in the first place?

      Have the game FREEZE while data gets loaded?

      Hardware has it's limitations.

    2. Re:A rebuttal in by Spacelem · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Saving is essential in some games, particularly if they're long (e.g. get a call and need to head out, don't want to leave computer running). The nethack style of one attempt at the whole thing is pretty evil, and gives games an arcade feeling. Maybe it didn't matter for certain games in the past, and for a very few current ones (e.g. Ikaruga, which is short anyway, and the point is to get a high score), but games these days normally have far more taking place and last longer.

      If games like Half-Life decided that if you died then that was it - you'd have to start the game again from scratch, people would quickly get very annoyed, and the end parts of the game would never be reached by 90% of players. Some things need a lot of thought for a very small time frame, and you may need to try the same part again with a different strategy. This is just unworkable without a checkpoint.

      I'm pretty confident that if game designers tried to remove checkpoints, then gamers would be outraged, and the game be only played by the hardcore few. Imagine playing Neverwinter Nights, knowing that death meant a new game from scratch. This is a clear indication that it's a bad idea. Or you could make the game so easy that death is unlikely to occur, but you end up with an unsatisfying game. If you feel that checkpoints makes things too easy, then set yourself a challenge and don't die, or don't use them.

  4. Immersion... by socrplayr813 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Immersion... by Xiroth · · Score: 3, Interesting

      And I don't agree with you at all. I frequently refer to characters as opposed to myself - not usually in actions, as I'm much more in control of the action, but in terms of properties ("He's got good magic skills but terrible agility") or narrative ("She was Light Side and destroyed the Star Forge") I usually prefer to speak in the third person. I'd say that this is because I'm more interested in the story than in immersion - I actually find it uncomfortable to be immersed too much in the game. I'm me, not some fictional character, and I don't like losing track of that, even briefly.

    2. Re:Immersion... by cgenman · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I am a game developer. And while I have the highest respect for Gambit, I have to disagree with Matthew Weise here (and, strangely, agree with Ernest Adams).

      Parent poster is spot on... Any 4th wall violations in video gaming should be very carefully planned. One of Weise's arguments is because the technology is always inherently present, game / reality interactions are less intrusive. I'd argue that because the technology is always present, creation of a true suspension of disbelief is incredibly difficult, and inherently more valuable.

      All semantics aside, you're trying to get the player into a flow state where they forget the controller, and interact with the video-game world as if their own didn't exist. If you have done that, you have successfully engaged the player. There is definitely some degree of "press the X button to continue" that players have been trained to accept without losing that sense of engagement. But at some point you're arguing that the player *should* remain engaged due to syntactic reasoning, rather than dealing with the reality of how average people interact with their entertainment.

      I'd argue that Psycho Mantis in MGS was more of a clever parlor trick or large explosion than a shining example of player interaction. MGS is an interesting choice, as it is notorious for finding all new and unique sharks to jump. Lots of players complained about broken immersion at the end of MGS2, and most of MGS4.

      Of course, all of this is academic until you hook the player's head up to some electrodes and see how their brain pattern responds to real stimulus. Unfortunately, I don't have one of those labs handy. We may have to agree to disagree until such a time as we can get some time on loan.

      --
      The ______ Agenda
  5. Two fourth walls by coppro · · Score: 2, Informative

    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)).

  6. Integration... by Metasquares · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  7. bogus by vux984 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  8. Re:idle by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  9. Sonic the Hedgehog is the 1st example I thought of by no+reason+to+be+here · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  10. Both is and is not the character? by DreamsAreOkToo · · Score: 5, Funny

    What, is this some sort of Schrodinger's player?

  11. Re:Really.... by Goldberg's+Pants · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's all a bunch of pseudo psychobabble anyway. Plenty of games break the fourth wall, but as this poorly written nonsense says there IS no wall. Which is of course nonsense.

    Unless the participant is actively acknowledged, that is a fourth wall.

    Metal Gear Solid, Snake never looks out of the screen at you and engages you. I can think of plenty of games where the character you play does. Just like there's a fair few movies where a character breaks the fourth wall.

    I mean really, what the hell is the point of the article? Writing for the sake of it offering no real insight or cogent, intelligent thought.

    The more I think about it, the more I'm amazed that this made it to the front page. Clearly the key is writing an article that appears intelligent but really isn't is the key.

    And I've now spent all this time commenting on an utterly worthless and pointless article that serves no purpose other than to give some random guys opinion. An opinion which is utterly ill-informed, ill-conceived, and totally irrelevant to anything.

  12. Re:Sonic the Hedgehog is the 1st example I thought by Veggiesama · · Score: 3, Informative

    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).

  13. limitations by Garganus · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.
    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 .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.

    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

    1. Re:limitations by TriezGamer · · Score: 2, Insightful

      .kkrieger might be tiny, but it's a horrible example to use here. .kkriegers' proceedural generation takes WAAAAAAAAY longer than any modern load times.

  14. Punchline by _Sprocket_ · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  15. Rehash of old Gamasutra article. by Animats · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  16. Multiplayer game avatars by dj245 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    --
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  17. Re:Really.... by Hahnsoo · · Score: 2, Informative

    There are plenty of other places in many other Metal Gear games where the 4th wall is broken. Even in the first Metal Gear Solid, you had to get a codec code from the back of the actual physical CD case of the game. There was no way in-game to get this codec code to progress, and the characters within the game mention "It's on the back of your CD case" directly to the player. Another similar instance happens during the Psycho Mantis battle. Oh, and Twin Snakes IS the remake of the original Metal Gear Solid. You probably should have picked a better example, but your point is valid, however.

  18. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  19. Re:Snake, check the back of the CD case... by trdrstv · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Actually, the fourth wall is notably and clearly broken a couple of times in Metal Gear Solid...

    There are many more sophisticated ways of breaking the fourth wall than "having a character look out at the screen and engage you".

    Yeah, Eternal Darkness was a bitch for using the "Sanity meter" to F*ck with the player...

    What!?!?! I went to save! Why is it erasing my file? Why is it back to the Title screen!?!?!?! Oh Shit Oh Shit Oh Shit... Oh, thank GOD that was an illusion...