Beyond the fourth wall: transdiegetic characters, distancing effect, nesting narratives, and opposite texts in gēmu

Last year, my colleague Antonio Loriguillo-López invited me to a panel at the EAJS2017 15th International Conference of the European Association for Japanese Studies that took place at Lisbon, titled “Beyond the Label of Commerciality: Approaching Narrative Complexity in Contemporary Light Novels, Anime and Gēmu”. It was a pleasure to share that space with him and Dolorez Martínez, Artur Lozano-Méndez, and Shiro Yoshioka. These are the (unedited, incomplete, and messy) notes I wrote for my presentation:

1. Metalepsis, or breaking the fourth wall, is a narrative strategy described by Genette as any intrusion by the narrator or the narratee into the diegetic universe, or from the diegetic characters into the metadiegetic universe (1972, 290). This crossing normally reveals the artificial nature of the fiction.
2. The interactive nature of videogames demands a special relationship between the player and the fourth wall. The player acts as a combination of spectator and actor and constantly needs to access the ludofictional world, which in turn has to provide her with feedback, often outside the diegesis.
3. The fourth wall has been widely discussed in Game Studies. Here I consider it within the context of gēmu or Japanese games, taking into account the Japanese notion of the media-mix and the particularities of Kabuki, drawing on Fernandez-Vara in understanding videogames as a performance space with links to theatre. I consider strategies like transdiegetic characters, nesting narratives and the Borgesian idea of a text that contains its own counter-text. I argue that, at least in the case of gēmu, the concept of a fourth wall is tenuous at best, and this mobility between diegetic levels increases, not decreases, the construction of the fiction. In other words, metaleptic strategies in gēmu open up new possibilities for ludonarrative complexity.
4. A close analysis of relevant commercial gēmu with a strong fictional component, such as Catherine, Castlevania, or Nier: Automata, reveals that their metalepses do not break the fiction as much as they recapture their technological and ludic foundations, reinforcing the games’ narrative potential. In so doing, these gēmu make explicit something every game implies: that the player holds a multiple, simultaneous and complex position during the game, operating on both sides of the fourth wall. Game metalepsis does not produce a Brechtian distancing effect, but rather an integration of the player into the fiction.
5. Steven Conway (2010) and Antonio Planells (2010, 157) have written separately about a “circular fourth wall” in videogames. For these authors, the player is always breaking the diegesis in a permanent act of possession over a character, modifying the narrative development of the game. Metalepsis is, then, a structural and inspiring element of the medium. Planells distinguishes two kinds of metalepsis: a “naturalised” one, composed of physical control and a gaming point of view (160), and an “exceptional” one, more traditional, in which the system-narrator addresses the player directly disregarding the separation between fictional levels (164).
6. But even these exceptional metalepses are often used as ways to integrate the player further into the game, if not as a fiction, at least as an activity. Even when player and avatar are separated by a metalepsis, the player is not separated from the game. Bertolt Brecht wrote about a “distancing effect” (1961) that created a transposition into the third person in order to make the message of the play clear and have the audience remain critically aware at all times. He wanted to criticise and change society through theatre. But gēmu such as Catherine or Nier: Automata, which acknowledge the mediality of the text and the existence, for example, of save files, do not seem aimed at reducing the emotional identification of the player. On the contrary, they break the fourth wall to make the player seduce a love goddess or break a never-ending cycle of destruction in the fictional world by deleting her progress.
7. In Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, a disembodied amnesic protagonist is used to mislead the player and make her believe she is controlling a human character, while in actuality, it is revealed in the end, she was controlling the ghost of a cat that at first seemed to be little more than set dressing. This separation between player and avatar is actually a reframing of the focalization (as described by Genette, 1972) that increases what Costikyan has called “narrative uncertainty”. Unlike the Brechtian distancing effect, narrative uncertainty boosts the player’s interest in the story.
8. Brecht defended his distancing effect by comparing it to Chinese theatre, in which he believed the actor made clear he was being looked at and the audience forfeited the illusion of being unseen spectators (130). However, Min Tian challenges this interpretation, saying that Chinese theatre never had a fourth wall to begin with and thus “no devices are needed to demonstrate the absence of a fourth wall” (205). In Chinese theatre, Tian argues, the audience is invited into the poetic atmosphere and imagination created by the actor performance. The Chinese performer plays “with the intimacy and sympathy of his playgoers, not the contrary” (206).
9. The Chinese theatre thrives on the playgoer’s familiarity with its art. Similarly, Yuichiro Takahashi argues that the kabuki spectator of the Edo era was far more participative than its modern counterpart. It was common for a performer to stop amidst a climactic scene for “a representative of a renjû (a kind of actor’s fan club) to climb on the hanamichi or onstage to speak words of admiration for him” (136). This practice was called home kotoba, words of praise. Only when theatre became bigger were stage and audience separated and something similar to a fourth wall appeared. Tetsuo Kishi (116) writes about Shakespeare and the Japanese stage and notices that the bard’s “openness” is quite prominent in kabuki, too. “As in Shakespeare, many speeches are delivered as a direct address to the audience”.
10. Videogames never had a strict fourth wall to begin with, and they thrived on the player’s familiarity with the medium. Metalepsis in games can be seen as a gesture to reinforce intimacy and complicitness, which fits into the Japanese culture of media-mix, or the cross-media serialization and circulation of entertainment franchises (Steinberg, 2012: VIII). Media-mix includes a central content, such as a manga or an anime, and a collection of complementary contents. Tosca has written about the importance of paratexts in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, in which out-of-game illustrations heavily inform the in-game fictional world. This expansion of the fiction has two consequences: the linearity of the story is broken, or at least partially halted, to account for fan interaction, and the characters are perceived to exist both within and outside the fictional world.
11. Media-mix characters seem fitter to cross from one diegetic level to another. Let’s consider the use of transdiegetic characters, or characters that exist in several levels simultaneously, in popular gēmu. The transdiegetic is that which has the ability to “cross the border of the diegetic to the non-diegetic and remain unspecific” (Henry M. Taylor). Kristine Jörgensen, for example, has written extensively about transdiegetic sound and music. I have conceptualised an intermediate space between diegesis and extradiegesis in videogames called antediegesis, in which the game rules are openly exposed and the separate levels are bridged and woven together in a naturalised manner. Transdiegetic characters can exploit these antediegetic spaces.
12. For instance, Hideo Kojima, a famous developer known for his formal experiments and quirky humour, appears as a minor character in his own game Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. Psycho Mantis, a boss in Metal Gear Solid, can read the player’s memory card and interfere with the system technology. An AI in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty talks about turning off the game console and messes with the interface. Hatsune Miku, a popular vocaloid or virtual singer, stars in the gēmu series Project DIVA while performing live concerts in the real world through screens and holograms. Trisha, the narrator of Catherine and the host of a TV show that acts as a framing device in that game, reveals herself to be the Babylonian goddess Ishtar after the player beats the game, and then offers her a new challenge in a separate diegetic level. And Nintendo characters, such as Mario, Yoshi or Kirby, assume different roles in each game: they can be enemies in one game and participate in friendly kart races. (Interestingly, Super Mario Bros 3 features a red curtain that frames the game’s reality as a theatre play.)
13. The player herself can be presented as a transdiegetic actant that exists in the extradiegesis of the game and, at the same time, can interact with its fictional world through antediegetic tools. The “reverse shot” or the “off screen space” are integrated within the game. This can be used for a quick joke, such as the shout out in Paper Mario: The Thousand Years Door, when a character addresses the player saying “hey, you, in front of the TV!”, or in a more prominent role, such as in Baten Kaitos. In it, the player controls an avatar but this avatar addresses her as her “Guiding Spirit”, an advisor and mystical force. The diegesis is reinforced by offering an excuse for the intrusion of the player, who has a privileged position over the gameworld.
14. These transdiegetic characters are ideal for hypodiegesis or nesting narratives (Bal, 1981). In them, a primary narrative has one or more embedded narratives. This is the case of the aforementioned Catherine, in which the framing device is reconfigured later as the primary narrative. This is a vertical shift in narrative levels that Planells compares to a russian doll.
15. Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow features a horizontal one, that is, a change of narrators (or, at least, of focalization) within the same level. The player controls a reincarnation of Dracula called Soma Cruz, and faces a decisive battle in the early stages of the game. If she loses there is no game over screen. Instead, she is forced to take on a new critical path in which she controls a vampire hunter who has to kill Soma. The extradiegetic fail state is, using Terry Harpold’s term, recaptured. This path is understood to be an alternative story, a “what if” version of the canonic one.
16. The last metaleptic strategy I would like to discuss is related to this alternative path. Many gēmu include alternative endings that clash with their tone, narrative or characters, often negating their main traits. It is the case of the joke endings in Nier: Automata, brief pieces of text that often narrativize silly deaths as part of the story, or the UFO endings in the Silent Hill series. These endings need the player to be aware of the game structure and its artificiality, interacting with it not only as a ludofictional world but as a designed artifact. In them, creatures that do not fit the construction of their fictional worlds, such as aliens or hyper intelligent dogs, appear as non sequiturs and close the games’ conflicts. The fourth wall is implied by omission and the whole text is reframed by in-jokes.
17. These alternative paths and endings can be compared to the idea of “counter-text” presented by Jorge Luis Borges in his short story “Tön, Uqbar, Orbis, Tertius”, an exercise in metafiction and world-building. Mirrors and encyclopaedias are important parts of this short story, as well as labyrinths: Tlön, one of the titular fictional worlds, “is a labyrinth built by men and destined to be solved by men”. In these fictional worlds imagined by Borges, “a book that does not include its counter-book is considered incomplete”. The flexibility of transdiegetic characters (including the player) and of diegetic levels allows for the existence of hidden levels within the “narrative labyrinth” of the game in which the fictional world is turned upside down. The games can assume different, often opposite meanings, and even be parodied and deconstructed from within.
18. In conclusion, the use of metalepsis in gēmu is rarely intended to create a critical distance in the audience. These popular examples show that they are commonly used to integrate the player into the fictional world and reinforce a feeling of complicitness, of being in on the joke and understanding the world and characters. Mediality and artifice are not obstacles for the suspension of disbelief but opportunities to increase “narrative complexity”, a formal, fictional and thematic sophistication (Pérez Latorre, 2015: 47). The medium of videogames seems to have a certain disregard for the idea of the fourth wall, just like Chinese theatre and kabuki did before, and gēmu characters and worlds fit naturally within a media-mix environment, defined by ubiquity and unspecific narrative levels. The commercial gēmu mentioned here break the fourth wall regularly without transgressing or negating the fictional potentialities of the medium. Instead, they use metaleptic strategies to expand their capacity for narrative uncertainty and complexity.

To recap:

1. The participatory and performative nature of videogames make this fourth wall flexible, and wide enough to include the extradiegetic position of the player within its confines,
2. Japanese games, or gēmu, break the fourth wall often (even in commercial productions) and through several strategies, which I describe here,
3. These ruptures refer to Japanese traditions and strategies such as Kabuki theatre or the contemporary notion of media mix, further reinforcing the naturalization of the diegetic divide,
4. Metalepsis in gēmu is generally not used to distance the player from the fiction but to bring her further into the ludofictional world and allow for greater narrative complexity.