[arg_discuss] TINAG, the Curtain, and the 4th Wall

[David Fono]

Hey guys,

I feel like it's my civic duty to point out that we should probably  
be using the term "fourth wall" in a lot of the places we're using  
"curtain."

It's a bit of a tricky distinction, but it's pretty much the same one  
that Andrea astutely made between TINAG as immersion and TINAG as  
information hiding.  The fourth wall refers to the illusion by which  
the characters in a fiction appear to inhabit an actual world of  
their own -- to break the fourth wall is to make the audience realize  
they're observing actors in a crafted work. The curtain refers to  
something far more specific.

I'm not trying to be pedantic, I mention it because I think that  
using the terminology from other genres illuminates some interesting  
contrasts. For one, it's interesting to note that almost nowhere else  
is the idea of a curtain around creator's identities considered to be  
useful for maintaining the fourth wall. There are few people who  
would question that a good film, play, book or videogame can be  
exceptionally immersive. But it's relatively unheard of for there to  
be a curtain around these works. What is it about ARGs that makes the  
curtain seem like such a big deal? You might say part of genre's  
raison d'etre is to push the very boundaries of immersion, but I  
think we can agree that a great many other works have similar aims.  
And even if this is a valid argument, do we really think that  
heightened immersion ought to be the primary ambition of ARGs?

This brings to me to my second reason for bringing up the fourth wall  
-- there is a rich existing discourse on how and why it's broken.  
Breaking the fourth wall is frequently used as a technique to  
heighten the audience's critical awareness (Bertolt Brecht used the  
trick extensively to provoke social and political inquiry.) Why can't  
an ARG do the same thing? (It would be really interesting to look at  
WWO in this context and compare it to Brecht's approach, given that  
WWO adhered to TINAG.) Breaking the fourth wall is also frequently  
done to produce a comic effect -- but I haven't seen this done in an  
ARG yet. Why not? (By the way, where's the ARG that's about people  
making an ARG? (NB: If you use this idea, please let me collaborate!))

It's also interesting to note that with the jump to interactive forms  
of fiction (i.e. videogames), breaks in the fourth wall have become  
increasingly frequent. Virtually every videogame contains some nudge  
or wink directed at the player as an extra-diagetic entity. It also  
seems to me that an increasingly info-saturated, hyper-cynical  
audience expects a similarly high level of self-awareness from their  
fiction -- The Simpsons, Family Guy, etc. are nothing if not repeated  
exercises in breaking the fourth wall. Yet amongst all this, ARGs  
have emerged with an incredibly distinct counter-trend, where  
maintaining the fourth wall at all costs in seen as so important that  
we have debates about it. What does this say about ARGs, and where  
they come from?

BTW, Eternal Darkness was freakin' awesome!

david


On Sep 19, 2007, at 10:00 PM, arg_discuss-request at igda.org wrote:


> The point of Eternal Darkness' "sanity effects" was to show that  

> reality was

> breaking down for your character. In some cases they did this by  

> trying to

> directly manipulate the *player*--with the "volume" going down, the  

> BSoD...

> One particularly cruel effect made it look like your save files  

> were being

> deleted. The thing is, I'm still on the fence about whether these were

> *effective*...Memorable, yes, in the sense of "I can't believe that  

> game

> actually did that"; but given that the game was trying to evoke a  

> horrible

> *world*, was it really worth it to break the "curtain" and remind  

> the player

> it was only a game? Hmmm...