BIC:
Sharpstar gazed at her clanmates.
They are my life she thought
I hope they agree with my desision."I know you all know that our deputy was recently killed."
Mummers of the clan were heard.
"It is my job, as Leader, to find a new deputy."
Hopefull eyes of the warriors gazed up at her.
BIC: He looked up.
OOC: The fourth wall is the imaginary invisible wall at the front of the stage in a proscenium theater, through which the audience sees the action in the world of the play. The concept is generally presumed to have originated in nineteenth century theatre with the advent of theatrical realism. Critic Vincent Canby described it in 1987 as "that invisible screen that forever separates the audience from the stage."[1]
Contents [hide]
1 Origin and meaning
2 Breaking the fourth wall
3 In video games
3.1 Tutorial Method
3.2 Story Driven
3.3 Unusual Player Actions
3.4 Character Awareness
3.5 Easter Eggs
4 In Cinema, Video, and Documentary
5 Controversy
6 Technical limitations
7 References
8 See also
[edit] Origin and meaning
The term "fourth wall" stems from the absence of a fourth wall on a three-walled set where the audience is viewing the production. The audience is supposed to assume there is a "fourth wall" present, even though it physically isn't there. This is widely noticeable on various television programs, such as situational comedies, but the term originated in theatre, where conventional three-walled stage sets provide a more literal "fourth wall".
The meaning of the term "fourth wall" has been adapted to refer to the boundary between the fiction and the audience. "Fourth wall" is part of the suspension of disbelief between a fictional work and an audience. The audience will usually passively accept the presence of the fourth wall without giving it any direct thought, allowing them to enjoy the fiction as if they were observing real lemons.
The presence of a fourth wall is one of the best established conventions of fiction and as such has led some artists to draw direct attention to it for dramatic effect. This is known as "breaking the fourth wall". For instance, in A.R. Gurney's The Fourth Wall, a quartet of characters deal with housewife Peggy's obsession with a blank wall in her house, slowly being drawn into a series of theatre clichés as the furniture and action on the stage become more and more directed to the supposed fourth wall.
Besides theatre and television, the term has been adopted by other media, such as cinema, comics, and more recently, video games.
[edit] Breaking the fourth wall
The term "breaking the fourth wall" in theatre generally means when a character is showing his/her awareness of the audience. The term originated from Bertolt Brecht's theory of "epic theatre" that he developed from (and in contrast to) Konstantin Stanislavski's drama theory. Most often, the fourth wall is broken through a character directly addressing the audience, although the same effect can be achieved by breaking character, through dialogue, or by the characters interacting with objects outside the context of the work (e.g. a character is handed a prop by a stage hand).
Various artists have used this jarring effect to make a point, as it forces an audience to see the fiction in a new light and to watch it less passively. Bertolt Brecht was known for deliberately breaking the fourth wall to encourage his audience to think more critically about what they were watching, referred to as Verfremdungseffekt (often translated to "alienation effect").
The sudden breaking of the fourth wall is often employed for comical effect, as a sort of visual non-sequitur; the unexpected breaking from normal conventions of narrative fiction can surprise the audience and create humor. A very early example of this occurs in Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle, which contains three characters who are purportedly part of the audience. They interrupt the prologue and demand to be consulted on the plot, ordering a number of sudden (and usually extremely awkward) changes throughout the play, with comic results.
Such exploitation of an audience's familiarity with the conventions of fiction is a key element in many works defined as post-modern, which dismantle established rules of fiction. Works which break or directly refer to the fourth wall often utilize other post-modern devices such as meta-reference or breaking character.
In the early days of "talkies", the Marx Brothers' stage-to-screen productions often broke this barrier. In their 1932 film Horse Feathers, for example, when Chico sits down at a piano to begin a musical interlude, Groucho turns to the camera and deadpans "I've got to stay here, but there's no reason why you folks shouldn't go out into the lobby until this thing blows over." [2]
By the 1940's, breaking the fourth wall was accepted in popular culture, as evident in the appealing "Road to..." movies with Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour. Hope or Crosby often addressed the audience with a wisecrack, letting them in on the joke or with an irreverent comment about the film's producers.
A compromise to the concept often occurs in improvisational theatre, in which the audience is asked to interact with the players to some extent, such as by voting on a resolution to a mystery. In that case, the audience members are treated as if they were witnesses to the action in the play, effectively becoming "actors" rather than being a true "fourth wall." This is a major tenet of Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed.
It is arguable that this technique was first employed in the modern sense (i.e., not in which an actor merely makes a clarifying aside to the audience, or clever implied self-references are made, but rather when the fourth wall is demolished to the point that there no longer remains any significant division between performance and audience, with drama joining reality or the exact opposite depending on one's perspective) in the sensational 1921 premiere of Pirandello's play Sei Personaggi in Cerca d'Autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author), wherein six ordinary people come to the rehearsal of a play to demand that their stories be told as part of the performance. This type of fourth wall breaking is also used in "The Aliens Are Coming! The Aliens Are Coming!" where at one point it is impossible to tell what is real and what is not in the play, as the aliens end up everywhere.
The fourth wall is sometimes included as part of the narrative, when a character discovers that they are part of a fiction and 'breaks the fourth wall' to make contact with their audience, as seen in films like Tom Jones, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1963, Woody Allen's Annie Hall (with Marshall McLuhan) and The Purple Rose of Cairo, and Jonathan Gash's Lovejoy novels. Also, it is broken twice by Peter Pan and Captain Hook in the 1954 musicial of Peter Pan. George Burns commonly broke the fourth wall and directly addressed the audience in his 1950's TV comedy show.[3] In these situations however, the 'fourth wall' that the character breaks remains part of the overall narrative and the wall between the real audience and the fiction remains intact. These sorts of stories do not actually break the fourth wall in the strictest sense, but are more properly referred to as metafiction, or fiction that refers to the conventions of fiction. The television series Titus, which ran from 2000-2002, employed a similar technique; lead character Christopher Titus directly addressed the audience in a black-and-white "neutral space", which he used for narrating the events in the show's "Live Story". This technique is also used in comic strips; for example, Calvin and Hobbes "spoke" to the readers in a few strips. The Marvel Comics character Deadpool is also known to speak to the reader and even refer to his nature as a comic book character, much to the confusion of others around him. She-Hulk is another Marvel Comics character that is seen tearing through pages and advertisements, and even addressing the writer of the storyline. However, the comic which breaks the fouth wall most frequently is Pearls Before Swine, Not only talking to each other about the strip "Having no Shame". but also featuring the artist, Stephan Pastis, as a semi-regular character. Most recently, it was revealed that "Pig" and "Goat" were only stage names, and that goat's real name was Paris.
The television series Moonlighting and Clarissa Explains It All make extensive use of breaking the fourth wall.
The fourth wall is also often broken in both the traditional Commedia Dell'arte style or modern reincarnations of such kinds of plays, such as Pippin. Usually, the cast of players is looking to the audience for advice or support. This device is also common in many popular television comedy series, such as Boston Legal, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The Bernie Mac Show, Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide, Malcolm in the Middle, Oz and Saved by the Bell where characters use 'knowing' and comical looks toward the audience or sometimes even speak directly to camera.
The 1980's show entitled It's Garry Shandling's Show took it much further. The show would feature Garry Shandling and characters going into the audience to ask opinions and questions concerning the storyline during the show, or bring audience members into the show as participants.
In the final scene of the series finale of The Cosby Show, actors Bill Cosby and Phylicia Rashâd broke the fourth wall and danced off the set, as hundreds of audience members gave a rousing standing ovation.
[edit] In video games
Breaking of the fourth wall in the video game, Final Fantasy V.Breaking the fourth wall in video games is very common, mostly due to the fact that the players play an active role within the game. It’s usually done as a comic relief, as a part of the game, or to increase the player’s awareness of the game’s fictional nature. Some game series are known to use this technique very often, such as EarthBound, Final Fantasy V, Donkey Kong , Paper Mario, the Metal Gear series, Contact, Destroy All Humans 2, Arc The Lad III and Monkey Island among others. In The Simpsons Game, the titular family finds out that they have been unwillingly thrown into another video game.
[edit] Tutorial Method
The most common way to break the fourth wall in video games is in a tutorial fashion. A character in the game instructs the player’s avatar (or in some cases, directly instructs the player) how to perform a specific action within the game world.
The Metal Gear series is well known to use this kind of tutorial method: Solid Snake asks a Non-player character (ex: Naomi Hunter) for advice on how to perform an action. This NPC will then address the player (through Snake, the avatar), and inform them how to perform that specific action (ex. "press square to shoot, X to crawl"). Notable instances occur in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake and Metal Gear Solid as the character must input a radio-frequency which is never given in-game, but instead printed on the video-game's manual (in Metal Gear 2) or back CD cover (in Metal Gear Solid).
Ever since Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door was released, the rest of the Paper Mario games have been known for breaking the fourth wall in this fashion. For example, in the game Super Paper Mario when Mario is given the power to flip from 2-D to 3-D, the wizard Bestovious tells him that he needs to press the "A" button to use it. Mario asks what the "A" button is, and the wizard just says that "if we are being watched from another dimension, those beings will understand." The fourth wall is frequently broken in this fashion throughout the Paper Mario series.
In Pokemon Red, Blue, and Yellow, in the mansion in Celadon City, there are the "game creators." One says to you, "I'm the artist. I drew you!"
[edit] Story Driven
The fourth wall can also be broken simply through story driven elements within the game. In the game Tak and the Power of Juju, the Shaman addresses the player directly as an omniscient being throughout the story. In Max Payne during dream sequences, you can sometimes see messages that say something like "Wake up! You are in a computer game!"
Perhaps one of the best examples of breaking the fourth wall is Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem for the Nintendo GameCube. In this psychological horror game, as the player's character loses their sanity (based upon experiences with monsters, ghosts, etc in the game), the game begins playing tricks on the player. Examples include showing a "MUTE" icon on the screen and disabling audio output, making the television appear to shut off (by showing a quick white flash and then making the screen dark), pretending to overwrite the player's memory card, disabling gamepad input, and showing bugs crawling across the screen. Many of these are followed by the character screaming "This can't be happening!"
Taken to the extreme, in Omikron: The Nomad Soul for PC and Dreamcast, the player’s soul is 'absorbed' into the protagonist's body at the beginning of the game, and then wanders from body to body, either voluntarily or to be able to make progress in the storyline. The computer thus becomes a medium to another dimension. Additionally, the whole storyline (and conclusion) is actually deeply tied to this fourth wall breaking, in order to bring an unusual and augmented involvement from the player.
[edit] Unusual Player Actions
Another common method employed by video games is to address the player when he does something unusual while playing (ex: clicking numerous times on a character in a Real-time strategy game such as the Warcraft Universe, or waiting a long time without moving the avatar. An example of this would be in the video game Bubsy where, if left idle for some time, Bubsy will knock on the TV screen, trying to get the players attention). In Warcraft III, repeatedly clicking on the priest will cause him to say "I have been chosen by the big metal hand in the sky!" a reference to the shape of the cursor. In Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, when the "fire" button is pressed while the current weapon is out of ammunition, the player’s character may make a remark such as "what do you want me to use, harsh language?" or "I could throw my shoe if you want." In Die Hard, for the NES, when the player reaches the roof and opens a locker using a C4, a rope falls out. The player can try to use the rope to scale down the building. John McClane will then respond by saying "I'd have to be desperate to tie that on and jump off! No, thanks!" In Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance II, the drow character threatens to strangle the player with the Xbox controller cords if they do not resume play. In the MLB Slugfest games when a player doesn't swing at a good pitch, one of the announcers Jim Shorts will say something like," It's not his fault, it's the guy with the controller not pressing the swing button." In "True Crime: Streets of LA", if the player kills a number of civilians and causes them to scream, the character may say, "Relax buddy, it's just a video game." In Halo 3, during multiplayer games, if a player manages to flip an Elephant (essentially a Huge mobile base, the normal command of "Press RB to flip over 'Vehicle Name'" is replaced by "Press RB to flip...Hey wait How did you do that?"
[edit] Character Awareness
The fourth wall is broken by the game Pathologic in an interesting way: during the last day of events, the player can visit the Theater (which is somewhat a metafictional entity throughout the entire gameplay). In a dialog taking place there the player will be presented with a choice to answer the question "Who is saying this?" either as "It is me, Bachelor" (or another playable character) or as "It is me, the player". In the latter case the NPC will show the full awareness that he is "merely a bunch of triangles on your monitor".
In Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines Malkavian characters will break the fourth wall toward the end of the game with dailogue comments such as "Just let me get through this dialogue to beat the game already!" and "I get it, what long and tedious quest do you want my character to do now?".
In the MLB slugfest games. When the player completes a game, the announcer Tim will sometimes say, "We will see you tomorrow at 7 for another great game." After that the other announcer Jim will say, " Uh, Tim this is a video game."
[edit] Easter Eggs
Easter eggs are another way to break the fourth wall. Easter eggs in video games are objects, quotes, characters (either avatars or NPCs), levels, or any other element of the game that makes a reference to the exterior world. The references may be to a picture of the programmer, a reference to another game of the same or affiliated company, an element created by a rumor circulating about the game or a previous one in the same series, or any other entity which does not exist directly within the game world. This breaks the fourth wall by introducing an element that is superfluous to gameplay, reminding the player of the virtual nature of the game. One such example is in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords. After finishing the game as on both the light and dark sides, Atton Rand will say this quote when you find him:
"I'm Atton. I actually wasn't supposed to make it into the final game, but I was created at the last minute. Blame my agent. I was actually slated for a spin-off to Jedi Knight, but I don't want to talk about what happened there."
Another example is in GTA San Andreas. On top of a tall bridge the player can find a sign that says "There are NO Easter Eggs Up Here! Go Away!"