Am I Ludonarrative dissonance?

 No, Brother. We are Ludonarrative- and dissonant!

Never teach a big word to a community of pseudo-intellectuals, you'll just be feeding fuel to their narcissism-engine. Just like with any term or concept, the very second that the term starts to float around the snotty-nosed of the industry it melts into the vernacular of the common tongue, thrown about with as much pretentious gusto as a Latin major loves to regurgitate pithy witticism in a dead tongue. The very term of 'Ludonarrative dissonance' itself is a 2007 coined phrase that just squeezes down a lengthy concept that every one who plays games is already decently familiar with; but of course with simplifications eventually comes the dissolution of the original meaning, tainting the original purpose. Suddenly if you want to critique anything that slightly relates to the idea, you're throwing the shiny word about like a club, killing any potential dialogue with a rambunctious play at intellectual superiority.

So in terms of a laymen, like myself; what the heck is Ludonarrative dissonance? Well it's fairly simple if you break it down. Ludus, Latin for 'Play'- Hideo Kojima traced the same etymology on his 'Ludens' mascot for Kojima Productions. Narrative- relation to the story. And 'Dissonance'; indicating a conflict which prevents the two sides from meeting. 'Ludonarrative dissonance' thus refers to inconsistencies between the gameplay and storytelling of a video game which creates an environment where one aspect doesn't quite compliment or shake hands with the other. The example which is always used is a game wherein you play a snappy wise-cracking happy-go-lucky hero man, like 'Uncharted', only to end up driven to acts of mass murder and gunfights throughout the gameplay which should, if we're being real here, probably have some sort of psychological effect on the witty man. Or at the very least prelude to some sort of latent psychopathy that the game has yet to explore. Hence the dissonance.

It is a common 'problem', if you choose to perceive it as such, but in practise the very ideal of ludonarrative dissonance only drives a wedge into total story immersion in truly egregious circumstances. The cast of Grand Theft Auto V, for example, may be largely level-headed and non-psychotic before the player gets ahold of them; (or rather, 2/3 of them are non-psychotic) but the game itself doesn't force players to act like crazy people, those are choices made by the player in their own free time. This could still be seen as an example of ludonarrative dissonance, of course, but in a more minor fashion and only on a very surface level if you choose not to really examine the characters you play as. Because in general Rockstar are actually very proficient at writing their characters smothered in so many flaws and hypocritical moral compunctions that there's very few of them you can picture accidentally running over a whole side walk and not managing to twist the incident in their heads into not making them the worst person in the world through tortured perspectives. I think John Marston from Red Dead Redemption 1 is perhaps the only character lacking in the hypocritical shield that protects him from potential 'dissonance', because his whole story is designed to be his redemption journey from the thug he was into a reformed avenging angel literally killing his past to make up for it. Yet still the player could go nuts and murder a whole covenant of nuns. (Not that I ever did that. My dad on the otherhand...)

Most of the examples that I do see bought up as poster-children for this concept quite often rub me the wrong way too. The new Tomb Raider games are apparently a beacon for 'Ludonarrative Dissonance' accusations, despite the fact that these games are specifically written to address this side of the storytelling. Lara is put up against hardships that we follow her with throughout the first act, from being shipwrecked on an island, pulling jagged rocks out of her stomach and being forced to kill a deer for sustenance leading up to the first moment she has to actually kill someone in a desperate struggle for self defence. The game does as good of a job as it can, without sacrificing momentum of the plot, to portray the 'hardening' of Lara to justify the intense combat she is thrown up against later, and the writers even touch on the psychological scars of that entire game in the prelude to the next one, which is more than most any other game out there even thinks to do. But perhaps that's just not enough for some critics who waggle their fingers at the fact that Lara doesn't burst down into vomitus tears after every combat encounter, as she tries to weigh up the value of her own life against that of the murderous pirate rapists that she's killing. (Maybe that would be their ideal 'Ludonarrative synch up' game!)

Doing the best to balance the wants of the game and the wants of the narrative is how one deftly combats both sides of this ludonarrative issue; and yes, perhaps the equation does not always line up in a perfectly neat bow where we see a perfect psychological breakdown, medically vetted, detailing how Lara enters the mental state of being ready to kill her way to survival. But the groundwork is laid there, Crystal Dynamics did provide a narrative of the 'hardening' of Lara to justify the lives she takes, and it's a bit galling for one of the only games that really tries to be narratively aware get dragged down and disparaged as the poster child for wanton narrative dissonance. It's as if the attempt itself is what makes them a target of questionable dissemination from the types of people who only kinda get what the concept means and is looking for a example case they don't have to think too hard about. It's screwed up.

Another curiosity I saw, rather recently in fact, was the conflation of video-game scaled narrative accomplishment as itself a dinner bell for the 'ludonarrative dissonance' sharks. Specifically I saw the argument that Cal Kestis, protagonist of 'Jedi: Fallen Order', is a posterboy for this sort of dissonant story writing because of the fact that Cal refers to himself as a 'good guy Jedi' despite killing hundreds of Stormtroopers throughout the course of the game. Now, this one I really had to scratch my head at, because as far as I'm aware within the wider lore of every Star Wars film and comic I've ever read, it's never been considered morally dubious or questionable to kill a Stormtrooper. The fascistic military tyrants placing their boot on the throat of the Galaxy? No, they've happily and handily been slain by ordinary people, rebel outfits and Jedi Knights (do try and remember that Jedi serve as actual 'Knights' in the galaxy, not pacifistic 'Air Bender' monks) all the time without the question of if someone is still a 'good person' on the otherend.

Which means the only distinction between how the movies and books depict actions and how the game depicts them, is the scaling of just how many Stormtroopers Cal slays through the natural act of scaling that video games, as a much longer form of entertainment, are beholden to commit to. Cal has probably on-screen murdered more Stormtroopers than any other character in the films or TV aside from, perhaps, Luke Skywalker when he blew up the Death Star. So does that scale in itself invite in questions of moral cracking, enough to summon accusations of 'ludonarrative dissonance'? This speaks again to my prevailing theme of the disintegrating meaning of the term as it's passed from pseudointellectuals making bad examples to causal luddites extrapolating upon misnomers. As the commonly held general belief is that killing is wrong, the umbrella application of that general standard confers wrongdoing into all forms of fiction, regardless of context, twisting all killing into an equal unjustifiable 'murders'. Thus, through the inevitable scale of accomplishment in near all video games, this perspective should turn every video game protagonist into a mass murderer. Thus any game where you don't play as a mass murderer is ludonarratively dissonant, right?

I hope you can start to see the fallacy in this way of characterising what was original coined as a pithy summation of wanting narrative trends in evaluation of Bioshock, one of the most narratively confronting games that had existed in gaming up to that point. Bioshock, a game which went out of it's way to ask you, the player, why is it that you do the things you do. It's fitting then, that a opinion on the game should coin a term about the examination between gameplay and context, but sad that the meaning and relevance of that discussion would become watered down and meaningless over the years. Consider this my application in the 'stop using Ludonarrative Dissonance freely without understanding it's meaning' defence fund. And maybe, if you have a point that only sounds firm if you phrase it with big compound words that sound impressive on their own, maybe your point isn't so firm as you think. Maybe you should analyse the context a little harder- lest you start falling victim to Fabulanarrative Dissonance! 

Story twists

What a Twist

This is a hard topic to talk about without major spoiler tags thrown about everywhere. You know, unless I want to do this without examples and we all know I'm physically incapable of that! But before we get into any of that, shall we pointlessly ponder about the exact definition of what a twist even is? I think we shall... By my reckoning, a 'Twist' refers to a moment within the story wherein the circumstances of the narrative shift or are evolved by a revelation that typically happens towards the end of the story. Yes, that definition most certainly is not a catch-all but it sufficiently sums up the two key points that a 'Twist' must hit in order to be effective and/or worthwhile in my opinion. It should evolve the circumstance on the basis of a revelation. Of course, one might add that an exceptional twist should be based on a revelation that has been hinted out throughout the story, but I want to keep things as simple as possible today.

Twists as a narrative construct have existed in some form or other long enough to have no discernible origin point, per se, but they did undergo something of an explosion in pop culture that I always find fun to look at. In the ever repetitive world of Hollywood, there was a period around the early 2000's where the copy-paste recipe for every tired b-movie had the 'big twist' ingredient thrown into it. A lot of folk blame this on the rise, success, and subsequent downfall, of M.Night Shyamalan's Twist-centric approach to film making, but I argue this was the sort of direction the industry was heading towards anyway. Films of the time all relied on word of mouth and FOMO to sell tickets, and so if you couldn't make a good movie then you could at least throw some crazy twist in there so that people had to see the thing or risk being alienated in their movie-friends groups. (At least that's my theory as to what happened.) Whatever the case, the consequence is that the film market became oversaturated with lazy, ill-convinced plots with terrible twist endings that, more often than not, completely killed the stakes and ruined the movie. (Look at what happened to the Horror genre around this time for an idea of what I mean.) Thus the whole concept developed a bit of a bad reputation.

This never really touched the gaming world all that hard, and I'd imagine that was down to the fact that even in the early 2000's storytelling was not a priority for the majority of games out there, so storytelling fads weren't even considered. Developers of the time was rightly focused on just making the game work and be fun, no time to care about if the narrative was well cooked. (Who plays games for narrative anyway?) And as it just so happens, that reticence to jump into stories meant that those titles that did tended to place more emphasis on narrative crafting because the developers were confident and usually knew what what they were doing. As such, in the period between 2000 and 2010 the wider gaming market was hit by two games with powerful twists that, I'd argue, completely changed how video game storytelling was done on the back of their successes. And I'm about to talk about the both of them without ruining too much, but spoiler warning anyway.

Firstly, in 2002 a legendary studio called Bioware released one of, in not the, finest game they'd ever craft in 'Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic'. It was based on a storied franchise and accompanied by a sublime Dark Horse comic run, framing the world of Star Wars from a vantage of practically unlimited creative freedom. (Something the series would literally never see again.) Bioware leveraged this story to tell another one of their signature tales of morality, destiny and ancient threats, (Seriously, those three bullet points describe so many early Bioware games it's not even funny.) but I'd argue it was in the twist that Bioware truly managed to put their mark on gaming storytelling forever.

In terms of writing, the moment itself is not that unique; it's telegraphed quite a bit and there's even a little excessive back-and-forth in the scene before the big moment that is supposed to build tension but just comes across as unnecessarily annoying. (Seriously Carth, why not just freakin' say it? Tell the class what's upsetting you, my man!) But the strength of the moment is established by the sheer immersive potential of the medium of gaming; we'd seen these types of twists before, but never executed so well in a gaming environment and that elevated things. This was one of the first times that I, at least, saw how the gaming could do more than just mimic movie storytelling, it could eclipse those stories by virtue of its very nature. This one moment showcased the power of a twist in the world of gaming.

But then there was one title which took that to a whole new extreme, and of course I'm talking about Irrational Games' Bioshock. That was a title helmed by a legendary director and driven by a visionary team into the construction of a surreal and sublime game world unlike any that has ever been seen before. With that world they told a narrative with another industry changing twist, only this one reached a step above even the last I discussed. Bioshock's huge twist lays all of it's weight upon it's inherent identity as a 'game' and the expectations that establishes. In other words, the team leveraged the factors that made gaming unique to other forms of media in order to subvert audience expectations in a manner that just plain could not be replicated in film, on TV or in a book. What they did was transformative, inspired and groundbreaking; and they presented it neatly in the glorified package of a twist.

Of course, that isn't to that there isn't the odd narrative game that squanders or misuses twists to a disappointing degree. Indeed, with the rise of interactive storytelling there has appeared a great many more b-movie-style twist moments that feel shoehorned or lazy. (Again, mostly in horror.) Look at Supermassive games, for instance, all of their games have at least one crappy twist. (Except, maybe, Until Dawn.) 'Man of Medan' had the over-telegraphed 'the real evil' twist, the Inpatient had some inconsequential revelations that were presented in the form of a twist and Hidden Agenda hit players with the super twist that (Super spoiler) the killer was exactly who you thought it was all along. (Seriously, what a lame mystery.) Perhaps that's just the natural consequence of more narrative games coming along to shake things up, but then Telltale proved that great storytelling can be achieved without relying on such gimmicks. (Although the penultimate finale of Walking Dead Season 1 did have quite the twist/cliffhanger, I will admit.)

As a literary device I have no quarrel with the 'Twist', but I feel it is a powerful tool that is all to often misused. At the end of the day, if I had to choose, I would rather that it was a retired trend of storytelling then watch David Cage literally neuter his own plotlines again with them. (I'm looking at that Alice Twist from Detroit: Become Human. Who in their right mind let him dumb down the plot like that? It's maddening!) Perhaps if that were the case, it would start to reinforce more positive storytelling habits, like the presentation of meaningful stakes and impetuses that don't rely on a third act shake-up to be interesting. Although knowing folk, they'd probably find something even stupider to replace crappy twists. It's a lost cause.

This is getting out of hand...

Now there are two of them!

As of late I have been in a state of perpetual hype due to the impending announcement of the Resident Evil 3 remake. I positively adored the RE2:Remake, ship it for Ultimate game of the year, and am fully ready to commit to this next game before I've even seen a trailer. I'm so enamoured with the concept, in fact, that I'm not even too annoyed to find out that we will likely not be seeing it debut at the Game Awards like we originally thought, but will instead have to wait until 'Jump Festa 2020', which is a couple of days before Christmas. (I can still make the 'early Christmas' joke.) And I'm only slightly aggrieved at how that change of plans will likely mean that the first reveal we get of that game will be purely in Japanese, meaning we won't get to hear Jill's new voice actor until the international re-release. Or the fact that I had an entire slate of blogs planned dependant on my RE:3 coverage which I expected to start next week. (I'm not bitter I swear.)

Although, from disappointment spawns opportunity as it would appear that one of my deepest desires has been answered in the from of a rumor that was officially confirmed by 2K yesterday via surprise tweet. "Today, 2K announced the founding of Cloud Chamber, its newest development studio. This team of storytellers has begun work on the next iteration of the acclaimed Bioshock franchise, which will be in development for the next several years." Oh yeah, that's right. After all these years, rumor upon rumor have finally crumbled away to reveal once and for all that the Bioshock franchise is not, in fact, as dead as we were all once led to believe. And now I have two unbelievably exciting series revivals to live for whereas last month I had none, ain't life grand?

For those who never had the pleasure, Bioshock is one of the franchises that absolutely took the gaming landscape by storm when it landed back in 2007. Irrational Games' FPS survival horror-esque hybrid seemed to defy everyone's initial expectation and prove to be a timeless video game classic. Acting as a spiritual successor to 1999's 'System Shock 2', Bioshock borrowed the one-to-one perspective, haunting atmosphere and twisting narrative of that title and polished it to a mirror shine masterpiece. Bioshock introduced everyone to the underwater world of Rapture, an art-deco objectivist paradise locked under the Atlantic ocean and doomed to become a watery tomb for it's inhabitants. The player is thrust into this world and expected to navigate it's depths, surviving the scavengers that feed off the city's bones and uncovering it's secrets until they discover the real truth behind it all.

Bioshock was a game that dragged people in with mystery, philosophy and style, just as Andrew Ryan himself would have, before punching players in the gut with one of the most poignant questions ever asked in a video game narrative, one that still rings to this day. Ever since then the series has stood for lofty ideas and incredible imagination as the scope of the vision has shifted throughout the years. Bioshock 2 bought players back to the City of Rapture but from a predominately different perspective, from the eyes of the working class that made the city run. Perhaps that game didn't have as much to say, but it was still as evocative and stunning as this series always, inexplicably, is. Bioshock Infinite bought that series screaming out of the Atlantic ocean and into the sky to the city of Columbia, through a project that was dripping in ambition. (Some would argue more ambition then the team could handle.) But whatever your opinions on the execution of that particular game, or the way it made concessions on some of it's core themes in order to remain feasible-to-make, it was still a brilliant entry that introduced one of the most iconic video game characters of all time.

After Infinite's 'Burial at Sea' DLC, however, things seemed to go south for the Bioshock brand. Irrational Games ended up shuttering their doors and Ken Levine, the visionary director credited with bringing much of Bioshock to life, moved on from gaming in order to try his hands at other entertainment pursuits. Since then the only real news we heard about this series was a few years back when a group of ex-Irrational developers banded together to form a studio and create a game which looked to be some sort of spiritual successor to Bioshock. That ended up fizzling out, however, and since then the franchise has appeared to be well and truly dead. But appearances, it seems, can be deceiving.

As soon as this announcement was made, Kotaku's Jason Schrier put together an 'I told you so' article wherein he laid out the fact that this title isn't exactly news, and in fact it was in development for a number of years. (I suppose now 2K are liking what they see enough to come out and formally announce the project.) Apparently, before this new studio 'Cloud Chamber' was officially unveiled today to be heading this project, 2K had been outsourcing the bulk of Bioshock 4 (codenamed: Parkside) to a studio called 'Certain Affinity', who are best known for providing additional support for Call of Duty and Halo development teams.

This was quite the break for Certain Affinity, as their jobs had entirely been on contracting up until now, but it seems that 2K either didn't like the rate of progress or wanted to put more effort behind the title, as they bought it in-house and rebooted the title in the process. This was in 2016, and since then the project has been quietly picking up folk from various 2K projects, including a few who worked in 'Hanger 13', the team that put out Mafia 3. (Let's hope that game isn't any indication as to their talent.) Parkside's team has been operating in heavy secrecy ever since and, despite getting outed in a report in April 2018, managed to avoid officially announcing the project until the press release yesterday.

If 2K are prepared to announce that the next Bioshock game is alive and under active development, even if it's not due for 'several years', it means that they are ready to go into full production, and that is exciting. Bioshock has never been a name that's stood for low-effort releases at any point in time, this has been a franchise that has been defined my ambition, innovation, and even a little bit of envelope-pushing when needed. And in a gaming age that is slowly beginning to welcome back many of it's storied FPS franchises for triumphant returns, (See: Deus Ex, Doom and Wolfenstien) I think there couldn't be a better time for the grandfather of the heartstopping plot-twist to make a return finally after all these years.

That being said, today's announcement was just that: an announcement and nothing more. So far we have no vestige of an idea of where this title will go in regards to story, themes, setting or even genre. (This could be a tactical resource management game for all we know.) We also have no idea who 2K has got manning this project from a creative angle, which is an important position to fill considering how influential Ken Levine was to the creation of both Rapture and Colombia, two of gaming's most iconic locations. Similarly, we cannot be sure whether or not this title will attempt to continue the 'A tower, a city, and a girl' formula of the first three games or go somewhere completely different with it all. (Personally I find myself desperately torn between the desire for something different and eagerness to see what can be done with the fertile land that has already been tilled.)

Whatever ends up happening I can speak to one truth, fans are absolutely ecstatic about the proposition of a new Bioshock and will likely happily digest anything that 2K decide to throw their way. (Unless it ends up being a live-service, guys, we may be desperate but we still have principles!) I cannot accurately convey how much the Bioshock franchise means to me, there are only two other games that have truly touched/effected me more and I'm so happy to hear that we might get a chance to see it again someday. Now we just have to see if the 2K of today can assemble a team with what it takes to do the title justice, and how the concept will evolve and morph to fit the mold of modern game development. "Constants and variables", as she says.

Breaking the Fourth Wall

This one's for the Audience

In typical viewing media there are three metaphorical walls. The three surrounding the character that exist within their world, and the fourth which exists only for the audience to peek in. A transparent glass wall that separates the world of fiction from our own. This fragile separation keeps our viewing experience rationalized as it means we witness without being noticed, the characters play their parts without ever realizing they are in a play. But what happens when things don't play out like that? What happens when the characters break that cardinal rule of cinema and look directly into the camera? Is it anarchy? Does the fabric of space time collapse around us? Well no... we usually just get an overdone joke.

A significant degree of 'Modern' story telling in film, TV and now games, have followed the trend of traditional art (one century late) and gone 'Meta'. That is to say, they often like breaching the metaphysical barrier between fiction and reality and acknowledge that they are in a performance. At first this was a little bit quaint, a scandalous break from the norm that gave the viewers a forbidden look behind the curtain. That sort of shared secret between the audience and the character could even become engrossing as they wrap you up in their world by acknowledging your own. But over exposure, as always, as sullied this charming gimmick and turned in into a sour and predictable move. Such to the point that only the quirky (lazy comedy movies) and the committed (Deadpool) still stick to the formula. Even games have given up on this cliche for the most part, however there was a time when it was all over the metaphorical shop of gaming, and I want to approach that today.

Seeing as how I already mentioned already, I might as well start with Deadpool. Not the movie version starring Ryan Reynolds, but the Video game starring Nolan North. (Good lord, both their names are alliterative. They belong in comic books!) Deadpool is a character built around one simple premise: he knows that he is in a comic book and he doesn't care. That has carried over to every piece of media to which Wade had emigrated to and it means the game is inter-cut with many instances of Wade breaking the Fourth wall. Heck, the entire story is driven around the premise of Wade struggling to make Deadpool game after getting his propositions cancelled by the studio and firing his prospective voice actor (Nolan North, obviously.) What follows is a wacky affair in which Wade chases down some vague threat whilst, every now and then, making a snide remark to the camera or even shifting his own reality to fit to some joke. He even personally makes the final fight 10 times harder in order to make it more climatic by cloning the boss. (Sounds more like the actions of a really annoying lead designer, honestly.)

Metal Gear Solid, (ding-ding-ding. I've exceeded my Metal Gear quota for the week!) featured one particularly endearing trait wherein the series would occasionally acknowledges it's own existence for little moments of "Wait, did you notice that?" Metal Gear Solid 2 has that moment when Campbell's AI starts going haywire and he directly informs Raiden that he has been playing the game too long and should turn it off immediately. Metal Gear Solid Ground Zeroes has the level in which you re-enact scenes from the original Metal Gear and get your game infected with the classic 'FOX-die' virus only to have the actual Fox Engine (The proprietary engine made for the game) save you, And then there were those off-the-cuff moments throughout the game wherein characters would teach you how to play the game by actually saying things like "Press the Action button." (That always annoyed me, truth me told.) But the classic Fourth wall break would have to go make to Metal Gear Solid 1 during the fight with the iconic Metal Gear villain; Psycho Mantis. Things start off with Mantis 'reading your mind' (scanning your memory card) and then commenting on games that you like to play. (Spooky!) They come to a head, however, mid-way through the fight once Mantis starts dodging all of your moves instinctively. Calling for back-up reveals that Mantis is once again 'reading you mind' and the only way to shake him off is to replug your controller into the second game port. (You can see why they don't try cool tricks like that nowadays)

Borderlands 2 is primarily a comedic game at heart, so it makes sense that the team would be a little bit flippant when it comes to creating a solid and believable world. That being said, Borderlands has managed to only subtly prod at the fourth Wall throughout all of it games, but never go the whole hog and shatter the thing. One of my favourite moments for this is when Scooter sends the vault hunters off to bring power to a small settlement, which can be achieved through the acting of clearing monster infested pumps. He commends you for fixing the first pump without prompt and then comments about how weird it was that he knew the task was done the second you did it. (A subtle nod to the same logic fallacy that affects all games with silent protagonists.) The best, however, comes from 'Tales from the Borderland' in a scene wherein the protagonist Rhys is shocked by the fact that he has the consciousness of the previous game's antagonist, Handsome Jack, inside of his cranium. (I guess Cyberpunk was taking notes for this scene.) Handsome Jack plays around with Rhys by threatening to overload his neurons before laughing it off by saying he can't do that. He's still tickled by his ability to  terrify Rhys and, in Telltale game's style, a little prompt pops up in the corner stating 'Handsome Jack will remember that.' By chance, Jack finds himself noticing the little prompt and points to it saying "What the hell?" before it disappears and the scene goes on unabashed.

Bioshock isn't the kind of game that one would usually equate with being 'fourth wall breaking', and that's because it isn't... In the traditional sense. Whilst Bioshock is both a sober and satirical look at a twisted society driven by extremest socialist ideals, it doesn't take much to see how the game aims at video game culture as well, especially in it's twist. Now, I know that the game has been out for over a decade now, but seeing as how the twist itself is one of the best in gaming history I will dance around it here. (Look it up if you really want to know. Or better yet, play the game.) But safe to say, 'that twist' is a direct comment on the way that games incentivize the player by forcing them to do tasks for which the player is not in control. Even when presented with a branching RPG narrative, there are still restrictions to your actions at some point, making the art of video game storytelling almost 'enslaving' in it's execution. Perhaps not shattering the fourth wall wholesale, but defiantly noticing it in a smart way.

One 'Fourth wall breaker' that is well on it's way to becoming a classic is Dan Salvato's 'Doki Doki Literature Club'. That is a game in which the player is initially rolled into a traditional anime-schoolboy set-up only to have everything turn on it's head in the weirdest possible fashion. The first hint of anything going off-script is when Natsuke pokes fun at Monika by joking how she should be the person to talk to about matters concerning fish seeing as how it's in her name. After a moment of confusion, the girl spells it out for us; "Mon-Ika". Eventually, Monika has to wave it away be explaining that the joke doesn't work in the English translation of the game, and we get our first glimpse into the way that things aren't sensible in this game world. The game itself goes into fifth gear at times but, once again, I refuse to spoil things so I'll encourage those interested to seek it out yourself, you won't be disappointed.

Lastly, there is a game that one certainly wouldn't assume would be flippant with it's fourth wall, and yet when it was, the moment was undeniably perfect. 'The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt' was  in development for a very long time and when it came out, critics and fans alike attested that it was worth the wait. The game was especially important for the Developers themselves, CD Projekt Red, as it was the conclusion of the franchise that had put their studio on the map. The team threw their hearts and souls into the game and were rewarded with adoration and fandom from practically every corner of the Internet. But things didn't end there, as the team then moved straight on to creating two DLC's for the game; 'Heart of Stone' and the new-land expansion: 'Blood and Wine'. With the latter DLC being the last time that CDPR would work on The Witcher for the forseeable future, the team ensured there would be a moment of closure for themselves and the fans. At the end of everything, once the day is saved, there is a moment wherein Geralt finally makes the choice to end his illustrious career of monster hunting and retire. Regis comments how the both of them deserve rest after their turmoil and strife, to which Geralt merely responds "That we do." Before looking straight at the camera to let the audience know that he's including us in that statement too. It's a touching scene to tell us all that he has earnt a break and is almost looking for our permission to take it, it was a moment that just felt right.

As you can see there are a great many number of ways that one can play around with breaking the Fourth Wall, and not all of them are lazy and awkward. That being said, I'm glad the trend has fallen off of late, before things started getting as dire as the 'modern art' scene and we started getting 'impressionist video games'. Perhaps there is still space for the odd subtle fourth wall wink in the future, in the same vein as The Witcher 3, but I'd still ask for it to be exercised in moderation before another foul trend starts to build.