So, I’ve been wanting to do a separate bio-op of meta-narratives since the very first blog post, and it is finally time for me to do it! I feel so giddy. Granted part of it was realizing that we only have about two more weeks of blogs left, so it’s now or never. Crazy how at the start I thought I wouldn’t have enough ideas to write about for this blog and last week I realized realizing I didn’t have the time to say everything I want to say and had to condense a topic with two weeks worth of points into one.
I don’t think I can effectively begin discussing the topic without covering the term “meta” and how the ensuing meta narratives are unique, so lets just get the boring part over with. Meta refers to anything that uses information about itself or about it’s defining characteristics to deliver an witty or insightful message, such as emblazoning the line “This is a T-shirt” on a T-shirt. Cleverly self-referential is how Merriam-Webster sums it up. When extended this self-referential nature to narratives it creates a meta-narrative, stories that are in some way aware or reference the fact that they are in fact just pieces of fiction and that often “draw attention to its own artificiality” (again thank you Merriam-Webster). Meta-narratives are often quite experimental as they blur the the gap between fiction and reality, using their self-awareness to explore narrative tropes and the whole nature of storytelling.
Perhaps this kind of definition is still confusing so I will try to elucidate it through another definition. There is a concept in fiction called the fourth wall. It comes from theater where typically, if the action occurs in an interior, you can see three walls on stage. There is on wall on the left, one on the right and one in the back that covers the breadth of the stage. So where’s the fourth wall? After thinking for a bit it’s clear to see that the wall should be between the audience and the actors. But that would block us from being able to see the action, so it doesn’t exist. Rather we as the audience, in a way are the fourth wall. Hence acknowledging that the fourth wall exists, signifies acknowledging that the audience exists, which in turn implies that the play is simply that: a play being acted by actors. This is where the term “breaking the fourth wall” comes from; if characters acknowledge the existence of an audience examining them, breaking the barrier between themselves and the audience, it serves as an admission of the fictive nature of the media they inhabit. And that’s what meta-narratives base their appeal on. Purposefully breaking the fourth wall and starting a discussion between the audience and the characters, along with their roles and interplay.
Confused yet? Hopefully that makes one of us, because whew boy I can already feel myself my head spinning trying to figure out what to talk about.
For my own sanity I’ll try to keep this simple and start from the top. I love meta-narratives… with a caveat. They have to be done well. That seems like a very surface-level and obvious statement, after all we typically only like things of sufficiently solid quality after all. What I’m talking about is with some things you can get away with them being just ok, and some things you can’t. If you order a burger and it’s a bit underdone or kind of light on toppings, you can be annoyed for a bit, but generally you can still enjoy it. Same can be said of cheap action flicks; if the story doesn’t make complete sense, you can still turn the logical part of the brain off and enjoy some cool action scenes.
But for certain things it’s do or die, either it is done well or the experience gets irrevocably ruined. What this applies to may differ a bit from person to person. For example I feel like this towards story plots that use time travel and time loops. I feel if you can poke a hole in the logic of how a change in the past can affect a moment in the future, or how you can prove something in the past can’t possibly have happened or find some other temporal inconsistency it just completely ruins the central hook of the story. And it all becomes pointless. For the most part I feel the same towards meta-narratives. When they’re done well they are absolutely brilliant and give a lot of room for you to think not just about the story but about yourself and you place in the world. But, when done poorly they just leave a kind of depressing emptiness.
Perhaps as I explain the does and donts of meta-narratives I should back it up with a concrete example. As it so happens, one of the best meta-narrative video games got a re-release recently. Quite auspicious! And since I’ve never played it and anticipated that I would cover meta-narratives next, I thought it would be the perfect time to finally get it off my pile of shame. The game I am referring to is, of course, The Stanley Parable.
The game tells the story about a man named Stanley being guided along by an eloquent and emotive Narrator with a pleasant British accent. By either following the directions of the Narrator or ignoring them and setting off on your own you can get into a number of wacky and fourth wall breaking situations. In spirit the Narrator is both your one ally in this world and an antagonistic force trying to bend you to his will.
Now I don’t mean for this post to turn into a review of the whole game, but I do feel that in places it encapsulates both the best and the worst of meta-narratives. so I want to go into some amount of detail on it. I do want to lead off that a lot of my feelings here are quite subjective, so it might be possible to wholly disagree with the arguments I’m about to put forth. And obviously some spoiler warnings too if you actually haven’t played it, and want to go in blind. Finally, as a whole I have to say the game is quite good and I had a lot of fun with it, so any criticisms I have towards it don’t outweigh the positives.
Speaking of, let’s start with the positives. For one, meta-narratives are capable of delivering some of the best off-the-wall comedy. By admitting that nothing in the story is actually real, meta-narratives become free to not take things too seriously. As a result they can poke fun at everything from the player, to common genre tropes to descending into the absurd. The Stanley Parable has all of these in spades, and then some, bolstered by the comedic timing of the Narrator. You go right when you’re expected to go left, the Narrator makes a snide remark layered with an air of annoyance about your inability to follow directions. You jump off a moving crane onto a platform while the Narrator is delivering a monologue and he is aghast at your lack of decorum. You enter a code earlier than the Narrator tells you because you remember it from the last run, and he becomes so annoyed that he prevents the next door for opening, puts on some chill music and gives you a time out to take it easy. Of course on subsequent runs he just resigns himself and lets you through without entering the code for expediency. You give his game a bad review and… well that’s just mean, why would you do that?
Secondly meta-narratives have an increased affinity for messing with the player psychologically. A side effect of weakening the foundation of the fourth wall is that it more personally integrates the player into the story. Adding in the fact that by loosening the restrictions of narrative consistency you gain the ability to reshape the world in the story on the fly, it becomes less of a case of you playing the game, and more a case of the game playing you. Rooms will change at a moments notice, your position will be reset to where you were 10 seconds ago, walls will spring up out of nowhere if the Narrator deems you’ve gone too far, hallways that are longer when you’re in them than what they seem on the outside, impossible geometries. It doesn’t even always need to be intentionally disturbing. I would sometimes get goose bumps because of how sometimes it felt like something inside was just messed with and I had to question my sanity for a moment. A real “glitch in the Matrix” type moment.
And this is from a game that isn’t overtly trying to be a horror game. It winds up feeling like that at times, and it does mess with you, but it’s not a horror. Now when a REAL horror game plays the same tricks, then it just feels other worldly and invasive. I’m looking at you Doki Doki Literature Club. I’ve genuinely recall being angry with the game and even shouting at it because of how well it had wormed it’s way into my brain and started tugging at my neurons. Great game though.
Thirdly you can explore and make light of common narrative tropes that occur in fiction despite how unrealistic they are. You know, things like giving characters a thin sheet of metal called “plot armor” and have every lethal attack from then on be blocked by that thin sheet. Stuff that the audience commonly makes fun of, so it feels somewhat validating when the game also acknowledges its own flaws. Once again Stanley Parable excels in this. You can climb on a desk and fall out of bounds through a window, where the Narrator admits that it’s all intentional, that you’ve found an Easter Egg and then delivers a lecture. You try and enter cheats, you get teleported to the Serious Room for a time out for being a cheaty-face. You found a different way to clip out of bounds that the devs actually didn’t catch?! Devs get revenge in the new edition by sarcastically applauding all the people who found the exploit they missed and added a song congratulating you on how special you are (sarcastically).
Finally meta-narratives can deliver powerful messages on how we as players interact with narratives and the characters within. By breaking down the fourth wall we lessen the distance between us and characters themselves deepening our connection. We can relate ourselves as humans to these characters and even have conversations as the characters address us; not our in-game avatar, but us as people. Regrettably I think this is the most common place that meta-narratives over-reach and while it’s only confined to a few parts in the game, The Stanley Parable has a similar flaw.
(Minor trigger warning) There is a route where after you deviate from the intended route, the Narrator is unable to bring the narrative back on track and gives up, choosing to set up a light show instead of continuing the story. After a bit the Narrator expresses feelings of gratification as he finds the light show “makes him happy” and offers to stay here forever. You, as the player have other ideas, as you want to progress the narrative somehow. And you can… by jumping off a high piece of scaffolding to your apparent death. The narrator tell… no BEGS you not to do it as he claims to feel contentment here and doesn’t want you to reset the game by dying. But you do it anyway, because… well, how else will you progress? Except you don’t die, you get a bit slower as if you broke a leg, but you’re otherwise fine. So…. you do it again, and again, and again and then you die. This is… grim… very grim, for a game that is mostly rather lighthearted, and I feel this piece shows the main flaw that plagues meta-narratives. That when the game removes barriers between the player and the characters and proceeds down a darker and more serious route, it often strays from self-examination into pure nihilism.
There is an interesting discussion to be had here about how we as players who are playing through a story would do anything to progress the narrative, even if it would mean hurting the characters. Because after all, they AREN’T REAL. No matter how much the game works to convince you otherwise, there will still be a slight gap between us as living beings and the fictional characters that are a little bit away from being real. I’ve played many meta-narrative games like Pony Island, Doki Doki Literature Club, Break the Game and each one of those games will fall into the same trap where it will try and present the characters as self-aware of being in a game and trying their best to defy that limitation. And each time they will fail, because no matter how well they are written, they are still fake and following a script so defying this limitation is impossible. Then the game will end in the middle of nowhere, because it has run out of ideas and the characters’ fate is left in limbo. During these moments the whole experience rings quite hollow as it begins to feel almost as if the whole point was to gaslight you into feeling bad for failing these characters that were doomed to fail in the first place. Perhaps in the future, more dynamic AI can make characters that are so close to presenting human that we will genuinely be averse to putting them in danger, and then we can have a whole different discussion.
It just doesn’t work, at least for me. No matter how the game frames it, you are still following a predefined narrative and while I can suspend my disbelief to a certain point when interacting with the characters who present as a real, that ends when the notion of them existing past the realm of the game appears. It just goes one step too far. Perhaps it’s an example of the uncanny valley in gaming, as the characters approach close to seeming real and wanting to be real, it unexpectedly highlights how fake they are and I lose my ability to connect. Now there is certainly room for endings that leave a sense of gloom and nihilism, I just don’t think they work for meta-narratives. It feels so close to being real, it loops around to feeling fake.
In terms of pointing out this drive for players to progress the story by any means, The Stanley Parable, which has in most other points been amazing at explicitly pointing out these narrative contradictions, leaves the matter in the background, trying to pull on your heartstrings instead. That honestly brought down the experience for me a bit. I can however list an example of a game that handles the same question with much more subtlety and becomes amazing as a result. To be frank, the game doesn’t have a meta narrative and can barely be said to have meta moments in it. However, when examining it through the meta lens, so to speak, it actually does a good job of demonstrating that we players are simply puppets dancing to the string of the game, all while keeping immersion wholly intact. That game is the first meta game that I referred to in my second blog post: BioShock
(Spoilers for 20 year old game) At the beginning of BioShock, you are introduced to a man named Atlas through a radio, who acts as your guide and gives you suggestions on what to do. A little over midway through the game however, it is revealed Atlas was never actually real and is an alter ego for the main villain of the game Fontaine, who has been using the cleverly disguised verbal command “Would You Kindly?” to issue hypnotic directions to kill off his adversaries. This revelation is brilliant, not only because you assume the expression is a personal verbal quirk, hiding the command in plain sight, but because on subsequent playthroughs you can go back and see every moment your quest marker updates after he issues you a new command. You realize that while you thought you were controlling your character on his personal quest, you were never in control of the story, the main bad guy was. And you never-ever questioned it because that’s just what you expect in video games: follow the quest marker to progress to the next part of the story. It is a moment that abuses player psychology, expectations and desire to proceed to weave in a genuinely unexpected twist the full scope of which can only be revealed through cross-examination and is especially powerful because of how rare it is.
When things are kept lighthearted and jovial, meta-narrative are at their strongest as people are generally content to revel in a bit of absurdist humor similar to enjoying the freedom in a lucid dream. However when they try to skew more realistic they need to walk a kind of a tightrope, having to balance serious motifs with a layer of subtlety to prevent them from becoming overbearing and disengaging the audience. Granted I don’t think it’s impossible to create grim meta-narratives, just harder. And I’d suggest that scaling back the degree in how self-aware the game is and in how liberally it plays with narrative rules would help keep the overall experience cohesive.
Regardless of my inhibitions I think there is a lot of room for meta-narratives to grow. Imagine for example if you were fighting an emissary of death, some kind of a grim reaper and you fail. As you character falls to the ground, the reaper goes, “I’m not done with you yet” grabs your health bar and manually resets it, resuscitating you. What about an enemy that messes with your audio input or makes narrative choices for you if you’re not fast enough. Examples of clever design choices like that exists throughout gaming, so I’d say it’s only a matter of time before someone can figure out how to balance multiple ideas into one package and create a truly unique game-play experience. Hell, I have some ideas, maybe I’ll do it.
