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Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses the strategies for ludonarrative complexity in games created by metalepsis, including transdiegetic characters, the Brechtian distancing effect, nesting narratives, and the Borgesian "counter-text", all of them commonly found in commercial geemu such as Silent Hill or Catherine.

Paper long abstract:

The nature of the fourth wall has been widely discussed in Game Studies, expanding it with variations like a "circular fourth wall" (Planells, 2010) or the "recapture" of mediality (Harpold, 2007) to account for the dialog between player and system. In this paper, we move beyond these descriptions to explore how metalepsis creates new possibilities for (ludo)narrative complexity.

We consider four narrative devices: transdiegetic characters who cross the wall freely; the construction of hypodiegesis or nesting narratives (Bal, 1981) that reframe the previous one adding a new layer of meaning; the distancing effect (Brecht, 1961) that separates player from avatar; and, following Borges, "counter-text", that is, the inclusion of an opposite meaning within the possible configurations of the same cybertext. In Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis, Tertius, Borges wrote: "A book that does not include its counter-book is considered incomplete". Geemu often include alternative endings that negate their story and even their tone, as the popular "UFO endings" of the Silent Hill series (Konami, 1999-2016).

These devices can be used in many narrative and expressive strategies, like the inclusion of the game designer as a character, the narrative chaining of consecutive playthroughs, or self-parody. In addition to Silent Hill, we study Catherine (Atlus, 2011), in which a framing device redefines the whole narrative setup of the game and the role of the player; Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective (Capcom, 2010), where the amnesiac hero trope is played for maximum narrative uncertainty (Costikyan, 2013); Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker (Kojima Productions, 2010), which presents numerous instances of deconstruction through additional missions; NieR (Cavia, 2010), a game that has to be played several times to access its "true" ending; and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (Konami, 2005), where failing at an early stage opens an alternative timeline where the player controls a different avatar to defeat the (now fallen) hero of the main story.

All these strategies depend on the particular nature of diegesis in games and on a complex ludonarrative structure that includes many detours in its critical path, something commercial geemu, as we argue here, have been doing regularly for years.