"Eternal Darkness", text only

Eternal Darkness as metacommentary: direct address in video games

This essay examines the use of direct address in video games, particularly regarding the medium’s relation to the player/user. I argue here that Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of defamiliarization and Russian formalism are productive strategies to examine video games’ direct address rather than using Bertolt Brecht’s concept of a distancing effect (or Verfremdungseffekt or V-effect) (Brecht, 1964, p. 91) or Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed (specifically how the audience can become “spect-actors”) (Boal, 2013, p. 135). I take up this issue because the latter theorists and their methods are commonly used to examine how characters directly address the audience in television, film, and video games (Clayton, 2022, p. 1047; Lim, 2021; Fiddler, 2017, p. 86; Paul, 2004, p. 232).

Academics often argue that by directly addressing the player or viewer, the text breaks the fourth wall, which can alienate or distance the gamer/watcher from their immersion in the fiction. In this light, Jane Feuer argues that “direct address is an ‘alienation effect’ in the Brechtian sense, but it does not ‘alienate’ us in the everyday sense of the term” (Feuer 1993, p. 41). While film scholar Tom Brown admonishes Feuer that “more care needs to be taken with the term ‘Brechtian,’” he notes that direct address in cinema can be a “device for ‘Brechtian’ alienation if we restore Brecht’s proper relation to long-established entertainment strategies and see ‘alienation’ as consistent with the influences he drew from popular culture” (Brown, 2012, p. 16).

Brecht’s theories are obviously compatible with the theater but less so with “industrial art” (film, TV, and video games (see James, 1989, pp. 7-9)). For Dana Polan, art’s self-reflexivity “may be nothing other than an expansion and making manifest of inherent qualities of art” (Polan, 1974, n.p.). Polan argues that when many theorists forego including a discussion about Brecht’s call to action and the politics embedded in his plays, they “adopt Brecht’s theory but only after declaring it necessary to eliminate Brecht’s concern for content. A new Brecht—Brecht the formalist—arises” (Polan, 1974, n.p.). While Russian Formalism, specifically Viktor Shklovsky’s defamiliarization (or ostranenie) (Shklovsky, 1991, p. 6), inspired Brecht’s art, Brecht’s reason for “alienating” his audience was political. In contrast, as Victor Erlich argues, Russian Formalism tried to be devoid of politics when analyzing art (Erlich, 1980, p. 19). For this reason, formalism and Brechtian theory must be separated, especially when considering the distancing effect.

Following this logic, I analyze Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem (Silicon Knights, 2002) for this essay. I use the game as an example of a text that interacts with the player by not breaking the fourth wall (as it is already broken)[1] but instead commenting on how games are made to expand upon the artistic practices of ludology.[2] I suggest that these strategies of direct address are not Brechtian, but rather a metacommentary—which is the term that I will use to replace what many scholars describe as “alienation”—on how games are made. I will use a formalist approach to examine how Denis Dyack (the director of Eternal Darkness) directly addresses the player to heighten the game’s horror. Eternal Darkness explores “the relation between ludic design features and the pleasures and affective experiences evoked by them” (Harrer, 2021, p. 537; see Bizzocchi & Tanenbaum, 2011; see Harrer, 2013), which is essential to the video game medium.

To begin this paper, I explain how Eternal Darkness directly addresses the player. I then examine Dyack’s analysis of his work and discuss how journalists comprehend the effects of alienation on Eternal Darkness. For clarity and space, I focus on strategies to heighten horror (a more exhaustive account of how it can be used for other reasons, such as comedy,[3] would be too large of a project for an essay). Instead of examining the direct addresses in The Stanley Parable (Galactic Cafe, 2013) (de Wildt, 2014; Vught, 2022, p. 292) or Spec Ops: The Line[4] (Court, 2021; de Wildt, 2014; Murray, 2016; Smethurst 2017) (which are two games extensively written about in game studies) I hope to call attention to lesser academically analyzed games like Eternal Darkness.

In the latter part of this paper, I explain the difference between triple-A games (such as Eternal Darkness) and independent games. To do this, I draw on the writings of Victor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, and Boris Eikhenbaum and note how game scholars have discussed Brecht and Boal. This will provide this essay with the context for arguing that formalism is appropriate for discussing direct address in video games.

Eternal Darkness and formal analysis

In Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, the player plays Alexandra Roivas as she investigates the murder of her grandfather, Edward Roivas. Alexandra discovers The Tome of Darkness in Edward’s mansion. Throughout the game, Alexandra searches for artifacts connected to the Tome that are hidden in various parts of the house. When Alexandra encounters these antiques, she experiences the lives of twelve different people who discovered the Tome in the past. To destroy the evil spirits connected to the Tome, Alexandra must summon an ancient creature to fight Pious, the antagonist in the text who uses the Tome for sinister purposes. Then, to successfully defeat Pious, the player must play as the several characters Alexandra encounters.

To heighten the game’s horror, Silicon Knights, the developer of Eternal Darkness, and the director of the game, Denis Dyack, implemented a “Sanity Meter” attached to the numerous characters. Eternal Darkness’ manual (which comes with the game’s box) explains the Sanity Meter as follows:

“When you are located by creatures, a sanity loss occurs, causing a decrease in the level of your Sanity Meter. As your Sanity Meter drops, you may start to experience strange hallucinations…The lower your Sanity Meter falls, the more our grasp on reality will slip” (Eternal Darkness Manual, 2002, p. 19).

The Sanity Meter exists on the screen as a part of the heads-up display (HUD). It, therefore, directly informs the player of their character’s status and how the game will affect them if their sanity drops too low. Gamers can encounter 42 different “sanity effects,”[5] such as the game’s reducing and amplifying the volume, as well as returning the game to the start menu or falsely deleting the player’s save files on their GameCube memory card (see Perron, 2018, p. 326).

According to Dyack, Shigeru Miyamoto asked him, “What if someone…throws their GameCube against the wall because they think the game [(deleted their memory)]. What do we have to do for customer service for that?” Miyamoto also asked Dyack if this had ever been executed in a video game before, to which Dyack responded, “No…. I think because you are saying, have you seen this before? That we should do it” (Dyack, 2019, n.p.).

Eternal Darkness’ box art promotes its unique subversion of gaming mechanics (such as memory storage) by highlighting the sanity effects. The back cover states,

“Is it real…or only in your head? Prepare for an epic psychological thriller…As you delve deeper into the dark designs of an ancient evil, you’ll have to fight to save your character’s sanity…and your own” (Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem Box Art, 2002, n.p., my emphasis).

The game’s box art is one of the first things the player encounters when purchasing a game (Fernández-Vara, 2019, p. 7), which advertises that it undermines traditional mechanics. The game’s subtitle, Sanity’s Requiem, clearly states that sanity is dead. To create that “sanity” effect, Eternal Darkness simulates malfunctions. For example, the game states that it has deleted the player’s save file. This lets players not only fear that they lost their game progress but that their hardware might be faulty or broken or that their saves for all games on their console might also be destroyed. While others have argued that this type of loss of agency is commonplace in horror games (Habel & Kooyman, 2014, p. 7; Krzywinska 2002, p. 208), the breakdown in autonomy is usually contained to the software, not the hardware.

Part of that loss of autonomy calls attention to Eternal Darkness as a game, such as the simulation of deleted memory; these tactics go beyond the diegesis of the text. Obviously, video games that allow for saving (excluding permadeath and arcade games) are not meant to delete the player’s progress. This is the point of playing a game—to complete levels. In this way, Eternal Darkness directly addresses the player and their expectations of what a game should do and be. It is supposed to save data. But when it does not (or threatens to fail), the game calls attention to what it is, and it does so not only by affecting the software's functionality but also the hardware's integrity. In this case, it threatens the console (the GameCube) that should allow the player to continue to play. This tactic heightens the horror effect as it causes players to believe that the game is in control and not them. Eternal Darkness announces itself as such by asking the player whether they can “save their own sanity” on the box art (my emphasis). In this way, I agree with Jasper V. Vught that analyzing video games via Russian formalism

“should…focus on methodology over ontology…[and] function over material [to understand] how a game works, or better yet, how a specific game works to cue our aesthetic responses” (Vught, 2022, pp. 289-290).

Eternal Darkness calls attention to the functionality of video games as their structure relies on the player’s capacity for interaction with the game, and many celebrate it for doing so.

According to my research on video game magazines’ understanding of Eternal Darkness’ direct address, numerous journalists commented on the sanity effects. They claimed that these features made the game successful in constructing a metacommentary about horror and video games themselves (see Table 1).

Table 1. Eternal Darkness’ Cultural Impact.

Magazines that Consider Eternal Darkness to be
one of the Most Influential Horror Video Games of All Time

Bloody Disgusting (Power, 2018)

Den of Geek (Byrd, 2022)

CBR.com (Stone, 2021)

Collider (Collider Staff, 2020)

Cultured Vultures (Cultured Vultures Staff, 2022)

Gaming Bolt (Cantees, 2021)

Hardcore Gaming 101 (Tysinger, 2023)

Kotaku (Tieryas, 2017)

Nintendo Life (Reynolds, 2022)

Paste Magazine (Martin, 2022)

Screen Rant (Gailloreto, 2020)

SVG (Simmons, 2020)

Unwinnable (Horvath, 2014; Moran, 2010)

VG247 (Raynor, 2023)

Horror games are often evaluated for their effect on the user. Mathew Byrd considers the best horror games to be “the ones that take full advantage of the unique abilities of the video game medium” (Byrd, 2022, n.p.). For Byrd, this includes the subversion of the volume and false corruption of saved data, two components that make a game a game (see Horvath, 2014). Game reviewers like Patrick and Malcolm Kelly state that “Silicon Knights deserves a lot of credit for coming up with such a creative idea, and it works…. [the game] can really freak you out (try playing it at night with the lights out)” (Kelly & Kelly, 2002, 77). For Matt Casamassina, the sanity effects “pick at the mind of the player outside of the game universe” (2002, n.p.). Thus, when Eternal Darkness was first released, many reviewers noted that the game’s intricacies moved beyond the text, and they recognized it as modernizing video games. According to Nathan Simmons, Eternal Darkness “broke barriers and the 4th wall, bringing horror directly to your console and television. At about midpoint in the game, I was saving when the game suddenly started deleting all my save files. I freaked out. Would I have to play through it all over again?” (Simmons, 2017, n.p.).

Like Simmons’ understanding of Eternal Darkness as breaking the fourth wall, Charles Moran states that when the fourth wall is broken in video games, with special reference to Eternal Darkness, “it is a jarring experience that removes the audience from the story. Sometimes, though, the audience can find themselves deeper in that world than they previously thought possible” (Moran, 2010, n.p.). Beyond these journalists and video game reviewers stating that Eternal Darkness breaks the fourth wall, Dyack also believes that his game alienates the player in this way. For Dyack, the game breaking the fourth wall “is a part of the narrative” (2022, n.p.). Dyack is committed to building story-driven games, and to him, the sanity furthers the narrative of Eternal Darkness: it resembles “the early days of Greek theater when the audience could get up on stage”(Dyack, 2022, n.p.).

However, Simmons, Moran, and Dyack misunderstand the functionality of the fourth wall in video games. Eternal Darkness is not breaking the fourth wall like Dyack thinks his game does. His toying with memory represents an understanding that these elements make up video games in the way that Eikhenbaum acknowledges how literary devices work, devices such as “jokes, plays on meaning…verbal mimicry and gesture, inventing special comical ways of speech, sound effects, whimsical word order” (1963, p. 378). Memory functions in video games as jokes and verbal mimicry do in literature. They are necessary in the make-up of the medium. In this way, Eternal Darkness is a metacommentary not just in horror but also in video games.

Shklovsky famously wrote that dissecting art using formalism is necessary

“to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art. The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition. By ‘estranging’ objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and ‘laborious.’ The perceptual process in art has a purpose all its own and ought to be extended to the fullest. Art is a means of experiencing the process of creativity” (Shklovsky, 1991, p. 6; my emphasis).

In the case of Eternal Darkness, for the game to feel scary, the designers play with the mechanics of video games. In that way, players can better recognize what makes a game a game—including the importance of memory and saving one’s progress. When the developers frustrate these mechanics, players become scared that they are losing progress and thus control of not only their character but of the game and their console. Video games are supposed to allow the player some agency. They can save when they want, but when the game takes control of that aspect, it alarms the player, thus notifying them that they are interacting with a device designed around constraints they cannot always control. This process is directly tied to art and the game developer as a creator. Although, in this case, Dyack may have underestimated the medium of video games (the fourth wall is already broken), he can create a metacommentary on video games that has no political admonition but derives from a poetic inclination to expand upon not just upon what horror can do but what a video game can be.

Brecht, Boal and (independent) video games

Horror video games like Eternal Darkness are popular and usually sell well. Teams of developers make these games to generate a profit so that any singular political message will be lost. Using Brecht and Boal to examine commercial video games is a misapplication for an apparent reason: profit-making video games are usually not political or use politics for profit. Politics may be embedded within studio-produced games like Spec Ops: The Line (Yager Development, 2012), which asks players to kill innocent civilians and then reflect upon their war crimes—and this can lead to a more considerable discussion about the U.S. “War on Terror,” for example—but still, the game is made to generate money. In contrast to more widely sold titles like Eternal Darkness and Spec Ops, independent video games like Gonzalo Frasca’s Kabul Kaboom! (Frasca, 2002) and September 12th: A Toy World (Frasca, 2003) operates as political games with a clear message and are not designed to earn cash. Both these games rework war violence to challenge players’ morals. Thus, they were made for educational purposes rather than for entertainment.

In such a game, Kabul Kaboom!, players must control a refugee and catch the hamburgers that the U.S. military dropped to help survivors while also avoiding the bombs that the same soldiers sent. The game showcases the irony of the U.S. sending humanitarian aid and destruction simultaneously. Another game, September 12th, inverts well-designed game mechanics of studio-made shooters by allowing the player to control a large reticle eyepiece (one that is far too large to shoot an exact target) to bomb terrorists. Yet the missiles are delayed, and the bombs will likely hit civilians. Once the destruction happens, more terrorists populate on-screen, implying that the civilians have transitioned into terrorists (Bogost et al., 2010, pp. 11-12; see Olson 2023, pp. 262-263). In frustrating the gaming mechanics, the designer Frasca destroys a pleasurable gaming experience, and through these mechanics, the game can become political. It is essential that September 12th: A Toy World is free to play. Using Brecht and Boal and other theater traditions of alienating the audience as the player acts are often incorporated by capitalist culture, and their intended political effects are co-opted.

According to Brenda Laurel’s foundational work Computers as Theater (1991), which began the discussion on how theater theory intersects with games,

“computer-based representations work in fundamentally the same way [as Brecht’s v-effect]: one participates in a representation that is not the same as real life but has real-world effects or consequences. Representation and reality stand in a particular and necessary relation to one another” (Laurel, 1991, p. 31).

Holger Pötzsch critiques Laurel for omitting Brecht’s Marxist roots, for these are essential to understanding his call to action for political reasons and the fundamental logic of why alienation works in the first place (2017). Social alienation can happen because the proletariat has become alienated from their labor, and they must understand that if they are to change the capitalistic institutions that dominate them (Marx, 1964, pp. 66-71). Similarly, Chaz Evans proposes “that practitioners evaluate software in terms of Bertolt Brecht’s v-effect” (2014, p. 6), and he notes,

“Like the determined emotional result of the audience member watching the classic drama, [games must] maintain…unbroken verisimilitude in software” (Evans, 2014, p. 8, to which Laurel also agrees. 1991, pp. 16-17).

According to Evans, game developers can emphasize the v-effect to

“distance the user from his avatar while adding to the visual spectacle…Brecht’s convention of speaking stage directions aloud could manifest itself in virtual space by allowing the software's code (or script) to appear creatively within the illusion. This would be a highly effective…technique that would not only expose the seams of how software is constructed but use those seams as elements of content” (Evans, 2014, p. 11).

However, this software breaking cannot be tied to Brecht as it does not create alienation but uses a formalistic approach to promote understanding of the text. Thus, Evans inappropriately applies Brecht’s theory to illuminate how and why software can be exposed when Russian formalism would have been more helpful. Evans later discusses how the video game Katamari Damacy (Namco, 2004) is Brechtian because players who control the protagonist (the prince) cannot “feel cathartic, empathic closeness with the prince’s labor,” and they are thus alienated from the game, which equates to Brecht’s intentions with the v-effect (Evans, 2014, p. 13). This, again, is erroneous in that the player is playing as a character who is working; furthermore, whether playing a video game can be considered “work” is an open question. Moreover, even if we accept that the player is alienated from the prince’s labor, the game is not calling for action like Brecht’s plays do. If it were, what would that action be? To challenge the prince’s labor conditions or those of the people who made the game?

Returning to Spec Ops, Lars de Wildt argues that the game presents a strong-willed protagonist, Martin Walker, with whom the player can identify (de Wildt, 2014, p. 11). In Spec Ops’ loading screens, the game questions the player’s actions by asking them, “How many Americans have you killed today?” For de Wildt, because the player identifies as an anti-hero, Spec Ops subverts war game traditions by using Brecht’s estrangement strategies to present the genre unfamiliarly. The game seemingly asks the player to reflect upon Walker’s war crimes and thus awaken them to form

“a critical potential: it serves to remind the interpreting subject of the unabashedly cruel actions taken for granted as enacted by the power structure of the game’s affordances and constraints” (de Wildt, 2014, p. 16).

However, as Spec Ops undermines the conventions of military games, it does not call for change. For Holger Pötzsch, de Wildt “correctly situates Brecht’s theory of the theatre, and the V-effect in particular, within the frames of Marxist dialectics asserting the relevance of games and play for the creation of a ‘critical distance’ that enables conscientious engagements with real-world challenges and contradictions thus facilitating political empowerment and agency” in Spec Ops (2017, n.p.). While Spec Ops might ask players to think critically about the U.S. military’s might, it is not challenging the player to engage with the American army politically. The game highlights this via its messages on the loading screen: “To kill for yourself is murder, to kill for your government is heroic, to kill for entertainment is harmless” (my emphasis). Spec Ops (like Eternal Darkness) is entertainment, and the developers depend on selling copies to consumers to thrive as a company. While it can cause the player to question why they play violent games, this purpose aligns primarily with artistic purposes rather than political reasons.

Regarding Boal and video games, Gonzalo Frasca argues that video game modders can modify “preexistent templates based on classic videogames (Space Invaders, Street Fighter, Pac-Man)” (Frasca, 2004, p. 90) or Sim City (91) to generate games that can address political issues in the same way that Boal’s theater would allow the spectator to become a “spect-actor,” thereby intervening in the play’s conflict and learning to how to create a more just life (see Boal, 2013, pp. 119-120). While video game modders are likely to be people who are not involved in the game industry and thus not (usually) profiting off the remixed products, the games Frasca uses as examples were designed to generate profit, and even in modifying them, they cannot enact change in the same ways that Brecht’s and Boal’s plays do since their art was initially designed to awaken theater audiences. Frasca’s September 12th is inherently political, whereas the formerly discussed games are less so because they are tied to the company’s bottom line. This is also the case for “freemium games” (which “allow players to download and play…game[s] at no cost while offering optional in-app purchases to supplement their experience” (Apple App Store, n.d., n.p.)) because they rely on in-game advertisements to generate income.

Compared to the politically motivated games, Eternal Darkness uses horror to entertain players and make players think about the construction of games. Like the make-up of video games, Russian Formalism is interested in “how literature is put together…. [it] focuses on how something is made…shifting from meaning to construction” (Fry, 2009, n.p.). For Jakobson, “The subject of literary science is not literature, but literariness, i.e., that which makes a given work a literary work” (Jakobson, 2017, p. 21). To reiterate Shklovsky’s quote, dissecting art using formalism is necessary “to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art…. By ‘estranging’ objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and ‘laborious’” (Shklovsky, 1991, p. 6). This estrangement process makes familiar objects unfamiliar. Shklovsky calls attention to how art defamiliarizes—art leads people to see things in a new light. He uses the term “estranging” not to call for political action like Brecht does but to address how art must alienate the reader/viewer for them to see it anew. In this way, the audience can understand how art is self-reflexive and that analyzing how it is made is necessary to understand it as a whole.

In “The Structure of Gogol’s The Overcoat” (Eikhenbaum, 1963), for example, Eikhenbaum does not focus on the themes of humanity and how people mistreat the hardworking protagonist, Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, in the tale. Instead, Eikhenbaum argues that Nikolai Gogol’s

“short story depends…on the kind of role which the author’s personal tone plays in it, i.e., on whether this tone is an organizing principle, creating more or less the illusion of a narrative in the first person, or whether it serves only as a formal tying together of events… The primitive short story and the novel of adventure have nothing to do with the first-person narrative, nor do they need it because their whole interest and their whole movement are determined by a rapid and diverse succession of events and situations” (Eikhenbaum, 1963, p. 377).

These “events and situations” are constructed through literary devices such as “jokes, plays on meaning…verbal mimicry and gesture, inventing special comical ways of speech, sound effects, whimsical word order” (Eikhenbaum, 1963, p. 378). For Erlich, Eikhenbaum’s reading of

“The plot of The Overcoat is described entirely on a verbal level, as a resultant of the interplay between two stylistic layers—comic narration and sentimental rhetoric” (Erlich, 1980, p. 75).

In other words, Gogol’s story is about how art is made—how to build a story is to build textual logic. In “The Novel as Parody: Sterne’s Tristram Shandy,” Shklovsky states that art

“is unsympathetic—or beyond sympathy—except where the feeling of compassion is evoked as material for the artistic structure. In discussing such emotion, we have to examine it from the point of view of the composition itself, in exactly the same way that a mechanic must examine a driving belt to understand the details of a machine” (1991, p. 155).

Writers like Gogol are not calling attention to the emotion associated with Akaky’s suffering in The Overcoat, but rather how that agony is conveyed, and it is done so by literary devices. Similarly, with Eternal Darkness, we examine the horror that Alexandra Roivas faces (along with the 12 personalities that engage with the horrors in the game). The game’s horror expands further than the action within the text as the game threatens to delete the player’s memory. Again, this calls attention to why we play, as the game threatens to delete our progress and thus the possibility of completing our achievements as game players.

To return to Shklovsky, he also uses the metaphor of a machine and how one can examine all its parts to understand how it operates. Such a comparison helps analyze the GameCube (a game system or machine) and its ability to store memory—to remember our progress in Eternal Darkness. Peter Steiner states that the machine analogy “furnished the conceptual viewpoint that enabled Shklovksy to redirect attention from the external conditions of the literary process to the internal organization of the work” (1984, p. 48). For Vught, the machine metaphor is helpful as it allows Shklovksy to explain the “internal laws of literature and look ‘under the hood’ of the literature machine” (Vught, 2022, p. 288).

In the same way, Eternal Darkness uses the various elements involved in video games (such as the heads-up display (HUD), memory, and sound) to show how they are essential for gameplay and the continuation of play. When developers like Dyack manipulate these elements in unconventional ways, they draw attention to their functions and, thus, how a game works. For Bo Kampmann Walther, games come into existence because rules are always intrinsically self-referential, which normalizes self-reference and renders games incapable of commenting on themselves. Walther’s argument addresses the problem of ludic self-referentiality to consider partially medium-specific surface phenomena and games’ inherent qualities. According to Walther, “games are games because they are fundamentally self-referential” (p. 219). Other theorists like Agata Waszkiewicz argue that the “breaking of the fourth wall should not be synonymous with any self-referential comments, but rather it relies on direct communication with the player” to advise them on how to play the game (2020, n.p.).

With Eternal Darkness, players must engage with the sanity effects to finish the game. The game will play with the concept of noise by showing the volume bar, which will increase the game’s volume tremendously. In that way, the game is stripping (even seemingly) the player’s autonomy away from them. Player agency is an integral part of gameplay, as players are given the idea that they are free to do as they please. Of course, games are constructed through rules and obstructions that guide the player. They must play within the boundaries of the game. When games like Eternal Darkness frustrate those boundaries, it is a call to consider how the game is made—not Brecht and Boal’s call to action.

Conclusion

This essay argued that Russian Formalism is a productive way to analyze games directly addressing the player. To do this, I analyzed Eternal Darkness to show how the game represents a metacommentary on video games, which is not tied to political messages but to entertainment. In constructing this argument, I also compared triple-A video games like Eternal Darkness and Spec Ops to Frasca’s independent games that display clear political messages. I then discussed the scholars who appropriated Brecht and Boal for unclear reasons, especially given Brecht’s groundings in Marxist political theory and practice. I hope this paper will help resituate how game studies can examine direct address, especially Shklovsky and Eikhenbaum’s analysis of art.

Notes

1. By players playing as a character and participating in the game’s rules, they are already interacting with the text. For Kristine Jørgensen video games do not contain a fourth wall “in the same way that much traditional fiction does” (Jørgensen, 2013, 125). The game itself is always directly addressing the player on how to play the game via the heads-up display (HUD), tutorials, menus, etc. Therefore, the breaking of the fourth wall is partly tied to the diegesis of the text. In other words, the video game medium can only operate if the player interacts with the game (Aarseth, 1997, p. 1; Krzywinska, 2002, p. 206). When academics discuss the game addressing the players in more “conventional ways” that have been defined in theater such as alienating the audience.

2. While video games have a tumultuous past as journalist and politicians regarded them as dangerous for children and American society (Kocurek, 2012; McKernan, 2013: 308-309; Payne & Alilunas, 2016) and low culture (Parker, 2018: 78) and critics such as Ebert have (in)famously stated that “video games can never be art” (Ebert, 2010), academics like Felan Parker have argued that they are indeed art (Parker, 2018). I do not intend to recenter this debate here, instead I will proceed with the assumption that video games are art.

3. Conker’s Bad Fur Day (Rare, 2001) would be a fruitful example as Conker, the protagonist, regularly address the audience for comedic purposes.

4. I do later analyze Spec Ops for how academics have incorrectly used Brecht to study the game.

5. YouTuber SuperHobbit discovered 42 sanity effects (SuperHobbit, 2011).

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