For example, I just watched a video of Resonance (which I haven’t played yet) and that part of the game was quite scary, because the character was in danger: since I couldn’t exclude that it was possible for her to die, the sense of real peril grew. Of course, I closed the video because I want to discover what happens next by myself.
When I was younger, it wasn’t so straightforward for me to assume that Guybrush couldn’t die. The animation of Guybrush contorting himself in anguish will never abandon my dreams.
I did but you have no idea how much profoundly I suck at this. I’m a complete inept.
Other players told me this, but the point is that if you assume that you can’t die, you feel free to explore the dialog tree as you wish, sure that there is no way to end the game just because you selected a sentence that in the developers’ intentions meant that you wanted to play an action sequence.
That’s right, saving helps you to go back in time and doing different things, but in my opinion saving/loading cannot be considered part of the gameplay in an adventure game.
For other kinds of games, let’s say “action games”, the save/load mechanism in an integral part of the gameplay, because it’s highly improbable that the player would reach the final goal without making any mistake. Also, deaths are usually an important feature of action games, so saving and loading become a mechanism necessary to play.
Adventure games are different, in my opinion: they are strongly based on narrative and any attempt to stop the story or to “rewind” the story can break both the player immersion and the illusion that you were that character.
As Ron Gilbert wrote (a long time ago):
There is a state of mind called “suspension of disbelief”. When you are watching a movie, or reading a good book, your mind falls into this state. It occurs when you are pulled so completely into the story that you no longer realize you are in a movie theater or sitting at your couch, reading. When the story starts to drag, or the plots begins to fall apart, the suspension of disbelief is lost. You soon start looking around the theater, noticing the people in front of you or the green exit sign. One way I judge a movie is by the number of times I realized I was in a theater.
The same is true of story games (as well as almost all other kinds of games). As the story builds, we are pulled into the game and leave the real world behind. As designers, our job is to keep people in this state for as long as possible. Every time the player has to restore a saved game, or pound his head on the desk in frustration, the suspension of disbelief is gone.
I think that the effects of breaking the fourth wall depend very much on the player. To players like me, absolutely yes, making me part of the story is a way to completely break my suspension of disbelief. I stop believing in the story simply because the story now has me (a real person) as a protagonist.
Really? In that moment? Most players are still “sucked” into the story. Of course the fourth-walling does “interrupt” the story but mostly after the scene.
I’ve visited many theater performances that used the fourth wall. And in that moment the suspension of disbelief never broke - at least for me. The opposite was true: Such scenes force the player/audience to be more concentrated on the scene because they are now part of the scene. So in that moment(!) they are not aware that they are in a theater. The problem is, when the scene ends. In most cases there is a short “break” (i.e. when the actors are walking the curtain or something similar). In such situations the audience has time to think about the fourth-walling. And that of course breaks the suspension of disbelief.
I can’t give one, you have to go into more theaters.
But in TWP there are several moments where someone speaks to or about you. Especially Chuck at the end. Try to remember how that was: Did you hang on every word in that moment? Or have you looked at the ceiling of your room? I bet you were focused on what they are saying.
Do you recall the alternative solution to the puzzle in question? I solved it the other way on my most recent playthrough by complete fluke first time around.
Yes – I’d like a superpower where I can forget my adventure game experiences so I can relive them. Fortunately, my memory is TERRIBLE so games do become replayable after some time, but there are some games I’ve exhausted. I think in 20 years time I could pick up DOTT and the first two MI games and still remember every solution. I’ve only played the wits path once for Indy4 so there’s some replayability left in that game for me if I give it a couple of years.
