In Your Reality: Gen Z gamers, nihilism, and 'the fourth wall'

I recently watched a play-through of Doki Doki Literature Club, a game I had never thought particularly much of because of its presence as a shock horror spectacle for much of its time in the zeitgeist. What surprised me, more than its actually pretty good poetry, was its realization of a thesis I didn't know I had. See, DDLC was released in 2017 (somehow 7, almost 8 years ago). Along with other indie hits like UNDERTALE and OneShot released in 2015 and 2016 respectively, the mid-teens began somewhat of a renaissance for games that break the fourth wall. The game knows you are there, for better (such as the player's benevolent role guiding Niko through OneShot's plot) or worse (such as the bloody, unexpected breakdown of typical game conventions in DDLC). Now, at the time these games were quite innovative in that sense. I can't think of another game before OneShot that relied on digging through your actual %appdata% folder on your actual computer to solve puzzles, and I think it would have been a novelty primarily when this wave of "anti-immersion" games came out. Nowadays you see this anti-immersion theme more and more; gamers, especially young gamers, love it, and the genre is here to stay. Cool! But... where did it come from, and why do we like it?

My shaky credentials for the following statements are as follows: I grew up in the 21st century. While my relationship to technology lagged a couple years behind due to my older siblings and their love for the consoles of their childhoods, I'm still a digital native and always will be. I spent my childhood elbows-deep in my Minecraft mod folders (this was when you had to use the file directory to compile the mods instead of uploading them through the main menu) and making RPGMaker games on the family Windows 7 all-in-one. Point is: When you're used to seeing the guts, you figure out what makes them tick. It stops being magic or even science, and becomes a part of your reality. Just as we understand that an apple, when dropped, will fall down, so too do we understand that you can press Space to jump. The ethereal plane of the Game becomes a paracosm, a safe bubble. For most of the history of gaming that's been that. Nobody expects the demons in Doom to look at the camera and start calling you by your actual first name (well, maybe Doom isn't the prime example of this-- even an innocent game like that can house lots of surprising things). In fact, the idea of that happening, the game acknowledging that something exists outside the safety bubble, was the basis for pretty much exclusively horror (lots of early Creepypastas based on that notion of 'reaching beyond the bubble' i.e. Polybius and Lavender Town) or jokes (Resetti berating the player for resetting their GameCube; arguably also horror) or whatever Seaman was doing. Which also might be horror. But I digress. The general idea is, the concept of the complete fourth wall break is pretty new in the mainstream, and even moreso when it's not meant to purely instill fear. With that established we can move onto the main point: We know young people like to see the reality of their games crumble. So why?

My theory is that it's really hard to leave adolescence these days-- that might seem like an unrelated point but I'm going somewhere with this. A combination of doom-and-gloom circumstances stunting the possibility for mental growth and economic pressure from late-stage capitalism stealing away the typical benchmarks of independence have enforced a kind of permanent teenagehood. To clarify, I don't mean that in a 'kids these days don't wanna grow up and be responsible' kind of way. I mean this in the sense that, well, if you can't fathom a future where you can afford to move out of your parents' house let alone buy your own, the typical frameworks of 'getting a good job' and climbing up the ladder which will typically net you a comfortable life are breaking down leaving you stuck in a void where your college degree is worthless, and everyone you know is suffering from at least a little bit of depressive nihilism or existential anxiety... then yeah, it would be pretty hard to get through the 'develop a sense of self' phase. What I mean by eternal teenagehood isn't helplessness or entitlement. It's the amorphousness of the self, an inability to slot the puzzle piece that is yourself into the puzzle that is the world around you. It's the constant change demanded by a world that is constantly changing, and the paralysis that comes from staring past the edge of meaning and seeing things that you can't understand. If that sounds weird to you, it's because it's a hard feeling to describe. It's a feeling that I've grown up with in my own head and in the hearts of my peers, and I still can't put it to words. But the effect of it is pretty simple: reality breaks down.

Obviously real life doesn't have a fourth wall, or at least not one that humans can conceptualize, but that's beyond my pay grade to start with. What I'm interested in is the fourth wall of the human performance. I think this is what causes that sense of amorphousness in my generation. Because we have learned to form paracosms within ourselves, we can perceive real life the same way. Looking beyond the screen into the simulated world of games translates pretty neatly into looking past the frame of reality we learn to see our lives within. You see the audience, see the props as props and the actors as actors. You see past the edge but don't understand what it means, and so on and so forth. And when we do that, there's the effect. Reality breaks down. You don't get to turn off real life and load up a different one, though, so the existential problems start. But in a game, where that feeling of looking up into a different layer of reality leads you to something you can safely understand, it becomes both practice and an escape.

Anyways, I don't have anything in particular to sum this up with. I wrote this at 1 in the morning in one sitting, so there's a solid chance that the past thousand words you just read are nothing but a bunch of schlocky pretentious nonsense. Hopefully you managed to find some sort of value in it. But either way, thanks for reading.