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[Artylo]

I've recently really gotten into Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear saga. I ordered most of the games for my old PS2, and started playing through them.
One thing that made me feel extremely good about playing this game, was in the very beginning of the first Metal Gear Solid for the PS1.
*spoilers for Metal Gear Solid*
Right after the first boss fight with Revolver Ocelot you have a dialogue with Kenneth Baker, the former president of ArmsTech. He points you in the direction of Meryl, and suggests you call her by Codec, but he realises that he forgot her frequency.
Here's where it blew my mind.
"Oh, that's right. It should be on the back of the CD case".
I took my MGS case and looked on the back and saw a small screenshot of a Codec with Meryl's frequency on it (140.15).

I guess that is breaking the fourth wall, but how would someone replicate that feeling In his own game.
Hideo Kojima basically did this through the whole of MGS. Baker, Psycho Mantis reading your memory card, the controller port switch. Nowadays we can't get that sort of interactivity with the player, especially on a computer.
It's not a very hard thing to pull of, but Hideo executes it with flawless design choices in my opinion.

[Jordgubben]

(This entire post is litterd with MGS1 spoilers)
A less famous/noticable one is the boss fight with Raven (the big guy in the tank). If you try to play with the Dual Shock he will turn of your annalog stick now and then.

The MGS series is a real oddball when it comes to tone. It have this over the top gritty serious dialogue with talk about nuclear war, gene modification and military conspiracies. It even uses stock documentary fotage, an the first game has an "American History Research Team" in the credits. Then there is the scene where Otakon literally pees his pants. And in MGS 2 you can slip on bird po and distract the guards with an "Idol Magazine 18+". The tone is all over the place.

Spy fiction is usually divided into Martini (James Bond) and Stale Beer (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy). But the MGS should probably just be labeled Acid.

[Artylo]

Especially MGS2: Sons of Liberty...
By the end, that game did not simply break the fourth wall into fine dust, but it broke all the other walls, reconstructed the whole house, and broke it down again.
With quotes like "infinite ammo", "turn off the games console", ect.
The trick is that Kojima and the Kojima Prod. team have done a great job of keeping that gritty seriousness. All the silly parts are basically fan service in my opinion, but the amazing thing is that the game turns into pure satire at that point.

[JasonPickering]

There was a Japanese MMO that required you to actually consult Wikipedia to solve some riddles and stuff in it. Would something like that work?

[Artylo]

There was a Japanese MMO that required you to actually consult Wikipedia to solve some riddles and stuff in it. Would something like that work?

Yeah, for example, slight hints to a paragraph or word from the Bible. Which is mostly cliche nowadays in film and books. Or even having to draw out a plan on a notebook with designs by Leonardo Da Vinci or something weird and unnoticeable like that.   

[ｂ∀ ｋｋｕｓａ]

reminds me of the mmo the secret world where you had to log in faked websites to solve riddles.
One of my favorite was the morse decoder part , you had to listen to a sequence and translate it so you can locate something in the game.

[JasonPickering]

Wasn't there stuff like that in fez? Like you needed a QR reader

[DXimenes]

There's also an event at MGS3: Snake Eater...
[spoilers]When you fight "The End", the old sniper in wheelchairs, if you turn off your console and just wait for a week (or just advance your console's clock) he is dead of old age when you turn the console back on.[/spoilers]

I guess you could do that by asking for access to some info with fixed places in the player's PC, like it's clock, maybe it's webcam?

I think that in L.A. Noir there is a thing where, if you buy the collector's edition, you get a folder within the disc casing that contains additional information to break the last case, as if it's a missing file or something.

Imscared also breaks the fourth wall in a very clever way. (don't read ahead if you intend to play the game. Download it now and play it.)
You can also consider instead of extracting info from the player's PC, inserting info in it.


Edit: You can also think about adding ARG mechanics to your game, depending on how it's played. In The Secret World there's an in game browser(that is actually connected to the internet, I guess) and you sometimes have to get online to browse stuff that will help you solve puzzles.

Maybe an adventure game where you act as a "consultant" to a field agent, and he asks you stuff and reports to you of his situation several times. Then the player has to go online and do some research to input into the game. Maybe go as far as setting up fake websites where these informations are? ARGs do that all the time.

[Artylo]

Imscared did it in a really cool way. It wasn't really player interaction, but it still did a job of creeping you out. It also gave the player a sort of bigger idea of the game, while functionally doing nothing more than editing some files.

[J-Snake]

I've recently really gotten into Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear saga. I ordered most of the games for my old PS2, and started playing through them.
One thing that made me feel extremely good about playing this game, was in the very beginning of the first Metal Gear Solid for the PS1.
*spoilers for Metal Gear Solid*
Right after the first boss fight with Revolver Ocelot you have a dialogue with Kenneth Baker, the former president of ArmsTech. He points you in the direction of Meryl, and suggests you call her by Codec, but he realises that he forgot her frequency.
Here's where it blew my mind.
"Oh, that's right. It should be on the back of the CD case".
I took my MGS case and looked on the back and saw a small screenshot of a Codec with Meryl's frequency on it (140.15).

I guess that is breaking the fourth wall, but how would someone replicate that feeling In his own game.
Hideo Kojima basically did this through the whole of MGS. Baker, Psycho Mantis reading your memory card, the controller port switch. Nowadays we can't get that sort of interactivity with the player, especially on a computer.
It's not a very hard thing to pull of, but Hideo executes it with flawless design choices in my opinion.

I personally don't like these Kojima tricks. I find them superficial and immersion breaking. If I had to add that layer to the game I would involve the real internet as an ingame feature (more or less optional). The imagination is the limit what you can do with it;)

[ironbelly]

My favorite use of real world entries into games has got to be Secret World's quests. Including the creation of fake websites, decoding Morse code, looking up biblical verses, book ISBNs, and all kinds of stuff... just really helped make the game feel like it was more REAL. That said, in Secret World you're playing someone who's supposedly in the "real world" whereas in MGS it's a bit less focused on reality, so I could see how 4th wall breaking would achieve the opposite and ruin immersion (despite being in my opinion, a fun gimmick.)

[Artylo]

I've never seen anything, nor played Secret World. I guess that there is some untapped design value in some of it's concepts and mechanics. I'll probably go and look up something about the game before I speak more on the topic, but it seems that they have the right idea.

[DXimenes]

Imscared did it in a really cool way. It wasn't really player interaction, but it still did a job of creeping you out. It also gave the player a sort of bigger idea of the game, while functionally doing nothing more than editing some files.

YTeah, it was more like... "player contact", I guess, would be more accurate?

And you should definetely dig a little bit about The Secret World. They incorporate elements that don't really break the fourth wall, but get close to it. It flirts with ARG mechanics and does it quite well.

[Artylo]

YTeah, it was more like... "player contact", I guess, would be more accurate?

And you should definetely dig a little bit about The Secret World. They incorporate elements that don't really break the fourth wall, but get close to it. It flirts with ARG mechanics and does it quite well.

It seems to be inspired by some themes by H.P. Lovecraft, so I'm definitely interested in checking it out. It also seems that they are still updating it. The last patch was a few months ago.

[DXimenes]

They are still updating, yes.
It has a some Lovecraft, but it's based on mythology, cryptozoology and conspiracy theories in general.

[ironbelly]

Beware the Illuminati, it is watching.

[Artylo]

Beware the Illuminati, it is watching.

You mean those guys in my closet?
I bring them some food once a week and they don't tell their higher ups about the stuff I do.

[twincannon]

The MGS 4th wall stuff is really cool. I remember people getting really angry about the controller port one though haha.

Reminds me of the puzzle I was stuck on the longest which was in the Zelda series game Phantom Hourglass on the DS. You find a map engraved in stone and it asks you to make a copy of the map on some parchment on the bottom screen. IIRC that was the extent of the clue. The bottom being the touch screen, the first thing you immediately try is to just write on it, of course.

Spoiler: To copy the map you had to close the DS and then re-open it, mimicking carbon copying

[DXimenes]

This kind of mechanical gimmick is pretty common in the DS. In Pokemon X/Y they introduced Inkay, a pokémon that only evolves when you have your DS upside down as he crosses a level from 29 to 30.

I'm a sucker for this kind of interaction, even if it isn't as "fourth-wall-breaking" as the GMS series usually makes.

[Alex Higgins]

Has anyone played Christine Love's Hate+? It does a number of cool things that break the fourth wall. First off, each day in-game corresponds to a day in real life - once you complete the first day, the game forces you to quit and wait for the next.

Even better, though" depending on the player's choices, they may be required to make a physical cake IRL. A hidden timer deters the player from lie - if they try to continue to game immediately after being asked to make the cake, the game will know that you didn't actually make a cake, and one of the characters reprimands you for it. So, you know, you might as well make a cake. I did, anyway.

People often find that breaking the fourth wall ruins immersion, but for me, it actually makes games more immersive. I like it when game worlds bleed into the real world and dissolve the barrier between the two. The first time I played MGS, when Psycho Mantis moved my controller with telekinesis, it kinda freaked me out a little bit, even though I very obviously knew it wasn't real. Its one of the most memorable boss fights I've ever played for that reason.