Power negotiation through breaking walls: a media critique of “fourth-wall-breaking” in digital games

Introduction This study examines fourth-wall-breaking in digital games not merely as a narrative device but as a mechanism of power negotiation among developers, game systems, and players. Methods Through a qualitative, media-critical approach and close readings of The Stanley Parable, OneShot, Doki Doki Literature Club! , and selected supplementary cases, the article distinguishes fourth-wall-breaking from metagaming, metalepsis, and metafiction and develops a tripartite framework of Wall, Interface, and Circle. Results The analysis shows that fourth-wall-breaking destabilizes the player's phenomenological experience of agency, reveals the authority embedded in rules and interfaces, and transforms the interface into a contested space where procedural authorship may be negotiated. Discussion The article argues that such resistance remains limited because designed transgressions can be pre-structured by the systems they appear to challenge. Within a posthumanist condition, meaningful agency lies not in escaping algorithmic systems, but in critically recognizing and reconstructing the dialectic between systemic control and participatory rule-making.