How do I prevent a structure-breaking character from being seen as a fourth-wall-breaking joke?
I am unofficially "fixing up" a video game through modding.
The game's Big Reveal is that the game world is actually a simulation, that the characters and population are all AIs, and that the villain is the programmer who created them all.
Here is my problem: because the player is playing a game, which is then revealed to be... a game, this Big Reveal might be taken as a fourth-wall breaking gimmick. That it might be seen as meta-humor, going "Oh, this was a computer game all along, of course."
But that's not what I'm aiming for. There's a clear, coherent plot. As long as the player takes the Big Reveal seriously, he'll understand the Big Reveal - not as a joke, but as something the game has been building up to.
How do I keep that from happening? How do I cue the player to take the Big Reveal seriously, and not just dismiss it as a gimmick?
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/25029. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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If you want the Big Reveal to be taken seriously, just present it as such. Make it serious. A 4th wall break cannot happen unless you specifically want it. Sure, some of your players will smirk and think "oh, so this is what your aiming at".
But it will be clear that it's not played for jokes, or meta-gaming, if -as you said- the plot is coherent. Being coherent implies showing real struggle and real character development in face of this major reveal. How can it be humor, if the main character is shown to be devastated by the realization?
Major, flashing red spoiler alert from Supergiant's game, Transistor:
Every character in the game is an AI or a form of digitally-conserved mind. This is heavily implied in all the game and in the mechanics as well, as you can "save" dead people and interact with them as "functions" (aka skills) of your sword.
Yet there isn't a thing remotely resembling meta-narrative in the game. Everything is played face-value.
So your idea is perfectly viable as it is. The fact that your villain, the programmer, programmed your game-in-the-game, doesn't means that you are automatically going meta; nor the programmer has to be someone actually existing in our reality.
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This sounds like you are describing a literary device known as Deus Ex Machina (The God in the Machine). It is a device use to get an author out of a plot hole for which there is no satisfactory resolution. The term originates from the Greek theatre in which plays would sometimes be resolved by a god lowered to stage on a crane to put all things to rights. (Thus the god in the machine.)
The problem with Deus Ex Machina is that is it a completely unsatisfying ending. Insofar as a video game follows the rules of story (and I have no idea to what extent this is the case), it will be an unsatisfactory ending for a game as well.
One of the most basic lessons of storytelling is that you cannot write your way out of a broken story. If the story does not work, no trick of words is going to make it work. You say "This programmer is corrupt and has secretly controlled said world through war and other misdirections because... no good reason really. He's a maniac." So not only is there a god in the machine, the god is mad and acts for no good reason. That strikes me as a simply untenable story element. There is no way to enact a satisfactory hero's journey and bring it to a satisfactory conclusion in a setup like that. I don't see any way that words can explain it away.
There are examples in literature of heros railing against the injustice, even madness, of the Gods. But they don't usually win. And I have no idea how portray this in a video game where all the player has to work with are actions, and actions are clearly futile if the game is programmed by a mad god with no purpose. In literature you can write a tragedy where the hero is undone by a fatal flaw or simply the malice or indifference of the universe. But I cannot see how the concept of tragedy can apply to a video game. Surely there has to be a way to win.
The malevolent god conceit can also be played for laughs, as in the Daffy Duck cartoon where the artist keeps changing the scenery and Daffy keeps complaining about it until it is finally revealed the the artist is Bugs Bunny. But in this case the fourth wall falls in the first ten seconds and the entire humor of the thing lies in Daffy's protests. This is farce, and again, there is no way to win.
In short, if the concept is untenable, and it sounds like it is, there is no way to explain your way out of it.
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I don't know games, but comic books play with 4th wall breaking a lot -- it's part of what makes Deadpool & She-Hulk so powerful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/She-Hulk#Breaking_the_fourth_wall
Since in the Marvel universe, the readers-reading-the-comics-in-our-hands is one of many specific universes (most adventures, the "baseline" inside a Marvel comic, is Universe 616), which is similar perhaps to your "layers" of reality in games.
A lot of it depends on what your reveals have been all along.
One of my favorite techniques of establishing "reality" in fiction is realistic snippets of other media -- in Stephen King's Carrie, the original novel has snippets of news articles. Perhaps a snippet of a Wikipedia entry explaining the day the big simulation was revealed? And a Buzzfeed Listicle about top tweets about the SimulationThingie? One tv network denying it, one with a scientist showing how it's so clearly logical...?
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